skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not sure if I understand recursion or not. My definition of recursion is a function that calls itself repeatedly until an exit condition occurs (the first chapters of little schemer define this as an empty list). If the exit condition never occurs, and the computer lacks infinite computing power, you will probably get a stack overflow. As far as I can tell, recursion and a for-loop accomplish the same thing.

Am I missing anything?

EDIT: I wrote this before reading the article
Forgive a naive question, but the way this article is written makes it sound like carrier-provided over the air updates may be forced on your phone even if you are running a custom OS build? Or is that not the case.
Let’s Make it Official: Innovation In New York is on the Rise
Do these companies host and maintain their own DRM systems? If they do it seems like they would fall in love with anyone ready to provide a bullet proof 99.99999% uptime DRM solution.
A lot of the disagreement here comes from what people consider recursion. As in all things, the basic idea behind recursion is quite simple to understand. It's just a function calling itself.

There are, however, some non-trivial uses of recursion such as quicksort and analyzing its runtime.

Thus, to say simple recursion isn't hard is true. But I'm sure that we can all find a recursive problem that we wouldn't consider easy.
Declaring a whole class of new and growing startups as "dead" is the most hipster thing I can imagine: Checking in? I guess. I haven't checked into a venue since 2010.

There is some interesting thoughts in here but they're so mixed in with flawed analysis that I don't think I actually learned anything from reading it.
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Wait, can you explain the part again about MIT programmers who weren't in demand?
Ask HN: Anyone using Cisco servers/blade servers? (Cisco UCS)
Just curious if anyone here has used/played with the Cisco UCS servers/blades. I have yet to run into anyone using them or find any good reviews.

Thanks in advance...
Location based checkin sites are basically games. The problem is that, like all games, people eventually get tired of them and move on to something else.
Lots of really good negotiation examples in the comments on this post. I just want it to become a skill that kicks in when I need it.
many years ago, i was a fresh grad with an ms in comp sci working at a bay area startup. i sucked at negotiations too, and my starting salary was 75k, which actually wasn't too shabby (or so i thought). long story short: the company imploded, but i was one of the few people kept around until they turned off the lights. most of my friends had been laid off, and we had all revealed our salaries. they made closer to 95-125k, and i was the guy in the OP's story: they guy that worked tirelessly, did the work of 2.5 of my co-workers, was well liked, and had a grad degree. i was pretty annoyed, so i went into the ceo's office and said i was due a salary bump. it was the least he could do seeing as how the company would be gone in a month, and i could use that as leverage in negotiations for next time. he complied, and bumped my salary to 90k. i got a new job about a month later and i negotiated 98k.

usually, you will get some incremental improvement when you move to a new position.
angelpad I hear is great.
I agree with the article's predictions with respect to foursquare, but I'm not sure about Facebook, there's still tremendous potential there. Facebook appears to have released Places without putting much thought into it beyond allowing people to simply check in wherever they are and share it with their friends. But I wouldn't be surprised if they were working on incorporating deals with local businesses, etc on a much larger scale, some time soon, either on their own or in conjunction with Groupon or Living Social.
Amazon.com and Beyond: Early Interview with Jeff Bezos (2000)
If you're into python, you can check out http://www.python.org/community/jobs/, there are the occasional remote/telecommuting jobs posted there.

A company I've run across before that only works with remote devs is Art and Logic: http://www.artlogic.com/ (absolutely no affiliation, I just know they're a remote company).
Checking-in is tedious. Most of the benefits of location-based services are happening through better uses of wireless communication. Excluding GPS, Shopkick uses high frequency audio signatures and ZuluTime just patented some new wifi based stuff (http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/11/zulutime-issued-patent-for-...).
The problem with having repetition in your compiled CSS files is that they become bigger as a result. Depending on how much you care about page load speed, this can be an issue.

I'm not entirely sure what she's suggesting since I'm reading the slides without any context, but it seems, given the thing about cutting down css file size for Facebook, the method she's suggesting reduces duplication in the actual css file.
It sounds to me like you are just debating the semantics of "good rapper" in a way independent of the article.
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"His group has published the code for its experimental bots online, 'to allow people to be aware of the problem and design countermeasures.'"

The code: http://www.webecologyproject.org/2011/02/complete-source-cod...
I wrote The Little MongoDB Book in Markdown and used Pandoc to convert it to PDF. Others have converted it to epub.

You can see the work at:
https://github.com/karlseguin/the-little-mongodb-book

I blogged a bit about the process:
http://openmymind.net/2011/4/5/Markdown-and-Me
John is honestly a great guy and we had an excellent experience with the program. I'd highly recommend Lightspeed for anyone looking for an alternative to the summer incubator route (though it's important to be aware that, as John states in the blog post, it's NOT an incubator.)
That reminds me of a technique for randomly selecting someone in a small group. Suppose that there are 6 people. On the count of 3 everyone has to hold out 0-5 fingers. Add the numbers mod 6, and that selects the person.

The funny thing about it is that as long as anyone picks randomly, the answer is perfectly random. But everyone can feel some sense of control.
In all seriousness, what would that tool do? There may be a market for an app that will allow you to consume/manage your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc, from one central location.
So two points here:

1) Usage on foursquare is up 40% since the beginning of the year.

2) We've always seen the checkin as just the beginning of what we want to accomplish. With the launch of explore and specials 2.0 we've started to get more of our vision out into the world. You can expect more of this sort of thing from us over the course of 2011.

-harryh, engineering lead @ foursquare.

ps: Want to be a part of it? We're hiring! https://foursquare.com/jobs/
A Student’s Guide to Getting Into the Games Industry
I'm not the OP, but I have had some experience with this when looking for my last job. I made the mistake of posting my resume on a popular tech job site, and the vast majority of contacts were from shady recruiters trying to get me to work 2 hours away in a "contract to hire" position where I would have to pay my own insurance. Making less than I was currently making, still employed at the time.

Perhaps this is similar to the OP. It was a complete ripoff - I think they were trying to take advantage of the massive layoffs going on in the tech industry in my area. The arrogance of these guys was unbelievable.
This seems very cheap, I wonder if that means the other pieces of Final Cut Studio will be sold separately on the App Store?

EDIT: Also I wonder if being cheap means that some 'pros' will take it less seriously, or worry that it won't be supported in the same way as more expensive software?

I'm reminded of this post: http://chrisashworth.org/blog/2010/06/09/my-2-bucks-on-prici...
"much of this is because CSS eschews Composition for (incomplete) Multiple Inheritance?"

Pretty much all of it. I remember being a bit surprised when they first released CSS at just how impotent it was. Over a decade later, I now realize my younger self would have gotten himself stuck in a morass of Turing completeness, but CSS goes too far the other direction.

Decoupling styles (which may contain several rules) from matchers, then allowing a match to apply multiple styles, and permitting simple variables (which I would be OK with restricting to simply "either a single variable or a single string" and not permitting concatenation or anything complicated) would have not significantly increased the complexity, avoids the Turing Tarpit [1], and would have been powerful enough that while the other languages would still have inevitably have emerged eventually they wouldn't have been necessary.

HTML had enough pragmatism in it from day one to survive being academicked. CSS is a classic example of how a beautiful theory can back you into a corner and everyone's too busy chanting the beautiful theory's mantra to notice they're doing it in a terrible way.

("You Must Decouple Content From Presentation." "That's a great idea, but don't you think that we should have something like a variable that represents a color?" "You Question The Value Of Decoupling Content From Presentation." "No, it's just that anybody with a couple of years of experience programming knows that you shouldn't hard-code constants into your files, let alone do it fifty times in a single file." "This Is Declaration, Not Code." "There's no difference; spend some time with Lisp." "You Will Burn For Doubting The Decoupling Of Content From Presentation, Heretic. A Thousand Curses On Your Websites." I've had this conversation a few times, though mercifully it has been a long time now.)

(Oh, and if you want to blow someone's mind, ask them why it's so important to decouple content from presentation. I'm sure some people here can at least articulate a reason but in general people can't, it's just a mantra. Then the mantra answer became "Semantic Web", but then try to get a definition of Semantic Web out of them... and if you get that far, ask where the semantics come from. There's been a staggering amount of what is nearly religion surrounding CSS and it shows in the engineering. Oh, and don't suggest that as long as your content is stored cleanly somewhere, it's OK to apply styles in another layer on the server... if it's not CSS, it's not Semantic and it's not Decoupled. Regardless of the actual architecture behind it.)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit
Am I along in never being "taught" recursion? I mean, throughout my curriculum, I've used recursion many times and dealt with everything from fibonacci to quicksort, but never once have I sat through even part of a lecture on "Recursion". Among my peers, I don't think anyone really has an issue with recursion or how it works. Harder to debug possibly, but everyone "gets" it, I feel.
my wife is a cpa/cfp, and this is how i set up my company. i write off most stuff (car, office supplies, computer equip, internet, phone, etc), and pay out yearly dividends on top of a base salary. for a one-man corporation, the overhead can be really minimal. if you can get health benefits from your spouse and keep nearly 40 hrs week in billable hours, you'll never look back.
Wait, what? You want developers with egos the size of Texas, who will drag into work 8 hours late, hung-over and with a gaggle of groupies (or prostitutes, whatever) hanging off their arms; and then get caught in the bathroom an hour later snorting coke off groupies' tits; then go out, get drunk, wreck a car, get into a fight with the cops, land up in jail, and then call you at 3:00am to come bail their asses out of jail?!??

Maybe you should go for some Ninja developers instead? Just be careful when they start turning invisible and pranking you...
Quick q - what does the green username that I've started seeing indicate? A new user? Certain level of karma? Got no result searching the Staving Off Decline thread for "green".
Cool for media, not yet super useful if you have directories full of code.
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Has your organisation considered offering "no de-duplication" to paying subscribers?
Personally I have no qualms with it, but I know some might, and they could be willing to pay for it.
I hope so. I've always wanted to play with Motion.
Excellent write up.

Instead of only the BTree vs. BTree durable comparison in qps, I think it would be helpful to add plots with the following information:

1) Increase in write speed gained from batching. Specifically, in section 3 you mentioned that the constant time overhead was your motivation to design the batching system. In a world of SSD writes, the usefulness of batching comes in to question. To see a gain realized would put this question to rest.

2) The effect of batching on the write-time of clients. The write up focuses on reducing the db's workload, which is the correct problem to focus on as that is the bottleneck. But there is a cost on the client which comes waiting on the writes of other concurrent clients. I would assume that your solution actually reduces the overall cost for clients as it reduces the burden of serialization, but it would be interesting to see this data.
Agreed - the problem is not recursion, but that it becomes useful for actual complex problems.

I understand recursion pretty well at a conceptual level (my background is math, mostly self-taught for CS), but I have a hard time using it for programming. Sure, fibonacci or quicksort are simple, but tree recursion or application to string processing (e.g. for edit distance compuation) is quite harder.
It appears as though they weren't in demand. The demand is for good programmers (school isn't relevant). These weren't 'good' programmers for a number of reasons.

1. They didn't have a degree. Technically, they weren't MIT programmers at the time.

2. They didn't have 10+ years of experience with Java. Good programmers are often confused with experienced programmers.

I still think my point still stands though, go find out where your supply (start up opportunity, applying new technology to niche community) is disproportionately in demand.
Would be better to take the wheels off the chairs, so you don't wreck your expensive macbook pro.
This sort of misses the point. Maybe it's true that the employee is taking relatively more risk based on his life situation, but that doesn't matter. What matters is the business needs $3 million. The only way it can get that is by promising a sufficient return to whoever is willing to risk that much. What the amount means to the investor personally is irrelevant. The reality is there are a lot more people willing to risk their time (take a job) than $3 million, therefore the $3 million has a higher price attached. From the perspective of someone investing $3 million, seeking the best possible return the market will provide is no different than a programmer seeking the best possible wage the market will provide.
Interesting article on recursion...
http://tenaciousc.com/?p=1000
It might be easier to teach them about functions that can call themselves first; and then explain the concept of recursion in the context of that (or just that it is called 'recursion').

A recursive function call is conceptually no different than a regular function call.
I went to high school in the UK and my tail-end years were the start of the Blair era when the government was on a huge "as many people must go to university as possible" push (which has only just begun to recede). That might explain the attitudes I encountered.
If this really became a problem for Dropbox, one response would be to have the server issue random challenges to clients that purport to have the file.
Red Hat's top secret Java Killer/Successor: The Ceylon Project
He wasn't saying that, he was saying that their cost of living was different.
Apple’s Mobile Strategy is to Make the Technology Irrelevant
Getting tail recursion right IS hard.
11 years to backup server?
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How Phishers Will Use Epsilon Data Against You
Microsoft launches first preview build of IE 10
I wish this were the whole reason. It may be why people are bored with the stories on the frontpage; there doesn't seem much if any change in those. But comments do actually seem worse. Though I still have hopes of reversing that trend.
It's funny, but also great that they're taking this step. The keyboard short-cuts are there for those of us that love them (they even mentioned this in the keynote), but the UI is far more friendly to mouse-based editing (especially with trimming controls).

Aperture 2 to 3 gained a much simpler interface, despite being a 'pro' app. FCX has taken this even further, and I'm glad to see it, because Aperture 3 was far better than 2.
Interestingly enough, in curriculums that start out with functional languages (e.g. Scheme) students have little trouble with recursion... and then consider iterative loops to be "hard".
While reading the article, I thought of another example of the described perspective. When reading one's own code from months or years ago, it can seem disappointing.

A friend mentioned to me earlier that this is likely a result of personal growth rather than a persistent state of confusion and bad coding. At least it's a nicer way to think of it.
Ask HN: Need a side project that will generate 100K within 4 years
Family is growing and house seems to shrink on us. i would like to buy a new house or expend my house with in 4 years, since i already have a day job i thought i might start a side project that i can sell in a couple of years or that will generate about 2K each month. Any oNe has an idea?
Wow, these guys produce a ridiculous amount of output for the size of their team...
I've heard rumors of just that.
Almost certainly. So far everything Google has sold directly has been uncrippled.
I don't mind convention over configuration (a la Rails) but sometimes it can be quite a pain to move from a highly configurable product (ie Gentoo) to a simpler interface (ie Ubuntu). While I spent years using Gentoo, I enjoy how simple and easy it is to get a running Ubuntu install. Then I try to configure something the way I've always done and Ubuntu's automatic config tools overwrite the changes I made to various text files.

I hope in products like Final Cut Pro, Apple keeps things simple but completely configurable if you would like to.
I work for a Cisco partner company and they gave me the sales pitch. On paper they look great, but I'm also looking for real life experiences with them. So far, not many reviews on them. Hoping someone here has tried them already...
facebook was actually pretty quick to launch deals:

http://www.facebook.com/deals
Ubuntu ShipIt has closed
Hi Rajdeep, neat UI. Just logged in and its an useful App for me. Btw, need ur opinion on my Idea in my post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437872
I think the best, non-hearsay source for this is anonymous data at glassdoor.com. Google has quite a lot of data there as well (over 500 reports from San Jose/Mountain View).

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-San...

533 Salaries - Mean is 107,174, with a range of [70, 133]. Median is about 100K.

Bonuses are underreported in comparison. But of 24 reports, the bonus is 18K on average.

This includes experienced engineers as well. So I think the original link's claim of 100K starting salary is probably an over-estimate.
HN used to feel like it was full of artists and now it feels like it's full of critics.
I guess the next company he investigates knows what to do now.
Early Windows 8 build leaks to web
Totally agree. This desk is the one I'm currently using and couldn't ask for more.

I'm exactly 6ft and this it works great for me in this configuration: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/77657/Photo%20Apr%2013%2C%2011%2037%...
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Xcode is $5 on the App Store, but included in either (Mac or iOS) annual developer program's $99.

What's more, so far App Store software updates have been free. So even if you paid $5, it may be the last $5 until Xcode 5, if ever.

If you've ever had to build GCC from scratch, you'd be willing to pay $5 just for that. And Apple gives you an IDE and by far the best interface to performance tools I have ever seen (Instruments).
Solving a maze is a classic. The recursive solution is the obvious/intuitive one.
Microsoft readies new Surface 2.0 developer kit for summer 2011
Need an excellent digital marketing resource
Need an excellent digital marketing resource

Hi All

I'm really keen on finding a few places that share results on digital marketing such as: A/B split tests, conversions, forms, e-newsletters etc... a community that are sharing their results for the interest of learning.

Something like whichtestwon.com but that's updated more frequently.

Any suggestions?

Cheers
I've seen Google Translate do excellent translations for Russian, Hebrew, and Arabic. Certainly not fully gramatically correct, but accurate enough to convey the meaning of virtually every sentence and paragraph -- which is the point of machine translation.
The foolishness of crowds: Investors tend to chase the latest fad
On the one hand, I'm in total agreement that we shouldn't tell students recursion is hard. It's a very natural analog to proof by induction, after all. It's an important basic component of programming.

On the other hand, "IMHO, recursion is much more natural than iteration and ought to be taught first" is just nuts. I mean, look at the first definition of his example function at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponentiation -- it's iteration, pure and simple. And in most non-functional languages, it's trivial to implement that way, and will probably be more efficient than a recursive solution.
This is very well put, and unfortunately I have to agree.
Worked for me, win 7, chrome 10, java 1.6. Looks useful, I'll be watching their progress.
There was a seminar at UC Berkeley on this, on 8-April (I didn't attend, though, and can't attest to its quality).

Link to a video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj64jVIvKQU

From the seminar abstract:

The smart grid will use automated meters, two-way digital communications technology, and advanced sensors to save energy, improve electricity efficiency and reliability. Use of these systems exposes the electrical grid to potential cyber security and privacy risks. For instance, there have been media reports of fears that a hacker could gain control of thousands, even millions, of meters and shut them off simultaneously; or a hacker might be able to dramatically increase or decrease the demand for power, disrupting the load balance on the local power grid and causing a blackout.
I would say posers instead of critics (myself included)
As a programmer of more than a decade who fell in love with CS in high school, thank you for teaching the topic to others!
Happens with every community as it grows, the only real solution is exclusivity and even then it comes with problems. The people who have the time to spend here are normally not those who create or produce anything worthwhile, there are of course outliers (patio11, jacquesm etc) but the average active user here will not be the sort of person that produce content we want to see. As the popularity grows the ratio of critics:creators grows ever bigger.
You aren't missing anything, but recursion can get more complicated. In the case of towers of Hanoi, or recursion on trees, the iterative version using a for-loop becomes substantially more complicated than the recursive version.

Also, in Scheme and other functional languages, function calls in the tail position are compiled or otherwise treated as jumps. So in Scheme this will actually produce an infinite loop with no stack overflow:

(define (loop)
(loop))
(loop)