skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: What do you do when unemployed?
Recession and lay-offs are on the way and i just wonder what do people do to be creative and motivated: reading, writing, learning new skills, try to be self-employed, develop a web-app etc, Yoga.

What do you do?
Thomas Disch, Novelist, Dies at 68
Heh, that's good. What other words mean both X and the exact opposite of X?
This reminds me my 9th grade "Computer Science" class. Mr. Brown taught us some of the same principles with Applesoft Basic. I'm always surprised when I work with other programmers who don't think it's important to write spartan code. Which isn't to say I haven't been guilty of the same thing a time or two - but this article reminded me of my first exposure to programming in the 9th grade. Here's to you, Mr. B.
Now asks yourselves this - how many of the skills you picked up during your work experience could have been as effectively learned in a classroom setting?

I worked for 16 months in between 3rd and 4th years where part of my job was doing requirements gathering. When I went back to school I had a course that included a section on requirements gathering and I know for a fact it would have made very little sense had I not done it for real beforehand.
Envy.
It seems Ballmer likes to play with his food.
They might if the programmer didn't have the sense to surround the keywords with word boundary markers. You know, something like %20SET%20 etc. I do this successfully with mod_security, and a good regex kit will let you do this easily.
Ballmer and gates are both extremes. Gates always wasted heaps of money, starting up projects and killing them again... have different groups build the same software (then kill the least successful project)... buy companies on a whim, and so on. Being wasteful is not the end of the world if your revenue grows with 500% each year, but it doesn't make the shareholders happy.

So with this tactic Microsoft started to dominate every field in software. At that point the waste started to add up so Gates got Ballmer to clean it up. And when Ballmer became CEO he did cut the waste and made MS tremendously profitable. A great accomplishment. However, now it's time (and has been for a few years) for somebody technical to take charge again.
Virtual competition - ex-boss of VMWare
Exercise, if you haven't been already, and try doing something of your own if conditions are right, or you can make them be right (by living cheaper for instance).
Wufoo and the Art of Customer Service
Providing Customer Service That Outshines Your Competitors Customer Service
Spat with Rogers leaves Canadian Apple stores without iPhones
The myth that a very narrow set of skills is all that's necessary is not a new one.

I don't really know where it comes from, and my pet hypotheses are too ugly to share, except that their nicest parts have to do with people believing what they want to hear, not what is true.
Chronotopic Anamorphosis
I'm less worried about reliability and more worried about having easy access to my stuff when on the road. With 10 computers, I inevitably have copies of my important data distributed everywhere -- it would just be nice to have a cheap canonical source I can pull from occasionally.

I'd also be okay with paying a large upfront cost (say $500) to buy hard drives and then paying small monthly fees for bandwidth/electricity/support. It doesn't seem to be too hard to make a profit doing something like this.

The last solution I can see is to make upfront and ongoing fees cheap but make me pay through the nose for downloads. I'd be willing to pay $50 per gig to download if it were free to upload/store. (I have really low usage requirements asides from storage.)

So I feel an entrepreneurial company would be able to make a profit in this realm (correct me if I'm mistaken) -- I'm just not sure where one is.
Exactly, it worked for real estate right?

oh wait
I think the "Lisp as a (potential) blub" meme is starting to catch on. You're starting to see some people release alternatives that are looking fairly viable. Two that are frequently discussed here are Arc and Clojure. Then there are guys like Mark Tarver, who are working on things like Qi to improve Lisp.

I think it's great to see that after 50 years, "Lisp, the idea" is still growing.
Uh... More like DRY is equally a new, fancy acronym given to a whole bunch of techniques that have been in use for years. This stuff isn't new at all, it's just experiencing something of a renaissance after the dark ages of the late 90's Big Design Madness.

The "Spartan Programming" stuff Atwood talks about is focused mostly on C, Java and other low level imperative languages. "DRY" tends to be most used in the context of web development. Other than that, I agree: they're mostly the same idea.
Can you be specific about which part of the system call you're talking about? Because you said "swapping the stack" (which doesn't take a thousand clock cycles) and "flushing the TLB" (which doesn't happen in OSs where the kernel occupies a permanent part of the VM address space).

I'm sorry, this isn't controversial. All I said was, "mmap isn't faster than read in typical use cases". But then we all got really specific talking about ESP and CS and CR3 and now we have something to go back and forth on, which is kind of fun, and I might learn something new. Didn't mean to snipe at you.
Why can't people just accept evidence?

It's tempting to talk about the human psychological urge to do something in the face of a problem -- an urge that serves us well in many situations, though it may also serve us poorly. And it's tempting to talk about how double-blind statistical studies are, at most, a few hundred years old, are nonintuitive for most people, and are often poorly understood even by those who are supposed to be experts.

But let's put that aside and ask: Do humans even care about the "effectiveness" of this ritual? Perhaps the use of acupuncture to improve fertility is a social signal. I can well imagine that infertile Chinese women feel one hell of a lot of social pressure to demonstrate that they're doing everything possible -- including all sorts of financial and physical hardship -- to get pregnant. Acupuncture is a dramatic statement of purpose, especially if it costs "hundreds of pounds". But if the alternative is for your husband and his family to grow unsympathetic, or even suspicious...

Scientists have also shown quite convincingly that smoking, wearing high heels, and being anorexic are very bad for your health, and yet many women do all of these things, at great physical and financial expense. Heck, there was a time within living memory when a well-bred Chinese woman would have had her feet bound in childhood, crippling her for life, in order to enhance her marriageability. Compared to that, the fact that some women feel compelled to undergo acupuncture is a sign of tremendous progress.
pg - the link you've posted has an extra http://
I think some of this is useful for normal, not-very-social people.
I've been using Fluxbuntu for quite a while now, I second your recommendation, it's pretty impressive and worth a shot for ubuntu linux users interested in an alternative to xubuntu.
The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining
We have formed an oversight committee to avoid repeating that egregious oversight.

Edit: Here's a collection! http://www-personal.umich.edu/~cellis/antagonym.html
One thing I think is missing from this exposition is a discussion of tradeoffs. You can't blindly apply these rules, because they're to some degree contradictory. Example: you can make all your variables private to better "minimize accessibility of variables", but that requires elaborate accessor methods which increase "vertical complexity".

Which is the right path? It depends, and the solution is a sense of aesthetic. That, not the rules themselves, seems to me what this techniques is all about. It's really just a different, more specific way of rephrasing PG's essay about taste in software engineering.
She was just featured in the most recent Economist:

http://www.economist.com/people/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11...
WALL-E: Economic Ignorance and the War on Modernity
While that theory has some support, I would also suggest that you not discount the synergistic effect of the popular association between marijuana and that "scary" jazz/beatnik scene which probably seemed quite threatening to the dominant culture of the time.
There is a theory that people with autism-spectrum disorders have trouble modelling what is going on in other people's minds, and this is what makes social situations hard for them.

If this theory is true, then a person with Aspergers who is not annoyed by his or her own body odor would have trouble realizing that the odor might bother other people.
I've had acupuncture before. It can help.

It's all about what you believe. The power of the mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo
Several of these games can be played on my site if anyone would like to explore them further. Specifically: Amazons, Checkers, Dots and Boxes, Othello, and Phutball. I like them all (naturally), but Phutball has become one of my favorites.

http://vying.org

My username there is 'eki', if you'd like to get a game going with a real person instead of the bots.
Depends on the people you appoint.

If you get a combination of technical people and business people who both want Yahoo to thrive as an underdog all will be good. Yahoo will stay independent and will probably do some great things in the next few years. Without Yang the new board will have to prove itself, so you can expect the new board to spend a lot of money in research/acquisitions. When a company is fighting for its survival you can expect great things to happen. So with a new board Yahoo will have to innovate and surprise us all.

If you appoint people for one purpose (selling the company), then that's exactly what will happen. Because the purpose of a merger between Microsoft and Yahoo is (partially) an "increase in operational efficiency" Ballmer will definitely get rid of thousands of jobs (= save money). Therefore, before the merger happens a lot of good people will leave (for google) and a lot of mediocre people don't want to wait for the axe to fall. The stock would normally crash as a result, but the promise of MS buying Yahoo will keep it reasonably healthy. (If MS walks away after the board is changed Yahoo is fucked.) So MS buys Yahoo, the shareholders and board of directors get their money and wall street is happy. Ballmer will start handing out pink slips and save billions. MS shareholders will be very happy.

So in the short term the MS-Yahoo deal works out for everybody. MS and Yahoo shareholders get more money and a lot of waste is cut out of Yahoo. Okay, it doesn't work out for the employees who become redundant, but that's to be expected. On the long term it doesn't look so great. The merger will make it even harder for MS to adapt to changes as it becomes even bigger, and squabbles within MS will make it harder to get anything done for everybody.

The entire deal is basically a short-term versus long-term issue. Either you want to cash out now (and sell Yahoo) or you want to wait it out and hope things get better. Yang, as one of the founders, thinks long term and stays positive. Investors and shareholders, by their very nature, think short term. Hence the conflict.
Even though this topic has been pretty much beaten to death here, it's still interesting to hear other people's takes. OP brings up a couple of good points...

We are not second-class citizens

This only makes sense. When all you need is a computer and a hookup, you are already connected to everyone else. Sure, there's no substitute for physical presence, but good people can be anywhere.

Avoiding the Echo Chamber

Like the frog dropped into cool water in the pot, this is an easy trap to fall into. I went to 4 or 5 events in SV and after a while, the conversations starting running into each other. It seemed like everyone was talking about the same thing, so I had trouble remembering who said what.

Maybe I'm a little old fashioned, but I was always partial to being close to my customers, not my competitors. (This is, of course, in those cases where it makes sense.)

I also loved to see the reference to Pittsburgh, my hometown. Nice people, great universities, 2 hours from 50% of the U.S., low cost of living - hope the startup scene does well here.
Yeah, I'm done here. I thought to bring some logic to the table, but with this sentence "Painters, the critic very credibly notes, also get laid more than hackers," its clear that logic will have no part of it. What that sentence has to do with anything about proving or disproving the actual original point of PG's essay I don't know, and probably never will. We're so far removed from what matters or counts as reasoning thats its useless to continue.
I remember emailing Ullrich Drepper once when I was young and foolish. He hasn't changed.
Apple just works. Even when you ask for someone's password.
Antagonyms: a single word that has meanings that contradict each other
To be clear: I didn't say "flush the TLB". Nonetheless unless you happen to be lucky and have those kernel mapping in there, those TLB entries need to be faulted in. That's expensive. Likewise the new stack isn't in L1 cache and needs to be read in from main memory. Likewise the kernel code to execute the handler needs to be read into the instruction cache, etc...

Given that main memory reads are pushing 100 cycles on a modern box, all those things add up. A context switch (my usage: meaning a bounce to a non-local, non-current execution environment) is really expensive.
'cleave' is always the one I remember.

http://www.fun-with-words.com/nym_autoantonyms.html

and

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~cellis/antagonym.html
The sad part, is that thanks to the market crash its still worth as much as the entire General Motors, You know general motors with its tens of thousands of employees, dozens of plants that are worth billions of dollars, 100% name recognition, worldwide market penetration, etc etc.
Google Nemesis - Buy Google Nemesis
"Example: you can make all your variables private to better "minimize accessibility of variables", but that requires elaborate accessor methods which increase "vertical complexity"."

No. don't create accessors and don't access the data in private variables outside of the scope in which they are defined.

Accessors, in most cases I have seen, simply outright defeat the entire purpose of having a private keyword to begin with.

EDIT: replaced CAPS with italic emphasis, in order to reduce decibel level.
If you have family to support, get employed.
Where did I back off any statement? I still think hackers are more like painters than most other types of people I know.

I notice now that you've finally produced a specific statement about painting that you claim he's refuted, though. And you are mistaken, as I think even you will have to agree. What I wrote was:

All the time I was in graduate school I had an
uncomfortable feeling in the back of my mind
that I ought to know more theory...

Now I realize I was mistaken. Hackers need to
understand the theory of computation about as
much as painters need to understand paint chemistry.

In other words, I am in fact saying that painters
don't need to know a lot about paint chemistry,
and using that as an analogy in statement that hackers,
similarly, don't need to know much about the theory
of computation.

Is this finally starting to give you second thoughts
about the idea that he's "carefully refuted" me?
I now have a name for my coding style! The email-send-function-case-study he links to pretty much follows the way I write code (when forced to write Java here at work).
That's not sad, that's just a good opportunity to buy GM shares.

update: Actually I just checked and GM is still worth 5.85 billion.
I agree the point of subsidised highway system encourages popularity of automobiles in America.

This also means when government's involvement distorts the market mechanism, the consequence of suburban sprawls, huge consumption of oil will creep in one day. If the government did not try to build too many highways, maybe we will not waste so much of natural resources, right?
Concurrency ≠ Threads
Some kill-OOP rules in addition:

* Rewrite your code so that you have more static functions that only deal with their arguments and possibly return something (no access to global data or class data). In other words, localize and isolate parts of your code that have minimal side effects. Such parts would be easier to write, debug and maintain.

* A class that contains only ctor/dtor and one method should be rewritten to a single static function.

* A class that returns a reference to a single instance (singleton) is a sign of terrible design. Rewrite.

* If the amount of lines in your unit tests is comparable with that of the original code, it means you expose too much in your interfaces. Rewrite your classes by making their interfaces smaller and simpler. This will reduce your unit tests and make them more meaningful as well.
Idiocracy was outrageous (and funny) for the same reasons, and they're more enjoyable if they're recognized as absurd conclusions of widespread materialism and anti-intellectualism. Looking at them as serious science fiction only provokes the indignation and outrage that Gennady Stolyarov II is feeling.
Yeah!
I recently found out a trick too.

Instead of using the small google search box, you can directly use the search phrase into the firefox address bar.

But I have noticed something: I typed "Hacker" in the address bar and I got a google search page. But when I typed "distrowatch", it took me to distrowatch.com
I think the behavior of this feature is like... it takes you to a website if the term entered is not a dictionary term. If the term entered is a dictonary term is takes you to a google search results page.

I have started using this frequently since I access the address bar with F6. I just enter my search terms. I am comfortable with this since most of my searches are with non-dictionary terms like "term vector tutorials" or "how to make pizza"

:)
Yeah, there's a few things here that set me on-edge.

For one, early returns means you have to go poking around for the returns. That highly-indented style is a much clearer "bad code smell" that makes it easier to clean up the routine.

And their "reduce curly braces" is just SCREAMINGLY awful. If you have a one-line block, you STILL want curly braces around it. The eye just loves to skim over this mistake:

if (condition)

i++;

applyTaxes(order);
Code Complete discusses this. When only at a single loop level, follow convention and use i.

However, as soon as you drop to 2 iteration levels, you should rename your index variables so that they are meaningful. Do not use j or k.
Valley's 'biggest' social networker
Warm & fuzzy profile of Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.
You should start a company in an environment where it is not an echo chamber for you. Start a company where the people in the community bring a different perspective, because this will ultimately help you get a better picture of the world.

This is exactly my hope for starting something that works in the Dallas area.
Sun Tests Social Networking Tool Kit
Playing an Action Video Game Reduces Gender Differences in Spatial Cognition
While I agree with your 1-2-3 analysis, my thesis here is that given the choice between (a) negotiate with Yahoo now and (b) tamper with Yahoo's board and negotiate with them later, option (a) gives Microsoft the most. Yes, they will pay much less later when they have gotten rid of everyone who considers independence an options, but they will also have watched the talent and customers walk out the door.

The price may be falling over time, but I conjecture the value is falling even faster.
Develop inexpensive habits like visiting the library, exercising outside, and volunteering in the community.
This is mostly just a list of features without context. I'm sure "ellipsize" really helps for ... something. But I don't know what it is, sadly, because I don't know arc.

Shouldn't posts like this be useful for people who aren't part of the cult already? :)
One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.

--Ken Thompson
Define the "Reality check" you're talking about?

When the dotcom burst happened, I got a big fat pay raise to guarantee I'd stick around at the firm I was at.

[Edit: I realize this wasn't terribly clear.

Those of us who knew what we were doing at the burst generally didn't hit hard times; but the developers who were in the industry because they saw it as an easy paycheck are the ones who got hurt. In that way, the burst was good for our industry - it helped separate the wheat from the chaff.]
Can T-Mobile get an Android onto US market in '08?
From the article: Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever ("Just wake me up when you're done.") had the highest productivity of all.

I'd love to meet that team...

In my own experience, development projects that don't have set deadlines (and someone applying "schedule pressure" as the deadline approaches) always go much, much longer than originally estimated.

In fact, I'd argue that developers especially are prone to overruns because, with code, there always seems to be something else that can be done to improve it. Even if you complete a discrete number of features and they all test fine, there's always the temptation to go back and refactor.
Because, in our society, rhetoric has become accepted as evidence. So, when Sally says "I used acupuncture and it helped me conceive", that counts as evidence. When a creationist says "well, a banana fits nicely in my hand which shows an intelligent designer", that's evidence.

This combined with the fact that the scientific community seems bent on publishing even when they have studies with no statistically significant result. I'm reading more studies of 50 people in two cohorts where one had 10 do something and the other had 11 do something touted as a breakthrough. In fact, it's evidence of nothing.

So, the value of rhetoric has grown in people's minds and the value of evidence has diminished because people are publishing crap.
Microsoft signs deal for rights to push The Green Button
Wow. The interesting part of this story is that VMWare was founded by a woman. Fascinating.
The single quotes are very common on the BBC in headlines and are used inaccurately for direct quotes. Don't ask me why they do that. It's in no way suggestive that the reporter is or is not endorsing the statement.

And it's not opinion. Looking at 2000+ women over 50 years is not merely opinion. It's a lot stronger evidence than "I'm really surprised by this result", which most certainly is opinion. Statistical anlysis does not care about experience, and when done properly it speaks in the cold hard truth that any effect we may have observed previously is spurious.

For myself, I'll happily accept the stats that the article talks about now as the best objective evidence we have now, and will happily change my mind when new evidence emerges.
I can't say I'm omfortable with the conflict of interest gray area for the two organizations. That being said, this article:

* Was written in November of last year, before FF3 release and some of Mozilla's latest initiatives.

* Is really stretching things a bit in terms of good reasoning.

* Has an "axe-to-grind" tone which I don't exactly understand.

I think there's some good points to be made about this relationship, but it doesn't feel like this author really has anything to show about where that Google influence is causing much in the way of problems.
The correct analogy would be that Ballmer is "licking his cookie" so know one else wants it.

And no, that was not a sexual reference, think middle school lunch room.
Absolutely it can help in some ways through a placebo effect, but placebo has known link to increasing fertility.
But is PR NPR complete?