skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As for the short term, yes, people do this. No, it's not something I would encourage. Bailing on your spouse is one thing, but bailing on your children is worse.

As far as the long term goes, I understand where you're coming from. It's a bit of a semantic game, as it's not too hard to argue that altruism is impossible and everything is ultimately done for yourself. That said, I think we differ here. I don't find the argument that everyone is equally selfish (only with different wants) compelling.

It gets complicated from here, though. You have to ask where these wants come from. Why does one person want the warmth of the needle, versus another wanting to change her child's diaper. Perhaps the ultimate selfless act is subjugating your wants in the first place, though I imagine you could argue this is also a selfish act. It could probably go on like this forever, but at some point you realize some people's circle of concern is bigger than themselves, and there must be something to this.
Interviewers don't give most candidates tangible feedback/criticism because the vast majority do not want it.

People who just bombed an interview usually know it, and aren't in a place to receive constructive feedback.

The rare few who handle that well should explicitly ask for feedback or critique.

I always give this when asked, but never offer it unasked.
There's a rule similar to 80/20 which is 90-9-1. 90% are just observers, 9% react/respond (think upvote), and 1% contribute. I wouldn't be surprised if the HN/Reddit/etc. is close to this or some normalized and skewed version of it.
I gave OpenOffice like 10 chances and all time it was a fail.
It wasn't stable. Idk why but it kept hanging, not that Microsoft's products don't do that. but MSOffice 2007 was a huge improvement.

Next, non-geeks (which make up more than half of the world and all of my clients) don't use "Open Office" and opening my files is a pain for them.

Third, even if I get them to work cross software, not all features are available so can't open client's files.

Fourth, it doesn't have as many features as Office 2010.

I love this quote on Open v/s Closed Source debate
"People don't care if it's open or not, people care if it solves the problem or not."

I mean honestly, why would my mom care if it's open source? ha!

Yea Google Docs is the next stop. Just that can't use it offline.
True. The rate of head injuries in either variant of Rugby might be a better comparison.

Quite apart from the frequency of contact, another difference between American Football and other contact sports is the greater emphasis on physical speed and power of players over stamina, positional awareness etc.

As someone who once completed a rugby tackle by intentionally headbutting a moving opponent's ankle (in a local third team game...) I can assure you that lack of helmet doesn't solve the problem of overly aggressive sportsmen on an adrenalin rush...
Time, and they don't owe you one.
Microsoft Sold 240 Million Windows 7 Licenses In 1 Year
This site isn't the right demographic for feedback either, unless you're building a website solely for other people who also have websites.
XMMS used to be a pretty good clone, but they suffered from a serious case of second-system-effect when they made xmms2.
Or you could get a job as a janitor... and then solve a difficult graduate-level problem from algebraic graph theory that a prof leaves on the chalkboard.
Psychology Today takes an evolutionary approach. They argue that drinkable alcohol is a relatively novel invention of 10,000 years ago. Our ancestors had previously gotten their alcohol kick through eating rotten fruits, so more intelligent humans may be more likely to choose modern alcoholic beverages.

Is it my imagination, or does that leap of logic make no sense whatsoever?

Perhaps I'd need to be drunk to understand it.
As a manager I can tell you that I am looking for any clues I can find to mitigate the risk of bringing on a new person. "Experience' means very little if I have no way of assessing what a prospective employee/contractor did in those previous jobs. You need 'evidence' more than you need experience; evidence of your language and problem solving skills; evidence of your communication skills; evidence of your motivation and interests.

Eric
vote: I think keyboard shortcuts would be a nice addition to the hacker news site.
I would be really wary of reading through the w3schools JavaScript guides first. You'll learn programming basics (which, as an experienced developer, you won't need), but not much about what makes JavaScript so interesting. And many of the coding practices you'll see at w3schools are painfully outdated and/or just bad practices.

Basically, if you're reading a JavaScript guide and it mentions document.write(), run away.

The MDC guides are much, much better. And Crockford's book is best.

There are also fantastic explanations of the Event model at PPK's Quirksmode site. Start here and read through all of his Event articles:

http://quirksmode.org/js/events_early.html
I'm glad google keeps it's money and invests in developing google maps, streetview, and gmail. The government would (and does) pay billions to IT consultants to build much shitter systems.

In the UK our government has sunk billions into the Royal Mail, but we still have to pay thousands a year for just a fraction of the functionality of google's geocoding.
As ridiculous as this sounds - this is the only reason that I keep an XP installation on one of my machines at home. I've tried Banshee, Rhythmbox, and AmaroK, but they all just felt clunky coming from F2K.

Based on other comments here, it sounds like I need to give Audacious a shot.
As a person who loves going to concerts and events, I really dislike the notion of reselling tickets/codes at higher prices.
They should care because they sell hardware to people who use those platforms. They will sell less hardware to Java/Scala/Groovy/Clojure/Jython/JRuby/Beanshell programmers this way.

The Mac platform is not important enough for Oracle to care. And Java Apps won't be in the App Store.
Because they spit into everyone's well all the time. e.g.

- OOXML and the related perversion of the ISO process

- Wilful violation of standards (web, others)

- Hurting users for hollywood (Protected media path etc.)

- Broken security (by design) that has enabled all the botnets and spam you could ever think of, and then some.
Dating Advice Book
First in foremost, I am not a counselor or therapist. I simply coach others in the dream of becoming better in their relationships and personal development. I was born into a traditional family that later split. Since then, it has been my purpose to educate others of the importance of communication, self worth, family, friendship and love!For the more information visit :http://therelationshipadviceblog.com/.
I reviewed 4 sites just for kicks and submitted my site to it. So far, only 1 person rated my review so I got 1 feedback point and 1 review for my website. Seems like getting an ROI on my time is dependent on a) whether people see the rating buttons b) click on them. Seems like something that needs to be fixed.
vote: I don't think it's a worth it to add keyboard shortcuts to hacker news
So your point is that even if you can get the Angel cash in the UK you'll face larger hurdles in the later stages compared to the US.

And I think you have a point about the risk adverse nature of Brits.

Thanks for the answer. Wish I had an answer to your question :-)
Psychology Today tries to give an explanation on Why Intelligent People Drink More Alcohol, and they claim:

It is important to note that both income and education, as well as childhood social class and parents’ education, are controlled in multiple regression analyses of these data from the US and the UK. It means that it is not because more intelligent people occupy higher-paying, more important jobs that require them to socialize and drink with their business associates that they drink more alcohol. It appears to be their intelligence itself, rather than correlates of intelligence, that inclines them to drink more.

also interesting:

Consistent with the prediction of the Hypothesis, more intelligent children, both in the United Kingdom and the United States, grow up to consume alcohol more frequently and in greater quantities than less intelligent children. Controlling for a large number of demographic variables, such as sex, race, ethnicity, religion, marital status, number of children, education, earnings, depression, satisfaction with life, frequency of socialization with friends, number of recent sex partners, childhood social class, mother’s education, and father’s education, more intelligent children grow up to drink more alcohol in the UK and the US.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundament...
In addition to Swype, I find Swiftkey to be a fantastic keyboard. Uncanny on predictions. The settings page has a count of how many keystrokes it has saved, so I know I've been made 27% more efficient by this program.
Or, as Lane puts it: "The underlying principles are universal. Even aliens need mitochondria."

Right, midichlorians are in all living things of sufficient complexity.

Episode 1 was onto something?

Kill me quickly.
Only because calling it "tax avoidance" is overspecifying. Google's ability to come up with amazing free services without immediate profitability is a consequence of their considerable post-tax revenue.
Again, depending on what you want to do, SilverLight works pretty darn well on Windows and Mac these days.
Yes, however the algorithms are such that failure cannot be made strictly local. For example, when solving a stiff PDE, there is unavoidable and quite complex global communication at every time step (indeed, within the nonlinear solves required in each time step). There is no hope of "continuous local checkpointing" or the like because the program state is changing to the tune of gigabytes per second per node.

The most common response is to perform global checkpoints often enough that hardware failure is not too expensive, but infrequently enough that your program performance doesn't suffer too much. Bear in mind that our jobs are not normally hitting disk heavily, so frequent checkpointing could easily cost an order of magnitude. When hardware failure occurs, the entire global job is killed and it is restarted from the last checkpoint. There are libraries (e.g. BLCR) that integrate with MPI implementations and resource managers for checkpoint, restart, and migration.

Note that it is not possible to locally reconstruct the state of the process that failed because there just isn't enough information unless you store all incoming messages, which can easily be a continuous gigabyte per second per node. Even if you had a fantastic storage system that gave you ring storage with bandwidth similar to the network, local reconstruction wouldn't do much good because the rest of the simulation could not continue until the replacement node had caught up, so the whole machine would be idle until during this time. If you have another job waiting to run, you could at least get something done, but the resource management implications of such a strategy are not a clear win.

So if hardware failure becomes so frequent that global checkpointing is too costly, the only practical recourse is to compute everything redundantly. Nobody in scientific computing is willing to pay double to avoid occasionally having to restart from the last checkpoint, so this strategy has not taken off (though there are prototype implementations).
I Imagined that people would draw the inference themselves, but obviously not. The internal culture of any corporation dictates how it interacts with the world. The phrase "Independent Software Vendor" is an example of the weird nature of the Microsoft ecosystem - the only explanation I ever get for what "Independent" means is "not Microsoft". The Microsoft monoculture leaches out into everything to do with the Windows platform. The obvious example would be something like Team Foundation Server - it's as if Microsoft as an entity can't imagine software being developed outside of a complex corporate structure that requires "lifecycle management". The fact that Microsoft are so deeply engaged with their developer community only strengthens the effect of this monoculture. There are an astonishing number of professional programmers whose entire knowledge of practical software development comes from the MSDN - after all, it provides everything you need to know, so why go elsewhere? The number of developers who have never heard of github is quite astounding.

The best analogy I can give is an anecdote from James Meek -

"One day in 1992, just after the USSR collapsed, I met a mid-ranking officer from the old Soviet interior ministry on a train heading to southern Ukraine. He'd lived in the Soviet system since he was born half a century earlier and knew no other way of doing things. We got talking. He was astounded when I told him that in Britain we had no ID cards or system of residence permits to keep track of who lived where. I saw a look of panicked incomprehension forming on his face and waited for a question such as, "How do you keep tabs on people, then?" What he actually asked was, "How do you know how much bread to make?""
iChat supports Google Chat (natively and also all jabber, too).
I'd go a step further than you on #3: forget about job postings altogether. Instead, make a list of companies you'd like to work for and for whom you think you'd made a good fit. Eliminate all game companies from that list. Then, make a project of finding people in that company to contact and ask if you can stop by and talk about how you can help. Then, don't let up. Nobody you'd ever want to work for is going to say "don't talk to me again".

We have hired people who did this to us. People who are extremely, pointedly, relentlessly interested in working for your team are much more attractive than job ad respondants.
You'll meet a lot of ageists in your career. Ignore the objections from all of them, including yourself.
If only Indian colleges worked that way. They have only one way to get it (I mean the finest one's IITs/NITs/BITS/IIIT/Best state colleges), give there entrance exam after 12th class. Crack it, your in, don't crack it, your out.

Also I like how the American colleges allow you to take several classes which are not related to my branch. I could tailor my degree to my requirements.

<irrelevant unfulfilled desire> If I had the chance I would have taken basic and advanced electronics (from semiconductor theory to VLSI anything in between), all the computer achitecture classes (from digital systems to advanced parallel computing systems) with embedded systems & DSP, lots of math and 4 specific computer science classes (algorithms, operating systems, AI and data structures).

That would have really fulfilled all my desires.

</irrelevant unfulfilled desire>
I downloaded iTerm 2 and it's amazing. It's a totally new application compared to it's predecessor. I finally, truly have 256 colors in the terminal now.
The Mac App Store also requires that you use XCode to package your apps.
I had a TA once who had an incomprehensible accent. When people complained, some honcho from the department came to class and berated everyone for complaining because she had passed all the qualification tests to lecture in English, despite the fact that actual students couldn't understand her.

This was in the business department. Apparently, the people who are supposed to be teaching how to run a business valued their own a priori qualification tests over the experiences of actual customers[1]. While the situation pissed me off even then, the irony did not occur to me until years later.

[1] Academics don't like the implication that students are customers, but in this case the analogy holds.
I think it is a double standard that US companies get to avoid taxation worldwide while US individuals have to be taxed on worldwide earnings (regardless if it was earned in the US).

To me, it's insane that the US government feels that this is reasonable.
I am unclear about why the acquisition of mitochondria by a cell is considered to be such an unlikely event, as I lean towards the view that given enough cells/space/time, unlikely short term possibilities become distinct probabilities eventually. Also, I can't help wondering if the reason that simple cells are not observed to absorb free mitochondria is that eukaryotic cells and the organisms they evolved into have somehow poisoned the well, or attacked newly-complex competitors so aggressively that they've suppressed the population of omnivorous simple cells.

But I'm no biologist. Am I missing something obvious, or is there a particular paper explaining why this mitochondrial upgrade is considered such an unlikely event?
Not only that, once they finally get it right it'll get phased out for their latest framework so you can keep on paying the Microsoft tax.

My biggest beef with them is that they chose to make money not through technical excellence but usually through more subversive means.
It does, like every prior version of WinAmp, IIRC.
They can't say "I hired the other gal because she sked my ck."
How I got accepted to grad school: I sent a typed letter as "priority mail" (where the recipient has to sign for it) to the prof I wanted to work with.

It was my junior year and I told him I could meet him in-person during spring break. He agreed and I traveled out there as promised. The screwed-up part was that he ended-up leaving town that week and I didn't get a chance to meet him! So I talked to everyone in the department I could get access to.

Eventually the department head at the time liked what I had to say, so he told me he'd see me back the next year.
Google Spent $1.2M On Lobbying In Q3, Up 11 Percent From Last Year
They can't say "I hired the hottie because she s--ked my c--k."
I do the same with minor exception.

If the busiest time is during working hours you maybe want to avoid it if you are taking in money during that time.

Another good reason for doing maintenance during working hours is that's when your network admins are also working - or anyone else outside your group whose help you might need.
This really works as a concept. I've signed up and reviewed a couple of sites already. I'm looking at one now that looks suspiciously like spam though. There doesn't appear to be a spam button for when you're looking at a site. If a site isn't spam then being labelled as spam is still useful feedback for them, even if it does mean going back to the drawing board.
Unless you want to be able to send your users passwords by email, in which case don't.
The padding of gloves in itself does not make blows to the head harder, it makes them less painful for the competitor delivering them, and that leads to harder blows. Hit someone hard on the head with a bare fist, and chances are that you break your hand. Because of that, before gloves came into use, boxers would go for body blows, rather than blows to the head.
Wow, that looks amazing! What I find most useful is that Swype saves me from pressing the wrong keys, which is by far the worst offender for typos on the iPhone...
It occurs to me that you could literally retrospectively measure the odds that someone's first experience with the site was due to a hypercontributing outlier member. My intuition is that a) they contribute a hugely disproportionate amount of the value on SO (pick any metric you want for this), b) they contribute a hugely disproportionate amount of value relevant to someone's first use experience, and c) if you segment users into "first use was influenced by a hypercontributor" and "first use was not influenced by a hypercontributor", there is a measurable difference in retention rates in favor of the first group.

Proving or disproving these assumptions would be pretty important for strategic direction at a QA site, incidentally, since the world if I'm right looks very different from the world if I'm wrong. Since StackOverflow's data set is public, you could do it as a weekend project. In general, though, this is the kind of stupidly powerful thing you can go with the data you already have in your startup.
"Now when you need to read from a file, you just do:

ReadFile(filename, func(file) {
fmt.println(file.Read())
});

Now you’re safely guaranteed to close the file when the operation is done. This works because Go has lexical closures, a really nice feature. But the syntax for this is ungainly. Ruby addresses this with block arguments. Translated to Go, they could look something like:

ReadFile(filename) do(file) {
fmt.println(file.Read())
}

"

He does realize, that all he did was replace "func" with "do", and moved some parentheses around, right?

Are there other examples where the difference is more dramatic than this?
From experience searching for jobs in the last year it seems to be exceptionally rare to get any sort of feedback after an interview - constructive or otherwise.

My guess is that this reticence is mainly due to the laws surrounding employment, since it costs practically nothing to send a brief email. If anything which was written as part of a response could be construed as being racist/sexist/etc then in theory the company could face lawsuits. Also in the current economic situation some people might react badly to a negative response, especially if they have made exceptional efforts to get to the stage of having an interview.
I can't help but feel a little cheated. I understand why this was the right decision for Google but for them to announce they are looking nationwide, for people to send them emails pleading their case for their hometown and then to see them say, "oh yeah Stanford gets it" - it feels like they made this conclusion before even the initial announcement.
You're missing the point of the analogy. If the legal status of the two alternatives is in question, fine...

"Sure, I cheated on you with your sister, but at least I didn't cheat on you with your mum!"

Google is dodging taxes by shuffling their profits around the world. Everyone knows the numbers are a legal fiction, and while legal, there are valid questions about how ethical a practice it is. That they pay other taxes is by no means a defense.
Encrypt the documents. Put them on a distributed hashtable, using something like Reed-Solomon codes to distribute them over the network, so you're only taking about twice as much total storage as the document itself but you're very resilient to nodes disappearing. Maybe add some kind of resource exchange system so you pay for the storage by participating in the network.

Google the projects I mentioned and you'll find a lot more detail on these sorts of ideas. Both projects intended to build permanent, uncensorable storage at global scale. It's not a totally solved problem yet but there's been a lot of interesting engineering.
Same here, I have a small nettop box with 7 installed just for Winamp and a few other, windows-only programs. I just tried Audacious, however, and it's very good. The only thing I miss is a hotkey for "toggle windowshade mode", but I think I can live without it.
I really don't understand what the distinction he's making here between "nerds" and "smart people who aren't nerds" is.

All smart people, nerdy or not-nerdy, have a vast collection of random trivia stored away in their brains somewhere (dumb people have something similar but smaller), and everybody enjoys saying funny things. What's the real distinction here?
How to game the U.S. higher-education system
This is a commonly accepted best practice in corporate accounting. In 2006 the IRS approved Google's transfer pricing arrangements. Also, it's so common that there is a name for it - "The Double Irish". Bloomberg recently had an article on the same topic:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-05-13/american-companies-...
Strategies for getting an Ivy League degree (not undergrad though):

"How to game the U.S. higher-education system"

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/1/24/11657/1141
Kitchen sink fluid dynamics experiment simulates cosmological white holes