skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Having said that, isn't that true for any other degree? In the end, it's not the degree that matters, but the person."

Yes, definitely -- there are a lot of cultures that place more value on the degree than on anything else, and these are cultures that emphasize rote learning and memorization.

Rote learning and memorization are worthless in the long run, since the avoid training you to think for yourself and actually USE the information you've crammed into your head, but it's also a lot easier to teach by telling your students to memorize things than to think.

I ran into exactly the same thing in biology, and a close friend of mine ran into it in medical school. He told me about some of the explanations that his med school compatriots offered up -- they demonstrated a glaring lack of understanding of basic physics and chemistry (we're talking high school stuff, not even college level knowledge here).
Cloudera is hiring AND they have a great post of how to get hired there, http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/07/how-to-get-a-job-at-clo... .
dnotify wasn't sensibly designed. inotify/ReadDirectoryChangesW are.

> Also comparing the two subsystems is entirely wrong. ReadDirectoryChangesW is still a polling mechanism, inotify and dnotify are kernel level events.

ReadDirectoryChangesW sleeps while there aren't any changes and only returns once there are some changes. Efficiency-wise there isn't any real difference between kernel-level events and sleeping on a different thread, and I don't see one as clearly better than the other. After all, waking a thread up is also a kernel-level event!

> Not only that but you still need a password for single user mode, and it would take a bit longer for him if he had a boot disk.

Who cares? The difference in the level of security you get is a small epsilon. You either don't care about physical attacks, in which case you don't care whether it takes 5 seconds or 5 minutes to break, or you do care about physical attacks, in which case you encrypt your data.

Of course, your entire point is irrelevant -- calling Windows 9x "on the top of it's [sic] game" in terms of security is lying. Windows 9x was insecure in much more serious ways than a stupid login prompt. Windows NT-based systems, especially Vista onwards, are much more effectively designed.

> This isn't about Microsoft Research, this is about Microsoft products. This is a completely irrelevant point.

You used the words "success" and "innovation". The fact that MSR exists and is as good as it is, is an important part of Microsoft's success as a whole, and there's no lack of innovation on display there (witness Street Slide for a recent example). To consider "success" and "innovation" only in terms of released products is myopic.
Far and away this is the best, most comprehensive synthesis of how to approach tech startup investing for consumer Internet in the new era
Ive always had the belief that iFrames are bad news. They are rarely needed in the days of simple AJAX and DOM manipulation. Come to think of it, I haven't used one in about 5 years...
I think it's almost a tautology. A hot startup is one that any investor would want to be involved with, so obviously they can have their pick of investors.
If there are many more examples of bad than good, and for JS apps, this is a dramatic understatement, this is a great pragmatic definition of it not being good for apps.

For example, I've never played a JS/Canvas game for the sake of it being a good game. Has anyone? I see a lot of frameworks, and a lot of demos to advocate for the platform, but no good games. Why is this? At this point, the novelty of the platform is no longer an excuse. It has been a forum darling for several years now.
Is normal, widespread behavior for humans when we are not getting what we want I think!

One practice is to be more conscious of when we're not getting what we want and pay extra special attention to how we're reacting to others as a result.

Greg says he wants Canonical to contribute more to upstream.

Mark probably wanted Greg to not badmouth Canonical.

Now neither party are getting what they want so the question is can everyone pay enough attention to their reactions to avoid a full-blown civil war?

Oy vey.
Tribalism is "the other". Racism is "the other". People who have made other choices, such as religious choices, can be "the other".

There's no contradiction here. It's just two different elaborations on how you get to "the other".
The first iPhone app I submitted got rejected for having "minimum user functionality". I resubmitted it, and it got approved. I'm not saying that this will necessarily work in your case, but it might be worth a try. Sometimes approval/rejection is simply a matter of which person is looking at the app.
I believe at a certain scale the markets actually pay a fraction of a cent per trade to encourage liquidity.
We currently run an in-house market maker but we don't really want to. The reason for releasing a public API is to bring in outside market makers to provide liquidity so we can focus on running the exchange.
having taken money from dave, i can say this guy knows his stuff. i like his way of thinking about things.
They do but it doesn't work that well. I have had to scan checks 3 or 4 times before.
I learn a lot already, and it helped until ~5 years ago, when I started seeing familiar patterns in new stuff

Then you are ready for the next level: see what other gems there are in CS/tech history that are yet undiscovered.
The absolute disgusting nature of standardization of data sets in the world, and this insane notion that we should maintain legacy data as the status-quo of doing things.

Just look at the airline industry. IATA, ICAO, ISO, all competing and separate, all with insane and bat-shit psychotic rules and conventions (eg, IATA lets multiple airlines have the same "two letter designator" [by the way, it's sometimes three, but you never know for sure] if they operate on different parts of the globe and 'rarely if ever will confuse an operator'). When the hell did computers need human-understandable designation short-hand codes for things? What the hell was wrong with 1 - American Airlines, 2 - Air Canada, 3 - Delta, 4 - SAS, 5 - That small one that flys between A and B once a year you've never heard of. Why the HELL do we have a system that has "AA" and "AA*" ? This is basically the worst thing you can do for normalization of global data. Travel GDSs are even worse, they don't actually follow along with these standards because they cannot, so while you take your "AA" flight number 123456 (oh, by the way, we recycle flight numbers instead of archive forever historical tickets) from airport zzz to xxx (by the way, depending on the standard they came from, your airport might not even exist), which are actually city codes for airports, so when you're flying to a city with multiple airports you have two cities in the GDS just to deal with this.

We can't even agree on how to measure distance, it's like we're stuck in the stone ages. What the hell is wrong with measuring in kelvin degrees? Why do we have MORE THAN FIVE separate standards for systems of measurme for what most people think is one (the metric system)?

Fact: We do not live in 1950 or any time before then, computers don't give a flying rats ass if the letters make sense to you as a short-hand abbreviation, you should just number them. That's what databases are for, to relate data. Major airports alone have several names people call them anyway, some airlines go by a few names (for example, SAS airlines is actually "Scandinavian Airlines").

Fact: We do not need to encode data about the data into the primary key of our data. For example, we do not need to generate employee numbers like "Q100-5-TR-9" where Q is the building they work in, 100 is their pay grade, TR is their last name's first two letters, 9 is that number we introduced for separating all duplicates of Q100-5-TR. This is just stupid, stop this insanity NOW.

People working on global standards, you should be ashamed. Do you have ANY idea how much time is wasted because we do not have UUIDs for so many things, even something as simple as an airport? There's only 50,000~ of them, and we have duplicates? Did we run out of beads on the abacus??
The biggest problem that I have with most pop music right now, is that so much of it is incredibly simplistic. I have no problem with simple music, but it never feels deliberate. It feels formulaic. I hear no artistry in most of it. That being said, there are a fair number of groups that I actually do enjoy.

Does anyone else here listen to Bela Fleck and the Flecktones?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q50xzhDO9lI
Isn't he using these two situations to show how he can advocate a reasonable common ground for free software advocates, but he personally holds himself to a higher standard as he tries to be the beacon for Free Software, and secondarily, that to replace non-free software, sometimes you have to closely blackbox it:

"The only way I could justify this is if I began developing a free replacement for that very program. It is ok to use a nonfree program for the purpose of developing its free replacement." - RMS answering 22.
Ask HN: What is a talent acquisition like?
Hi Everyone,

My co-founder and I are meeting with YouTube in the next few weeks. For various reasons our best guess is that they are interested in a talent acquisition.

We were just wondering if anyone has any personal stories or articles about what it is like to go through a talent acquisition or what possibly to expect.

Thanks,
ryanjmo
That underscores my point that it is increasingly important to differentiate, regardless of what your preference is.
Since we launched in February:

6085.51 | 2010-2

6375.40 | 2010-3

51072.15 | 2010-4

194208.93 | 2010-5

111775.68 | 2010-6

65577.25 | 2010-7

The spike is from the world cup. We will probably see a similar spike in August when the premier league starts.
Emacs can do this!
Let me clarify what I mean. Zed usually takes this approach: "Here is something that idiot programmers do; let me show you the right way."

Half his audience will read this and think, "Gee, I don't want to be an idiot--I should continue reading!". The other half will take it as an insult, or just find it to be in bad taste, and put the book down.

A good writer should be able to get across his message without insults.
Yeah, completes documentation on a product he announced an intention to develop 5 seconds ago (internet time).

Gotta respect the guy's work ethic and coding chops!
At my previous company we had an IRC room for the devs (and whoever else wanted to join) which had a bot that reported on updates to certain feeds within the company, it was pretty useful and it's not distracting at all. I used irssi+screen, the bot was a Supybot.
Just launched FR2.0, Daily Journal of the US; open, on rails and cloud hosted
That sounds fun. Maybe once I get my green card I'll get in touch with you guys.
1. Seeing a traffic jam where every car has exactly one person in it.

This is just a tragedy.

2. Job interviews that require quizzes and an "intensive" multi-stage interview process.

As a candidate, I've just sent you a bunch of links to open repositories where you can review my code and offered to give you other code examples from my private repositories on request. I give you links to my previous work and letters of recommendation. Yet you insult me by being paranoid that I can't actually program and expect me to believe that this half-assed exam rife with trick questions and obscure trivia is actually going to tell you something about me?

This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth has disrupted the hiring process and made it more expensive, paranoid, and stupid than most other processes in a business. There has to be a better way to verify a candidates' potential. At least for programming jobs.

Maybe something like Ohloh's repo log-analysis tool that can create a dashboard view of a candidates' source-code contributions to the world? Obviously only works for candidates that can provide URLs to publicly accessible repositories. Probably ways to get around that.

Anyway, that has been really annoying me lately. :)
...Or if sold anywhere but the US.
And unfortunately the taxpayers are the ones that are paying due to this mastery.

I do not understand why everyone is getting hyped up about this. What is the purpose of the electric car? The low/no emissions or the high MPG? If you ask people you will find out that almost all of them will say the MPG since that is the reason that has a monetary impact.

I recall when I was in England I had a Renault Clio Diesel with 1.5 liter engine. That car would give me 66 mpg on the highway and around 50-55 mpg in the city. That was back in 2003 and it cost brand new 9,000 GBP (less than $15,000). That car was small, comfortable and fun to drive. It did what it was supposed to and more.

Why do we see then a $41,000 price tag on a vehicle that cannot give us 66 mpg and that will be subsidized by the government (i.e. we will all pay for every car sold whether we like it or not).

Great!
It is sort of crazy. Consider two products A and B. They are identical, except that A is more expensive and has advertising. B is cheaper, but has no advertising. Which one wins? A because nobody knows that B even exists.

However, everybody is worse off. Consumers got advertising displayed to them that they didn't want to see and they got to pay more for the privilege. The manufacturer of B lost totally. Even the manufacturer of A is worse off because without the advertising, he could have split the difference with the consumer and gotten a larger profit.

The only winner is the advertising company who is making something nobody wants.

That is totally inefficient. Can it be fixed somehow?
How would you lift the pedal? Is your foot clipped in?
Same goes for "alot" instead of "a lot".
Open Source Toolchains
The article only looks at it from the 'Apple is evil' perspective. I wonder if Apple are patenting these purely so that others can't and thereby allowing freedom for developers to develop these apps without worrying about patent infringement
This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth has disrupted the hiring process...

It's not a myth.
Right.

Because Apple never capriciously brings down the hammer on the small guy.
Let's not forget about "it's" and "its".
Cyclists that disobey the rules of the road, but complain when motorists don't follow the rules of the road really bother me. (I am a cyclist.)
If the CPU power really is there, then at least the good news is the software can be fixed over time. Early adopters typically suffer in any technical realm.
Nationwide is great for my needs.
IRC is an indispensable part of my work. The team I'm on uses a private server for team discussions (works great when someone is working remotely), and we also are in a few public channels on freenode. On freenode, I'm in #openstack to talk about cloud object storage infrastructure, #eventlet to learn more about it, and #cloudfiles for Rackspace product-specific questions. #openstack has been pretty active in the last couple of weeks (since we released the code) and has been pretty good for helping people who are learning about the systems. Internally, I can't imagine not using IRC. If I choose to work remotely, or if I'm working odd hours, it becomes a very important tool to keep up with what the other devs are doing.

To stay in the channel when I'm not online, I use an IRC bouncer (znc running on a slice, for me). When I log back in on my computer, I have the conversation I "missed" played back for me. I know other people that use irssi in a screen session to accomplish something similar.
too many tiles; have to fill them with something...
Of course. Mostly for private communication with friends and with BitlBee gateway. But it seems that many OSS project have freenode channels, that are very active, and not only that. There's very active #haskell channel on freenode, #xmonad, there are various fedora channels, there's an unofficial channel for students of the faculty where I study now, even channels like #lgbtreddit.

I don't see any decline of IRC use in any foreseeable future.
I keep the client running in the background (not even minimized). I have it set to save a log of all chats. I occasionally glance through those logs 2-3 times during the day. That's also the same frequency with which I check my mail.
Worst Movie Year Ever?
ageism. It's so common today that people who would never exclude women or minorities or the handicapped or whoever have no problem excluding people over forty.
Wireless Technology Hits the Road
Vehicle-to-vehicle wireless communication could improve traffic safety by delivering detailed information that helps drivers avoid collisions or take evasive action.
Living expenses.

Currently it takes nearly 30% of my income just to afford the physical shelter. Then pretty much the rest for basic necessities. Not to mention the time it takes to maintain all of this stuff. Pay bills, car maintenance, home maintenance, clothing, grocery shopping. I feel like just living takes up so much of my time.
For my day job I primarily program in ada95. My startups are generally using Python (Django), some javascript, C and occasionally writing wrappers in various languages for API access.
I'm looking at this from the "ANYONE who tries to patent generic ideas is evil" perspective.
For years I've said that Apple is by far one of the scariest software companies out there.

The enthusiasm for their products and CEO seems to have a blinding effect on the very same people that would normally be up in arms.

I think it would be an interesting social experiment to outline many of their business practices without mention of the products, company or brand, even possibly an alias, or dummy co. and survey their hardcore base for opinion of the company.
We (developers and sysadmins) use it at the big corporation where I work. Keeping irssi open in screen (GNU screen) means I can connect remotely from anywhere with a single session, and it doesn't appear when I'm focused on something else in a different screen session. Each project gets its own channel. It's way better for collaboration than having to match schedules for each little question.

It's also very helpful for asking specific questions about OSS projects, as mentioned. The people actually developing projects hang out in IRC, not at StackOverflow.
lies & laziness.

I see people around cribbing why they are not rich or can't or not being treated at par or not getting due credits. Dig in a little and you see they don't even want to work hard.
I'm doing lot of work in free software (paid and unpaid, just for fun). Does it count?
I might be the only one who thinks this around here, but I think the concept of mortality is kind of beautiful. However, ask me about that when I'm facing my own and the answer might be different.
Software patents. Need to spend time and energy to get around them.

The increasingly extended copyright term. Come on, create something new instead of milking the old stuffs forever.
The Volt website does seem to imply that it comes well speced. Navigation and 30gb music storage seem to be standard. By comparison a similar speced Camry hybrid is between 30-33k
As bad as this seems, the best thing you can do as an aspiring developer is ignore it completely, and do whatever you're going to do anyway.

The only way these patents are going to matter to you is if you hit it big enough to be worth taking to court -- it's a millionaire problem. Even then, there are lots of steps between "patent granted" and "patent successfully defended in court". You're so far from that point that it's not even worth thinking about this kind of crap.

Also, before you bust out your pitchforks and torches, put your logic hat on for a second: this doesn't make any sense as an offensive move. The patent system is broken and everybody knows it. And as a result, any responsible tech company with sufficient resources must play the same game of mutual self-destruction. Meanwhile, Apple has a vested interest in cultivating a developer community. Patent trolls could easily kill that community. If Apple didn't patent ideas like this, some patent troll in Texas would, and the situation would be much worse for small developers.

Obviously, I don't know if Apple is being defensive or offensive here, but it's pretty difficult to imagine them going from retail hardware company to professional patent troll. Again, it doesn't make sense as an offensive move.
I wish I had heard of your group earlier. Are you guys still taking newcomers to your group?
WP Engine, the new robust and secure way of hosting a WordPress blog
Read about this new service from a new Austin, TX startup company.
(Err, sorry, “expertly manipulating rules … that he could not manipulate” is nonsense. I meant “expertly exploiting rules …”; but I can't edit that post any more.)
I use an IRC bouncer to stay logged in to the IRC servers. I connect to the bouncer, which replays anything I missed on the IRC server while I'm not logged in to the bouncer.
Deception online. Tricking people into providing their personal information and reselling that information to third parties.
Customer Support.

If only they knew what they know forget what the customer needs. People trained to very politely deliver long quotes without really meaning an ounce of what that sentence is. And of course not knowing much to really resolve the issue unless it is listed.

A good trouble-shooting software would be less annoying and more truthful.
I keep it running in a seperate screen session that I open occasionally throughout the day.
I'll admit it's pure speculation on my part. I have a hard time believing that ninety-some-odd percent of applicants believe they can blatantly lie their way into a position they are clearly not qualified for. How embarrassing is it to be caught in such a lie? Not every needs to be keenly self-aware to at least have an intuition about the limits and potential of their own capabilities...

Maybe I'm just not cynical enough...

update: and even if it were true, it's still a pain for qualified applicants to get through these draconian hiring practices.
Emotiv EPOC - Consumer EEG Headset Devkit
I heard tell this practice arose because of some newspaperman who struck up deals with local businesses to salami-slice pennies off their prices so that people would have more pennies with which to buy his one-cent newspaper.

If true, I don't think he realized the Sorcerer's-Apprentice-like consequences of his actions, as I'm now AWASH IN USELESS PENNIES.
> These are obviously mutually exclusive definitions!

Not at all. He is saying racism is a subset of tribalism, as is being an OS fanboy. Tribalism the the umbrella term.
Maybe it seems obvious in retrospect to you, but I was dealing with the same need for an A Bit More button with the toaster at my old place, so there's nothing retrospective about it for me.

Now if only they can figure out a way to add the "A Bit Less" Button.
If you can't lurk and review in realtime, setup logging on your irc client and review later. I do automatically no matter what, happy that if a great conversation occurs, it's automatically captured. Screen, tmux, or similar may be helpfull in this case; setup your client in tmux on appropriate computer, detach, and review later.
Your reading of that article isn't accurate. His distribution provisioning profile (basically his name, address, phone, etc) expired. All he had to do was go in and (for some unknown reason) just save his profile again to "renew" it. You'd think he'd get 5 emails that his profile was about to expire (why expire at all?).