skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess that this journal does not even send out rejection letters. It if did, you could consider using this Rejection of a Job Rejection letter as a template for a reply:

Rejection of rejection letter

Dear Sir or Madame,

Thank you for your letter of February 9th. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me
a job in your department.

This year I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually large number of rejection letters. With such a varied and promising field
of candidates, it is impossible for me to accept all refusals.

Despite your department's outstanding qualifications and previous experience in rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet my needs at this time. Therefore, I will assume the position in your department this March. I look forward to seeing you then.

Best of luck in rejecting future applicants.

Sincerely,
<you>, Esq.
Sell your soul to the devil.
Thanks for the relevant comments.

I addressed #1 in the article. Suffice to say I disagree.

#2 Who says you interact deeply with material in school?

#3 comes from Emanuel Derman's interviews of fresh grads.

#4 I do understand the difference but I would rather prop trade than make markets.

#5 There are so many sub-areas. Should you study wavelets? Finite element method? Differential geometry? EDA? Bayes? ML?

#6 Perhaps I am more risk-averse than you. Or less trusting.

#2, #7 - I said that's the irreproducible part of an MFE.

Would you mind adding your comments to the Disqus on the site? They're very thorough and as you're an MFE grad they counterbalance what I said. I think your viewpoint is quite valuable.
At this time Comes the Bride | Fashion Ups
Check out BBC Business Daily's currently running series about internet use in the developing world.
Read on, the next clause indicates that I don't think it makes you smart.
Really interesting, thanks! This will probably the first thing I will use for real projects in node.js.

Does anyone knows how it compares to say Nokogiri or Hpricot, both in terms of speed and in terms of ability to handle crappy html ?
Great point, I have experienced exactly this problem.

It's actually the reason I started writing on the internet (note the extremely clever site name).
Definitely. And the "rookie solves a seemingly impossible math problem without knowing it's supposed to be difficult" is a pretty common archetype, but it seemed like enough details matched that maybe there was a connection.
That's because all his life was spent in academia and getting a real job after years in the university can be a big jump, especially if you are a theoretician.
I've read only first 3 chapters. So look there. I'm sorry I'm too busy to spot the exact points right now.
Seedcamp reveals the 18 companies selected for London
To sell DRILL,advertise information about making HOLE
Hi Romil- our new startup will help you find the best co-founder immediately. No need to spend months searching. We expect to have a private beta online within a few weeks and a full version shortly thereafter. We are currently accepting sign-ups for the beta now if you are interested. www.venturocket.com
There's a long established legal principle that if you don't pay a workman he can place a lien on your property, which may even result in it being sold at auction.

Not heard of this before - is this a US thing?
Yes "python 3 has failed to gain lots of users" is different from "python 3 has failed to gain lots of users, but planned to at this stage".
This explains a huge part of the real reason productive programmers aren't paid more: In general they are providing that output without asking for proper compensation in a way that gives them enough leverage. Facebook wanting to hire them is giving them leverage enough, so they get paid.

Managers have leverage, so in companies making billions of dollars in revenue top level management can make hundreds of millions.

What the productive programmers should look for is effective leverage. Traditionally, the answer has been to form a union. I don't think that is feasible here though, the practicalities, ideologies and the fact that the programmers already get paid enough to eat and sleep comfortably, stand in the way.

But you never know.
> I'm always surprised to see that code still being used - it's the least complete selector library out there by a long way.

For this use case being complete doesn't matter so much as users are just after a handy way pull content out of a page. And having "got intimate" with the source while porting it, it's a really elegant piece of code - have the impression that try to make it do more would ruin it.
Icon Design: Bitmap vs Vector
Hoax?
$1000 to do something awesome
requires overwriting the instruction

Not quite. Some processors, including X86, have hardware support for breakpoints (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_debug_register). It may also be possible to (mis)use virtual memory hardware for setting breakpoints. Also [pedantic], one overwrites a byte, not an instruction.

Using a single byte is necessary because the program could jump to (address+1). If that address contained part of the breakpoint code, program semantics could change. O, and jumping to (address+1) could even be useful if address contains a multi-byte instruction.
Ultimately yes, just like any business what you add to the bottom line is the brick-hard determinant of wage.

But just like in other businesses, perceptions, measurability, and org structure are very important.

It's not as simple as "can you generate alpha". Does your desk manager give you as much leeway as you desire? Does your alpha come only after your position has been underwater for weeks and you were given position to double down?

Measurement is also a huge issue. How much did you contribute to the bottom line? Can you prove it? What if you told Moira about low-discrepancy sequences, which improved her Monte Carlo sims, which somehow affected someone's trading down the line ....?

I met my current (quant fin) employer on the internet. While I was living in a trailer park.
MathDoctorBob does some higher level stuff on YouTube. I was just watching his short bits on representation theory and characters.
On Software Patents, ACTA and "Big Money"
Looks neat, I'll give it a go. Dude, you should add it to https://chrome.google.com/webstore
academicearth.org

Reddit has a lot of such things.
IBM Centennial: They Were There - People who changed the way the world works
Honest response to compromised site | Lush
You should try tmux also
Great to see meditation discussed on Hacker News. I would like to join with my two cents.

There seems to be some confusion regarding the different kinds of meditation there are, and there are lot. Within the Buddhist context there are two main types: Samatha (concentration) and Vipassana (insight).

Concentration meditation calms and relaxes, and this is usually achieved by instructing the practitioner to focus on something and not to let go for the period set aside to meditate. That which is focused on (the object of meditation) can be the breath where the instruction would be :follow your breath while you meditate, a syllable - om is the classic one, a posture - by sitting in a certain way and just being fully aware or engaging in a yoga asana or even the whole body which is what mindfulness meditation seems to be about. Most people find it hard to stay with something like the breath without interruptions for 3 minutes, let alone 15, 30 or 60 minutes. If this is done long enough it becomes natural to stay with the object for any amount of time and the ability to focus increases.

Insight meditation leads to breakthroughs in the Buddhist framework. In this practice one focuses on something in one’s awareness: a physical sensation, a thought, a mental imagine or visualisation, etc... By doing this one is said to be able to realise it’s 3 Characteristics which are Impermanence, Suffering and No-Self. The breakthrough will eventually lead to Enlightenment which is the Cessation of Suffering. The capitalisation is to denote Buddhist dogma for a great explanation of these concepts and the stages one goes through please refere to: Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingram MD, available for free here. http://www.interactivebuddha.com/mctb.shtml

Traditionally, in Buddhism anyway, one builds up the ability to stay with an object with clarity for a period of time by doing concentration (samatha) and then moves on to do (vipassana)

I hope this is helpful. Meditation is an interesting topic but at this point in time it is difficult to make sense of all the jargon and perspectives. Perhaps my time reading up on this is helpful to someone in a position similar to mine a few years ago.
Perhaps the markup used to describe the vector icons isn't precise enough? The differences between the sizes for the example icon is mostly grid-fitting and adjustments to keep the highlights/outlines one pixel wide and could be mostly machine automated
Ask HN: What's your definition for 'being hacker'?
You should use ctrl-a instead. Then you don't need to take your hands away fr the main part of the keyboard
I find myself wanting to buy some tiles.
From their humans.txt file, Chef:Juanjo Bernabeu

I don't understand the key value format used if this is for human. It would have been more appropriate to use a format like "The Chef is" if this is for a human-being. Or is the file to be read by robots to treat better human?

In other words, I don't know if this initiative will really help us to preserve the three laws of robotics - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics .
Ask HN: Company offering a Talent acquisition - terms? 
A large company has approached our startup to discuss an "acquisition". During the meeting they were offering a talent acquisition where we join them in their management team.
We,ve been bootstrapping since launch (10 months ago)

A few questions:
What terms should we ask/negotiate about?

Some things that pop to mind are salary, our new roles in the larger company, stock options or cash? Other things ive read are "retention bonuses etc"

What do we need to be weary going into further discussion ?

The ball is with us now to get back to them on whether we are willing to give-up our own startup and join them.
Our team have decided we are - how should we approach it?
We also have a small shareholder who isn't full time and would want to work at this larger company - does that mean he will not gain anything from this acquisition if it is purely a talent* acquisition?
Thanks!
No, it's not just a US thing. Various kinds of liens are part of most countries' laws, though obviously the details vary.
You're quite right. But since your price doesn't go up, why should you care?

BTW, when I wrote this piece it was intended for QuantNet.com. However I pissed off the guy who runs it and now he thinks I'm a douchebag.

That's all to say, I never thought this piece would get any traffic at all. The fact that so many people are interested makes me even more skeptical of the putative value of an MFE....
I decided to try this a few weeks ago and have kept using it since then. I'm not really using any fancy features beyond the cmd+click to open URLs, but it is fast and generally works better than Terminal.app.
If all you are looking for is an iTerm that is faster and bugfixed, this is exactly that (and more).

edit: Oh, and I should say that I can't recall it crashing even once in this period, and I started out using my own build from git head. So I'd say it at least feels very stable.
In particular, aren't you also signalling that you're a fraidy-cat conformist who can't do things for him/herself?
It seems like you got some really interesting results. I meditate on my own for a while and like you I found several "more or less scary reasons" to stop.

Recently I started again with a teacher and it is awesome. It makes all the good bits great and minimizes all the unpleasant stuff.

There is a dude called Alan Chapman, who has a great deal of experience with meditation and dream states. In addition to this he reads Wired and is down to earth.
As far as wealth-creation goes, Facebook doesn't even compare to Google. Facebook is great, and has huge potential, and may find ways to make money head over fist, but it is fundamentally a toy. There are no ways to create value directly from it, only to piggy-back on the number people using it. Sure, there's the occasional community and event management that takes place there, and as far as social communication goes it's really unequaled (I talk to most of my friends on facebook), but this does not feed anybody.

Google on the other hand has both feet firmly planted in the internet infrastructure. At this time there are more people using them directly then any other web service, for both work and personal reasons. They create real and tangible value. They actually make money for the people using them.

This is a big difference. Sure, for the lonely entrepreneur it doesn't really matter if his startup is about lolcat pictures - as long as he gets enough visitors, he's set for life. But in the grand scheme of things it actually matters if you're dealing in lolcats or create real value. It wouldn't scale otherwise.
Imagine if shrinks employ actors and control the people close to a person. The person wonders why people know things they shouldn't. He freaks-out decides it's terminators or replicands or aliens and runs-em over with his car! Hilarious. That'll teach shrinks to mess with people's reality. Shrink actors have bulls-eyes on them. Shrinks make people psycopaths.
Taras Glek's blog (http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek) contains a lot more information about link optimizations to improve startup times of Firefox.

One of the reasons why loading libxul is so slow normally is that the chain of constructors called at initialization time is arranged backwards in the library (http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/05/27/startup-backward-co...) so the OS (which is usually optimized for forward loading) cannot efficiently prefetch the pages.

There is also a post that explains how they measure the startup time on Windows (http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/10/04/diagnosing-slow-sta...) and Unix (http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2011/01/14/builtin-startup-mea...).
Thanks, I'll read that. If you have more, It would be welcome.

For the other side, I suggest http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Reductionism_%28sequence%29 It's longer, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. (I'd like to recommend http://lesswrong as a whole, but it's literally months worth of reading)
I guess that caused more trouble for your dad than it did for the shop owner, economically at least. Plus he would probably brag about your dad to other shop owners. (I agree that just doing the job for free is no solution either, but do not have any better retaliation, except for proper contracts and court claims, in mind.)
By looking at the guys "recent work" and his blog, I tend to understand the behavior of his client...
you kidding me? facebook is worth 50 bil and you can't even build a website to make you 2500?
What if it is .01% and suppose that the base price for options is pretty low? .01% of a $50 billion company is still $5 million. Even if you earn just $2 million out of that, it will still beat accepting Google's offer hands down.

If you're good, you can also go back to Google once your options at FB vested. See Cuil founder: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/14/cuil-google/
"This website is in the mail. Coincidentally, the same mail that you, dear customer, used to send the payment cheque. I'm sure it will arrive, any day now."
Amateur developer, amateur clients.
The arrest was likely the instigator, but at that point it had long been clear that Reiser4 wasn't going to be accepted in the kernel mainline, and Reiser3 had gone off into an 'unsupported' limbo. The switch would have happened sooner or later.
yep, IBM was granted a record 5,896 U.S. patents in 2010
Source: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/33341.wss
My school rewarded sustained effort on a letter scale, A through F, which I guess they must have borrowed from Dance Dance Revolution. I never did get the AA grade, myself.

Richard Feynman once wrote a great article called Cargo Cult Science[1], where he defined cargo cult science to be something that takes up the trappings of science (journals, jargon, lab-coats, &c) without taking up the thing that makes science what it is (the scientific method.) In a lot of these "videogamification" ideas, I feel like there's a kind of "cargo cult gaming" going on, where people focus more on the trappings of video games (levels, points, reward structures, &c) without getting at the real meat of what makes video games fun (which I would argue can be enhanced by the reward structure but broadly speaking is something apart from the rewards structure.) You can hand out points all you want, but my experience is that points won't make schools or chores into a game any more than adding big black spots will turn a sheep into a cow.

[1] http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
Courts are not a solution to most problems. You spend hundreds just to get started with fees, serving the other side, then the time back and forth to court over and over with the other side continuing the case. Now it is 6 months later and maybe the court will decide in your favor or maybe the court will decide that you didn't do the work as specified by the client (even if you did).
Sure but that's a statement of fact.
How I Learnt Git
For what it's worth, I'm not saying that Corporations are legally bound to do immoral things. My argument is that people within corporations are required do to things that are in the corporations and the shareholders best interest.

And, that pressure at times causes people within corporations to do actions of questionable morality.
All of Google's Strategic Initiatives in 2011 are Mobile
Maybe he's getting his 235th visum? ;-)
http://mojolicio.us is way better for this kind of stuff. Here's the synopsis example redone using Mojo:

$ perl -Mojo -e'g("reddit.com")->dom("a.title")->each(sub { warn shift->text })'
There are three "good" things in the world, Truth, Beauty and Kindness and all good things are done in the interests of these three things.

Another idea that has helped me is: You can only do what you want, not want what you want.
The one liner is cool, but I guarantee that node.js's non-blocking IO will outperform perl any day of the week. Try scraping thousands of pages at once using perl..
Could you elaborate on your "jump to (address+1)" argument? Why does this make a single-byte "int 3" necessary?
Some of those 110 hours would have to be spent originally getting the 50 hours of rails work.
(Slightly tangential but) I like this: http://www.thinkvisibility.com/robots.txt
I would suggest honing in on programming and logic skills, software engineering is a vast space of opportunity. Unfortunately Architecture is one of the worst industries in terms of opportunity. It is over saturated with talent. Many of these brilliant minds work endless hrs for free.

grasshopper3d.com is full of jobless young designers with the same skill set in parametric design...
What about MS Word's AutoSummarize feature?
(what, people don't like a joke? I happen to know the rough timeline; when it becomes a specific timeline sometime in the very near future -- probably around the time we release 1.3 -- y'all will know about it too)
Not quite. 1.3 won't be dropping support for Python 2.4, because we can't quite do that yet.
to succeed...
What if you don't have enough money to go to Vegas at all?
Ask HN: What is something that you now have and wonder how you lived without?
Do you think that anyone succeeding can be called 'hacker'?
Now that I have a notebook that I use to keep track of experiments I want to try on myself, I can skim this article, add a half dozen sentences to various parts of my notebook, and actually have a decent chance of trying out the advice that it provides.

I think something about having this intermediate phase between reading self-help advice and first trying it out helps me out a lot.
Verysimple, how much actual reading do you think comes out of people bookmarking and voting up these lists? I would guess very little.
It is difficult to assess the merits of Mr. Clarridge’s secret intelligence dispatches; a review of some of the documents by The Times shows that some appear to be based on rumors from talk at village bazaars or rehashes of press reports.

Actually, the New York Times could have gone back to older dispatches and evaluated whether the bazaar-based predictions came true, or were otherwise accurate.

The danger of using such information is much of it is not true, greatly exaggerated, subjective, etc., but is nevertheless being taken seriously by some military, diplomatic and intelligence staff and helping drive strategy and tactics on the ground. This potentially creates even more problems, misunderstandings, and mistrust and can even lead to unnecessary death and destruction.
It all boils down to this: What you can measure, you can pay.
A company's increase in revenue can be measured, and that's what top managers get paid for.
Measuring the performance of a programmer is very hard and blurry even for great hackers, and impossible for a manager without hacker background (but he's the guy you will have to negotiate with).

In the end, at least you can measure the office hours of a programmer - and that's exactly what the average programmer is paid for.
I measure monitors by the number of Terminal windows I can use at a time
I think everyone did get your point, but you've not addressed the problems that people have mentioned. Just hand-waving and saying 'transparency' is not convincing.
mojolicious is using a non-blocking async runloop as well =)
ReiserFS: The filesystem with killer performance.
Maybe. Nevertheless, I'm wondering, whether his web "design" and behavior is common among people living on a small remote island. I really like to see some statistics about that ;)
Liens only legal binding on real estate things such as vehicles, property, etc..ie does not for software..
I think the ultimate tool for understanding regexps is Russ Cox's notes:

http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/

When explained well, the big picture of NFAs and DFAs is bog simple. I'm sure some of the details are messy, but I expect they rarely matter.
Where are you taking this five years number ?

The roadmap has already changed, BTW. At some point, the plan was to have python 2.x such as to convert so that python 2.x will be very close to python 3, plan which was abandoned AFAIK (I can certainly understand why, though, since it would have required a lot of non-fun work).
Cocoa IS Nextstep - which is why the class names are prefixed NS
What in particular should one set their TERM variable as to support 256 colors?
The problem here is not non paying clients..

Its refusing to do proper pre-client interviewing to weed out non paying clients.
This might be relevant, if you don't know what CPAN Testers is:

http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/WhatIsCPANTesters

The best part is that there is a cool link from the pages at CPAN module pages to an overview of the results. Including of the modules used.

Here is the CPAN testers results for Moose, with results for all its dependencies:

http://deps.cpantesters.org/?module=Moose;perl=latest

(Note the links for every module, including a link back to CPAN. Btw, I like the D link, which shows what CPAN modules use Moose)
The problem isn't just rank though. After I've seen the original source of duplicated content, I don't just want sites that copy it to rank below it, I want to not see them at all, so that the rest of my results are filled with /different/ things.
There can be two types,

•a programmer who breaks into computer systems in order to steal or change or destroy information as a form of cyber-terrorism
•a programmer for whom computing is its own reward; may enjoy the challenge of breaking into other computers but does no harm; "true hackers subscribe to a code of ethics and look down upon crackers"
Someone who improves the world through innovation.