skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The second half of your experience can be had on github, launchpad, bitbucket, or project pages http://www.chromium.org/ or http://source.android.com/, where one can find advisors, peers, and faculty to rip your work a new one. As well, this translates nicely to the experience one might expect from a future workplace. Many of these projects have everything one would need to self-teach process, humility, and success:

* http://source.android.com/source/submit-patches.html

* http://source.android.com/source/life-of-a-patch.html

* http://source.android.com/source/code-style.html
Optimizations could provide "a factor of 4 driver overhead reduction," he estimated, noting that the current software allows mobile games to look great but restricts them from rendering "a whole lot of objects" on the screen at once.

Anybody know why?

EDIT: I'm guessing because GLES doesn't support geometry shaders (even though the PowerVR SGX chipset does)
Finding a single reason why thousands of people (and robots) trade the way they do is a folly, in my opinion.
Assuming that it was an interview for an electrical engineering position, the Intel question "Explain quantum electrodynamics in two minutes, starting now" doesn't seem at all ridiculous. If you don't understand the topic well enough to give a brief overview of the concepts, you're not qualified to work an engineering job in the semiconductor industry.
Reminds me of the Saki character who was asked a young woman how many chickens she could keep in a pen of certain dimensions. His reply "Whole crowds, as long as you keep the door closed." satisfied her, or at least closed of further questions.
"Epic developer" is kind of underplaying the fact that its Tim Sweeney.
Xcode 4 Color Themes
I'm hoping that nXhtml mode and its support for Multiple Major Modes might do the trick here http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/nXhtml/doc/nxhtml.html
$99 for 2 years of .com.au registration? ziphosting.com.au are pricing it for $21
... Toward ... is the one I have, and every time I reread it I feel like I should find a way to transcribe it into emacs lisp.
Even though this is just a bugfix release, Aaron "tenderlove" Patterson's writing style made it seem pretty exciting!
I am thinking of porting his code to ccv (http://github.com/liuliu/ccv). Unfortunately, his code is released under GPLv2, and ccv is BSD licensed. I have sent email to him in order to obtain further permission.
Simple, fair, effective.

Pick 1.
IST sounds friggin awesome, at least compared to MST (Mexican Standard Time). We've had guests invited for 8:00 arrive at 10:30.
Epic meaning Epic Games.
Study Shows Saggy Pants Linked To Erectile Dsyfunction & Other Health Issues
Reminds me of another classic Feynman/Gell-Mann quote, from Surely You're Joking:

Telegdi also sent us a letter, which wasn't exactly scathing, but
nevertheless showed he was convinced that our theory was wrong. At the end
he wrote, "The F-G (Feynman-Gell-Mann) theory of beta decay is no F-G."
What an awesome interactive tutorial! It was actually fun going through that.

This would be a great format to help learn programming languages (thinking Zed's Learn Python the Hard Way).
No voting? Seems like an odd omission or is it a cross-domain issue?
Quantum electrodynamics? Really? OK, give me your two-minute explanation starting now.
There appear to be at least 2 (if not 3) different types of E. The first is a very distinct E. The second has a more curved shape for the back (like a bracket '(' rather than '['), the final (which seems to only appear at the end of lines) appears more like an arrow, with the back being triangular <-
Mark Cuban: The Role of Media for Sports Teams
"How many balloons would fit in this room?"
.64 length * width * height (distance measurements roughly in feet).*

Ah, but who said anything about the balloons being full?
I sleep 2am to 7am most days and keep myself busy so much that I sometimes go to 3:30am before forcing myself to sleep. Sleep time happens within 3-5 mins after going to bed - according to my WakeMate.

I think alot of this is due to a busy lifestyle. I find myself doing multiple things at the same time in the evening and being very productive in getting stuff done. While on holidays where I actually disconnect from work I find I sleep long hours each day.

An afternoon 20 min powernap is an amazing recharge! Everyone should do it. Using Paul McKenna's audio helps with the powernap. There's something weird about the hypnotic audio. Instantly puts me to sleep.

Finally, supposedly the need to nap in the afternoon is normal and every animal in the kingdom does it. Humans has largely forgotten about this clock due to the "working culture". In the book Brain Rules, this is described in more detail: http://www.brainrules.net/sleep

My 2c's worth.
I think Firefox's JetPack labs initiative might be close to that. https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/
I'm not sure why people assume that Microsoft only makes money on Windows and Office. There were 11 separate businesses within Microsoft that brought in a billion dollars or more in revenue last year: http://techflash.com/seattle/2010/07/microsofts_11_billion-d...
I was going to ask the same question about interns (Saw a posting a few months ago about internships there). I sent my resume over.
Did you used to work for me?

I ask because when I moved into management and worked with a stellar group of extremely experienced engineers, far better AND more experienced than I ever was, that's exactly how I explained my job to them.
I had a good experience writing a little web service in Haskell a couple days ago, an autocomplete server. You give it a prefix, and it returns some number of strings in its database starting with that prefix. I wanted it to be fast, and lighter on memory than the approach some people have been doing with Redis, where they store all prefixes in a sorted set:

http://antirez.com/post/autocomplete-with-redis.html

Sounds like a fun toy project, right? I figured I would store everything in a trie, so I could do really fast prefix searches, and then bolt on a REST interface that would send back JSON or JSONP. So I wrote some C code to handle the prefix searching in a JudySL trie (see http://judy.sf.net/ for details; it's a nice library) and bolted that onto Haskell and wrote some bridge code. What I ended up with was a really nice, easy server that took me only a few hours to write, and was every bit as memory-efficient as I'd hoped. Source code here, if anybody's curious:

https://github.com/PeterScott/acdaemon

The learning curve on Haskell, though, is really something. If you really want to see something ridiculous, try looking at the auto-generated library documentation for anything involving regular expressions. The type declarations in Text.Regex.TDFA are like something H. P. Lovecraft might write about.
Organizational culture is one of the toughest things to change! Larry has his hands full
Love your work guys! Keep up the awesome job!!
Found your videos on "Valuation and Investing" priceless and so easy to comprehend.
I'd rather be able to pay Google to stop showing me ads and collecting my personal data.
That's also the first thing that came into my mind. It seems to me like a completely legitimate answer.
Congrats guys! Very exciting.
Can you be sewed for discrimination or violating grading policy. I am sure your grading policy doesnt say you can give arbitrary grades. Just curious, drop me a reply at soumya.5200 (@) gmail
Well I don't know about others, but I moded it down because it was "jerk-like" behaviour. The same comment could have been written in a polite and professional manner, but the op chose to write in an insulting manner.

Following the recent thread on HN quality, I've decided to be much more aggressive in downvoting impolite comments.
Feynman and other physicists built a mass destruction weapon that they knew it was a mass destruction weapon. Feynman is a murderer http://science1.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/ten-most-wanted-phy...
well maybe i don't use my exclamation points as haphazardly as you do.
It is estimated that consumers save about $1.1 billion a year form online sales ... which they probably spend on other (local) stuff. The state is getting their taxes either way.
Worth mentioning here that there's a XSS security fix in this release.
This was fun. Granted, if I ever use MongoDB it'll probably be in Rails with either Mongoid or MongoMaper, but this is a great intro to the underlying operations.

And the linked book was concise, clear, and definitely worth the read.

*nitpick: I also ran into a glitch, and wound up redoing 18 lessons. On the bright side, I think this helped.
Why Recessions Suck More Than Expansions Rock
Amazon's main strength is building platforms for other businesses , and innovating business models. their product innovations are just tools to build platforms.
You can see this from a list of their innovations:
1. amazon fulfillment services.
2. the affiliate marketing method.
3. 3rd party sellers arena, used book selling arena inside their own store.
4. the kindle - a digital platform for many authors and publishers. the physical kindle is not that hard, just look on how many e-readers are there.
5. aws - a good product, but also an innovative business model.
I'm reminded of Feynman's critique of Brazilian physics education.
Delete humorous one-liners vigorously, especially ones that get lots of upvotes.

Lots of other good suggestions in this thread but I don't see
this one.

I hope you can turn it around, I've gotten a lot of value from this site.
At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths
Is there a non video version of this?
Next, Techcrunch stop's their inane self promotion in blog posts. As per my suggestion!
I'm looking for a backend engineer in Seattle
Who are we?
We are a startup working on developing software in the education space. We like to have fun, work hard, and experience more in life than the typical day-to-day grind of an office.

Responsibilities:
•	Translate high-level customer/business needs into well-defined and scoped functionality
•	Implement new functionality, improve existing infrastructure

Requirements:
•	Experience using a dynamic programming language in a production environment (or personal projects)
•	Strong CS fundamentals gained through Bachelor’s degree in CS, Math or related discipline or equivalent industry experience
•	Personal projects that show an aptitude for engineering and product sense
•	Ability to work in areas outside of their usual comfort zone and get things done quickly

Desirable:
•	Experience using PHP in a production environment
•	Experience using HTML/CSS/Javascript/AJAX in a production environment
•	Experience scaling high traffic websites (architecture/database/memcache/CDN)
•	Experience with server administration and Amazon Web Services (EC2/S3)

Sound Interesting?
Great, we would love to hear from you. Please submit your CV/Resume. If we think there is a fit you will be hearing from us shortly. Have questions or want to learn more? Feel free to shoot us a note.

contact me at:
ClaudiusChristian@gmail.com
I honestly believe that as long as we will be using rockets, the best cost savings will not come from reuse, but from increasing the launch volumes to the point where launch vehicles stop being hand-built boutique items and start being mass-produced commodities.

I'm not sure that economies of scale can get you that far when you're talking something as complicated as a rocket. How many jet engines does Rolls Royce make every year? Rolls-Royce and GE make many hundreds (thousands?) of jet engines per year, but they still cost a crapload of money each.

You might be right, maybe fully-recoverable rockets aren't possible. On the other hand, being personally unqualified to judge, if I've got some random piscinymous internet commenter telling me that it's not possible on one hand, and Elon Musk telling me that it is possible on the other, I'm more inclined to believe the dude who owns a rocket company.
Also, congrats!
Is that the legislative version of the CAP theorem? the SFE theorem?
If only my own college experience had provided that. I get far more "exposure," new questions, and ideas from reading HN than I ever did in my CS classes.
If you're going to get modded down anyway, you should have gone with a "your mom" joke here instead.
I like the fastball question. To me a fastball is directly challenging the batter. No trickery. Your best against my best. Hit it if you can.
If that were true, you'd think that would be the first thing they were told when they started complaining about crashes a year ago. Certainly, you'd think by the time they had talked to the CIO, somebody would have said, "you guys need to buy bigger instances". We know money isn't a problem for reddit anymore, and all current and former employees have said the problems with EBS just aren't something they can fix by throwing money at.

I would suggest the guy from netflix simply doesn't know enough about reddit's particulars to offer an informed opinion. Either that, or he knows better than everyone at reddit, every support person at amazon, and even the CIO of amazzon how best to solve reddit's problems.

I strongly suspect the former.
Growth for Growth's Sake
Is there any legal restriction preventing them from putting a person in their next test flight?
Same here - no problems at all. And ever since Sparrow came out, I barely ever open the Gmail web interface.
I've used fastmail for years - it is a great service. Their status page will show you the downtime they have.

http://status.fastmail.fm/
Seems it would, but there might be an issue with having a bouquet of two flowers. Still, I like your answer better... predicating on the empty set is fun.
I still think it's worthwhile to distinguish between failure of execution and failure due to factors beyond your control. Buzz and Wave certainly had market challenges but they were seriously hampered by some poor decisions.
IMHO, Zdenek Kalal has some short sighted view for business. Even if someone offered him a plane filled with money for his algorithm, or if he thought "hey, I can sell this shit! fuck the world! show me the money!", he fails at acknowledging that it doesn't really matter whether you created one of the best algorithms for image recognition: what matters is if you can do it again.

What I'm talking about is, what if instead of selling one of the golden eggs, you give that for free and create a reputation for yourself worldwide, so more people will be willing to hire the golden egg's goose?

Anyway.. Somewhere, Richard Stallman is smiling.. and I'm happy for that.
Bureaucrats and politicians who make ad-hoc decisions like this do a lot of indirect damage to companies. What they have effectively done is raised uncertainty for businesses in SF. Will we get a break? Will our competition? Etc, etc. Uncertainty adds to risk and risk adds to costs.
I was also looking for and missing something about selling the right product to the right customer. Customer development?
I didn't say that I was qualified to work an electrical engineering job at Intel. (I'm not.) However, I know enough (from watching Feynman's University of Auckland lectures - see http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8) to understand that QED theory is absolutely fundamental to Intel's business, both in chip design and in manufacturing processes.
Since 2007, I’ve used FastMail [..]. FastMail’s uptime has been incredibly good [..].

Funny, I clicked the link and saw this:

MessagingEngine.com Server Outage

[..] I'm sorry, the server your email is on is currently down. We apologise for the inconvenience; any email sent to you during this time is being queued by another server and will be delivered as soon as the server is working again.
Great story from Vancouver!
Something that nobody else has brought up so far is that certain media start off with the username.

Facebook, irc, etc al, all give you the subject. So it looks like 'bmelton would love to talk to you about', and such.
Brendan knows what he's talking about. Met him on his recent trip to Vancouver and he definitely know what can get an investors attention.

Well written post, with tactical notes. Will definitely be using his advice.
Freeman Dyson got to know Feynman quite well when they were at Cornell after WWII. He described how Feynman refused to take anybody's word for anything, so he spent five years rebuilding quantum mechanics from the ground up in a way he could understand. He wrote that he'd never seen anyone work so hard as Feynman.
Ask HN: A VC firm wants to meet. should they pay for the flight?
They seem to be reluctant/ignore that qs in email thread a couple of times. What's the standard? I thought that I give up my time and they give up their money was the general way things worked.

Or are they not interested and just wasting our time?
Do you complain when cities and states make themselves more attractive to outside businesses by giving exemptions to certain classes of companies? Do you complain when cities block big-box stores like Walmart from opening in their limits? (Since those are as targeted as this exemption.)

Personally, yes, I complain about both of these.

As for this specific deal... I'm not too concerned about it, but I think it's the kind of special deal that cities shouldn't be allowed to make. There's just too much potential for corruption when city hall can say "OK, businesses inside this particular neighbourhood don't have to pay taxes". (Gee, Mr Mayor, I've been so good to you with campaign donations over the years, how about you declare my block to be dumpy too?)
Conan 2.0
Thanks Peter. The most telling part of your statement was that VCs would question my ability to build a team. I take blame but it has more to do with the fact that I've placed building a team behind developing the product. As a result, the product is almost ready for Beta release but I'm left to tackle all the issues alone. As soon as it's Beta ready, I plan on reaching out to whomever I can.

Furthermore, there are two people that I rely on for advisory purposes. They provide me with insight and advice when needed but don't work with me 24/7 since they have their own lives/careers. I hesitate to call them part of my "team". I wonder if others would consider that as part of their company's employees.
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.

Is anyone else who's been following this discussion disturbed by the absolute paucity of any hard evidence to support any of the arguments given?

It appears to me that nobody (including me) actually knows anything, statistically speaking, about what the differences are between self-taught and CS-educated programmers. Everyone has an opinion, and some anecdotal evidence (I worked with ... or I've met ...), but that's a far cry from hard data.

Is anyone aware of any studies that might shed some light on the topic?
Are you sure you're not getting quantum electrodynamics confused with quantum mechanics? Because QED barely matters in semiconductors at all. Pretty much anything you could possibly care about in semiconductors can be done with the plain ol' Schroedinger equation.
I still don't get what the question is supposed to mean.
There's no contest between a person who spent their childhood messing around with computers and somebody who's trying to learn it all in school.

I think CS degree programs are actually most valuable for people who already know how to program. You get to spend the time refining your art, whereas somebody starting from scratch barely has time to become competent.
Slides from his Java Symposium presentation which probably covers similar material:

http://www.slideshare.net/javasymposium/a-jvm-does-that-pres...

Title is actually: A JVM Does That?
So Epic doesn't make PC games anymore either?
I think if the bugs affected everyone, no one would use the product. It is going to depend on your use habits and the path your email client takes through the API.

After 15 years of running sendmail/postfix/uwimap/dovecot for a growing company, and uncounted spam fighting tools, I use google for all my mail accounts now. On their scale, they can do a better job at spam fighting than I can with only access to my own mail streams. (But I can beat them for reliability.)

1) The 10 connection limit bites surprisingly early. Mail.app makes multiple connections, and if you leave a couple computers logged in, carry an iPhone, and maybe use an iPad you will find yourself randomly blocked from your email. (Their "help"[1] article says you can reach the limit with as few as two sessions open.)

Google's solution is for you to remember to disconnect your computer from their IMAP servers when you are away.

2) IMAP searching is a mystery. I routinely have to use the web interface to search for things that I know are in my mail, but I can't find from Mail.app. I don't know who is at fault here.

3) I have instances of attachments becoming corrupted. Again, I can't conclusively place blame.

4) The strange organization issues from the "tags" vs. "folders" issues can be confusing to people that don't understand the nuts and bolts.

5) They have rather limited logging available. I recently had two laptops stolen which subsequently did IMAP updates while in possession of the parties unknown. Google's low granularity logging information (day and IP but no time information) caused trouble getting a court order to compel the ISP to produce the subscriber data. The court wants a specific time.

So there you have it. There are warts. But I'm not going to leave because they are great spam killers.

[1] They call it a "help article", but it really just says "This breaks, we know why, we do it deliberately, and we can't be bothered to make it better. Suck it, meatbag."
Hmm.. it must be even harder to develop for such a fragmented platform as the personal computer, then, where there is essentially nothing guaranteed except the OS you are writing for.
Are you sure you know if it is them, or if it is you that wants to meet?

If someone called me and said "I love your company I'd like to meet", I'd say "well you can come into my office Friday if you like". If they said "we're too busy to come to you" then I'd say "I'm pretty busy too, let me know when you're in town next and we'll meet."

The fact that they have said "let's meet" and you have rushed to buy a ticket to go to them probably means you want to meet them more than they want to meet you, therefore they will not pay for the flight.
I'm not going to argue whether Amazon (and other online merchants) should be forced to collect sales taxes in California, whether it's an ethical or legal responsibility, but it's definitely in California's interest to do so, and not just in the obvious way.

The obvious benefit for CA is that it can collect more sales taxes from online purchases from companies like Amazon who have historically not collected the taxes. But a less obvious benefit is that it tilts the playing field so that merchants currently based in CA are better off (relative to itself without the tax) competitively. Additionally, companies that have avoided presence/nexus in California for the sole purpose of avoiding the tax will have less disincentives for avoiding California. As a result, perhaps more companies will open branches in California, either for sales, distribution, or development; and merchants already with presence in California will do relatively better than otherwise.

I can see why California would want to push for such a tax.
according to a tweet from July, they aren't accepting any more pitches. http://twitter.com/virginpitchtv
Hmm, you mean have emacs warn you when you violate the guidelines?
FTA: "If you took the underlying NGP hardware and shipped Android on it, you'd find far far less performance on Android. Let's say you took an NGP phone and made four versions of it. Each one would give you a different amount of memory and performance based on the crap [the carriers] put on their phone."

He lost me there, is he saying that custom carrier launchers, etc. impede access to the hardware? Even with the NDK?