skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One word for you: foreigners (or people that English is not their main language).

Very capable, very smart and awesome to work with (most of the time), but can make some silly mistakes when writting in english... Specially on things that a spell checker wouldn't catch.

Not unfair, but you could miss a lot of good people by doing that.
Profile picture added to online resume
Are Github and open source projects turning programmers toward a portfolio based resume?

I've had success in interviews initially linking to my github repo and letting the interviewer view for themselves what I can accomplish. It has been a good diving board when you start talking in person.
I think the down voting is due to the perceived extrapolation of 'I've read a bunch of slanted online content and it seems that Somalia is doing great without any government oversight'...sure, so try living there and see how awesome no government can be.
They can't.

First off, there will be a small lip to keep it from falling in flat. This means that the hole is actually smaller than the manhole cover by an inch or more.

Second, no matter how you orient an equilateral triangle with on point facing down the hole, there is an edge across the top that is too big to fall in. The way to visualize this, if you take one edge of an equilateral triangle and sweep it in a circle around one end, it will be outside of the triangle at all points except where the corners meet. So trying to drop it in any position other than with the edges lined up will make it impossible to fall through. And since there is a lip when the edges line up, it can't fall through.

In contrast with a square or rectangle, if you sweep one of the edges it will be inside of the square or rectangle at some points (on a rectangle, you have to use the small sides). This means all you have to do is shove one edge of the cover down the hole and it will fall in.
Yeah except Interviewers assume by default that you don't know how to program and you somehow cheated and got someone else to write your open source project.
> Not exactly a toy app though.

It could have started as a generic to-do list. That's how I'd begin.
Part of the problem is the open source movement's increasing antipathy towards Microsoft. This is an understandable attitude to have, of course, but it doesn't win you fans when you try and acquire users outside the movement itself. For most people, computing isn't a political stance or a way of life; it's just another thing they need to use to do their job.

Integrating with Active Directory to some extent, for example, shouldn't be incredibly difficult - and you would have thought that full integration with the new Office XML-based formats should be possible. But I suspect there isn't much appetite to actually do the work without substantial commercial incentive. I agree that a million dollar bounty would do the job, but then you'd have to do it again the next time a version of Office came out, and again and again. When it's so difficult to actually make money through an open source project (see LibreOffice's recent plea for 50,000 euros), that's difficult to justify.

Despite what many people who run projects say, the open source business model problem is anything but solved. I know from experience that running an open source project as a business can occasionally be a soul-destroying experience (although, particularly if you're socially orientated, the good times far outweigh that). When there's a reliable way to make payroll and grow companies through producing open sourcing software, as opposed to packaging it or selling customization services, all of these problems will go away. Until then, we're - as ever - reliant on developers and teams within companies scratching an itch.
Java retakes the top O'Reilly book rank in 2010
Python 3.2 arrives with a better global interpreter lock
Doesn't that really depend on the language.

And for me to say

> I have a good feel for the capabilities of the language and largely understand it?

I would need to have built, deployed, maintained, rewrote version 2.0, etc of a production app with actual users. Anything else is "Academic Knowledge".
Thanks for your comment.
You're absolutely right in that it is vage, although I did think that if the site managed to get some substantial amount of (recurring) traffic it would make it worth for "anybody who could fix these things" to actually pay attention.

I see it as a potential PR tool; a way of letting the world kow you're listening to your customers.
Again, it all depends of hihg traffic volumes and I am of course, biased in my view. =)

Thanks again.
Statistically, yes. Not, I suspect, because marriage suddenly confers stability and harmony onto relationships where none was previously, but because of a mix of people having to pay a large deposit on the relationship and of non-marriage relationships getting lumped in with pre-hypothetical-marriage relationships.
While I'd love to agree, reading someone's code does not tell you:

1) If they actually wrote all of it, or if it derivative of someone else's work.
2) Whether any particular function took them 10 minutes or 10 hours.
3) What options they considered when choosing how to architect a particular solution.
4) Why they made any particular choice in their solutions.
5) Whether or not they will fit on your team, take constructive criticism, etc.

The questions posed in the article don't give you those answers either, but the applicant's speed at answering, their confidence, they demeanor as you ask further questions and discuss answers... all that communication does answer most of the above questions.
Since when is downloading a file from a server considered file sharing?

Otherwise: Zappa was 20 years ahead of his time, it seems like the technology he proposed really would have worked, amazing read.
Comparing noSQL databases
> The interviews were pretty evenly split between very large, large, and startup-sized tech companies.

Really? One person is looking for a job in a big company or a startup?? One of the most common programmer interview questions is What type of job are you looking for? I suspect that "Oh, I don't know, maybe cubicle dweller in BigCo, but then again a startup might be fun" is not the best answer, and describing each company as being your ideal destination is dishonest.

Then again, another possibility is that he looked for a startup job, and when he couldn't find the right spot he tried some medium sized companies, and so on. That might make sense in an interview: "I was really interested in exploring a startup, but when I actually looked into it I realized it was far more romantic in theory than it was practical. I like the idea of writing great software, but it turns out that the companies I met with aren't very committed to some of the best practices that interest me."

So I won't jump to conclusions about the OP, but certainly I am interested in hearing what chain of events led to what appears to be a wide spread of environments.
It is easier to just think of it as freezing ether.
I'm Hungarian-English-Romanian(intermediate) speaking(in order of capability). Hungarian is my mother language, Romanian is the government's language and I learned English around the age of 4-5(I don't remember exactly).

I thought multi-tasking is a programmer/freelancer skill. There were times when I undertook 5 projects the same time. I was helped by the fact that not all clients were in the same timezone, though I still had to quickly shift between projects and I had no problem with that, I didn't feel that it was anything special.

About information filtering: I go trough HN's full RSS feed along with other news sources I have in my Google reader.

I think the mind manages to create some sort of independent representation of thoughts, sometimes I can't remember if I have seen a movie in English or Hungarian.
If I don't want to use Paypal, what are my best options?
It's not seamless though, and that makes it a very different idea.

He's talking about it working at the same level as a browser where it sees if you have HTML5, and if not falls back to flash, dynamically.

I can't imagine it being a high priority - fiddly, low return, creates huge performance issues. Lots of basic problems - you don't want someone supplying input to a game over a (latent) network. You don't want to be running instances of performance-intensive games on your webserver.

Still - the proposed idea is distinct from VNC or X.
"No offense intended, but I think that using `2to3` at release time is exactly the wrong way around."

It's not a method I'd recommend, but I was just pointing out that some people had such success with 2to3 that it's reliable enough for them to provide releases based on it. I would guess that this isn't their eternal 3.x support plan, but may give some confidence in projects that 3.x is only a 2to3 run away.
"How do you spend 4 to 5+ years and over $100,000 and still can't stand on your own two feet?" - Exactly.
Common Design Styles Used in Album Artwork 
In this post, we will look at over 70 examples of excellent album artwork. The styles could be categorized as: painted, abstract/experimental, photographic, retro/vintage, minimalist and illustrated. Scattered through this article, several mini-tutorials will teach you how to create certain effects.
The real issue is that binary search doesn't work if you can only break two bulbs.

I believe yours is the common optimal solution.
I work at Google, and have a BS in CS from The College of New Jersey. So if they ever filtered on graduate degrees or prestigious schools, it's no longer the case. In fact, your description of a self-taught programmer fits me pretty well.
If your system works, you have minted (at least in the short term) a license to print money. Why sell it now?
Spy Software Blackberry Makes Spying Easy
Spy software blackberry is a wonderful spying device, you just need to install it in your girlfriend's mobile and relax!! Once the device is installed, you don't have to do anything the entire spying task then becomes the device's job and you have no headaches to take!!
There is no easy answer to this.

I've seen many resumes that contain 1 or 2 small grammatical errors or typos. I don't get too hung up on those.

However, if the resume is poorly constructed overall, I usually won't choose that candidate for further consideration.

Every part of our jobs todays involves communications with others. I personally HATE chat-speak in email. "R u going 2 lunch 2day" drives me fucking bonkers, and I don't care if you're typing it on a phone where you have to tap 2 wires together to spell out the message in morse code. So, for me, I really don't want to interact with someone where every other communication is likely to make me want to strangle them. Similarly, even if they have poor English, I don't want people to require a decoder-ring to dissect their every message.

So, depending on the exact details of the resume, I would have probably done the same thing. The exceptions tend to be when you require a particular skill set that seems to be most predominant in someone that is not a native English speaker. EG: if I were hiring an expert on Russian social networks, I would not expect to find an ideal candidate that didn't also make some grammatical errors at times.
I usually always start by writing an IRC bot. Mainly because I know the IRC protocol really well, but more importantly because it let me feel the language. i.e. How easy is it to use socket? What about parsing strings? Reading/Writing files, etc.
Having worked with people trying to encourage adoption of open office I can say the main problem is compatibility. Pretty much everyone can adjust to the slightly different interface.

The issue is that if you save a doc in open office and email to a customer who uses word if you've used anything beyond the basic text features there is a good chance when they open it there will be something wrong. The reverse applies too.

Almost everyone I've tried open office with has eventually given up and migrated back to word primarily because they couldn't open files other people were sending them.
> In my personal experience, I won't easily switch between languages

For me the trickiest is switching fluently between the sound systems of several languages in a split second. Suppose I'm speaking in American English and mention a double-barreled word like "Stern-Brocot tree" which contains a German and a French name. In that context it's very difficult to maintain proper pronunciation even though I can pronounce the parts perfectly well individually.
It's a shame that about 30% of the comments in this thread are about how the author of the Reddit comment is female. I have a feeling the discussion on Reddit actually trumps the discussion on HN for this one. What's worse is that you have to wade through this irrelevance to get to the "good" comments on here.
http://github.com/raganwald

1. Do you look at my github and wonder whether I wrote it or copied it from elsewhere?

2. What do you care if anything I wrote took me ten minutes or ten hours? And with rewrite_rails, the answer is more like ten months. Is that a problem? Are you looking for LOC/hour or for a certain approach to thinking about programming?

3. A trivial coding problem will not answer this question any more than Github will, but you can always just ask: "Reg, I'm looking at Faux, and I wonder, what other approaches did you consider before settling on pushing application logic down into the browser?"

4. See above.

5. "Reg, #andand seriously sucks. This is pervasive nil checking dressed up in metaprogramming clothing with opening core classes as a third deadly sin. Before I consign your soul to the abyss, what do you have to say in your defense?"
You can always install other versions of Python. I have never used the distro's version of Python. I have always built my preferred version from source. It's trivial.
For the initial lessons, I would use the material at http://codingkata.org/ (which unfortunately seems to be down at the moment).

That should provide a good feel for the basic language constructs, and the essentials of the standard library.
Yeah, allocation is usually included in the constant factors. Keep them in mind, though - things like locality can have a big impact.
The original poster child of Cloud Computing is hiring
I honestly don't think that everyone cares about the size of the company they're working for. I'm currently applying for internships for this summer and I am far more interested in what kind of work I could be doing than how big the company is. I don't think that's uncommon.
I happen to know the original creator of nbPython (what led to the official Python support in Netbeans), and he's currently on sabbatical from Python as an employed Rubyist. I can put you in contact with him if you want, but I don't know what his level of commitment is to Netbeans post-Oracle. The guy who backed it at Sun/Netbeans, Tor Norbye, also quit after the Oracle acquisition and now works with Google.

Unfortunately, I don't see community support keeping it afloat. I'd look at PyCharm since it appears to have a future.
> First off, there will be a small lip to keep it from falling in flat. This means that the hole is actually smaller than the manhole cover by an inch or more.

Exactly, and with a big enough lip/flange, ANY shape will work.
The term "exceptionally obvious" might be over-stating the case a bit. Please could you expand on why you think that
The thing that bothered me about Spotify is that it seems to want me to type in my entire music collection, and then select individual songs to listen to. It just seems like work.

What I expected before installing was that it would work something like Genius in iTunes, where you give it a starting point and it just starts playing music based on a relatively smart algorithm.

Once one of these music-as-a-service things gets that bit right, I'll be back.
Presumably he/she envisions a Facebook/BitTorrent hybrid with content replicated across the social graph.

You'd get drafted into storing images for some subset of the intersection of your social graph and several others, and the rest of your images would be served by someone(s) with whom your social graph intersects.

Presumably invitations would be via e-mail, or, if you wanted to be even more decentralized, QR code.
I may be misremembering, but I think that figure was the record high; it's not an ongoing rate.
Why does an administrative office write device drivers instead of buying printers etc with Linux support?

Is there a missing capability in the Linux supported hardware, somewhere?
I like the way the Asimov talks about hyperspace, a currently unknown dimension that allows for "jumping" through/over huge segments of space without technically traveling faster than light, completely circumventing the issue of faster than light travel and extreme time dilation.
"Bad people" tend to become negative and destructive

I think this is the root of some very important lines of thought.

There are well known reasons why people tend towards negative and destructive behaviors. There are well known ways to encourage positive and creative behaviors. I think these both have to do with the feelings of safety and efficacy. It's one thing to apply such thinking when observing governments overseas. It's another thing to start thinking about that in an entirely personal context.
Run JSLint with your Jasmine suite
they often rationalize and are fooled by selection bias.
Assuming you are talking about me, that's crazy. I have asked, literally, a handful of times that they never contact me again.

It might be selection bias, but it's not rationalization and it's not fooling me. It's annoying the crap out me. I hope they go bother someone who is interested in working there.
Power utilities already do this (to a certain extent). No typical power utility has the manpower to respond to a major event, so they all have mutual aid agreements (to help one another).
I know that many people don't care about the size of the company they're working for, but turn it around: Do you think that employers care about whether an applicant cares?

To make this perfectly clear, let me propose this interview question: What is more important to you: The company and culture or the work that you'll be doing?

I think that people being people, they will prefer applicants who honestly are more interested in the company and culture than the work. This is absolutely true of BigCo, and applies to startups as well. What if the company needs to pivot and you are no longer working on whatever excited you about coming to work on day zero? Will you start looking for somewhere else?
Entrepreneurs Can Thrive on Services or Products
That's interesting, I've had the opposite experience. If they communicate badly, in my experience, they tend to build overly complex things that meet the wrong requirements.
Yeah, it appears it's actually quite common, and I must be one of the last people to be surprised by it. =] I've never been part of a major multi-person C++ project, though, so my stylistic conventions are a mixture of C conventions and the conventions used in the STL. I tend to SPELL_THUSLY even C++ typed constants, though I have also seen them PascalCased (but then, unless context makes it sufficiently clear, they can look like class names).
Isn't the point to have this work below the application layer? We have to make a new encrypted and authenticated transport layer and also rewrite all of the application protocols?

Then again, with key distribution being done with nym urls the network stack is more like a tangled ball of yarn.
Hmm, may be the tools weren't useful for.. just him? Facebook is a life changer for Tunisia. In the start of the revolution, it has served as an alternative news source for more than 1.5 million Tunisians. It served both photos and videos. It's fast and has what it seems to be an infinite bandwidth.

But Facebook is doing much more than that these days. The pages which served the news during the country unrest has now gathered on Facebook and planned anti-government protests virtually, and then in real life. The result was today 100K protesters in my city (of around 700K). The result was also the constitution of a team from different cities that is now leading the strikes.

The current protests may change the government. And if it did, Facebook is doing more than diffusing information: It's building an entire generation. That's because the current protests wouldn't exist if Facebook (or an alternative social network) wasn't there.

For information there are around 1.5 million using Facebook here and the revolution union in Facebook has around the 1 million fans. That is if compared to the USA, that page should have around 200 million fans.
I'm left wondering wether the idea is server-side browsers or browser-side servers. Plus, what's the problem with having to deal with JS client-side and something else server-side? And as for this...

"I therefore cannot redistribute and decentralise the server-side parts without expecting the end user to understand how to configure and run a server"

You can. It's called a desktop app.
Can you fire someone for disparaging your company on Facebook?
This guide refers to outdated and obsolete concepts from CLtL1. I'd recommend reading http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/programming-in-the-large-pac... from Practical Common Lisp or just the relevant portions of the spec at http://l1sp.org/cl/11.1.1 - it's pretty readable. One non-recommended approach: guess and be disappointed when your intuition doesn't match how it actually works.
> Assuming you are talking about me

Er, no. You implied you are not a googler. Perhaps I was talking to you.
Advertospam?

Edit: http://techoctave.com/blogcast/ does look pretty neat though.
I'd be very wary of paying any translator who messes up simple translations that they put into marketing materials.
This is how the phrase "traditional characters" is written in each script:

(written in traditional): 繁體字
(written in simplified): 繁体字

Also, the bit about traditional characters being harder to learn reads like propaganda. Traditional character-using areas have higher literacy rates. Also, my own personal experience as a language learner has been that traditional takes longer to write, but it's more systematic in its structure and it's much easier to read.

One further thing worth pointing out is that mainlanders read traditional characters far better than Taiwanese and overseas Chinese read simplified.
"Integrating with Active Directory to some extent, for example, shouldn't be incredibly difficult "

I get confused on this one. I am trying to implement some simple software at work, and the software (not Open Source) is supposed to be LDAP compliant. The Unix admin in charge of the LDAP Directory insists that Active Directory itself isn't LDAP compliant, and that when people gear their software towards Active Directory they "break LDAP."

So far, his comment is correct. The product keeps trying to pull in windows AD objects just because the server is running Windows. Frustrating.

Sorry, I guess my point is, that for some of us, it gets really difficult to figure out who is breaking what in terms of compatibility.

"For most people, computing isn't a political stance or a way of life; it's just another thing they need to use to do their job."

100% agreed.
Or, on the flip side, if a comment holistically seem strong, the weak points within (which, otherwise as isolates may have been viciously voted down) stand to get leverage by the strength of the comment's whole worth. And perhaps thereby granted earnest consideration and a chance to discussion (which arguably they may not have gotten a chance to otherwise as a one-liner).
high lvl nap talk
Wonderful writing!

He should collect these essays into book form to counterbalance the influence of pseudo-erudite pedants like Lynne Truss.