skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Coding tests - how do you decide if the result is "good code"?
Say someone does a coding test as part of their recruitment process. You look at the resulting code and decide if it is "good code" or "bad code". What is the exact criteria to decide? I'm asking here for tangible assessment criteria rather than wishy washy hunches, vague feeling, subjective hand wavy "yup that's good" or "no that's bad" decisions.

Imagine the coding test is an anagram solver. To come up with the best solution, the programmer must realise that anagrams can be determined by sorting words and comparing them. The ideal solution is one in which each word is added to an associative array using the sorted word as the array key. Okay, so if someone does not come up with that insight and solution, does that make their code "bad", or make them any less of a programmer, who does not deserve to get the job?

Do coding tests based around puzzles or logic challenges obscure the purpose, testing for someone's ability to solve a puzzle rather than testing their ability to get stuff built with "good code"?

I put it to you that most coding test results are evaluated in a very airy-fairy way with no science or precision.

Is there a science of defining "good code"?
100% is "more than 90%".
The Future Will Be Personalized
Aaron and Paul,

You guys weren't joking when you said you were moving fast. Looks great. I'm kicking the tires now and will report back. As I told you in January, great damn idea. Let's grab a beer -Jason
Awesome browser size tool from Google labs
> "The iPhone 4 wasn't interesting because it had x more DPI clocking in at a total of y; it was interesting, because they had achieved so many DPI that the average person would not be able to discern the pixels."

That measure of achievement is entirely dependent on the distance between the eyes and the screen. I went around measuring a couple of days, many people with smart phones already had non-discernible pixels at the distance they held them in late 2009, before the iPhone4 (by Apple's measure of non-discernible). Why pick one arbitrary distance over another and call that the interesting transition?
Oh wow, great news indeed. About a year ago I was looking for book-writing software, and Scrivener was far and away the best reviewed and regarded among writers. But alas, Mac-only, and I never really found anything great for Linux. This is terrific news!
Node v0.4.2 released
There is a group of a people who will get worked up if they think you would say anything neutral or positive about Microsoft products. I'm not sure why but a sizeable number of people believe that you must be getting bribes from Microsoft to use their software.
Just when i think nothing can impress me more, i find that in HN you can, i'm not technician, not a programmer and not and entrepreneur. I follow HN because i like the news and mainly the discussions, seeing different points of view, etc ... and from time to time in HN you make a thing that surprises me and show the power you have inside you. Like now from a video , came a comment about the old days , you found the person and so many years after you organize a tribute, because apart from the money this really is more of a tribute to a man whose work you admire. HNers you are great. Maybe the vets say that this is not the original HN but i think the spirit of HN is there.
I haven't seen any numbers reported on the Verizon iPhone, which I think hints at the impact being minimal (if you sell a lot, you talk about it).
If you are unable to take care of yourself, then the state has a responsibility to take care of you.

However, with freedom comes responsibility, so if you cannot be responsible to take care of yourself then it follows that you should lose some freedoms too. They should not be free to mill around corners drinking and doing drugs, using the sidewalk and street as a toilet.

Here in San Francisco we have many street people and most of them are not capable of taking care of themselves. Most have mental illness, drinking and/or drug problems. It would be nice if someone could triage the ones who have potential to be rehabilitated. As for the ones who cannot be rehabilitated, they should be warehoused somewhere where they are not a danger to themselves or others. As of today, they are warehoused in the streets, and it is lose-lose for everyone. Everyone seems to blame Reagan for shutting down most of the mental hospitals. I do not know to what extent that is true.

Overall I fear that there are now too many people in the wagon and not enough pulling it.
Haha..
We can hear true 3D. There are actually a couple of ways in which we can sense the direction of sound. One is loudness, which obviously only works for left-right. This is loudness only in the sense of sound-gets-more-silent-farther-from-the-source.

Another is the phase difference of the sounds in both ears. Phase difference comes from the fact that sound arriving at one ear had a longer way to travel than sound arriving at the other ear. tells a more complete story of direction than loudness and is very precise.

Thirdly, there is frequency response. Both our head and our ears absorb different frequencies at different angles. Also, there are some reflections from our shoulders and chest.

Taken all that together, normal people can detect the origin of sound sources to about one degree of precision.

But, there is more. Close your eyes and have another person talk while turning his head in different directions. You can clearly detect the direction he is talking to. At the same time, you can roughly sense the size and type of the room you are in. Also, you can do this while being in really noisy environments (say, a car in traffic with the radio playing and the kids in the back).

Talking about seeing vs. hearing: The response time of the ear is about 10-50 ms. It usually takes 200-500 ms to make sense of something you see. The human ear has a frequency resolution of about one Hz (at <500 Hz), a dynamic range of about 120 dB and a frequency range of about 10 octaves. The eye can only detect a very small dynamic range in comparison, and about one octave of wavelengths. But most importantly, the eye can only detect averages of three distinct, fixed frequency ranges (red, green, blue; red and green overlap 90%). The ear has floating detection windows and uses an arbitrary amount of different windows at any one time. That is, the ear can detect any spectral distribution with great precision, while the eye only detects three distinct spectral windows.

So in a lot of ways, the ear is physically way more precise than the eye. Of course, signal processing makes all the difference and the amount of signal processing going on in our acoustical and visual brain centers is just staggering. There is nothing in the technological world that even comes close to that.
A cost effective way to help the homeless may be to simply give them money
They just raised another $27.5 million; I'm sure there's lots more 'launch' coming.
1) "Poverty" and "homelessness" are entirely different things. Conflating them is simply stupid.

2) There's actually a HUGELY valid point, here - in many jurisdictions around the country, it's basically illegal to be homeless for reasons described in this article.

People have to sleep, whether they can pay for a place or not. Protecting private property is one thing, but what do people expect the homeless to do if you chase them off of supposedly "public" land and carry out what amount to raids on homeless shelters?
Right now we're just USA and Canada, but we want to add more countries ASAP. I've added the British Tax Offices to the list though for when we roll out in the UK! Thanks for the feedback.
How can this be hacked?

I'd suggest improving education, making it easier to get involved in politics, taking an approach in which different remedies for ($homelessness, $drug abuse, etc.) can be tested instead of assuming our legislatures or courts know best.
Those weren't bad decisions, they were technical debt - a very useful thing in early stage startups.
not hacker news.
I hope PyPy pings all those sponsors. As a wise lady once said, 'connections never hurt'.
Fonolo has been offering this type of service for a while (http://fonolo.com).
SO when will the FTC catch Apple in the Truth IN Advertising gaffle..[sarcasm]..

You see keynotes are not covered by FTC truth in advertising but if I was an Apple stockholder right now I would be worried about all that fibbing by Steve Jobs.
"they should be warehoused somewhere"

I've heard there was once a proposal to round up all the homeless in San Francisco and ship them off to Treasure Island.[1]

Does anyone know if that's true, and if so, what the history of that proposal was?

[1] - https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Treasure_Isla...
Nice. It makes the text on the page look like IE9 or a WPF app.
This puts into words really well what's been stewing in my brain the past few years. Having spent the last few years traveling the world and seeing the many different ways people live, it's sometimes a bit of a shock to come back to the States and having to check if there's a nearby police officer before jaywalking across an empty street or enjoying a beer outside in the sun.

The more I leave and come back, the more it seems to me that, as this article states, we punish, ticket, fine, and incarcerate for the slightest of "offenses", things that in other places would be chalked up to "live and let live," or at worst, a verbal warning. There's the commonly cited statistic that we have more citizens in prison than China does. A country needs laws, but there's certainly a difference between laws that keep peace and laws that are petty and domineering.

All of it (among other factors, not least of which are health care and wild militarism) adds up to an environment that I'm increasingly less inclined to return to. For a country that prides itself on its freedoms, I'm constantly surprised at how successful here people are at imposing their desired behavior on others.
Hm. Thanks!

I'll give you 1, but I'm not sure about 2. I guess if there's a pattern of lawsuits over licensing, but isn't a lawsuit what you resort to if someone uses your patented process without licensing?
Thank you, that was very enlightening. Am I right in suspecting that one can use their Narcissism against them? If they really take their self worth from others, they would be very easy to train to do as you want (in pretty much the same way cult leaders does).

I realize that this isn't exactly what hackers normally do, but maybe it is worth starting to do?
Is it so hard for you black and white moralists to say something like "companies interpret any data they can in the most favourable light they possibly can and it's up to you to work out what you want to know" instead of classifying the company you like's interpretation as "truth" and the company you dislike's interpretation as "lies"?
I live in San Francisco, and I voted for the recent sit-lie ordinance. I would've have done so had I not recently been working in the civic center area, and come face to face with the dirty reality of homelessness. The sidewalks smell like urine, people are belligerent and drunk or passed out often. I was punched in the face while waiting for a bus outside of work. A lot of the opposition to sit lie used the rallying cry "Sidewalks are for people". I agree; they're for me too. And I don't want a bunch of drunks sleeping on my sidewalks; dirtying them up
Mexico has other problems that obscure any direct comparison. Government corruption in Mexico is a big factor as well as having the US on it border providing better opportunity plus the war on drugs.
that "would've" should be a "wouldn't"
I really wish it were the case that most devs on the MS-stack don't drink the kool-aid and use all-things-Microsoft. There are still devs using DataSet's in VB.NET, pushing the SOAP envelope, using the MS Patterns & Practices stack and continue to develop ASP.NET web apps like state-heavy windows apps since that's what they were told to do.

I don't blame anyone for forming a stereo type on .NET devs, considering pre-ASP.NET MVC (years late to the game), there was no competing web framework to the anti-web state-heavy ASP.NET, simply because IMHO there was none sanctioned for use by MS. Sadly there is an inherent Microsoft culture that will only believe and advocate anything as long as they've read it on microsoft.com.

Despite their failed DAL's and poor application frameworks, Truth is IMHO Microsoft have created a superior development platform with C#/.NET and with VS.NET/R# by the C# devs side, it's one of the most productive ones to use.

Fortunately there are free-thinking pro developers, not constrained to think inside MS toolbox, who just want to use the best software they can use, regardless of the culture. Interestingly it seems a lot of the time C#/FOSS devs will independently come to the same conclusions on best-of-class FOSS software to use: e.g. nginx / redis / linux / naigos -- i.e. the best tool for the job.

StackOverflow is clearly one such 'pro-dev company' not shackled to the MS Platform nor will purposely/religiously maintain an anti-MS stance since they'll continue to use MS tools and products where they think to be highest quality (i.e. C# / IIS7 / SQL Server).

It's quite clear StackOverflow has a job to do, and they'll end up choosing the best tools they think to do it. I believe this pro-dev, high-quality culture is why they've become so popular, providing some of the most enjoyable website experiences on the Internet - all without skipping a beat, or with a hint of growing pains.
Gartner lowers PC sales forecast, says Apple's iPad 'redefining' computing
What are we supposed to say? I don't think I'm the only one who is tired of what basically amounts to Apple marketing being posted constantly on HN (and sure maybe the rate of those posts is lower than sites like Techmeme but it's still quite high, see for example Ipad 2 posts http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+%22... )

There has to be some way to identify this group of people, and say, look it's fine that you love Apple, but this is a place for in-depth discussions, not a place to show the latest shiny new trinket and 'ooh' and 'ahh' over its features.
http://www.fastcustomer.com clickable link
Ruby on Rails Outreach Workshop for Women (in SF)
I'm confused. Their site says GHC 7.01 was released in November 2010. This release is 7.02.
i was just injecting JSes with bookmarklets. got to see CSS tricks too, thanks for sharing this. nothing blinks on HN though ;)
So you get to relaunch every time you raise a round of funding? Must be nice to perpetually be a startup.
Would be totally rad if it could detect when any call is off hold. I bet there's some magic DSP heuristic that could do it, maybe with some false positives e.g. "your call is important to us..."
Ligament.js connects backbone models with relational associations
As for the right tool for the job nonsense, let's cut the bullshit. We all make religious decisions when we "start" a software project.

I think you speak for yourself here. The fact that you can't even imagine that people don't make religious decisions at the start of a project is telling.
That was not my intention. I consciously avoided anything similar to the Third Reich. I really didn't think the story of the Mormon pioneers was all that horrific for most people, and I figured segregation was both mild enough (it was terribly unfair, but not gut-wrenchingly brutal) and far enough removed in time that most people would not be unduly influenced by the mere mention of it. If you can think of better examples of things that were legal but still blatantly wrong, I'll make sure to file them away for later use.

But I don't think taking out the logical explanation and turning the comment into a baseless assertion would improve it. Clearly what I was saying is non-obvious to some people (or I wouldn't have had to say it), and without any justifying logic, the only people who would come out agreeing with me are those who went in that way. My intent was to persuade, not preach to the choir.
You've been here for 1,466 days, and you didn't realize that this might not be the way to move a debate forward on HN? Please try harder not to call people names.
Some say it's probably due to the installer copying lots of things around, combined with slow IO on the VM plus the installer assuming reads are going to be slow (the source being slow CDs or floppies).

I call pish posh on that. What you're actually witnessing is The Microsoft Minute, as explained by http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19990318
AT&T adds new post-paid twist to iPad, tablet data plans
'Toy' isn't quite right. Closer to 'status symbol'.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing for entrepreneurs. When angels are investing for any reason other than 'make more money', valuations go up and terms improve.

Seed equity in early-stage companies is on the verge of becoming a Veblen good - the more expensive and exclusive the deal is, the more satisfying it is to be able to nonchalantly say "yeah, I'm in that deal."
They have said it was the best selling product in their history. That implies that it was at least as good as the droid or the htc incredible.

That kind of volume might well be worth a couple of percentage points.
I'd sat Hacker News competes more with Quora than Techmene - especiually the ASK HN section.
Fonolo is pretty cool. There's another similar service called LucyPhone. I'd say the main difference between those great services and ours is that with them you still have to be on the phone, listening to prompts and pressing buttons, and then they wait on hold for you.

With our service you just press a button and go back to your life.
curious how you intend to handle abuse? Maybe have an sms sent to the recipient first and they must confirm? I was just able to enter the example number ("555-555-5555") and it seems to process just fine (currently "Status: Operator on the line! Trying to connect you...") even though I clearly don't own that number. I could cause problems for both customer service people and cellphone users with this. I'm assuming you don't do any of this based on the video though, I'm unable to test as I'm in the UK.

Excellent idea!
It depends on how much more. Women write roughly as much as men in the blogosphere, so if the overall results were (say) 75% male it would indicate a bias. The times I've looked at Techmeme and memeorandum they're usually 80-90% male.

I don't know why Gabe blocks out female voices but from the Atlantic article linked to in my thread he doesn't seem to read any women regularly so my guess is that he either (a) doesn't know he's doing it or (b) doesn't care.
Isn't R GPLv2? Isn't that incompatible with AGPLv3?
Chris Dixon's Graphs presentation
Searching Without Objectives [video]
> in Redis is easy because everything is in memory

Only by recommendation. You merely advise users not to allocate a DB larger than available memory. There's no built-in protection against overcommit, at least last time I checked (the documentation has been reorganized recently and I can't find the page that has the command-line arguments anymore).

One could create a capped collection in MongoDB that was smaller than memory to achieve the same effect.
Well, I can tell you that the land picked for reservations was not picked by the tribes. Mostly it is not the best or nicest. Some tribes got lucky because of what was discovered later. I would need a source cited who thinks this interpretation of the word would be good for a tribal leader.
Some companies dump all their computers at once (either by upgrading on a fixed N-year cycle or by going out of business); these machines occasionally show up as large lots of refurbished equipment at certain internet stores. (The store presumably didn't pay a lot.) If you're looking for basic and cheap, you should at least consider it.

makethetick is right, though - give a location. I seem to recall that http://www.mr-at.nl/ occasionally had such lots (I'm not affiliated and in fact never bought anything there), but I'm not sure they still do and it wouldn't be very useful to you unless you were in the Netherlands.
Post-mortem means after death...not after the fact.
Perhaps "take off" was meant?
I assure you MongoDB is just as subject to memory pressure as any other database.
3 New Javascript Projects: jQuery Waypoints, JSHint and Spellcheck the JS
you can find links to various people's social media profiles and find pictures there. my friend is trying to get me to couch the site more as a hotornot type site where you meet someone's social media presence and tell them what you think about it.
As you have just demonstrated, it is perfectly possible to complain about the coverage Apple gets on HN without calling people names.
How can I securely erase the data from my SSD drive?
Failure of Maquiladoras? Could you explain this statement?

As far as I know, Mexico has more or less continually grown since NAFTA, and Maquiladoras play an important role in their economy. They certainly are facing competition from much less wealthy countries (like China), but so is everyone else in the industrialized world.

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&ctype=l&s...
Haskell (GHC at least) has lightweight user-level threads, similar to Erlang.
It turned out that Mr. Szekely, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs or curse in front of ladies, did indeed have a warrant — for not appearing in court to face a charge of “criminal trespassing” (for sleeping on a sidewalk in a Washington suburb). So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail.

The utter insanity of this is astounding. There are so many actual criminals that law enforcement officials could expend their efforts on, but instead they're raiding homeless shelters in the middle of the night. Why?

Homeless shelters might house blue collar criminals, but in order to alleviate the "cost" of blue collar criminals, the law needs to be more aggressive in finding and stopping the white collar criminals. White collar criminals (Bernie Madoff, the NAR, etc.) are the usually the underlying cause of blue-collar crime. Blue collar crimes tend to be about survival; white collar crimes are about greed.

Disclaimer: I have been in a place where I've seen it up front and know not all homeless people are drunks or derelicts.
the marker of a good idea is when it seems rediculously obvious in hindsight. the basic premise of the site, a forum to say things about people that isn't controlled by the people, seems rediculously obvious and i'm dumbfounded that there is this huge gap in the internet.
don't get sick after june http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31210909/ns/health-health_care/
If you read the thread, you'll see that there was no fawning. Just an attempt to understand the motivation behind Jobs negative statements. Understanding how and why someone like Jobs communicates seems pretty relevant to this community.

Name calling does not.
(Disclaimer: I've never programmed Haskell or used GHC outside of Xmonad)

I'm pretty sure they use a M:N language-thread to OS-thread system. So they need to decide what thread to put "on" an OS-thread at any given time.
There's no way to know, really. When you mmap() backing stores into process memory as MongoDB and Redis do, the OS takes care of paging activity for you. And they get to compete with other processes on the system for memory pages.

InnoDB (MySQL) allows you to fix its buffer pool in RAM, so it makes decisions as to which pages to buffer instead of the OS. Sometimes it makes better decisions, sometimes it doesn't.
I mean the one that is useful to me, that has, as pg would say, "a quantum of usefulness" :)

Google treats the social graph as an engineering challenge, but they've never understood that it can actually be useful for stuff.

And the link you posted isn't a social graph, it's a list of accounts connected to my account. Nothing social about it.