skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two sides to this coin.

This is easy to say when you're 23, single, and you are almost completely defined by your occupation. Asking a child what he wants to be when he grows up doesn't give you good information; ask him what he wants to eat and he'll say "candy, all the time."

Maybe it's because I just watched Cosmos, but your life is a blip on the cosmic time scale. Make it count, but remember that very few people will remember or care what you did to make money.

That's not to say that you should toil in a job you hate, but there's nothing wrong with not doing your dream job because your committment to your family is more important.
Not at all! When walking around a city, our brains filter out less relevant input, stopping it from entering our own massive lookup table with heuristics.

For example; I hear a gunshot and see a flower. I'm not going to notice the flower. I only consider the gunshot and begin to process that information, deciding the give precedence to figuring out an escape route over botanical pondering.
"Most of the Haskell/Lisp developers I know just use Vi or Notepad."

Uhh, what? In Lisp's case, most people use emacs and coding Lisp in Notepad is mostly IMPOSSIBLE because trying to balance parentheses and navigate and indent s-expressions manually (and correctly) is idiotic.
Big banks need IT reform almost as badly as regulatory change
I think you're confusing "finite" and "small enough that I can imagine something that size".

A billion operations per billionth of a second for a billion years is still finite, it's just big.
It actually hasn't. LLVM is consistently slower in most benchmarks. Not by a large amount, but it doesn't beat GCC for speed.

The thing is that most compilers these days are limited by the performance of the CPU itself, as they're getting within a few percent of the best you can do.
I resigned from a reasonably safe, reliable career and went to med school, married, with two kids(1). I'm glad I made the move, but it was definitely scary. With marriage, you're still pretty risk-tolerant. Kids . . . not so much.

Once I was there I realized it was going to be even harder than I anticipated, no thanks to evacuating three weeks after starting to avoid Katrina, but also, just managing the added responsibilities of a house, diapers, daycare, regular meals . . . it adds up. 2-3 hours a day, usually prime study hours.

And I agree with barrkel. You are taking time away from your kids. And your spouse. Which will increase your spouse's stress. It's not a pretty picture. I still think it has been worth it, but I'm 34 and my hair is turning grey.

--------------

(1)I was also going from being an officer in the Navy to med school in New Orleans and asked what would happen if the big one comes, to which the dean replied, in the spring of 2005 "We have very good pumping systems". . .
The halting problem, for instance: whether or not a e.g. Turing machined will halt on a given input or loop endlessly.
Is it easy? Maybe they had an intern do it? Will this functionality be missed?
[warning. rant head]

This has to be the most mind-numbingly stupid thing I have seen the government do in the last couple of decades -- and that includes bad wars, if that's your thing.

Why can it be so bad? Because it screws with every single economic entity in the nation, in a way that pervasive, subtle, and micro-managing.

If you want to know where "1984" is, with Big Brother watching all of your moves, it's not bullshit programs like TIA. It's making you rat out the guy who is on disability but mows lawns on the side, or the guy who paints houses at nights without reporting the income so he can send his kid to school. Or the mom that babysits kids so that she can stay home.

Yes. These people are law-breakers. In a web of such complexity that 80% of IRS's own employees can't answer sample tax questions, we are all law-breakers. But this takes tax collection to a new low -- now I am going to be responsible for "double-checking" on my neighbor who sold me those used lawn mowers last year. I need to do my part to make sure he's reporting everything.

It is so outrageously stupid and infuriating that I still can't believe it is true. I'm beside myself. So if I eat at Burger King during the week when I travel, about the 120th time I buy a burger, I need to chalk them up for a 1099.

It's the worst thing for small businesses and the underground economy that I've ever heard of the government doing. It just can't be true.

</rant>

ADD: And don't get me started with some bullshit about how the agency hasn't decided yet how to enforce it. This is like saying the Congress voted to install cameras in everybody's homes, but that might not be so bad because the administrative work hasn't been done to decide who exactly gets a camera and when. As if this somehow mitigates things.

Also, for all of you folks down-voting me. Tell me I am wrong. I'm not a tax professional and I don't read the political spin sites. The only reason I've commented now is that this is the 3rd or 4th time I've seen this posted on HN. So please. I would love to be wrong about this.
MBTmall
IT departments just as much a stumbling block for banks as regulators
World’s cheapest laptop: Made in INDIA
I was... "fascinated" by this quote: "That is good news for start-ups such as Metro Bank, which wants to open more than 200 branches in Britain by 2020. With such grand designs, isn’t Vernon Hill, one of the bank’s founders, tempted to build an IT system of his own? “I hate programmers,” replies this dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur. “They only cause trouble.”"
http://samhuri.net/mirah.html
>They are describing a basic Monte Carlo simulation. It shows you that, given a certain distribution, some subset of trials will exceed some arbitrary cutoff. But, well, of course!

Of course for you and me maybe, but many people wouldn't think of that.
friendsjob

Not sure if it exists but I work in IT recruitment and am curently toying with more inovative ideas for jobseekers online and to be honest, if this doesn't already exist then I will legitimately consider creating something similar.

The fact is, there are so many companies trying to avoid using external agencies for recruitment due to cost/economic climate that they are turning to employee referrals more than they ever have in the past so a user-friendly forum that offers a degree of discretion for people to post vacancies that have yet to be advertised is a great idea in my opinion.

I'll draft some ideas and let you know how I get on. You never know, there might be a job in it for you!
The '=' vs. '==' example actually nicely demonstrates the limits of automatic bug hunting. The variable 'rig' is NULL when it is being dereferenced, thus the program will segfault regardless of '=' or '==' being used. The "fix-it" tip is highly misleading.

http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html...

(This is probably a side effect of PR people preparing the website; there is no reason why LLVM should not be able to detect this particular kind of NULL-dereference.)
I don't understand why they need to do this. Does anyone have a good explanation ?
Wow. Jump to conclusions without evidence? Sign me up!

More likely it was an attempt to close a perceived tax loophole without understanding of the cost of compliance. I have no doubt it will get fixed before it actually goes into effect.
I'm pretty sure it would take me about as long to master...
Or a bunch of ski masks.
Overblown.

Name me a 1st world country where 20-somethings with generic degrees and zero experience don't have a hard time finding a job.

Disclosure: I work in Japan and have been here since graduating uni. I started with a low-paid design job, worked hard, changed jobs a bunch of times and now am comfortably in 6-figure land. That 20-somethings have to take shitty salaries should come as absolutely no surprise. You work up from there. That's life.
Specific welfare help for "single mothers".

The law was written more with the intent to help widows with small children. But it turned out that many young un-married girls could also just have a baby and take advantage of the same program. At some point having a baby became a good way to get decent welfare assistance.
Internet will soon be running on IPv4 address fumes
Uh. Welcome I guess.

May I suggest that if you're going to post, please post something that provides an interesting topic for debate, rather than "here's my great idea because I thought of it, everyone must do it nao" type of posts.
Can China Successfully Build Soft Power Without A Global Internet Strategy?
Viagens Turquia Pacotes 
Brazilian website that offers tours in top places all around the world, specializing in Europe tours.
I'm honestly amazed at how quickly everyone has stopped throwing sh_t at the various financial institutions that caused the chaos of the last couple of years.

In the UK, where most public spending is being cut by 25% there are a lot of unhappy people who blame this mostly on the £850B bank bailout (of course, it wasn't just the cost of the bailout, but it certainly didn't help).

I think things could potentially get a lot uglier before they get better.
I think integration is definitely a cultural thing, since in my anecdotal experience, the level of integration seems to vary wildly with country of origin.

When I was in grad school, the Chinese students formed their own secret society to the extent that non-Chinese might never even know their name. Indians also had a secret society, but unlike most of the Chinese, they individually interacted with the outside world. Israelis, Russians, Koreans and various flavors of African all integrated more or less completely with the outside world.

In concrete terms, Chinese math students joined the Chinese soccer team and had Chinese advisers. Indians had secret Indian parties, but they played on the Math soccer team. Russians invited people of every nationality to the Russian vodka drinking parties.
How do you find compile errors, run the debugger, edit build settings? Do you have MacVim integrated with Xcode somehow?
If all web traffic is encrypted end to end, then either every web site needs to pay for a tls certificate, or your isp can insert adverts into the stream anyway.
People Suck
Postgres does it with versioning, as that's how everything is stored on disk.

As I've seen DDL outside of a transaction take much longer than inside one, it may use locking there.
Part of what they are doing is getting the system ready to put a sales tax on services. That will generate some serious revenue (or provide another effective mechanism to steal money from some people to give to other people, depending on your perspective.)
Maybe. But once you learn it, would you be set for life? Or would you have to relearn a bit the next day?

It's interesting to combine the idea of trial-and-error learning with "save that strategy in permanent memory."
Classic, "StumbleUpon: Tripping Thumbs"
Solving a particular instance of a noncomputable problem is not the same than solving the problem itself. Eg, the busy beaver problem is noncomputable, but it's trivial to make a machine output solutions for simple cases in the same way that it's trivial for a human to do so. In fact, you cannot prove that what we are doing is essentially programming ourselves to solve ad-hoc cases of the general problem, which is computable, as opposed to somehow having in our heads a general way of solving the problem, which we know it's not computable.

Basically, what you need to prove to show that humans are intrinsically more powerful than machines is that we have the ability to generally solve noncomputable problems in a general way, ie, that we are hypercomputers.
Malware -- really? Is this speculation or something you've encountered yourself?
Apple as religious experience
Next: try pancakes of varying shapes and sizes. I have a suspicion they might struggle with their approach.
If the urge to pursue one's dreams is strong enough, a person will find ways to take action towards them. In many cases an inner cocktail of fear, laziness and other areas of higher personal importance will prevent a person from taking the crucial first steps. Overcoming those factors is what separates the doers from those who daydream themselves into a rosy future. I am not to judge other persons as I have found myself guilty of it on countless occasions but I have an interesting story to share with you:

A few years ago, a friend of mine mentioned that he would really like to become an entrepreneur. I got all ears and starting listening more closely. During the chat he also mentioned his desire to invent something new. My eyes lightened up and I tried to extract a few more nuggets of information out of him. You never know - maybe I accidentally bumped into the perfect co-founder for a future venture? As our discussion progressed, I tried to evaluate in what entrepreneurial stage he currently resided.

Me: "What actions have you taken so far?"
Him: "I am thinking of business ideas all the time."
Me: "No, no! I mean: What have you specifically done so far?"
Him: "Reading the news and trying to come up with a business idea."

Recently I met up with this guy again and asked him about progress. He is still in the thinking stage which disappointed me. But that is the path he chose and I accept it. Thinking only takes you so far. Doing is what ultimately pushes things forward. Sometimes people do not want something bad enough that they push harder and leave the stage of randomly coming across the next big thing. This is perfectly fine and one has to accept it.
Anyone know why this was put into the bill? What good intentioned upside someone is trying to accomplish?

To make sure that retailers/sellers are accurately reporting their sales and not lowballing their revenue numbers on their tax returns. It's basically to reduce tax fraud with the hope that the extra tax income (which is assumed that corps or fraudulently not paying) can be used to pay for health care without having to add additional taxes.
Is the convention of beginning a reply with "This." a Reddit meme? I'm beginning to see this more and more and it always irks me for some reason. Isn't an up-vote on the comment the correct way to say "This."?

Forgive the meta-comment, I'm just curious.
Stuff like this is the reason why I read HN. Not too long ago a HN thread I posted changed my life and the way I think, hopefully, permanently. It's not just the advice, some of it is obvious or trimmed versions of common knowledge, but the people who give it.

Most people who talk about chasing after dreams are the ones who want nothing more than to run in the rat races that surround them. The same goes for other topics. Most people who talk about virtues of hardwork and other stuff are the same people who have never done so themselves.

I've learnt more about life from such people in a matter of months than my immediate environment in the past 18 years.

In the past few months I've become certain that I will work on my startup no matter what. So what if I am a teenager with a startup (the horror)? So what if I fail? So what if my nightmares of not having a future come true? So what if I don't have money or a permanent work station? So what if no one takes my ideas seriously? So what if I still have truckloads to learn?

I am going to still do it and enjoy every second of it.
For 2, wouldn't most of that memory be either COW or physically shared, read-only? It's been about a year and a half since I've operated a large PHP site, but I don't recall the apache workers getting anywhere close to 15MB each, unless a request was operating on a larger than normal dataset. (this site used curl, gd, memcache, uuid, pspell, tidy, soap, and probably some others I've forgotten, loaded dynamically.)
Headline borrowed from Kottke.org.

See his summary post:

http://kottke.org/10/07/apple-as-religious-experience
We can write code that doesn't suffer from any of these problems. All you have to do is pay for it and realize that it takes time. Deal?
IDS experts brawl, create confusion on where intrusion detection is headed.
Feel free to ignore this if it's something you can't talk about... but can you confirm if Yodlee works with startups concerning licensing costs? Do they do something where you pay based on the number of accounts? Or do they ask for equity?

I've seen a number of startups use Yodlee or CashEdge and I was always curious how they could afford this or how the setup worked. I can't imaging they pay what Mint was reported to have paid (about $2mil/yr) to license the software.
The funny thing is that there is a lot of innovation within large companies that will never see the light of day elsewhere. These inovations are viewed as a competitive advantage so will never emerge. Sometimes engineers have invented things within corporate confinement only to take those ideas and refine them within the freedom of a start-up. Then there are those who speak of things within companies like Google who swear what they have seen in open-software pale in comparison to what happens behind their closed doors.

Speaking of Wall Street, people need to realize that there's just as much emphasis on learning, evolving, and discovering new science there as there is in many smaller companies. The problem domain is more geared towards the maths, data mining and currently low-latency systems.
"Are their dreams not worth it? If not, why do we sulk about them later?"

Yes, their dreams are not worth it by their own account, and in their own words ("Are you crazy? Where will the paycheck come from?") and most importantly, as evidenced by their own actions. No, they won't sulk about it. Really. Not everyone has the passion it takes to change the world, take risks, or whatever it is that makes people like Jobs and Wozniak do what they did. There are a LOT of people who never let their eye off the ball called the next paycheck. Luckily for the rest of us, these people are called "customers". :-)
I only have a BS in Physics (UCSB) so this may be rough: about 10 years ago I went to a Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness conference and the gist is that there is a quantum effect that is required consciousness. My dad taught physics at Berkeley and his friend from Berkeley Henry Stapp presented an interesting paper on this theory. The philosopher David Chalmers was also there and he talked about the difficult question of consciousness: why did evolution favor the development of consciousness and qualia (an inner mental life)?
They are providing valuable liquidity to our financial markets. Is it too much to ask that they be rewarded for their contribution to society.

Seriously, this is the most ingenious thing I have seen in a while.
Why not take a reverse engineered Ultima Online server and client, and add your AI twist to it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online_shard_emulation

http://www.runuo.com/index.php
The associated article seems to think that 50 steps is a long amount of time for learning this article. I would argue that 50 steps is nearly no time at all. Even though a human being may take less attempts to learn,
1) we are likely taking input from more senses than the robot is about what's occurring (we sense by stereoscopic sight, feel, etc. The robot may not sense by all of these.)
2) can apply knowledge from other domains in solving this problem (if memory serves me, this is part of the Holy Grail for artificial intelligence)
3) may make multiple attempts in our own minds before attempting to perform the activity physically again.

While I'm primarily experienced in Genetic Algorithms and NNs (so not re-enforcement learning, so much), 50 steps (or generations in a non-steady-state GA) is a very short amount of time, and so learning to properly coordinate multiple degrees of freedom into a successful activity in only 50 steps is, to me, pretty impressive.
it might not be easy to find your perfect job since you don't know about all the company

www.glassdoor.com has anonymous reviews of companies. People post salaries, reviews, interview questions, etc. It helps you get an idea of the company before you accept. They have recently introduced photo uploads for offices, and a referral feature.

Imagine applying for a job and going in knowing what questions they ask in the interview, what salary range they offer, and even what the office looks like.
The Changelog Episode 0.2.9 - CoffeeScript with Jeremy Ashkenas
I am not confusing them.

My argument is that each time you add a question to the table, you need to encode an answer that depends on all the other questions asked.

Meaning the number of answers is exponential (actually	factorial) to the number of questions in it. Such a table is essentially infinite.

i.e. if you have 10 questions you have 3 million possible answers. But with a million questions you have 8 x 10^5565708 answers. I hope you realize how big this number is.
I wonder how much the person the author was talking to was really dreaming about being an animator, and how much he was actually dreaming about not having the responsibilities that were "preventing" him from being an animator.
I don't think there's anything particularly topical about death rates here in the UK right now. The author together with Michael Dilnot presented a radio show "More or Less" which covered lots of topics of this sort, showing how maths can aid an understanding of the world in general and current affairs in particular.

Their book "The Tiger That Isn't" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tiger-That-Isnt-Through-Numbers/dp/1...) is excellent and includes some other examples around sample size and regression to mean.

One thing that struck me from the article was how computers and Monte Carlo simulations have lowered the barrier to entry for statistical understanding. It seems much simpler to run this sort of simulation than to understand the intricacies of different probability distributions.
There seems to be a significant business opportunity here. An institutionalized program of language immersion/internship could be designed to address all three problems.

The program would obviously address Problem 1 and Problem 3 by being structured to ensure that new "interns" are immersed in an environment with new norms for language and culture.

Problem 2 would be addressed through a school-like structuring of the program -- everyone knows how to make friends in school, even if it's the introvert's 1 true friend. At the very least, people have the shared experience and come away with a circle of acquaintances. Structure the program so that this circle includes lots of natives.

The advantages of such a program would be obvious -- highly valuable cultural and language skills. If spending a year abroad working as a server is attractive because it's less work and just as much pay, then such a program would be even more attractive as it would have all the benefits of a working vacation year abroad combined with those of internship. Those providing work to the participants would also benefit by getting labor below market value.
If we're to assume that consciousness only exists where it is observable, only I exist. All of you are automatons.

In fact, because of the fact that it is unobservable, you cannot even make a reasonable argument that the netbook I'm typing this on lacks consciousness.

I for example can argue that anything that is executing a series of algorithms as part of a system has consciousness, and therefore this computer is quite conscious, just as I am (even though my series of algorithms is much less well-defined and reproducible.)