skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember people saying that, too.

In 1980.

It really isn't true, and the reasons why it isn't true have been known for a long time, and it will never be true, and it is this: A (good) programmer is always prototyping. Virtually by definition, you are doing something that hasn't been done before. If it had been done before, you would buy it or download it, it would be a component, and then you would move on to the part of the problem that hasn't been done before.

It is not true that programming is moving towards a model where you just grab components off the shelf and wire them together. Or if it was true, it has happened, it is in the past, it isn't "becoming" true. All the components mean is that you no longer have to research the best way to handle images, and you get a lot farther before hitting the unsolved part of your problem... but it's only the unsolved part of the problem that is interesting. There's no money in solving solved problems. (Well, that's not entirely true, but this is a comment reply, not an exhaustive description of all programming niches.) The unsolved problem is always the focus and pretty much by definition there will always be more unsolved problems.

If you aren't writing much code and you really, truly are just wiring bits together, it is time to either learn how to write metacode that wires the bits together for you and start wiring much, much faster, or to desperately cast about for a new skillset because you are easily replaceable (or possibly just discardable) and you really need to change that as quickly as you can!
It's safe to say that if you need an app to find women, you probably also need one to tell you what to do once they're located. I should start iCyrano.
I have the belief, largely anecdotal, that transgendered people tend to adhere to stereotyped gender roles rather more than people in general.
Rio de Janeiro. Highly recommended :)
A better solution would be to combine HSAs and 401ks, which many people already have, and allow tax-free withdrawals from the 401k to pay for qualified health-care expenses.
I'm never bored, I have more things to do that I could do. Life is difficult,unexpected, always have problems to solve but never boring.

I never "kill time", when I'm with my girlfriend-other relationships I enjoy it, riding bike or playing soccer or cooking because i love it.

Maybe it is have something you always need to learn, improve. Boredom has to do with stopping to grow, it seems like your life need some risk taking,maybe you are playing too safe.
Free Unix/Linux shell providers at dmoz: the open directory project
Thanks riffer, I have searched low and high for a usable automatic text summarization library, but everything was a high-dollar item for finance.

Also, the tone, if there was any, was friendly to neutral.
I don't think he is necessarily lying. I can see the computer room story playing out as described. There were five people apparently in the room, all female except for one male. The female with the printer problem saw the "worker" female was busy helping another female, so it was down to a choice between one male and one female working independently at their computers. With that 50/50 choice I can certainly see her gravitating to the male, and possibly for more than one reason.

Next, notice all the other assistance requests came from people he already knew -- co-workers and friends who should all be knowledgeable of the transition. I imagine these people might actually be more inclined to ask for "man job" assistance from their friend who now models being a man in a serious way.
Maximise your utility function. Duh.
Disregarding your slurs ("shemales," "trannies," and "butch lesbians"), you seem to be acting as though it is somehow trivial to tell if someone is transsexual, or that all transsexuals tell everyone they know or have just met that they are transsexual.
Are you just referring to transsexuals whose friends know that they are transsexual, or do you claim that people can somehow always tell if a person they've met is transsexual? Or some other option, and my interpretation of your post was a bad one?

I'd like to see some evidence that what you claim about behaviors around transsexuals is true more than anecdotally.

Additionally, you are disregarding the vast amounts of transphobia and violence targeted at transsexuals. You are painting the picture that transsexuals have a great, wonderful life post-op. That is patently not true. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unlawfully_killed_trans... for a short list of some people who have been killed purely for being transsexual.)
I'd talk to a lawyer: they'll know the ways you can get screwed over and help protect you.
Jobs for an AI undergrad
I will shortly be graduating from a top UK university with a BS in Artificial Intelligence. The skills I have aquired are very diverse within the field, spanning machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, with a healthy dose of programming (parallelism etc) thrown in. Would anyone in industry be able to give me an idea of what sort of work awaits me as a new graduate? Getting a PhD in some combination of the areas mentioned above interests me too. What would be the effect on my employability and earning potential?

Thanks.
>>.. it sounds like Facebook missed out on a hire it probably should have made. Commitment, motivation, intelligence, and learning skills..

When you say Facebook missed out on a hire it implies he has what they seek and by not hiring him they are now not getting what they first sought, right?
I wonder if that's the case though. There probably exists people who are committed, motivated, intelligent and has good learning skills but yet also would manage to perform "flawlessly" (during the interview) or even as sought.

Now I'm not saying anything about whether they should have hired him or not, just merely stating that above conditions (commitment etc) are not always enough when comparing candidates. Ones current knowledge base is a factor since if persona A has x amount of knowledge and person B has y where y>x it would take A time to go from x to y while in the same time B goes from y to z where z>y.

>>just his lack of knowledge about some technical issues

"just". That's the thing. Why not hire the committed, motivated, intelligent, good learning-skilled person without that lack of knowledge about that technical issue?
As he states in his post -- it's not like [big tech-company] has a shortage of bright people to pick and choose from.
It might be worth paying some extra for TI because the UI is consistent with what your peers, textbooks and teacher uses.
Dear CEO: I don't give two cents about you or your company
> AI research and related topics and startups rarely make news.

Research of any sort rarely makes news. The exceptions involve universities with very zealous, hard-working P.R. people (who pretty much always overstate the importance and impact of the work they cover).

As for startups, they, and other businesses, are there to make money. And there just isn't much money to be made in A.I. (yet?). The only commercially viable idea to come out of A.I., that I know of, is the expert system. And that turned out to be a pretty small market. [EDIT: Seems I was way off here. See replies, and my apologies to all the hard-working A.I. researchers out there.]

> Is it really such a dead field?

Well, not dead, but it certainly is not what it once was. 50 years ago, many knowledgeable people thought that machines with human-level capabilities were just around the corner. Today it's just Ray Kurzweil. 50 years of rather dismal results tends to dampen the enthusiasm of prospective researchers.

> There's never any breakthroughs announced, ....

"Breakthrough" is a word used by P.R. people. Real researchers know that knowledge is almost always advanced in small steps, building on previous work. When you read about a "breakthrough"--in any field--be skeptical.

> ... and there's no grandiose research projects underway that I know of.

Almost certainly not. This is because the U.S. Congress, and similar organizations elsewhere, have not made A.I. a funding priority. No grant $$$ means no big research projects at universities. (And no obvious commercial possibilities means no big research projects at corporations.)

But there are certainly plenty of little projects.

> Are there any websites that try to track the different AI projects going on?

That would be difficult, since, when a researcher starts a project, he generally does not announce the fact to the world. Research projects often have no official status. It's just a few people--or one person--playing around with some ideas. If they come up with something interesting, then they publish a paper about it, but that is only after the fact. So it would be hard to gather the information for such a website.

Generally, the way to track current research in a field is to look at the relevant journals. Unfortunately, this can be tricky without expertise in the field. In any case, here are a few links to A.I. journals, to get you started:

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
http://www.jair.org/

Journal of Machine Learning Research
http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/

Journal of Intelligent Systems
http://www.jisjournal.org/

Another possibility is to find an online discussion group about A.I. research. However, I can't help you there.
Yeah, this happens to me all the time. I've managed to suss out a number of the factors for me, but based on everything else I've read on it, I've also learned that the factors, reasons, and responses are different for different people.

So, the short of it is, you'll have to figure this one out on your own, by figuring yourself out.

Here are some of the things that cause me to get lazy, and how I handle them:

1. Probably closest to what's going on for you, I will occasionally be working on a project and then hit a problem that I wasn't anticipating. It seems like my motivation goes through the basement, but what's actually going on is that I'm just chewing on the problem, turning it over and over in my head. Eventually -- days, weeks, or months, depending on the problem -- I will find the extra insight or information I needed and the whole thing will fall together. I try not to stress out over this any more; if the project doesn't have a deadline, then I let it stall more-or-less indefinitely. If it does have a deadline, I try to adjust the deadline accordingly. If I can't adjust the deadline, or it just really needs to get done, then I try to work around the roadblock by implementing a "good enough" solution. I have trouble working on project steps out-of-order, so even if I don't have to solve a particular problem in some project before proceeding, the project will still usually stall.

2. I've lost interest. In this case, the best thing is just to come to terms with giving up on the project, and I do this by realizing that there are many projects that I would actually be interested in working on, and there's no reason to beat myself up over something I don't care about.

3. I'm exhausted. The best thing to do here is go out and eat a good meal (I don't tend to cook very well), go for a walk, read a book, re-connect with some friends, and take a nap or get a full night's sleep.
Nice piece. I don't think the writer can be faulted; (s)he prepared quite valiantly for the interviews.
I usually try to work on something interesting. I have several unfinished projects on the go that I try to find time to work on.

But, today I wrote a tool for my fiancee to help her make knitting charts. Very minimal, but it's a start.

http://knitting.heroku.com/
Remind yourself of why you started this project in the first place. You're trying to change the world, disrupt an industry, destroy an enemy. Remember why you're in this fight and why you're going to win.
Well, the contrarian view is a nice reality check, but... despite the fact the Packard plant may have shut down in 1956, it's still relevant today. Despite the fact that there may be a bustling factory across the street from half a square mile of abandoned prairie, the prairie is still relevant. Because in a healthy city, you don't have mile-long abandoned plants or half a square mile of prairie land, because the land is too valuable to be left that fallow.

It's a gallant try at some sort of defense, but no sale. Find me half a square mile of abandoned grassland in the Austin city limits, or some other healthy city.
You don't agree with referring to people as the gender that they consider themselves?

There's a lot of people out there that don't like their first names, so they go by their middle names. I don't see how calling a female-to-male transgendered person "she" or "he/she" is any different from calling someone that prefers their middle name by their first name. In both cases, you're shoehorning them into a way of identifying themselves that works fine for most people (Most people go by their first names; most people go by the gender they were biologically born as.) but does not work for them. In both cases you're being an asshole.
I've been in a similar position as this guy, and really-- you never know what goes on behind the scenes when you don't get hired. His feelings about what he may have missed might or might not be accurate. We have no idea what the other candidates looked like. That 20k number doesn't really mean much once you've made contact.
Rosenlicht.
Linear Algbera done Right. Then Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces.
Halmos' Measure Theory. Awesome.
In the fall of 1980 I taught my first class (AI) as a professor. The TA, Jeff Shrager, suggested this word problem, which he called dog-cat, as a good homework exercise for implementing the A* search algorithm. The students had to do it for three letter words in Lisp and on a Univac computer that the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School had at the time. I’ve been using the problem on and off for 30 years now in homework assignments.
Or if they insist on calling it that, at least shorten it to "Social Network." It's cleaner.
Journalism in the Age of Data
I used this for my undergrad analysis class and then relied on it as a foundation for reading Rudin/Royden in grad school. Killed qualifying exams. Use it. Sure, it's all Riemann integration but you will not suffer until you get to measure-theoretic integration later.
Yeah, I also got the impression that the author's technical background was slightly weak. Trying to cram on scalability questions using YouTube isn't going to give them the same background they'd get from hacking on real projects.

But having interviewed programmers, I'm deeply impressed by the author's work ethic. Probably less than 5% of people I've interviewed have spent even 30 minutes preparing. I'd love to have employees who approached problem solving with that kind of gonzo determination and resourcefulness.
Don't you just love it how often all of us practical programming types who are too cool for school, realise that getting a CS degree/education is pretty damn useful as soon as a real problem comes your way.
TV: College football on Saturday; Rubicon, Boardwalk Empire and Madmen* on Sunday. (*Although Madmen is seemingly plotless and is becoming a source of boredom instead of a cure.)

Code: Weekend coding is usually reserved for work on side projects and personal / in-house tools.

Read: Veering toward the non-technical and fiction lately.

People: Gotta stay connected to the important stuff.

Go outside: Try it. It's great!
Yes, you could easily create this.
I read that distance running lowers Co Enzyme Q10 levels (whilst raising anti-oxidants) with people that don't do it regularly. As a weekend warrior, do you think stress levels go up as a result?
Superprofits from the Arcade
Similar situation, but I don't live in NYC. There is somewhat of a salary ceiling from what I've seen for the average developer (where "senior" is as far as most typically get). However, I have known a few devs that do multiple jobs (typically supplementing pay with part-time), and contractors can work longer hours or have niche experience that can make a good bit more.

If you're willing to take it to the next level, there are plenty of opportunities. See the salary range on left here:

http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Java+Developer&l=New+York%2...

Instead of looking for senior dev positions, look for principal dev, lead architect, etc. After you interview for one of those types of positions, you'll see what they are looking for: leadership experience, system and application design, real-world experience with enterprise system/application development (high load, money involved, etc.), flexibility in methodology, and dealing with loads of documentation, process, etc. You usually would have more opportunity to get that kind of experience in a larger more structured shop (banks, financial institutions, large company, etc.). I would stay the hell away from them though, personally. The politics and lack of ability to feel a part of the whole business will suck the life out of an entrepreneurial developer.

I assume that since you are here you are considering going off on your own or starting a company or have thought seriously about it? If you do this, be prepared to lower your salary not raise it. However, if you are doing what you love to do, you'll probably be good at it, and you'll be more successful.

If you don't feel you are good enough to make what you are making now somewhere else, maybe it is time to either start training, or start looking into what you really want to do with your life. Procrastination (which I'm good at) is not going to make you more successful.
CJ, pepperjam, etc are great networks. You can reach a TON of people. You should also expect several thousand in upfront fees.
Actually, the pedagogy of his videos is the thing that the opposite of "broken". Khan has an excellent teaching style, and gets his points across rather well. So calling it "pedagogically broken" is completely ridiculous. If you had said it was "productionally broken" you might have an argument (although, I'm not sure "productionally" is really a word :-D ).

Khan could indeed use fancier tools to produce his short videos, but what really makes them valuable is the content. I don't see that the current presentation style detracts from the teaching value one bit.
So happy to see Nyx Net still up and running - it's where I first learned the *nix shell back in '92 or '93 on their Nox server - ahh memories.
My username is sephr.
And I posted that here last week:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1743918

HN's algorithm is interesting lately. My posting had more upvotes, I have better karma than this poster, it was on the day it appeared on the Big Picture, and linked to the original, not to some blogspammer.

Mine never got above the second page.
Good thing you don't work at DARPA.
The article isn't even telling half of the story, though. We only know his perspective on the actual interview, which includes his brain's attempt to explain what he perceives as failure, and we have no idea about the nature of the hiring process or what the other candidates looked like.

At some companies, you can apply for a position, go through the entire interview process, and then a company-wide hiring freeze can kill it dead. Sometimes you might be up against an internal applicants with huge advantages. The interviewer might have had a hangover. There are so many things you just can't know.

At the same time, I am a bit surprised that questions about threads and interprocess communication were challenging for a senior systems engineer with ten years experience.

The guy had taken some time off and was probably rusty.
[EDITED: original comment deleted before I finished typing my response...]
Ask HN: Please review our UI (Round 2) - Feedback is greatly appreciated!
I'm back for Round 2! Here's Round 1 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1748421) - I asked the HN Community for some feedback to help my startup fix our UI and boy did they do a great job!

To give you a bit of background, my startup is called Vuru. Our web app applies value investing formulas & benchmarks to tell you how much a stock is worth, its strengths & weaknesses & to help you discover undervalued stocks. Vuru provides the equivalent of two hours worth of analysis in the time it takes to load your page.

We've also built a tool that provides an overview of your portfolio, from a value investing perspective.

HERE'S THE PROBLEM: We want to make our site even better so HN Community please help us out once again!!

Page users see when they first sign up:
http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/9710/vuruanalysispagesignupf.png

Sample Analysis:
http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/3658/vuruanalysispagev3.png

Portfolio Page:
http://img704.imageshack.us/img704/4853/vuruhomepagev3.png

So, what do you think? Where can they be improved?

I'll provide clickable links below and if you're interested, sign up to be notified when we launch into private beta (www.vuru.co).
Lost Rover Found on Moon With Retroreflector Still Intact
I play pick-up soccer with a regular group, read, cook, occasionally ride my bike around. Used to go on a ton of hikes until I exhausted those in the LA area.

I used to play ultimate (frisbee) but didn't like the rules. Good group though and plenty of geeks. When I played in Seattle, it seemed that all of us either worked for Boeing, Amazon, Microsoft or Google. You can find out about plenty of pick-up groups online.
Clickable:

Page users see when they first sign up: http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/9710/vuruanalysispagesign...

Sample Analysis: http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/3658/vuruanalysispagev3.png

Portfolio Page: http://img704.imageshack.us/img704/4853/vuruhomepagev3.png

Our actual website: http://www.vuru.co
Large-scale data-mining, predictions, and machine learning are not new per se, but have rapidly expanded in terms of available practical techniques, and actual use of those techniques in applications. Palantir is one major startup based around that, and there's a bunch of other less-high-profile stuff moving AI into marketing (behavior prediction, etc.). There's also quantitative finance. Less businessy, there's a bunch of research on applying machine learning and datamining to huge datasets like NASA's sky surveys, or biology or physics data repositories.
The slippery slope to obesity
the tone, if there was any, was friendly to neutral

No hard feelings, sorry if I was reading too much into it.

I have search low and high for a usable automatic text summarization library, but everything was a high-dollar item for finance

Now you really have my attention. I'll shoot you an email.
I don't know if this is strictly American though. In Italy, people are often referred to by their professional titles. We do that with doctors here, but they would say the equivalent of "Lawyer Smith" or "Engineer Jones".

I only know this from studying the language. I have never been to Italy, so correct me if I am wrong.
Can you share some links to this high quality content you have been producing and giving away for free?