skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, this is true and logical, and actually observable in small/medium companies. In large companies, or companies where software is not the focus however, there is very much room for this sort of counter-productive behavior/effect.

In the middle management tiers, and in the "non-mission critical, support divisions" the company goal and money making are easy to lose sight of. There is a lot of politicking for personal gain, and the employees have a tendency to not care about the company and maximize ways they can personally benefit. This is the land of the programmer who can't code. He exists as a warrior in the landscape of barely competent people with nominal jobs, carving out little empires for themselves and doing things that actively hurt the overall bottom line.

I think maybe jacquesm, you have been a good, motivated programmer surrounded by other good, motivated programmers for long enough that you have forgotten the world isn't entrepreneurial, that most people do the bare minimum at "work, cuz thats why it's called work". This isn't a criticism so much as a reminder of the rest of reality :)
Having to use a ! for every system command is a dealbreaker for me. Honestly, it would be a dealbreaker even if you only had to do it once per line, but multiples is just too cumbersome to be a good replacement for bash.

If there were some way to put it in "shell mode", where you could avoid that, and perhaps use bang for "this line is now python", that might be okay.

EDIT: I think I misunderstood what he was saying about multiple !'s. I still think ! is too cumbersome to use in front of commands by default, though. Also, when you use !, you don't have any way to test whether a call has run properly (i.e., no $? that I can figure out)
This is 2011. Resumes are how your daddy got interviews at Dunder Mifflin. HR reps get forwarded hundreds of resumes a day. My friends who work in HR tell me its actually the really crappy resumes that get noticed - but only so they can make fun of them and then toss them in the garbage. The good ones don't even grab attention - they just look like the hundreds of other good ones they've got on file.

Apparently, in 2011, HR departments make fun of bad resumes and toss them in the trash, rather than interviewing people with good resumes?

If you put this kind of effort in, opportunities will come to you. People will recognize you and your work. Your well earned reputation will precede you before you even walk in the door.

So the advice boils down to "be famous"? That's great, if you can manage it, but there's a finite amount of fame out there: it's a zero sum game.

Perhaps this is atypical, but I just have a bog-standard resume, no twitter account, and a blog that probably averages 2 hits per week. Despite that, I haven't had a problem getting interviews by submitting my resume through company job websites. As this guy would say, there's nothing that makes my resume stand out from all the others they have on file: I got a BS from a state school, an MS from another state school, and have a job at a small startup no one's ever heard of. And when I interview, just knowing algorithms 101 seems to be sufficient to get a job offer (and not even necessary unless I'm interviewing at a place like MS or Google).

This guy makes landing a job sound a lot harder than it actually is.
Contacts have always trumped resumes.

"It's not what you know, but who you know."
How IBM's Jeopardy-playing Watson computer was built
yes, it's available with `npm install ready`
DropQuest 2011
Interesting perhaps because of its naivete; takes as part of its thesis, "Group coupons are nothing but a souped-up iteration of a very old phenomenon: Plain old coupons date back to the 19th century, if not earlier". This seems (unless I'm crazy) totally wrong. Classic coupons have purposes beyond promotion; for instance, capitalizing on price insensitivity. Classic coupons rarely offer huge discounts, or, if they do, they do it for a loss-leader product (and they do it infrequently).

Groupons offer huge discounts for a business' core offering for the sole purpose of attracting new customers. They're purely a promotion mechanism. They're a big deal not because coupons needed modernizing, but because they're a means for local businesses to cut out a middleman in promotional costs and spend that money directly on prospective customers.

Also, it's hard to take seriously a competitive analysis that doesn't recognize the network effects of group coupon sites; it's a winner-take-most market with a capital-intensive customer acquisition model (they're doing direct sales to tens of thousands of local businesses).
Why keep talking about college athletics? Comparing U of Phx admissions/passing criteria to that of high level athletes at big schools is not exactly redeeming. Because everyone knows the idea of the scholar-athlete at major programs is a mostly a farce (which is not to say there aren't exceptions).

Addition: And if you're simply trying to knock non-profit higher ed from a pedestal, my point is that it's already been knocked. At the same time, there's a continuum of relaxed academic standards and capitalizing on certain types of enrollment, so U of Phx is not necessarily on equal standing simply because there are some concerning things happening at Big Football U.

Did you catch the law school article which was the #1 article for several days on nytimes.com this week? My thought is that with all of this, the education bubble needs to deflate some lest it burst.
+1 for funding issues.

When I was working on my undergraduate thesis on applying machine learning techniques to board games, I developed the basis of a new method of analyzing board games (using graphs of games and graph isomorphism) but I wasn't able to find anyone who could finance me doing a research masters in it. Although I think part of my issue was that it wasn't obviously Computer Science, nor was it obviously Mathematics.
It's not updated for a current version of Rails but it is completely open sourced.
> What if we make things easier for the machine? It is obvious to a rank beginner that a perfect game with a rook handicap is a win for the side with the material advantage. No, make it a queen! Surely that must be a provable win?

Hm, I'm sure it must be. Although I don't know how you go about proving it, it's a simple matter to force equal trades; black cannot avoid the exchange of pieces forever, and if white plays a perfect game he will always win, without doubt.

> Not so fast. Even against a crushing asymmetry in material, it is not too hard to avoid mate for a couple of dozen moves, which means that calculating all the way to the end of the game is beyond the reach of search-based algorithms.

Okay, just calculate the moves it would take to force the equal exchange of material from a given position. Generally as the game progresses and the board opens up it becomes inescapable.

After a certain point, when enough material has been removed from the board, looking for mate becomes trivial. Esp if you operate with such a commanding advantage as a queen...assuming you can force the equal exchange of all other material, it is possible to calculate checkmate within a couple of moves.
Do you make the same judgment about saving files? If it's important enough to be saved to the filesystem, it's important enough to be remembered forever?

What about general edits in your editor? If it's important enough to have been typed so undo in my editor works, it's important enough to be part of the project history so someone else can see my typos when they're (as I've heard used as an argument for why you should never squash commits) tracking down a bug they can figure out the train of thought that led to that work?
Auburn is a bit of an outlier. It is sometimes referred to as a football program with a university attached. Auburn has faced NCAA sanctions half a dozen times in the past 20 years. My friends teach at U of Michigan and report their football players as being comparable to the rest of student population, at least during the Spring semester.
http://www.alertme.com/
The numbers you quote look in line with what I would expect, especially if you are getting close to a market rate salary. They are profitable and funded, which is a big milestone. It would help to know - Are they paying you a market salary? What is your past work history like? Does it include startups, and if so, in what role? How great is the rest of the team you are joining?

The Mark Suster link mentioned by brudgers is solid. My suggestion is to examine your motivations and goals, and then to be true to them. It will also help you evaluate your progress against those goals.

I'm going to presume this is your first startup, so these comments may be wildly off base if it isn't. The things I got out of my first startup were these:

(1) Money (we actually went public, though I had a very small piece of it).
(2) Massive rapid skill development in circumstances where I could take on as much responsibility as I wanted and could learn from great people.
(3) Connections to people that pretty much set me up for almost every job I had after that.

The value of (2) and (3) were huge. If I could give advice to my younger self it would be to focus on those two things first, then negotiate the best financial outcome that I could after maximizing those elements.
Techcrunch definitely never lets an opportunity slip to slag on Yahoo!. The irony of this critique coming from an AOL-owned blog dependent on advertising revenue is kind of cute.
Discuss HN: Dropbox Scavenger Hunt Thread
Anyone else doing it? Let's discuss here...
Re: Number of bits per pair: TC, AG, CT and GA? I.e. composition (1 bit) and direction (1 bit)? Not sure, but that seems to be the most logical way.
Slashdot(http://slashdot.org) and Proggit(http://reddit.com/r/programming)
The reason one base pair can encode 2 bits is that T-C and C-T are different valid base pairs. The same is true for A-G and G-A as well. A "single" strand (the famous double helix) of DNA actually contains 2 copies of genetic information.
The potential bias causes me to doubt the article statistics. Take for example:

"More broadly, a recent survey of executives, managers and recruiters by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) found that 64% of them plan to hire new MBA grads this year, an increase from 60% last year."

The GMAC administers the GMAT, a test used by top business schools as a means of evaluating potential candidates. With this in mind, a positive looking survey would be favorable to them. "Look here! MBA hires are up! Now's a great time to get an MBA! You'll want to take the GMAT before you apply!" type of thinking comes to mind. I'd rather see someone besides GMAC or an academic institution doing these studies, but the question would be who.
If I had to guess, it's because the way you read DNA is only along one of the strands (starting at the 5' end, IIRC), in which case you've still got four possible "characters" to use in your representation- A-G is different from G-A, etc. People have thought up all sorts of clever ways to think of how one might encode data using DNA base pairs, but it's been too long since I did any bioinformatics for me to be able to remember exactly how they calculated it all out.
I'd be fine with an extension in Firefox, but like the author I use this ALL the time. And I'm not a fan of the Chrome extension. It doesn't even show the feed URL in the address bar.
That would've been a dealbreaker for me too. I'll update the post to try to make it clearer. When you run 'ipython -p sh' or include 'import ipy_profile_sh', by default everything will be in 'shell mode'. I'm not too sure, but I think it basically parses the first command and determines if it's in the IPython set of commands/value namespace, and if not runs it in the shell...
A couple days ago, I submitted this article to HN http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19940-chess-grandmaste... . Basically, it says grandmasters use both hemispheres of their brain while playing chess while novice only use the left side.

I agree with his point that almost anyone could learn to program, but what I don't agree with is that a programmer(expert) and a non-programmer thinks the same.

I think your brain re-wires itself to be more efficient for the task and recruits the right hemisphere of your brain to make intuitive jumps to solve problems. I don't have solid proof, but I think a similar transformation happens in a programmers(expert) brain as what happens in a grandmaster brain.
It can be done relatively cheap by reverse engineering a $15 power meter you get at home depot and combining with $10 worth of electronic parts and a $20 Arduino. Was a college project, and we blew up 5 meters before it worked. Working with 220V (or 110V) right next to 5V can be dangerous and not an easy "electronics problem".
Kasparov on computer+human chess teams
I'm not saying anything about innate ability. Just as a lawyer gains 'legal lenses' as they work through law school, so do programmers gain 'software lenses'.
500 Error :(
> - Blood is far from being that dense, but I'll assume you mean to calculate a theoretical limit.

There are more ways of having cells arranged, I explicitly mentioned red blood cells because they are exceptional in not containing any DNA, but any chunk of tissue with that volume would do.

> If you use the whole of a cell's DNA to encode information, the cell will die. It can't be used to freely encode information like a hard disk.

Yes, that's obvious, but a cell's DNA does hold that much information, it's just not our information.

> - There is no way to retrieve information in this system.

There actually is, the information retrieval mechanism that is used to 'express' the DNA (actually, the RNA, an 'unzipped' strand of DNA, but who's counting) is a wonderful little nano machine called a ribosome, it's probably the most amazing structure that I know of outside of the DNA itself.

They're in the volume quoted, the DNA only occupies about 25% of that volume iirc.

> Reliability of hard disks is far, far better than this.

The error correction mechanism that allows your cells to be copied through very large numbers of generations is actually pretty good, most 'mutations' are lethal and only very few actually result in viable copies passing their changes on to newer generations. Mutations are also pretty rare on the whole.

You are right that only TC and AG are valid, but those combinations can be attached 'in reverse' as well (CT / GA) so that makes for four possible combinations in all.

If it weren't for that the movie 'GATTACA' would have been unpronouncable :)
What's the benefit?

I would expect pg to adopt IPv6 right after he replaces his table-based markup with CSS.
Chris & I started Proxlet as a side project to scratch an itch and keep our skill-set fresh & do things in new ways. A great & rare opportunity to choose wild new tech stacks!
Can't wait to share these numbers! Blog post forthcoming in a few weeks.
so what will you decision be (working for a startup or doing ur own thing)? I remember you did your own stuff (iphone app) and stuff. I m in Sf now and in a similar situation so I d like to hear your take.
Basic Wysiwym Markdown Editor: jquery-wysiwym
0.5% is roughly the market price for an otherwise well-compensated engineering role at a company with low financing risk.

Factors that increase equity:

* Founder incompetence, poor negotiating skill, impatience.

* Financing risk (near end-of-runway with no term sheets, &c).

* Sometimes, lack of revenue (at shoot-the-moon startups, revenue isn't expected early on and isn't a factor).

* Below-market salary.

* Non-substitutable technical expertise. Rare. Rails devs may earn a premium relative to the market, but there's still a market for them. SEO, on the other hand, is hard to acquire, because people who can actually do it can almost always earn more freelancing.

* Ownership of relevant core IP; ie, if you came up with the idea behind the company's product, or own an idea that would be key to improving it.

* Frothy talent markets (but, see "impatience" above). If you need someone RIGHT NOW and LOCAL in the NYC startup market, you may pay a premium.

Note that none of these factors are "the primary technical person in a code-based business". That ain't got nothing to do with anything. Yes, that person may be key in proving the business ahead of revenue or funding. But when you got funding and sharply reduced financing risk, you got yourself to a place where you don't have to pay the lead tech person a cofounder's equity grant.
Well, that is much clearer, thanks :)
Net Neutrality: The real Internet backbone
The true meaning of network neutrality: the foundations of the current "internet". Our backbone.
If you put this kind of effort in, opportunities will come to you. People will recognize you and your work. Your well earned reputation will precede you before you even walk in the door.

sigh This works for high flying traders, it works for rockstar coders, or people applying at "indie" companies (i.e. ones with renegade hiring styles). And so on.

And, typically, someone in that high flying arena misconstrues what he is seeing around him as the future.

It could well be.

But it ignores the fact that the vast majority of people still submit a CV, then wait and hope for an interview. CV's are far from dead (should they be? who knows).

If you want to work at the top, you can't do what the rest of us do. If you don't want to work there, well, it's a waste of time.
If the job requires tangible skills that can be demonstrated in a 20 minute interview, the resume has never been that important. Similarly, if you are poaching someone with a proven track record from somewhere else, resumes have never been important.

But if the job requires intangible skills that cannot be demonstrated in a 20 minute interview, and the candidate does not have a proven track record, employers have to use some method to filter and find. Resumes are far from perfect, but they are one way to do this, and I expect any rumors of their death are greatly exaggerated.
This is their Chrome webapp.
It reorders the bytes of the image from RGBA to BGRA, which is the natural byte order used by the GPU (other byte orders are supported, but have to get swapped when loaded). Also, it premultiplies each color channel by the alpha channel. So if you have a blue pixel with a 50% alpha (RGBA 00 00 FF 80) it gets converted to (BGRA 80 00 00 80). After that, it uses the usual pngcrush method of trying all different compression settings until it finds the smallest size. So it's optimized both in terms of size and speed of rendering.
> Indeed, if you start from a closed position where strategy dominates and tactics are of relatively little use, top human players can still trounce computers

I haven't been following computer chess as much as I used to be I suspect this is actually untrue. Computer speed has been increasing as always but there has also been massive gains in chess program strength (e.g. compared to old programs when running on the same hardware). For example, Rybka 4 would absolutely crush programs from 10 years ago.

Those combined gains make computer chess programs so strong that I doubt even top players can hold them off even with the position looks quiet. Rybka can defeat GMs even when they have pawn plus first move odds[1]. In one match Rybka had a tiny opening book so the GM had every opportunity to steer the game in a strategic direction.

1. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rybka#Odds_matches_versus_grand...;
So the advice boils down to "be famous"?

I don't think that's fair. Why is "be famous" a better decoding than "be awesome?" Are you seriously telling me that you know of no one who, while they don't have celebrity status, isn't known in your community or subfield as someone awesome?

there's a finite amount of fame out there: it's a zero sum game.

I'm calling bullsh#t on this one. How in the world can you justify there's a finite amount of fame? Fame is basically the garnering of attention. Are you implying there's a finite amount of attention? How is this so in the face of increasing population and wealth? Not only are there more people, more of the people have more free time and access to information resources. There's more and more people able to pay more and more attention. Even if this were not true, fame still wouldn't be a zero sum game unless you've shown that everyone's attention is saturated. I posit that there's still room for growth.
All you need to know via Fred Wilson http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/employee-equity-how-much.htm...

In short, the first few in terms of percentage, then move to Wilson's multiplier factor model.
The major optimization is that it converts images to 32bpp and premultiplies them.
go China!
this is local for me. we're gaining 400 jobs. (we work 2x harder than those lazy americans)
How about cc1.4xlarge we have been debating using them for the IO.
You want all the (potential) pollution?
I read "don't scroll down until you're done", thought "ah, this is probably one of those tests that has an entertaining comment at the end unrelated to the questions", scrolled down without doing answering any of the questions, read the entertaining comment. I wonder if that's worth bonus points or negative points.
Let's see, braces and parens but no semi-colons, almost. ;)
I'm not sure how I feel about the "killed or injured" bit under obsession.

Every couple of weeks, I get into the zone while driving my car. For this the situation needs to be just right, i.e. the road can't be empty, but it can't be full of cars either. Basically the ideal situation is that there's just enough cars that you can't stay in the same line while maintaining your preferred speed, but there's enough switching lanes is viable.

On those days I might get 'in the zone' and have intensely heightened situational awareness. I 'feel' the cars around me and can easily navigate the road like I was flowing through a river (aside: 'flow' is a synonym for 'zone').

Situational awareness is also a key trait in becoming proficient in an FPS. In fact, almost anytime a video gamer goes on a kill streak it's because they were able to tap into heightened situational awareness (e.g. you 'feel' your enemies, know where they're going to come from, so you take them out before they take you out). The only difference is that since it's front of a computer screen it's easy to be misled that you are ignoring everything.

You are just ignoring everything irrelevant.
I'm sorry, but that is simply incorrect.

it's a simple matter to force equal trades; black cannot avoid the exchange of pieces forever, and if white plays a perfect game he will always win, without doubt.

Yes, that's pretty much the human intuition for why no one doubts that White will win. But it is very, very far from a mathematical proof.

Okay, just calculate the moves it would take to force the equal exchange of material from a given position.

Let me remind you that each ply has a branching factor of about 20, which means each move has a branching factor of several hundred. In most positions you'd be lucky to be able to calculate even one or two forced exchanges, let alone all the way to the end of the game.

A program attempting to prove victory operates in a very different context from a normal chess playing program — it is not allowed to prune any positions at all. We haven't even found the status of all seven piece endings yet! That is despite intense effort. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame_tablebase

It is utterly, utterly inconceivable that a search-based approach will ever prove victory with Queen odds.
I was starting to lean towards 'A' being the more programmer-ish set of answers, based on the hypothesis that the scoring of the test would be something like the number of 'A's one answered, but some of the questions really confused me until I got to the end....
http://i.imgur.com/BAefW.png

Very clean :)

(Firefox 3.6.13 on Windows 7)