skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His point is that success as an author is not a state function: what works for Joe Konrath (or any other established author) will not necessarily work for a new author. If we want new authors to succeed at self-publishing, we need to give them good advice, and Joe Konrath's advice is like an experienced cliff-diver telling a bunch of strangers with no experience: Come on! I just jumped off this cliff and it was awesome! You should do the same!"

There is far, far more to becoming a successful author than building up a critical mass of fans. I completely agree that, with middle-men eliminated, the number of readers required to support any given author is much lower, but even to get to that lower number you have to achieve a certain level of proficiency as a writer, and right now there are no mechanisms in place to safely build up to that point outside of the traditional publishing industry.

This is a quote attributed to Jim Baen by Eric Flint, editor of Jim Baen's Universe (original emphasis):

"Eric, almost no first novel is worth a thin dime, in cold-blooded money terms. Most first novels lose money for the publisher. But publishers--smart ones, anyway--aren't really buying 'first novels.' What they're really doing, when they pay an advance for a first novel, is taking a gamble that the author will someday be writing books that will bring in a lot of money. It's an investment in an author's future earning prospects, not the purchase of a book..."

Along with the payment for that first book (to help put food on the table), freshman authors also get a lot of mentorship to help them grow. More importantly, they get good editing so that their first novel won't be so disastrous that it destroys their reputations as authors and handicaps all of their future work.

An incredibly talented first-time author will probably succeed no matter what. Likewise, a bad author will never succeed, no matter how much he tries or how much help he gets. I'm concerned about the authors with potential--the ones who aren't great yet but have the potential to be great. If they start out in traditional publishing, they will get the help and support they need to realize their potential. If they start out self-publishing, they will encounter economic failure and, more importantly, will establish reputations as mediocre authors, reputations which will be incredibly hard to overcome.

I'm sure it's possible to separate the "grow new authors" aspect of the publishing industry from the "gatekeeper" aspect, and I'd love to see it happen. Unfortunately, right now there is nothing out there to serve that purpose.
I ordered one! For a robot that can run around and talk $100 isn't bad at all. Only thing that weirds me out is the constant tethered power source. But I'm sure that can be hacked around if it hasn't been already.
I had to write a binary search a few weeks ago in the course of Real Work.

I agree technical interviews aren't the only way of assessing a candidate's qualifications. Their open source projects, their writing on technical topics, and just having a geeky conversation with them are all good indicators of cluefulness.

Jon Evans is clueless. No hire.
Agreed. If requests per second is the metric you're optimizing for, then threads are a perfectly fine solution (see e.g. Paul Tyma's presentations about how threads are superior to event-driven approaches in Java). The strongest case for event-driven servers is for cases like long polling, where a connection will sit idle for a minute or more and the number of connected idle clients becomes an important metric.
But of course, one prerequisite is absolutely necessary: the ability to approach problems logically. That is what one should look for on top of the domain knowledge.

This is something that many people in the enterprise and in mainstream programming are incredibly in denial about. I would guess that fully half of enterprise software decisions are made on an irrational basis, or at best on stuff that amounts to no more than hearsay.

http://www.globalnerdy.com/2008/01/28/zed-shaws-writeup-of-c...

Actually, most people are partially in denial, in that they are unconsciously trained to operate on groupthink. Most companies are not startups, so they have some proven formula for making money. The best strategy in this case is to let that work and to not rock the boat. In this case, being an obedient corporate drone is desirable. In the startup case, one is actively in search of a new formula, so it is most certainly not!
No you won't. Academia thought me how to be a better programmer, about compiler construction, functional programming the theory behind OO programming, prolog, how databases actually work (IE not just some random subset of the sql language) how 3D graphics work (including how to compute light and how you go from a mesh of triangles to an image on a screen), Haskell, SVN and how to work on large projects with others (including many of the issues that are not just technical, etc). While there were a few classes that was a waste of time (how to design enterprise systems and usability comes to mind, since the first is just a matter of ticking of enough boxes and the second is do what the user expect) most of them wasn't.

There is a real bias against CS degrees in certain circles, which I suspect is fueled in part by a couple of bad experiences with no-good hires (which exist in all professions) and in part by a feeling of inadequacy some who never got a degree might feel.
Centre champions UK space innovation
> This is really dangerous stuff.

It looks like one photo off Google StreetView and the rest off the house's MLS listing. It's all public info.
You mean RP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation
I hope every single one of these predictions is wrong. I do not like infinite loading, I have NO desire to rearrange Google results and I do not like the new design that was on TC.

I always come back to Google, from Bing to DDG, because of how quickly I can scan the results. The contrast, size, spacing is all very good. The new layout Google is testing wastes way too much vertical space.
Lsyncd sync local dir with a remote target using inotify, rsync and ssh
>Besides interview questions, give an interview ASSIGNMENT. Meaning, before you are hired, you have to complete some task. This shows a) commitment to wanting to work here, and b) shows that you can sole the kinds of problems we had to face before.

Are you hirering for Facebook? Because if not you will miss the developers who aren't desperate to work for anyone.
You're not wasting the time if you're learning something, but don't expect the degree itself to be generally considered a notable accomplishment.

Additionally, whether or not 5 years and $X dollars is worth the reward depends heavily on you, and where you go to school. Some people might find more value in spending that time and money elsewhere.
I was handling college level biology texts just fine in eigth grade. I handled the chemistry required at that level as well. (private school, someone had donated intro bio and chem texts to their library.)

A high school age person getting a college degree does not surprise me. I don't think this is unusual at all. Many kids are far more capable than we give them credit for. As for the social aspects, I would tend to agree with you.
"This article applies to a different operating system than the one you are using. Article content that may not be relevant to you is disabled."

If I don't use Windows, they hide some content.
"Fairly decent" for a 'genius'?
MBAs are for wusses: Military service makes Israeli techies tougher
Import women or kill the surplus men?! Could we please tone down the vitriol? Frankly, the barbarism your "solutions" presupposes is quite offensive.
Corify - Great new start up
The heapq change was just last week and has not yet been in any release, so that's a perfectly reasonable omission. :) But yes, this is about a pre-1.0 release, so I would encourage anyone interested in exploring tornado internals to check out a more recent release.
I've never actually heard that term before, though I am familiar with it being called the Queen's English, and BBC and Oxford English.

But commonly it would be considered "upper class" within England, and probably considered "English" outside the UK.
How to Rotoscope in Photoshop
Tired stereotype.

And furthermore, an instance of the more general case of 'unverifiable claim.' The list doesn't stop there, either.

The first paragraph is a misleading hypothetical. You're left to infer the statistic from the author's anecdote. The new guy can't code? Is that every new guy? One in a hundred? How would you know that his first paragraph says anything at all? In the absence of making a factual claim, the author is trying to inflame passions.

"It's a big problem...[because] there's a boom on." Really? A boom? And then the "50 times more productive" trope? Then "negative productivity?" Ah. This time, the payoff is actually stated: "terrible mistake," "catastrophic company-killer" that "happen[s] so often." LOOK! THE BOOGEYMAN IS RIGHT HERE!

And then, Microsoft's fault. Of course. What isn't? It's here that we find that 'unverifiable claim' is just one of many classes of things that the author is using as a means to pander. Certainly, MS's interview tactics might have worked when initially introduced. Certainly they may have become a fad, and ineffective through overuse and the mere passage of time. But "fault" is a complex thing, and ultimately of little use, here. What if this was a deliberate plan by MS to wreck interviewing forever? So what? It gets you nowhere, except indignant, which is what the author seems to be counting on.

The article just goes on (and on) in this fashion. I won't bore you, but, now that you've got an idea of what the author is doing, go back to the article and find every spurious or unverifiable claim and ask yourself, "What could the author be trying to accomplish since he's clearly not trying to relate factual knowledge?" (Remember that the author included 9 links in as many paragraphs.)

The article is flippant, and is written in a breezy we-all-know-it's-true voice. It's apparently a moot point how tripe like this front-pages, but, with a little work, you can learn to quickly sift through crap like this and move on to meatier fare.
> You are calling the syscall "blocking" just because it performs its work inline.

Yes because there is _another_ mode of IO where it doesn't have to do that. So the reason that is called "blocking" is because there is another mode of operation (albeit it is exotic) where the process does not block while performing IO -- the kernel reads/writes the data on behalf of the process. If this second mode of performing IO did not ever exist you could just interchange arbitrarily asynchronous and non-blocking as synonyms.

Since you didn't bother reading the link I posted here is the basic matrix of IO operations:

Synchronous Asynchronous

Blocking read/write select/[e]poll

Non-Blocking O_NONBLOCK+E_AGAIN aio_*

There has been talk and various attempt at implementing aio_* style IO for network sockets on Linux, but nothing good so far.

> Even aio_read() performs some work inline (namely enqueing a read request).

Enqueuing the read request is not the same as actually copying gigabytes or terabytes of data from disk where the actual work is performed.
I strongly recommend both of these:

* The Practice Of Programming (co-authored by the 'K' in C's K&R)
* Code Complete 2
We built most of our community back in 2003/2004 by combination of contests and offline events. But on the other hand I'm not sure whether to call that successful or effective as it seems to me that most useful leads come from outside of this "community".
If it's something that simple then how on earth could MS ship it? What tests would they have run that could miss this - I'd think that a test on a file comparison program would include cycling through a single bit alteration and checking that it was captured up to some arbitrary number of bytes (and I'd think you'd let it run > 128 bytes too).

I'm not a coder, does this sort of assumption seem reasonable. If you can't get the basics right ...?
As a hiring manager, my 'bias' against CS degrees, such as it exists, is that they don't actually tell me much of anything.

Individuals have the capability to learn "compiler construction, functional programming the theory behind OO programming, prolog, how databases actually work", et al, independently of a degree, and yet, having that degree doesn't seem to actually guarantee that a potential hire understands any of the above.
In Windows XP, which is two generations outdated.
This post is obviously overly-biased against technical interviews. Steve Yegge said it best: "It's a bit easier to tell if someone's in great shape physically than if they're in great shape mentally. You can't just stare at their brain and hope to find a six-pack in all those folds." - http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/practicing-programm...

Reading this did remind me an old thread on StackOverflow though about some CS grad who still didn't feel like she knew how to code: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/43528/im-grad...
In what kind of real-world situations would this bug impact results?
I suddenly realized by accident that Chinese children do not have brothers and sisters. I mean just imagine a whole country... hundreds of millions of children... not one has a brother or a sister. Imagine a sixth of a population of the planet shudder when it hears words like "brotherly affection". Life must be so different there.
If you will be programming in Java, my condolences. (yes, I'm ready for the downvotes).

I'm sure there's some nice Java code out there. I recently agreed to do a Java project, and the 6 months I was at it sucked the joy of programming out of me.

I've spent the last few years doing Python, C and K, and in comparison, Java is so bureaucratic that I felt like 10% of my work was advancing towards my goal, and 90% was bureaucracy (compared to 20% bureaucracy in C, 5% in Python and 0.001% in K)

And as for books, I recommend Jon Bentley's "Programming Pearls" series, Steve McConnell's "Software Project Survival Guide" and DeMarco and Lister's "PeopleWare". The last two have more to do with project (and people) management than with software engineering - but you will need these skills much earlier than you'd expect, perhaps even in your first couple of months of work. And PeopleWare is a short and enjoyable read, you could put it in the "leisure" pile.
Are you sure you identified all of the 16 and 17 year olds?

No, but of all the young women I knew well, I first found out that they had made it into college a year or two early, then much later found out the kind of shenanigans they were up to. I also had a girlfriend in graduate school who had many stories of similar young women at her alma mater. Granted, it's much too small a sample size to be scientific, but it was a striking realization for me.

When my wife was a 15 year old college student, people assumed she was quite a bit older. She was intellectually, emotionally, and socially ready for college at that age. Those students who are ready in all three ways are often overlooked.

This is a good point. A student who is savvy and mature might want to keep their age a secret, and they would be missed by an observer.

On the other hand, I am more and more convinced that performance in substantive work is one of the few good indicators of emotional maturity.
http://www.finaid.wsu.edu/coa.html

$3000 less per semester, AFAIKT.
What a waste - why destroy something promising just to get another warm body for another useless conflict over a country so tiny most Americans walk longer to take a piss and which may or may not have once played a role as the place where some people who worshiped a god in their way slept until they were kicked away by some other people who worshiped the same God in a slightly different manner? Why not at least let the delusional people fight it out amongst themself.

And yes, it would have killed me to make the sentence shorter.
The word "evil" if much overused these days.

Slipping a little of topic: my main reason for distrusting Skype is that it is currently owned by eBay. eBay are a very good company, in that they are very good at being a company that does good for itself with little care elsewhere while occasionally pretending otherwise (like every now and then they have a "no PayPal feeds on donations to charity X" run).
That probably won't happen (anytime soon at least), because Rails takes the approach of generating your model attributes based on the table fields, not Django's (equally valid) approach of declaring the model attributes on the model and then generating the migrations based on that.

Personally, I prefer the Rails way of doing it, since it keeps my model files cleaner and avoids ambiguity (to me) when adding/removing/changing attributes. Of course, there is a tradeoff in increased startup time because Rails has to analyze your tables, but PassengerPreStart pretty much takes care of that annoyance for me (and I use background processing that doesn't require the Rails environment be instantiated for every job).
i think the cost of a booster is roughly 30m at best :)
Then do you have any alternate solutions? I highly doubt that all those men will be satisfied with sexbots, no matter how realistic the Japanese will have made them by then.

My presuppositions were purely based on the Chinese government's history of human rights violations. Given that the government is dominated by engineers, it's actually not that surprising that they focus on the ends rather than the means. I did not intend to inject any vitriol; I was simply giving some probable solutions based on an objective assessment of the situation.
I have often wondered whether free trade of goods has retarded the development of more sophisticated automation & robotics. What technology advancements have we missed out on when it's been cheaper to move manufacturing to China, rather than make capital investments at home?

Note that any decision to off-shore is distorted by a) limits to the free movement of labor and b) currency manipulation. So at the margin, you might replace an efficient domestic operation w/ an inefficient foreign process, and make up the difference in currency and labor cost arbitrage. In such cases, free trade of goods alone has a detrimental effect on technological progress. Or at least that's the speculation.
It would be better to give away cheap feature phones and a pair of headphones. Connectivity and content is more important than the size of the display. Even a system that can only do audio would be an amazing educational tool with the right content. An mp3 of a story or a lesson is content rich, a small file, and very cheap to play.
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This is an easy mistake to make, and miss when looking over your code. With hindsight - and having it explained to you - it is also a very easy mistake to understand.

That doesn't mean it was an easy mistake to find. I bet it went without being detected for a long time.
"She can go out and do things without worrying about degrees."

Her work life is set, but it still does nothing for personal growth. You usually need both to be successful. I wish I would have learned this earlier in my life. I went to a commuter school and did not get the full college experience.
It's a dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2442915
This is hilarious :) I honestly thought it was a joke... but now I am uncertain.. he seems to genuinely think that Britain is like this :S

The best bit is the wonderful caricature of Oxbridge interviews, as if the modern world is left behind once you step foot in those hallowed halls :D One guy at our school that went to Oxford worked like absolute hell to get his grades, pass his entrance exam and pass the exhausting round of interviews (2 days, testing all sorts of aptitidue).

Sure; the colleges have a tradition of "sprawling on sofa's" while enjoying a glass of the good stuff. But it is just tradition!

Aged 18, perhaps hungover, you read out your pitiful but elegant essay. The tutor points out gaps in your knowledge. For an hour, you talk your way around those gaps.

Hahahahahahahahaha. Ahem. All of the friends I have that went to a really top flight university (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, etc) were basically working flat out for their exams from about January every year..

(I was the drunkard.. see "winging it" below)

Traditionally, elite Britons then leave education aged 21. Until recently they rarely bothered with graduate school.

Meh, classic nonsense confusion regarding the British and American educations systems.

Britain’s rulers still struggle to judge scientific arguments about nuclear energy or climate change

Very much struggling to see American, or indeed any other countries, "rulers" doing any better.

It was the urge to amuse that recently prompted Cameron to riff on an old TV ad and shout “Calm down, dear,” at a female Labour MP.

Failing to understand British humour, he only got it in the neck because at that level of politics you have to work with international norms.

Admittedly, ignorance sometimes saves Britain’s rulers from error.

And here we really get to the crux of it. We are not talking about "winging it", or an aptitude for rhetoric, but "ignorance". I'll be first to admit that the UK political elite are, to some extent, "clueless" on technical topics. But... how is that any different from any other politician in the world? Is that not why they have advisors? Hmmmm.

Nah, this is just some sneer-y anti-British hit piece. A caricature of the great and powerful of Britian as bumbling idiots who get by through a wing and a prayer.

But.

Winging it very much is a British tradition. One I have always been consistently proud of, because we tend to be fucking awesome at it. I winged it through school, university, life, career. And it works, brilliantly.

So, ba shucks ;)

I could go to America and make a casual, 2 second, assessment that the masses were pretty crass (seriously, the amount, scale and volume of advertising on your TV is terrible!), thick people and that the ruling elite were basically a bunch of manic argumentative idiots. Because they are the most vocal or visible types of people. I could go to France and make a similar assessment of the people there as rude and xenophobic. etc etc. But that would be a disgustingly shallow view. Quid Pro Quo. This is just thinly disguised xenophobia and the FT should be ashamed to print it.
He may be referring to the claim that greater consumption of animal proteins, not fat, leads to higher incidence of cancer, heart disease, etc. It's a controversial claim, of course.
That's not the way it works; the "finder's fee" goes only to the first person to find an error.

Knuth also pays for suggested improvements, but these are a bit harder to get.

(Not that you asked, but I've got one of each.)
What this study doesn't show is whether the women wanted to work the full 40 hours and were not allowed to,...

It helps to read a report before claiming it doesn't show something.

According to the report I just cited, 32% of part time men wanted to work full time but were unable to, but only 20% of part time women women wanted to work full time.
What It's Like When Steve Jobs Chews You Out For A Product Failure
I will probably be downvoted for this, but I am a bit more impressed with a high school age person getting a college degree in biology or chemistry or engineering or math, not history and political science from a state school (no offense Wazzu alumns).