skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This comes down to ethics once again.
Forgotten to mention, Simplified is a simplified version of Traditional, so words can be translated directly one to one. Simplified just makes the Traditional word easier and simpler to write. When you translate to either one, you basically already target both.
> Moreover, in a digital world, they make no difference in input speed.

On the other hand, traditional Chinese on a <4 inch screen always PITA to read because every fucking single character looks like a black block, for example 龍, it's very hard to see the exact strokes which cause an obstacle for reading. (yeah, like 赢羸蠃嬴 are totally 4 different characters.) Traditional Chinese under 12px is simply un-readable on LCD screens.

The retina display on iPhone4 is good news for traditional Chinese.
I take the point about "Java's designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them."

But, consider the reverse - The C++ spec always seemed to as if the language designers were showing off - competing to add fatures that showed off how clever they were, without as much regard for the readability and maintainablity of the resulting code in the language. I don't think that strategy is optimal either.

Also, if you think only simple code can be done in C#, have a look at the Rx framework. C# as a language is suffering from a bit of bloat too, but not as bad as C++.
I'd think that this discussion is significantly more hacker-y than many of the others here. I mean, I can see your argument: HN is obviously becoming more and more mainstream, and hence, articles will tend more and more in that direction.

This article, though, isn't one of them.
In my experience most of the programmers I know and consider to be very talented also have good writing skills, at least in their native language. When I meet a programmer who writes poorly I immediately suspect they're not going to program well either.

However, I'm willing to concede that I might be engaging in a bit of stereotyping. I'm not sure your actions can be legally or even logically justified, but I can say that I would probably do the same thing.
>I read that as: if you're not prepared to get the details right when you're applying for the job why should I expect you'll get the details right when you're on the job?

You shouldn't. Nobody gets everything right the first time (why do you think we have bug systems) and it would be a waste of company resources to reread every email for every grammatical error, especially when they don't actually cause the recipient to misunderstand the intended point.

The same goes for who/whom, its/it's, weather/whether, phrases such as "in a timely manor", etc.

Perfect grammar is like bug free programs: desirable in theory but too expensive and impractical in reality.
We used to have ridiculous numbers like that at MSFT. If Google is reporting them the same way, they're not counting re-applications and people who are completely unqualified and either hoping for a lottery win or are just satisfying some unemployment requirement.

Seriously, the recruiting folks told me that the vast majority of the "blind submit" resumes that came in via e-mail and website forms were unchanged duplicates of things already in the database.
I'm fully bi-lingual french-english and yes, I can 'think' in both languages, but I wouldn't say my simultaneous multitasking is that great. When focusing on complex problems I tend to tune absolutely everything else out.
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Interesting idea. It should be relatively easy to make various versions of Word and Open/LibreOffice load documents and print them and then compare the bitmaps for meaningful discrepancies.
From my experience, person's behaviour in difficult situations tells, whether he is "good" or "bad". "Bad people" tend to become negative and destructive, "good people" try to stay positive and creative.
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> The one biggest problem is Microsoft Office

I agree. Office is the problem, not the solution.

The solution is to avoid using it.
That's lower than the 40000 feet the person to whom you were replying was flying; in his post he mentions specifically variadic functions.
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No, they're not mutually exclusive. But what actually matters in most software is "amortized constant time": linear time worst case only matters in hard real-time systems which can't tolerate any deviation from the expected runtime.

Even algorithms like binary trees can end up with very bad worst cases unless great care is taken in allocating their nodes.
The most important part of great ideas is to follow the money. No money, no honey, no funny.
The problem arises when you are asked to provide further (possibly infinite nr) elements of the sequence: the first would still compress nicely as

"a(i)=i*10+1."

yours would be
"a(3)=pi, a(4)=zebra, a(5)=cheetah, a(6)=akrcqfztaf a(7)=666" etc.

But I agree, if the question is just "what is the next element?" and so far only 3 are given, your answer is as good as anything else.
What's the difference between "shared" and "out-sourced"?
It'll just bring back some results that may be useful. However, Wolfram Alpha does this pretty well..

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=when+it+is+10am+in+new+...

It doesn't understand the question exactly, but still shows the current times, and quick math could tell you what it would be at 10am. Some playing with the query and adding "timezone" into it gets you closer to the actual answer you're asking though
But if you ever choose to stray outside of Ruby and web development, you may find yourself in a whole different boat.
it's not about the final score the comment gets, it's about the amount of influence early in the story.

edit: Also, I kicked off the downvoting when you were on 1 point, as an experiment. I wonder if the other 3 people who downvoted to get you to -3 would have done so if I hadn't initially put you at 0. Also, clearly three other people upvoted you. If I hadn't put you at 0 and then 3 others followed my lead, would you now be at +4?

It makes a big difference in the perception of opinion. Simply by initially putting you at 0, I was able to make it seem as though your opinion was worth less than mine. The difference between a +8 comment and a +1 (or -3) comment is much larger than the difference between a +8 and a +4.
And that's why I like the idea - because you replied - dialogue can exist.

I could care about the "I downvoted you because I disagree with you" part. I'm more interested in what you said next. And even though I disagree with what you said, I don't feel the need to downvote you to say that. That's what discussion is for.

Second, you downvoted me when I was already in the positive, and I find that less aggravating than downvoting to the negative, which reduces readability of a comment, and reduces the opportunity for dialogue.

I find that the quality of the community makes a much greater difference than the problem of upvotes as you describe it.
Although my choices have changed over time, my ideas on the matter are the same today as when I blogged about it a couple years ago: http://blog.fogus.me/2009/05/29/pet-projects/
Well, I've been working as a programmer for 13 years. I speak three languages fluently and have worked in the USA, Argentina, Brazil, and most recently, Italy. I think that qualifies as reasonably diverse and not so limited.

But yes, my statement does in fact come from my personal biases, exactly as I claimed in my comment.
I disagree. I have tried using lots of other office software like OO, more lightweight text writing apps, and of course online apps like Google Docs. In the end I'm back to using MS Office (both on my primary Macbook and the secondary WinXP), even without the interoperability issues it still easily beats all other solutions. Also, as another commenter noted, if they can get them $10-100/yr, there's really not much to think about.

The truth is, Office software is hard, and even though the MS product has a lot of suck, the others are much worse. Finally, the new 2010 version of MS Office actually really good.
I'm just saying a random position at Google isn't that important. So IMHO, WildUtah shouldn't feel bad because he doesn't fit some stupid profile.
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I'd say if you're going into it for any currency (actual or ersatz) you're going in for the wrong reasons.
I have a feeling the spokesperson in the interview is describing interviews for positions other than software engineering. It's been well known that Google doesn't ask brainteaser-type questions for it's SE positions. Positions like Product Manager on the other hand are a different story.
It'd be very difficult indeed to find and duplicate all the bugs.
I'd recommend writing something real. Something simple that is useful to yourself or someone else.

A fresh take on a basic tool.
Write a literal toy app that is filled with small puzzles to help the user learn the same language.
http://searchlightdigital.com/2011-02-21_1408.png it's just HN, all the way down...
Would a car that only takes you places --but has no music system and no air-conditioning seem very compelling?
The proposed fork-join framework is actually quite awful. See here:
http://www.coopsoft.com/ar/CalamityArticle.html
"Hit-man funds for elimination of internationally-designated dictators"

Where is the donation button?
same here, but works on Chrome. And it's even pretty nice, I like it. Maybe figure out some way to show comments side by side with the original page?
Don't forget Outlook/Exchange - the scheduling capabilities are awesome. I could figure out when the people I wanted to meet with were free, find out what rooms were free, invite the people I wanted to meet with (and then see whether they RSVP'd), and reserve the meeting room for a desired time slot, all through Outlook. I don't really know of an open source solution that does this quite so well.
It gets people talking, so there's something there. But it has to get the masses if it ever to make sense. The UI could be vastly improved. And of course, you need a biz model.
Actually, it is called pedantry.
Bubble for major funded consumer websites only?

I think the social websites that have made no money, and haven't thought about monetizing are the ones that have suffered.

Think the difference between now and 2000 is you may need to prove you can make some money now, not just get uber traffic.

http://www.founderspeak.com
These look a lot better than when Google first came out with the font API. The selection is pretty good now, and seems like a great free alternative to Typekit.
I regret that my comment came off as being snippy -- indeed I was in a hurry to get to my sleep and chose not to remark on additional things.

> [...] and then someone writes a one line 'toss off' reply, and rakes in the free karma. This is the utmost BS.

I should hope that the HN community doesn't impulsively ascribe so much value and pride into winning some system of karmic points. I don't. I think it's a non-issue. And because of the HN interface being so sleek and minimal, we can at least afford to have a few one-liners here and there without wasting a significant amount of screen space.

Lastly, I would like to point out that my comment at least was not a derisive or snide one but one of an observation/correction which I thought was worth the trouble pointing out.
But, again, I do regret not supplementing my comment with more substance.
The "instant gratification" excuse doesn't make much sense for a Kindle. You can purchase books and have them delivered to it within a minute or so.
Because they're a cost centre not a profit centre. Hiring talented people to work in cost centres is always hard.
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I had an interviewer who thought he was the only person using the round manhole cover question. When he asked it I instantly answered "so they don't fall in the hole" and he freaked out. "Wow, you are so smart, I've never had anyone answer that question so quickly!"

I didn't have the heart to tell him its a cliche.
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This is terrible advice. Going through Google HR's meat grinder you have a small probability to get in. The process is quite random and it takes a lot of time and energies from you.

Don't gamble on 1/10. Most likely, you'll feel like crap for nothing. And don't listen to the 1/10ers, they often rationalize and are fooled by selection bias.
It doesn't seem worth pursuing to me. I mean, it's well-executed and the design is pretty good. But it's a toy - it doesn't solve any particular problem or serve any particular purpose. So for that reason you'll always struggle to get traffic (leaving aside the question of how you would ever monetize it).

Why does it not solve any particular problem? Probably because it's too vague. It's people leaving complaints about things in the middle of nowhere. There's no reason to think anybody who could fix these things is paying attention.

I would move on.
Someone will repost the story and it will hit the front page again anyways.
Could someone translate what this is actually trying to talk about into something clear? This blog post reminds me of someone on weed trying to relate to you this profound idea to you and rambles on stream of consciousness style. He wants there to be no 'centralization' (that is, servers) and have things run on a cloud of people's web browsers, yet at the same time it still talks to mysql somewhere? We won't need any one site to hold data and things just magically work by sending things out into the ether?
It's funny, Excel was the reason I switched to OpenOffice.

1) Closing one Excel windows closes ALL of them. Often I (or other people I was supporting) would be working on an important Excel file, and then open another one temporarily, close the 2nd one, and then unthinkingly say "no" to the "Do You Want to Save" dialog that you THINK is for the 2nd file, but is actually talking about the very important original file. Oh, and Word (which also has a separate window per document) doesn't act this way at all. Oh, "save more often" you might say? Well....

2) Excel doesn't let you Undo past the last save. This is annoying for a lot of reasons, but is completely terrible when you opened a file with the intent of saving your changes as a copy. Oops, you "saved" instead of "saved as"? Your original document is gone, and pretty much unrecoverable.

OpenOffice just works.

(I don't know if the latest versions of Office addressed either of these issues... and I don't really care)
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Charisma is useful. Ethics are also useful in the same way that the rule of law is. Ethics are also beautiful in the way art is.

It's arguably easier and more profitable to do business with ethical people. I met one cocky dot-com bubble ex-startup CEO who thought that creating things of value is piffle and it's all about being cool and getting the payout so one can do nothing but lounge on the beach drinking mai tais in the company of prostitutes. (Sadly, this is not a stereotyped exaggeration, it's exactly what happened and what was said right up to the mai tais, and only the remainder is watered down a bit.)

I think there are 100's of ways one can reveal one's ethics to intelligent observers, especially in person, especially over an extended period of time. (Disturbingly, commenting on social news can be just as revealing.)

Something that occurred to me in the shower:

A useful but disturbing exercise is to start listing your heroes. After you're done with that, start being brutally honest with yourself about how you're not like them. (Then pick out the ways in which this could be turned around as achievable positive goals.)

Of all things, it was listening to Timothy Sykes on Mixergy a few weeks ago that's the soil from which this thought sprouted, in particular the part where he talks about meeting his fans and being disillusioned by that. His fans were mostly nothing like him. They were all just people who wanted pretend to be like him. I'm going to start thinking about this in relation to my professional life and with respect to music.

(I don't think Mr. Sykes would like me, nor I him, nor do I think I'd care for his writing, but I find I respect him as a perceptive human being.)
Ask HN: rate our shady start up idea
Flaws in online sports betting operation opens an
opportunity for arbitrage.

We are working on a crawler which browses bookmakers sites in order to find sure bets.

Also, we have a program which can back using found results.

According to our estimations it's very profitable.

We are looking for a way to make a service out of it e.g. provide gamblers with betting automation to some extent using our software.

Using such advantageous situations across several bookmakers is prohibited according to the rules of some of bookies.

What are the chances for us to find an investor?

If you look at Betfair sport events usually gather millions of dollars at stake.

Our technology stack includes Lisp, Chrome and other smaller open source libraries at the moment.
In my personal experience, I won't easily switch between languages (it takes on or two seconds at best), but when I finished switching I am 100% focused on it. I don't think about the other languages except when a concept can't be properly expressed in the current one.

In computer terms, it's more like a fetching a page on the swap on a page fault than accessing several contexts at the same time.

I guess translators would be more aligned on the model presented..But how common would it be?
The best thing about this is that sometimes you don't even have to pay out the referral fee! I personally don't like to accept fees for anything where I'm already being compensated.

For example, if I am working with a client (or even plan to in the future) and I recommend Jacques, I will not accept 10%. It's a conflict of interest. Of course, if I'm not working for/with someone and I have no expectation of doing so in the future, I'm free to accept a referral fee.
> Is that unfair?

Short answer: No.
Long answer: Yes.
Correct Answer: It's a poor question. Given the limited data you provided, anyone here passing judgement is basing it off insufficient information. Furthermore, the information provided (a typo) doesn't make the described situation ("bad writing"). Furthermore, you provide no information regarding the candidate.

Anyone giving you an answer is doing so without all the information. Expecting an answer after providing such limited information is unreasonable.
And we would politely end the interview and not call you back. Questions like these are not made to decide who to hire -- They are made to establish a base level of competence.

The ability to answer these questions does not prove anything.
However, the INABILITY to answer these questions says quite a lot.

So you gotta ask.
Another reason why reading a tutorial or two (or better, five) is essential as the first step. Just jumping to coding programming exercises won't help much in learning how to write idiomatic code for the language.
Are good writing skills a requirement of this position?

I'm sure pretty much everyone here has worked with people, who don't know how to write English worth a damn. For example in my last job I worked with this Scandinavian dude, whose written English was atrocious. It was so bad we made jokes about it (with him, not at him). I had to repeatedly correct his writing.

But the dude was a brilliant technologist. Innovative, incredible work ethic and he just got s* done at an unbeliavable pace. The projects we were working on were much better off with him than without him.
Contrary to what the simplified/traditional categorisation might suggest, there is nothing non-traditional about the simplification scheme. Most, if not all, of the simplified characters are taken from existing forms, such as those used in cursive script(草书, aka grass script, cao style) and variants used in certain eras/regions which happen to be simpler in forms. There had being painstaking and rigorous process to validate established usage before any character was approved for inclusion, in order to ensure the coherency and continuity of the whole writing system. During the cultural revolution, there was an effort for further simplification, and in the revolutionary zest, the process was not so rigorous and many poorly designed and indeed ugly forms were invented and included. Thankfully, these late additions were later repealed and are no longer in use.

There was (or still is, politically motivated, I think) opposition to the simplification in Taiwan, but fortunately pragmaticism prevails and nowadays, even the current President Ma Ying-jeou advocates "识繁写简" (recognize complex, write simplified), because the practicality of the simplified version is undeniable.
You make some good points, but I think the rule of thumb the article brings up still holds true: "choose translators located in the region you are marketing your product in." Yes, Traditional to Simplified mapping can be done easily by computer(the article actually provides a link to a site that does this for free), and yes, despite regional vocabulary differences for words like taxi, all words can be written in Traditional or Simplified and be largely understood by all of those in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland. The article could have done a better job explaining this, and sometimes simply understanding is good enough.

That said, the article really has non Chinese speakers marketing their product in China in mind, and just as if I were marketing my product in the U.K. I would want British spellings, I would want local words to be used if I were marketing my product to a specific Chinese locale. And, in my opinion, the difference in vocabularies between HK/TW/CN are arguably greater than the English vocabulary differences between UK and the US. Simply put, if I were marketing my product to Hong Kong, I would not want to pay even $.05/word for a translation of a product description if I knew it was done by a Mandarin speaker from Beijing who was not versed in the regional differences, and had only converted the text from Simplified to Traditional. I think this holds true for both small boutique hotels, and "high volume group-buying websites."
You have to wonder, though, in a big bureaucracy, how much of the pain is due to "not 100%" compatibility, and how much is due to "this Linux thing is not what I'm used to".
> I'm not saying it doesn't work, just that you could ending up knowing a framework not a language.

I agree I'm blurring the lines a little, but when I talk about liking 'Python' or 'Javascript' I mean not just the syntax, but the libraries, the package managers, and other parts of the surrounding toolset.

There are some languages with great syntax, but small communities and little library support. Checking the whole, bigger picture gives me a feel as to whether it's something I'd like to use in production.
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