skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To all the naysayers here:

Please remember that the set of people who read HN is NOT representative of the set of people applying for programming jobs. Something that may seem trivial to the point of insulting here may be an effective way of filtering hundreds of really bad resumes out of the process.

For example, the very act of installing and properly running "Hello World" in your language is probably going to cut your pile of submissions by 50% or more. It's a fizz-buzz filter. It isn't meant to try to filter the top 50% of HN readers from the bottom 50% of HN readers, or to identify the Scala programmers but reject anyone who solves the "puzzle" in Python or PHP, it's meant to filter out the folks who can't get anything to work in any language.

No big deal really, it's not like they're promising you a job if you solve the puzzle. They just want to cut the submissions down to a manageable number by eliminating the no-hopers.
Oh, come on. It's pretty obvious at this point that Bin Laden was in an ISI safe house. We're not talking remote Pakistan tribal lands here. This is next door to the capital.
You've got to be kidding, right?

You've set the bar for entry so low that most people on here would be able to solve the problem in their sleep!

It's fair for us on HN to assume that we're not your target market, so posting the answer here can by definition do no harm.
Top 15 U.S. Startup Accelerators and Incubators Ranked
m.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/nov/01/afghanistan.terrorism?cat=world&type=article
While you are right at some point I don't think that it would all good if people would stop creating better software.

It's what makes the human being stupid and at the same time a genius: Always trying to make something better (even if you know you can't). Otherwise we wouldn't have lower consumption cars, color TVs and so on, right?
I don't think it has anything to do with girls. CS is just a relatively more anti-social major and guys are masters at it.
I had an 80GB X25-MG2 fail within the first week of use (by "fail" I mean a nearly complete irrecoverable loss of data--most probably related to a faulty controller rather than flash chips) . The replacement I got had been chugging along perfectly for a couple of years. I've never had any problems with a Vertex 2 120 drive that I also have.

Both drives had a pretty high read/write usage ratio, though. And most of the rewriting taking place was small in volume. I ordered a Vertex 3 drive last week, and I intend to sync its contents with a magnetic drive in the same system a few times a day, just like I have been doing with the other two drives. So all in all, besides the first Intel drive being a fluke, my experience was quite positive.
Photo Inspiration From Tod Seelie
Tod Seelie has photographed in over twenty countries on five different continents. Originally from Cleveland, he relocated to Brooklyn in 1997. His work has appeared in publications such as The NY Times, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Spin, Marie Claire, Men’s Journal, Thrasher, Vice, Art Forum, Art In America, Flash Art and Adbusters among others.
Photography
CNN is not included with Comcast Limited Basic cable. That's the cheapest TV option, which you get automatically if you sign up for cable Internet service and nothing else.
You're being voted down because they are not actually that outrageous.

"purity of non-blocking libraries": the context makes it explicitly clear he is not talking about side effects and referential transparency. If I were more mean spirited I might say that you don't understand how to parse a sentence or that words can take on different meanings in different contexts. I'm certain that's not actually true but that is effectively the conclusion you came to in the same situation. Pretty silly right?

If you followed the Node mailing lists you'd see that there are questions about allocating gigabytes of memory with Node, and Ryan has to shrug and say "Sorry, Node isn't for you because v8's memory management doesn't facilitate such use". Also he mentions that he likes to win benchmarks and the GC gets in the way of that. Whether or not winning benchmarks is useful is debatable, but given that constraint it's obvious you don't want GC. He wants a scripting language without GC not JavaScript specifically. Give the guy some credit, he is a C programmer by trade.

Didn't read the stuff about Akka and can't comment on that but after the first 2 criticisms I'm not going to waste my time.
Obviously, they didn't try to patent the Chinese Remainder Theorem, or any other previously existing mathematical algorithm.

But, as the top-level comment and the original post point out,

> ...any method of manipulating information (i.e an algorithm) can be translated into a Haskell program, every Haskell function is a formula in the Typed Lambda Calculus, and all the variants of the Lambda Calculus are part of mathematics.

The RSA patent doesn't provide source code per se, but it definitely describes a particular algorithm which could be transcribed to lambda calculas.
Clickable - https://www.distala.com/
90% of programmers dont know that this==super is true
In programming lenguages the use of super is commonly mistaken. Usually super seems to call the method of the super class of the class where the method is implemented.
Factoid : super mean start the search in the superclass of the receiver.
This post explains the thruth!
Using the labels "global" and "local" as distinct categories is the dichotomy I referred to. I see them relative values, not absolutes. You can't have something be "global" or "local" - Only "More global" or "More local". I understood that you operate with categories here - Maybe I'm mistaken?

Certainly, for a given program it may (or may not) make sense to have a restriction which prevents one type of resource to be assigned more than once. My point being that there is no need to treat this restriction as "special" somehow.
We do occasionally procure visas. Apply and find out? :)
Think what the sympathizers to OBL would do if they knew that he was in custody and still alive? Nothing breaks their will better than to kill him swiftly.
Really? That seems to inefficient though... I not a huge expert on commercial SSDs, but when I've written my own flash drivers for embedded sensors I would always make use of multiple writes per erase.
One intel X25-M 80GB SSD. According to the SMART information 10% of its write life has been used over 1.5 years. Still going strong in a work machine used day to day.

Two OCZ Vertex 2E's 120GB (separate machines). Had both for 6 months and both are working reliably with no signs of problems or performance degradation.

Not had a single failure so far.
Shocking but true. When I read my grandparents diary about the Spanish civil war(1936), I see they killed people for getting info about the relationships, friendships of the principal leaders so they could kill selected people and destroy entire public movements.

That happened in WWII too. When Soviet Russia entered Poland, the first thing they did was to investigate the links of relationships of the Polish resistance. They kill every single of them so nobody opposed the Soviets(if they opposed German domination they would oppose Soviet too).

That was not far ago. Today a single American company could store all your public information, and your messages(audio transcribing is starting to work) because you give them.

Facebook is great as a concept, but It would be a better idea using private implementations with your own servers not depending on a commercial company. Something simple to use with open communications...
Share buybacks and dividends are mathematically equivalent:

1% share buyback when you own 100 shares (price=$100) -> $100 cash in your hands + 99 shares valued at $100/share.

1% of corporate value distributed as dividends -> $100 cash in your hands + 100 sharesvalued at $99 (since 1% of corporate value was given away).
Meaningful amounts of Mater + antimatter produces extreme amounts of radiation, and takes ridiculous amounts of energy to produce.

To put things into perspective, 1kg (~2.2lb) of antimater + 1kg of matter = 2* (9×10^16 J/kg) of energy, TNT = 4.2×10^6 J/kg so that works out to 42,000,000,000 kg of TNT or a 100 mega ton bomb which is larger than the largest H bomb ever tested.

PS: The other issue is unlike gas which is fairly stable, any sort of containment failure = detonation.
Python Library for creating and using Asterisk call files easily
You don't have to go these lengths. I use quite a bit of social media and none of the sites I use, has my correct personal information. All my ID's are all made-up personas and connected to junk email accounts. It would take a lot to get to my real identity. It's not hard to do, and it keeps me plenty safe.
When dealing with corporate tax rates one should talk about effective tax rate. There are quite a few examples of corporations paying very little tax on their profits. Some even pay zero tax whilst making billions in profit.

I believe that the effective tax rate on U.S. corporations is roughly the industrialized nation average. Having no corporate tax would make the U.S. an outlier in terms of tax policy. This doesn't make it unsound but does make me hesitant to agree with you on this point. Are the tax policies of most nations unfair to corporations? I have a hard time believing this to be so.

Imagine a business with one owner. The owner employs 5 workers. Shouldn't the business pay tax on the profits? Suppose the business owner makes a profit of $100,000. Should this be tax free because he/she owns a business? If the business owner made $100,000 while working at 3M then the salary (profit) would be taxed.

I think the philosophy under girding the tax system is that, roughly speaking, any entity that gets money [edit] should pay tax on it. This seems fair to me.

There are notable exceptions of course. If I find $5 million dollars in gold while on a walk I pay tax on the whole amount. If I get the money because someone died I don't.
My comment to the most voted answer:

I think that as an 'interviewee' things are not on your side to begin with. You are the underdog, no matter what the interviewer or the company which is interviewing claims. Esp. the new graduates are nervous. I think @Developer Art at least gave an alternate solution in his interview, most folks will find it easier to accept what interviewer said.
I've had an Intel X-25M for over a year now and it's been amazing performance wise. In that same time span my 1TB data drive did die. The only problem I've had with the SSD is that it about twice a month it will randomly freeze. The hard drive light is solid on, and I have to just reset my machine. Not a big deal though because the SSD starts up so fast.
Git. Although I don't know how it performs on windows. OS X and Linux is just fine.

To give you a better answer please provide information about version control knowledge, such as "Did you ever use a VCS?", "What did you use before?".
Continuous writing to the same area on the drive can probably exhaust the spare cells and degrade performance. I don't know how the firmwares deal with 0 spare cells and further failures, though.

I have a swap partition on my SSD but I also have swappiness=0, so that it only writes to disk if there's actual memory pressure.
Singleton pattern overuse is pretty common among PHP developers, probably due to lack of namespaces (until recently).
The label "murderer" should only accompany a guilty verdict.
Well, the point of science is that we don't know until we observe it. So it shouldn't be that astounding since we've had a ridiculously hard time getting large amounts of neutral antimatter (everything before was charged, so EM affects overwhelmed gravitational). The consensus seems to be that antimatter will behave 'normally'. but we haven't seen it yet. Also, it turns out that certain frameworks where anti-matter is repelled by matter gravity doesn't violate anything else that hasn't already been violated (for example, CP and CPT symmetry have already be observed to be broken). And thus the uncertainty.
This is an update to a Java app that was posted on HN a few days ago:

http://5mins.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/data-structure-visuali...

It appears that they are the exact same visualizations of the same structures and concepts
Most of the small business in US are pass thro entities so they pay ordinary income tax rates and also they reinvest the money back into business. They are inherently non-scalable business so the owners don't realize wealth by selling the business instead they get it thro the profits from operating the business... IMO, its not ethical that his tax rate is double than that of a tech entrepreneur or a wall street hedge fund guy.

My personal preference would be a lower overall rate (25%) with no deductions for both ordinary income and capital gain. For a brief time in US history (in the Reagan administration) this was the case and from what i read it never discouraged capital investment.
Not unless it's in a tube, and it would quickly reach an equilibrium anyway.
Looking for 20-something content producers & bloggers
This month, GenJuice will debut its exclusive network of 20-something content producers and bloggers.
Indeed. We get resumes for PHP developers living in Bangladesh. We get resumes from outsourcing companies.

And indeed: we're not promising you the job. Just promising you we'll talk to you on Skype.

And finally: we've already gotten a few really good job applications with the attention this is getting :)

And finally finally: yes, I messed up the blog post.
Galaxy S2 vs HTC Sensation Comparison
So you're saying that this has fantastic military applications? Interesting...
Show HN: LocationAlerter, think BreakupNotifier for locations.
A couple of additional points about my abysmal 8/8 failure rate:

- These were in 8 different machines in 8 different locations.
- 7 were in desktops, 1 was a laptop
- All were running Windows
- All purchased from NewEgg
- Most of these were gifts for other people.

(I may be slightly crazy, but I don't have 8 computers.)

After this saga, I've concluded that there are probably two root causes leading to high failure rates:

(1) Something about installing an after-market SSD in a desktop, probably related to power fluctuations, increases the likelihood of failure.

(2) NewEgg only offers a 30-day warranty on their SSDs. You can't even purchase a third-party extended warranty. So I suspect that you'll see a higher failure rate from NewEgg purchases than from a merchant who offers a 2- or 3-year warranty. (But NewEgg's prices are so damn good!)

I should also say that the SSDs that I have purchased with laptops - 2 from Dell (2008, 2009) and 1 from IBM (2009) have not failed.
Have to back you up on point 1. It is disappointing to see this deeply significance, globally relevant event treated as somehow immaterial to the hacker community. Such a dogmatic interpretation of the guidance is certainly contrary to the intention and spirit.

That said, this stream is rather interesting, and it belongs here too.
What does losing a helicopter have to do with it being a covert operation? Special forces use helicopters all the time. The official story is they brought two helis, had a mechanical failure with one, destroyed it and then left in the remaining unit.
Normally I upgrade Ubuntu on several machines immediately upon the release of a new version. Often before it is released, which has occasionally gotten me into trouble. This has been my cycle for, I don't know, at least since 5.04 or 5.10.

I'm not upgrading to 11.04.

11.04 is clearly a disaster. We'll see if 11.10 is the same and whether I need to find a new distribution or not.
London, UK

Qubit digital - http://www.qubitdigital.com/join-our-team

We're looking to double the size of our company over the next 12 months. We're hiring senior and graduate software engineers in the next quarter, plus a whole bunch of other roles. We're not looking any skills in particular, just smart people.

Qubit Digital is a year-old company founded by 4 ex-Googlers. We're in the business of making company's websites perform better, by generating rule-based concrete advice.

We've a bunch of huge clients already, and are trying to keep up with growth! It's a busy time and you'll get thrown in the middle of bunch of AI work, doing cloud computing and presenting complex data to clients in a simple actionable manner.

It's a fun place to be (not just because we're in the middle of Soho), there's a bunch of perks for everyone and there's both strong leadership from above and freedom for everyone to do things the way they know best.

If you are interested, send an email to careers+yc@qubitdigital.com.
Yes, but I didn't use the labels "global" and "local", so why on earth are you still going on about them as though I had?
Top Incubators Ranked: TechStars Boulder beats out Y Combinator
Show HN: Restaurant POS system built completely on iOS
Hi guys,
I've spent the last 18 months building a restaurant POS app that can run completely and reliably on iOS. Along the way, we've really pushed the devices to their limits and have something special that doesn't rely on the cloud for service, doesn't copy old and crappy "100 buttons on a screen" POS interfaces, and is still just as efficient and much more usable. Combining Bonjour (Apple's implementation of zeroconf) with the excellent Cocoa APIs also made it a relatively magical experience - you can literally watch on an iPad as a waiter takes an order on a iPod connected to the iPad.

This is my first time as an entrepreneur, and we're trying to bootstrap out of Buffalo, NY. I'd love to hear any advice you have on marketing to a relatively hard to reach segment such as restaurants, and any feedback you have on the app itself. The app is available for free (trial version that doesn't allow adding menu items or allow complete printing of checks to receipt printers) at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ambur/id408723017?mt=8&ls=1 , and our website is http://www.refulgentsoftware.com

Thanks for your time!
It is ironic that distractions are by far the biggest cause of collisions, and State Farm releases an app that is a distraction while driving.
I think the idea of double taxation is a bogus one. When I get money from an entity or process or by working there is no reason to consider whether or not the source of the money has paid some tax in some context. From the perspective of the person receiving the money the only thing that matters is that you got the money.

I pay income tax. With the money left over, after paying the tax, I buy things. I pay tax on the things I buy even though the money has been taxed, so to speak. Suppose I buy something from the place I work at. The money I'm spending to buy the object has been taxed multiple times and part of that money ends up back in my hands. You just can't realistically distinguish between the myriad ways that money has been previously taxed.
I do not understand:

- I think all photons fall down in a gravitational field.

- you claim photons are their own antiparticle.

Hence, antiphotons fall down in a gravitational field. How then would antimatter fall upwards ~because~ it is the antiparticle of matter? Am I wrong in 'knowing' that all light bends the same under gravity?
Google Launches New Webmaster Verification Plugin For Wordpress
> He said: "purity of non-blocking libraries" which has nothing to do with purity in the functional sense of the word

I'm sorry, but the word is bizarrely used here. I challenge you to find a single use of this word in this sense in the literature of our profession. I'd be surprised if you could. If he had not used that word, the sentance would have been clearer.

And it's not even true. A library could contain an infinite loop, which will do what blocking does.

> Huh? Why? How can anything not allow manual memory management?

Languages with closures and callbacks have a pretty damn hard time with explicit memory managment. And please note that he didn't say he wanted some explicit memory management features, he said he wished Javascript didn't have garbage collection (like C). This isn't, "I sure do wish I could manage some buffers."

> Very vague statements from his side; how can you claim he don't understand how it works?

Because Akka's and Erlang's dispatch model is inimical to the way Node.js does business.
If you must use Windows, Mercurial is known to be more Windows-friendly than Git while maintaining many/most of its benefits (and has very similar command syntax). It's written in Python and so works beautifully on Windows, OSX and Linux...

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Tutorial is as good a place to start as any (or see http://mercurial.selenic.com/guide/) for pointers to some tutorials...
Also, a suggestion - don't go anywhere near SVN. You'll thank us in the long run... :)
Get your idea out in the wild, iterate your ass off, and hopefully build something spectacular.

- Kyle Bragger (@kylebragger)

http://startupquote.com/post/5133656656
There are a lot more factors to look into other than the level of proficiency in programming: I would hire a so-so programmer who have room to grow in addition to being able to follow directions and schedule over any super star.

Related article : Are smart people overrated? - Malcolm Gladwell http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm
Read this if you are concerned about TRIM and want to restore a SSD drive on OS X to a "new" state.

If you have an SSD on OS X, I discovered that in many cases you can "reset" the drive and regain performance. Basically, if your drive implements the "security erase" command, you can use the following procedure by taking the cover off the back of your Macbook, removing the hard drive, leaving the SATA cable in reach, and booting with the GParted Live CD.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?76612...

The tricky part: You have to plug in the SSD drive >after< your machine boots, so it's not in "frozen" state. The other tricky part, is that you first have to set a security password to do the erase. Then doing the secure erase also erases the password.

I know first-hand that this works on Crucial C300 RealSSD and I've seen lots of reports that this works with OCZ drives. This is also useful for doing new installs on an SSD if you've gotten a new machine. (My situation)

WARNING: DO NOT try to use a Crucial C300 SSD with an i5 or i7 2011 13" Macbook Pro. The problem is in the hardware, namely electromagnetic interference in the SATA cable when trying to use 6GB/s SATA. Wrapping it with aluminum foil doesn't always work. Buying an upgraded SATA cable doesn't always work either. Buying a 2010 Macbook Pro instead always works. You have been warned.
Osama bin Laden killed near Pakistan's West Point. Was he really hidden?
You got it wrong. It is not a puzzle, it is not a problem. There is nothing to solve there, there is no challenge. They don't ask you to solve anything. It is just compile and run. You don't even have to explain how it works, just compile and run. Yes, it is easy as hell, but raganwald got it right: it is just to filter the resume spammers.
Cost comparison between Cloud Datacenter and enterprise hosting (infographic)
If they can be trapped using photons for this long, I guess they don't react?
For the record, I realized something interesting about wheat consumption in the USA, which is that sugar follows wheat very often in the modern diet. It's very challenging to find packaged sandwich bread in a USA supermarket which doesn't contain a significant amount of sugar or HFCS. So today, wheat consumption tells you a lot about sugar consumption, but that may not have been the case a hundred years ago.
Mobile Couchbase is Beta (CouchDB for iOS)
Not if you're holding onto it using a magnetic field, or any other method that doesn't involve direct contact.
Circles - Simple multiplayer physics game demo created with maga