skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think employers reliance on grade and qualifications are more about eliminating the really bad hires than finding the best hires. It is good in a way though, just like having a body of work to show, a hiring process that comes down to how you solve a few problems in an interview can be really hit and miss and is hard to show your full abilities.
funny- I don't see man pages (nor info pages) for pushd, popd, or dirs. What am I missing about the documentation?
I spent 7 years in Pisa and I moved to Cambridge some months ago.

Cambridge is way more boring and depressing than Pisa.
You can't imagine how large that pile of junk CVs/resumes is. When I was doing hiring (MSFT), having full-time recruiters working for me was key to getting the load down to something that was even remotely manageable. I can imagine that if your company was small enough that you didn't have the money to hire a full-time recruiter to source candidates, relying on third-party referrals would be a reasonable alternative.

That said, almost 100% of the non-college hires I made were either personal recommendations from other members on the team or people whom I directly contacted after seeing their name pop up repeatedly in the context of interesting things.
Sorry for offending anyone but this came off to me as pompous and somewhat pathetic.
Ask HN: Startup from icy centre of Canada hoping to meet SV Hackers and YC Alum
Hello HN,

We, the guys from Windsoc (the Unified Social API) are planning to rent a car and drive down the peninsula on the Friday after LAUNCH. Are there any HNers or YC alum who may have 5-10 minutes to meet and talk with us?

Part of our curiosity is based on what it's like to be a startup in a place where people actually talk about startups, and part of it is to get some different perspectives on our product. Where we live (Winnipeg, Canada), the nearest major city is over four hundred miles away, so sometimes we feel a little isolated.

Please let us know if you have a few minutes to talk to us. Thank you very much.

(And yes, it is very icy up here right now... the cold has emptied the streets, and I slipped on the ice outside my house twice last night.)
Being able to solve problems outside of your domain knowledge is a very good skill to have. Especially, in start ups.

This manifesto implicitly states that you're either an expert, or a person with broad skills. Why can't one be both: an expert with broad skills ?
Actually that's the strange thing. She's learned not only the specific funny quotes but she uses them in situationally-correct instances. When crashing two cars together, "Buckle your sphincters!". When I pull her out of the tub and she can't see because her massive amount if hair is in the way, "My lawyer will hear about this!" When she wants to make us laugh she puts both her claws up in the air and goes for a Zoidberg scuttle.

I've had to defend the fact that I let a three year old watch Futurama many a time. Mostly to people who would rather I show things like Dora (I don't like my kid yelling at the TV) or movies like The Little Mermaid (truly horrific from viewpoint of relationship modeling). Admittedly sometimes my kid walks around quoting Bender "Ass Ass Ass Ass Ass!" and it might one day get sent to the Principle's office but she also admires female star ship captains, recognizes hard work (fry and the holophoner), and naturally distrusts cephalapod doctors. There are a lot more issues I hope she can start to pick up like the value of friendship, that math is awesome and to never be without your doomsday device "for duck huntin'!"

Sorry for the tangent.
The most effective propaganda is self-propagating among its unwitting targets.
It also depends to some extent on whether you count interpretations as "within" mathematics. For example, Stephen Hawking's latest book clearly draws on a lot of mathematical models of the universe, but its main arguments are non-mathematized, philosophical ones. Arguably they're arguments over how to interpret the existing mathematical models (though some stray further from math than others), but the arguments themselves appear to live outside what you'd normally call mathematics.

Interpretations of quantum mechanics fall into a similar camp. There is the actual formal theory of quantum mechanics, which is clearly mathematics; but something like the Copenhagen Interpretation is also attempting to "describe" the universe, but is forced to do it extra-mathematically, by attaching interpretations (which can't be mathematically proven) to the formal results.

I suppose it also depends on what one means by "describe": does quantum mechanics fully "describe" the universe, or is it quantum mechanics plus an interpretation which describes the universe?
Then the transcendent propaganda move is to dumb down the populace and the popular discourse to a level where fallacious and manipulative discourse is just the accepted norm. When all everyone expects is smoke and mirrors, no one is going to be looking for the substance underneath.
Fortran - the father of all (programming languages)
Well, at least I know the meaning of proactive, so personally I think smart.

You can't be proactive to solve the unknown.

Also the opposite of reactive is not proactive.

Apart from being pedantic about the word proactive, I also totally disagree with the premise of the article, some of the most inventive problem solvers I've met are lazy as hell.
In addition to execution, earning good grades require particular kinds of intelligence - among them recognizing the bounds of systems and social relationships.

Being smart isn't an achievement and hard work won't get you there. It is merely potential and without execution, it eventually becomes "wasted potential."
I wonder what role the diminished state of funding has had on increased college costs. In the 90s, the money from DARPA/ONR and even NSF flowed quite readily into schools, which take 50-55% of that as "overhead" costs. Now, military research funding is more commercially targeted, and the combination of competition and shrinking funding for the NSF has turned it into a dogfight over scraps (at least so it seems in CS).
If you have a business based on say, using Twitter's API, you are wholly dependent upon them.

They could cut off your access, destroying you overnight. They could become less popular themselves, decreasing the value of your business in a way you have no control over.

That's not at all like being dependent upon a host, a linux distribution, your customers, or yourself. In a business based on some corporations external API you have all the usual dependencies plus your source, a single point of failure who is in a position of power over you.
PyCon 2011: Interview with Geremy Condra - two pycon security talks
IPad 3 with Retina Display, other form factors coming
A veritable Venn diagram of beverages ...
" 'One can follow a series of rewrite rules (just about blindly) to transform a program into another form with some desirable property. This was exactly what I needed.'

Can anyone explain this with an example? I have been pondering what he meant with this for a long time. "

see the cps-transform rewrite rules in "Essentials of Programming Languages". The first edition has the densest and most extensive explanation. The third edition has the clearest, but a relatively attenuated exposition.
Introduction to Meditation: Registration Open
There is dolphin, and a few others.
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3990/is-there-a-good...
Such attitudes may predate the communists. Even in my mother's generation, entertainers carried a stigma with them. Much like in ancient times in the West, entertainers of many kinds were considered the lowest of the low.

My mother was born to parents who were living in what is now North Korea. My grandfather was a doctor and a successful entrepreneur. Needless to say, the communists didn't have a very sunny view of him, and the family had to be quickly moved south.

Both my mother and my father had some inclinations towards the performing arts and were actively discouraged from this. In the case of females, yes, a fear of "dishonor" was involved. Since many men of power in the North Korean regime are effectively above the law, such fear is perhaps not unwarranted. (Is it really much different than our society?)
Fortran for Speed, Python for Comfort
Call the fire brigade.
Schools are designed to provide education for the masses, just like jobs are designed to reward workers' efforts with money. Such schemes remove the low / high extremes (slackers / highly gifted people) by conforming them to a pattern which is proven to increase, in time, the average performance of people participating in them.

Was Bill Gates better off as an entrepreneur and a drop-out? Yes, he's a highly gifted individual -- for him the freedom to focus on what he does best allowed him to shine and get from life huge returns when compared to what the 'system' would have reserved for him. But for a significant part of the more average folks, we could have trouble stating similar things.

The question in the title is nothing more than a matter of risks and insurances against them: do you want to take the chance of dropping out of school and pursuing your raw intelligence/dreams or you want the overhead of an administrative process in order to get at the end some lose guarantees about your hire-ability and your skills... It's not an easy question and it depends too much of everyone's personal situation (parents support, wealth savings etc) to be addressed generally.
Technically it's an Euler diagram, because not all intersections are shown:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_diagram
Good point. Context is everything for language choice.
When I was applying at many of the big engineering firms last year, several of them wanted a copy pasted, text only version of my resume. Maintaining a copy of the resume in good plaintext form is always a bonus. Well worth the slight bother when updating.
Screen Prints by Adam Smith
Screen Prints by Adam Smith
personally i'd have no problems with you getting $700/month for an apartment to work on a startup. That might encourage more long term "job creation" then many other policy that is being set in place.
The most worthless, stupid people I know got straight A's their entire life.
What are the chances of this getting adopted as a standard eventually?
Career dilemma != Quarter-life crisis
What distinguishes this from F2PY?

http://www.scipy.org/F2py
The four capital mistakes of Open Source
Smart people can get A's too, and tend to find it even easier than stupid people do.
"Education is what is left after you've forgotten everything you've learned." -> Albert Einstein
Their "Hello world" demo is kind of a turn off: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient-sdk/source/browse/trun...
What I Want In My New Google
:-)

I remember using Morton Order for memory layout of dense matrix operations. Very handy and much better than row or column major order. At the time, I was using this for wavelet operations.

Some of the nastiest C code I ever wrote from a readability perspective. The experience permanently scarred me - prior to doing it, I wrote nice, clean C. After, I couldn't read my own code after a week . . .
Want hacker password Internet in my local area
how I love socialist europe: free world class college in germany and france, in holland and danmark, in austria and switzerland. that and world class health care for free too.

yes taxes are high, insanely high by american standards - but in the end it more than evens out. plus life is less stressful.
LibreOffice / The Document Foundation needs €50,000. Please donate.
Techmeme's Coverage of Twitter / UberTwitter was Important for News. Here's why.
Same-origin prevents your corporate intranet from getting scraped because a user visited a malicious website.
Some Thoughts On Public and Private Markets
Wow. Where to start.

The first thing that caught me about your comment was this: as Chomsky says, "If you don't behave in a dictatorship, they'll just bludgeon you over the head."

Ignoring the appeal to authority (which always is a red alarm for me) the problem is that dictatorships are completely different entities than are commonly thought. Most people think that in a dictatorship there's one guy in charge and he directly controls the lives and actions of all the people. But that's not true: simple span-of-control theory says that one person, at most, can observe and coordinate the work of 5 to 10 other people. The more control, the fewer number of people. So there are dozens of levels between Kim and his people, each level interpreting things their own way and each level impacting how things are run to a great degree.

Nope, dictatorships are actually oligarchies, with a symbiotic relationship between the dictator and the "middle management" so to speak. Even if the dictator took all the middle level management out and had them shot, there would just be a new structure put in place with all the same old problems (and symbiotic relationships)

My perception of your comment kind of went downhill from there. Some highlights were comparing "news shows" across several different channels, 1 of which was a news show, 1 was a quasi news show, and 1 was an entertainment show. I seriously doubt such comparisons are going to lead to much value for the reader.

Then we had the whole problem of definitions. As I understand it, propaganda is the dissemination of information in order to effect change in public opinion. It doesn't have to be false, involve logical fallacies, or any of that. Some of the best propaganda, as the Pentagon says itself, is simply telling people the truth about stuff they haven't heard before.

Then there was the over-reaching narrative of "everything is propaganda" -- joining up marketing, entertainment, sales, etc. It's a sign of a poor definition when it fails to distinguish things. And of course we had to trot out a good dollop of American-bashing with the Creel commission and such. Sometimes I think America-bashing has become the salt and pepper of faux intellectual discourse. Discussion getting a bit tired? Throw in a few jabs at the Yanks. "Easily manipulated into warlike frenzy" and "more controlled by propaganda than North Koreans" (I paraphrase) are serious assertions. Assertions that you began with, then failed to offer any proof, aside from a Chomsky quote.

So apologies if I am being a bit harsh. I just didn't get much value from your comment at all.
Better for society: good grades. Means you might be productive.

Better for you: smart. You will be happier, or at least know the reasons you are unhappy.
The same conditions do not exist in North Korea. In the USSR, there was a clear disconnect with economic reality. Communism was not a superior economic system. In fact, it produced rampant disincentives.

The North Korean regime doesn't rely on such ideology. Rather, the idea is that Koreans are the world's "true" people, and that only the North Korean regime keeps this faith and keeps their culture away from willing economic and political servitude to the west.

The North Korean regime sees itself as the last bastion of resistance for "the good guys." As far as they're concerned, they're like the rebel alliance in Star Wars. As in Star Wars, their weapons are worn and inferior and their industrial power is dwarfed by that of the evil empire that they fight. Yet they somehow heroically fight on, defying the odds because they are "the good guys."
The demographic of Mensa is "underachievers".
But people game the system. Govts that subsidize startups don't get much success - its too easy to slack.
(self-promotion) I wrote a somewhat related post a few days ago (Twitter predictions in the early days): http://syskall.com/twttr-and-the-benefit-of-hindsight
The first quotation, from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, contains no prediction.
I don't think they are insanely high by American standards. The marginal tax rate for Americans of almost all income levels is about 40%, until it drops to 15% or lower if you're extremely wealthy and able to route all your income through "investments."
Measure Performance Before Optimizing
I appreciate your use of "might" in the first statement.
If you were to hand transform your high-level code into assembler, you would have little choice.
Conversely, I was always told I was smart. I always aced tests but I struggled constantly with doing my homework (not because it was difficult but because I avoided starting it until the last minute).
Mathematics will always be inadequate to describe mathematics, let alone the universe, as there will always be a need for new axioms.

That's mathematically proven, so it must be true.
Smart people can also find grade school to not provide enough challenge and complexity and thus they tend to find other ways to occupy their time. In college the scene changes because you pursue what you want and most professors recognize true interest over mere putting in time to complete a class for credit. The moment you find a professor who recognizes your interests, keep a close relation because they can help you in more ways then you can imagine.
All of the resumes pictured were for graphic artists or UI designers.

I'm not sure why say an engineer would even have this skillset, much less think he or she needed to show it off while interviewing for say C# developer of the line.
I use the following scripts, both by Petar Marinov, they've saved me an enormous amount of keystrokes. One replaces CTRL-R history search, the other makes a much friendlier replacement for pushd and popd.

http://geocities.com/h2428/petar/bash_acd.htm

http://geocities.com/h2428/petar/bash_hist.htm

highly recommended.
We are experts in nothing, yet we know a great deal about almost anything.

Exactly what is "a great deal?" I think one is just starting down the road to being an expert when you begin to get an idea of what you don't know. The current depth of human knowledge is such that a half lifetime of study is required in many fields to become a true expert.

Then again, sometimes, it's better to know less to get started. Knowing the sheer magnitude of what you don't know can be paralyzing.

Getting things done is a valuable thing in itself. A lot of arguably smart people have difficulty with this.
Yes, that's texture swizzling.

It's useful any time you are accessing higher-rank arrays in a spatially coherent manner without any directional bias.

Bit interleaving only works with power-of-two dimensions. That's limiting. But for the cache benefits you don't need self-similarity at all levels. For less regularly sized arrays, you can play this trick with only some slices of lower bits, and then it's usually called tiling.

Scientific computing people also do this whenever they want to lay out a matrix in memory so that it efficiently supports both row-coherent and column-coherent access, which is required for basic operations like matrix multiplication. You can formulate tiled matrix multiplication in terms of smaller tile vs tile multiplications.

The earliest GPUs supported only square power-of-two-sized textures using swizzling. Later ones like the GeForce FX supported non-square, non-power-of-two textures using a simple memory unit with tiling. But the total number of tiles in use was a limited and non-scaleable resource, and once you exceeded the limit you fell off a performance cliff. Finally, the last two generations of GPUs (starting with the G80 microarchitecture in NVIDIA's case) have a more scaleable multi-level tiling approach that combines benefits of both swizzling and tiling although with higher hardware complexity than either of them.

My coworker wrote a great blog post on fast multi-level tiling in software: http://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/texture-tiling-and-s...
- include telnet.exe in the default install (worst vista/7 change ever from a network debugging perspective)
Point taken, but standard practice is to write correct code for a CSS bug, then write a 'hack' that works for that specific browser version.

On the other hand, if you're doing an intranet site with a company that only has one browser, you might have dispensed with writing correct code and only written the hack.

Its' temporarily practical in a time crunch, but not a good practice since the next update may kill your hack.
Android was most discussed OS at MWC 2011
The kind of hand transformation from a Lisp-like language into C/asm is described very well in Dan Friedman (2001)'s talk, The Role of the Study of Programming Languages in the Education of a Programmer http://www.cs.indiana.edu/hyplan/dfried/mex.ps

Friedman is at Indiana, so the similarity in the transformation is no surprise. I'm surprised the arty doesn't mention Friedman.
Here's the link to the free issue:

http://www.mashedcodemagazine.com/download/MashedCodeMagazin...
I tried doing a simple application with Javascript + native hooks for the iPhone, using UIWebView + hooks to native functionality. I did it like that because the UI needed fast updates if available.

It was a horrible experience. Mobile Webkit is buggy and inconsistent and comes with restrictions; and trying to emulate the native look&feel ... it's like trying to provide a native look an feel for a Java AWT interface, running on top of IExplorer 6.

I don't see it happening, and I don't wish to see it happening. Just build the damn thing with whatever native platform the phone comes with, and leave the platform-specific extensions out of WebKit.

Thanks,
Google Plans to Launch Disruption-Tolerant Internet Into Space This Year
Proactivity does not make one busy by definition. I think it means, when one is challenged by an interesting problem, he/she does everything and more to tackle it. A side effect may be that proactive people generally care far less about boring problems, thus making them appear lazy.
Taxes are higher, but you don't have to pay for private insurances, healthcare etc. to the same extent.

I don't know why people keep bringing up the level of taxes, it's not important or interesting. What's important is how big part of your salary you need to spend on necessities like government, schools, roads, healthcare and pension. That's what should be measured.
It's very important that you're not mediocre in absolutely everything. There should be at least one field you know in depth. As far as I know, this is the only way anyone ever gets a good feel for what it means to know anything in depth. It's much better to know two or more things in depth. Then the generalizations you make about deep knowledge in areas where you're not an expert will be operating on more data.

It's also common to know one thing in depth, but then fail to realize what this implies about every other field of knowledge. It's not a good thing, IMO.
If I redo all the layout, the whats the point?
Not insanely high, once you add up what Americans pay for health insurance that won't actually pay out if they get sick, plus state and local taxes, and higher usage fees and so on.

My daughter will probably be going to TU München instead of Purdue, actually. It's time to blow this popsicle stand.
There is also PURE for javascript already. http://beebole.com/pure/