skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say that's neither surprising nor something to be annoyed about. It's the developers who should know better, and their responsibility alone to inform management about why.
Wireless config Extractor v1.0
Show HN: Hacker News Instant (3 hour project)
Let me expand my point a little.

It is striking to me how often a world renowned expert, really top-notch in his field, can turn around and say something spectacularly dumb in an area that isn't his field. You'd be surprised how often people just don't know what they don't know, or get emotionally attached to something foolhardy. You get an expert entertainer talking about statecraft or a hard scientist talking about religion or even just a software guy talking about hardware. It can be gobsmacking.

There is a train of thought that tries to classify people into reliable and unreliable -- worth listening to or not. And I think that's a very bad idea. No one is perfectly reliable. No one has a completely rational and educated worldview. No one. I think just about everyone is going to have an opinion about something that I think is monstrously, provably, stupidly wrong.

I think the best you can do as far as reputation goes is assign it to (person, topic) tuples.

But I still think that's a heuristic at best. Perhaps a necessary one, but I think it's better still to reserve judgement for evaluation of the evidence. Listen to what someone says. Listen to the arguments he makes. Listen to the arguments other people make. Trust your own experience and reason, and go with what makes sense.

What I am saying is that if you ignore people who you think believe stupid things, you'll be ignoring a lot of people who really do know a lot of things worth listening to. And I think more than that, I'm saying that if you classify information, not by empirical value, but by the tribe of who it comes from, you're evaluating the world more like a cultist than like a scientist.
Put in a quick first entry for the contest (HNInstant.com):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2621144

More coming...
I don't think Microsoft should be a startup incubator. I can't imagine much which is further from their current area of expertise now.

Also, why would they do this when they already put enormous amounts of money into R&D? I think you could make a much better argument for bringing more, smaller things out of their research into the market.
Fail Series: "I was losing $1 million every week" - with James Altucher
Unfortunately, banning abusive or spamming users is basically providing feedback that they have been caught. So allowing them to continue expending effort instead of just creating a new account that will also have to be caught and banned creates a more difficult terrain for the abuser.

"hellbanning" in my mind, though, ought typically be applied to automated spammers and other miscreants, not actual humans with opinions, etc.
New York is still full of schemers, compared to SF Bay area. I lived in Mountain View for two years, San Francisco for three, and NYC for two -- I am in the process of moving back to Mountain View. I love NYC as a place to live, but found it frustrating for tech work. The job offers I've had in the SF bay area always seemed reasonable to me. In New York, I've received ridiculous low-ball offers, and have had a few friends have the same experience, but only in New York. They all have moved to San Francisco now.
It turns out that if you ban a certain set of users they will react strongly, often causing many more problems. At Chesspark I was just amazed at the lengths people would go to to get revenge for some perceived wrong when they got reprimanded for violating community standards.

Making them think nothing happened but removing them from the rest of the site is extremely effective.

Blackholing IPs is a poor solution in practice, since many users can change IPs on a whim, and some ISPs run DHCP out of large subnets that may contain respectable users.
It was part of the structured programming dogma. One entry point, one exit point. Multiple return was lumped in with using goto.

I never use goto, but I often use multiple returns similar to the examples in this article.

I have sadly code reviewed many pieces of code with the nesting problem.
If the money came from Groupon's revenues, sure. But if he owned stock in the company and he sold his stock to someone else for cash, what exactly is the problem here?
Using new HNsearch.com APIs, designed, developed, launched in 3 hours. More coming, this is about as MVP as it gets. Same ranking algorithm as used on HNSearch.com. BTW, hidden feature...you can double click words in search results to load a search for that term.
It's worth remembering that the expression "maximize shareholder value" is composed of three words, each of which represents a highly elastic variable. In combination, this set of terms can be defined (and redefined!) in a manner that will justify virtually anything.

Take "maximize" - depending on your timeframe, this can mean a range of very different things. And if you cleverly avoid specifying any timeframe at all, you've effectively said nothing whatsoever.

Now take "shareholder," which can refer to everyone from mutual funds that may buy and hold for decades to bots on high-frequency trading platforms that measure their holds in nanoseconds. There is virtually nothing that these extremes have in common. Given a hoplessly conflicted set of interests, how does management decide whose benefit they're going to privilege? More to the point, if they DON'T make a clear choice, how can they claim that the generic word has any legally-binding meaning?

Same goes for "value" - not only can this mean different things to different investors, those meanings can be diametrically opposed. For instance, does "value" mean providing a return big enough to outweigh very substantial exposure to risk? Or does "value" mean bunker-grade protection from risk, even at the cost of a low return? It's yet another very elastic term that can mean a lot of different things - or nothing at all, if the appropriate frame of reference is withheld.

The takeaway is simple: if anyone tells you they're "maximizing shareholder value" without carefully defining ALL THREE words, they're probably lying, which is ironic, because they're also implying that they're living up to their fiduciary responsibility. In reality, chances are good that they're doing the opposite.
Discussion of the same paper from yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2615096
Sure, but that's a different issue entirely.
What happens when a Social Game - is run with Bots?
Knowing how to write Java is absolutely not needed at all. Knowing how to read Java can be useful depending on what libraries you need. The one thing that you have to learn no matter what is the basic IO classes, which are covered pretty well in http://copperthoughts.com/p/clojure-io-p1/.

Before the clojure.java.io namespaces was created, it used to be necessary to interact directly with those classes for even basic usage. (Kids these days! They've got it so easy.)

The web application ecosystem can be a bit intimidating to peace-loving programmers with all its talk of wars, but even that is changing with deployment options like Elastic Beanstalk and Heroku.

Anyway, you hear horror stories about Enterprise Java Beans, dependency injection frameworks, Maven, and whatnot, but you never see any of that in everyday Clojure.
I'm willing to pay for email instead of using Gmail. The combination of Google's massive accumulation of data about you and American authorities' relatively easy access to the data strikes me as somewhat creepy. Google claims to not be evil, but the truth is, we don't know, because Google employees are contractually bound to secrecy on a lot of issues.

People say that "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product," and there's something to that.

The amount of money needed to get a normal IMAP account with SSL is quite small, and worth it if you ask me.

http://runbox.com/ and http://gandi.net/ are good options for those who want paid secure accounts hosted in Europe.
A: That's impossible to do. B: They do not have incentive to criminalize things.

A resident who criminalizes looses far more than they could possibly make. A resident who encourages criminal activity also looses more than they could make.

And if the money vanishes (for example they burn it) then that reduces inflation which is exactly equal to giving it to everyone in the country. So you might as well give it directly because different area have different levels of crime.
Snippets Velocity
Interesting. Is it normal that the browser's back button is essentially rendered useless after a query or two?
Thanks for your input, but what were you saying about "anecdotal evidence does not a large dataset make" ; )
Harvard only gives out B.A. degrees (more precisely, A.B. -- Artium Baccalaureatus spelled in Latin) in the sciences. I would assume the same for their masters program, but it is effectively equivalent to an MS.
GitHub Jobs is a great resource, as well.

http://jobs.github.com/
This directly relates to a popular HN story from the other day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2594668 (in the sense that the solution outlined in that story has sort of been evaded by some optimizations made by Ruby core - temporarily, hopefully).
Back button support should be there (for most browsers) :)
Show HN: Find the perfect gift together
No thank you. http://i.imgur.com/bywAE.png
Announcing theVintage Computer Festival Southwest 2.0
Duff's advice on avoiding if/else is echoed in a functional programming context by CMU's Bob Harper, who writes, "[A]void if-then-else entirely, and instead use only case analysis for branching..."
http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/some-advice-...
A working scale model Cray-1A
Setup a bare git repository in your DropBox folder and clone from it into your development folder. The DropBox folder will act as your "remote" origin. Now you can push and pull changes to it. It will physically get backed up when DropBox notices file changes.
Essentially, you stay away from it because of the low signal to noise ratio.

For employers, the deluge of candidates who think that technology is HOTHOTHOT means that they have to look at far more resumes to find people who are worth bringing in to interview. Skipping Craigslist, for many companies, acts as a low-pass filter - the bet being that you'll ignore more noise than you will signal. After all, the good employer probably only needs one good employee, not 100 mediocre ones (especially in engineering.)

For employees, a similar phenomenon occurs. Once you've been burned once or twice in your career, you start to notice that managers at worse jobs tend to rely heavily on Craigslist, Monster and the like. These companies know that technology is HOTHOTHOT, but they not be savvy (or even care about technology) enough to go to meetups and post jobs in ways that engage the tech community. So again, many of the best employees will only use craigslist as a last resort, because they don't want to deal with the poor postings. Ignoring it is a low-pass filter for employees as well - after all, they only need one job.

There are plenty of more tech-specific sites with "elite" job boards, where the sheer knowledge of knowing about the job posting site - and understanding the technologies and discussions around them - is enough of a filter to encourage both good employees and good employers to show up. (Hint: check out HN user whoshiring.) But at the end of the day, the best jobs are almost always filled the old fashioned way - by word of mouth. And that's why it makes sense to get out there and meet people early and often.

(In a happy coincidence, it also turns out you'll learn a lot more in general by meeting and talking to people and frequenting tech sites instead of sitting in front of Craigslist.)

Obviously this stuff is wild generalization - and as with any low-pass filter, you take a risk by ignoring Craigslist. I usually go to Craigslist once in a while myself. In my experience, it's worth checking on them once in a while (if only to see what you'll find), but not relying on them.
Ubuntu releases Ensemble, the equivalent of DPKG recipes for deployment
The differences between Java and its bytecode are pretty small. There are only a couple things that you can do in bytecode that you can't do in Java source and they are mostly irrelevant.
tl;dr: Chef recipes need to be modified by anyone who want to use them. Ensemble offers "formulas" that can be re-used and shared with no modifications needed.

Formulas link: https://ensemble.ubuntu.com/docs/formula.html

Ensemble link: https://ensemble.ubuntu.com/

> sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ensemble/ppa

> sudo apt-get update

> sudo apt-get install principia-tools

> export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

> export AWS_SECRET_KEY_ID=0123456789ABCDEF

> ensemble bootstrap

> principia getall /some/path/for/formulas

> /usr/share/principia-tools/tests/mediawiki.sh
/some/path/for/formulas

> What does this give you, well it should give you a 7 node mediawiki cluster of t1.micro’s in the us-east-1 region of EC2.
This is better written as "I agree".
Compcert uses small-step operational semantics for both the source language and the assembly output (and intermediate languages that are irrelevant to the final statement of the semantic preservation theorem).

Specifying such a semantics is basically like writing a very simple functional interpreter for the language. I don't see how it could get much simpler. Here is the description of the semantics for their input language:

http://compcert.inria.fr/doc/html/Csem.html

and their PPC output:

http://compcert.inria.fr/doc/html/Asm.html
Since we were talking about Java and not bad engineering management and poor design choices, I thought I would point out that programming in Java doesn't have to be like that. Perhaps I should call it Java!EE.
I noticed a good percentage of the spam I received originated from SearchYC links (via links placed on HN under a different account name).

I would be interested to know if HN also receives less spam with the removal of SearchYC.

Does HN track stats on this?
I will join your gentle threadjack, because it runs along an interesting tangent.

I think a lot of schools give lip-service to segregating "advanced" students but miss the point of the exercise. I was placed in an accelerated maths class at school. The school determined which students were ready to learn more advanced mathematical concepts by test grades.

Long story short, the class was generally filled with unquestioning swots who could complete hundreds of worked examples according to the textbook but had no critical analasis skills whatsoever.

When the "advanced" class is seen as a bonus option available for successful students, unfortunately teachers aren't inclined reward the BS-detecting students, who have questioned their authoritah too many times.
If you are very new to the industry, you might face some difficulty initially since people are not sure if its worth paying you more when there are others who are ready to do same work at cheaper rate.

But if you have good portfolio, audience, contacts, you won't face much problem.

If somebody is cheaper, there's a reason why they are cheaper.
If you are good at what you are doing, people will be happy to pay you what you are worth.

Good Luck :)
Q1 2011 after the Engadget story covering his work.
searchyc is still alive and well http://searchyc.com/
Show HN: I wrote a really simple client side HeatMap Effect generating script.
The use case am considering is to do self testing on your site yourself, rather than depending on any third party, I plan to OpenSource it.

I am storing the mouse movement coordinates of the user in a javascript array which I plan to send to server every few seconds and save into DB.

Where I plan to aggregate the data and show final results.

What do you think?
http://websymphony.github.com/labs/trackerapp/

Currently tested on only Chrome.
World's first Facebook Like House
Kendinizi evinizde hissetmeyeceksiniz
> In a pinch it can create them from fat or protein,
> but that's pretty inefficient.

[citation needed]

See vitamin B-12 and vitamin C, for example. On the other hand, in a pinch your body can convert fat/protein into energy rather than carbs. Though your urine may be smelly from the chemicals it uses.

> The "complete protein" thing is a myth, at least
> in the sense that you need to eat (e.g.) beans
> and rice at the same meal. You do need to get all
> of the essential amino acids at some point, but
> they don't have to come in one slug.

I wasn't referring to the idea that they need to be in the same meal. I mostly calling out the fact that 'we' always tend to refer to 'protein,' but it's possible to eat tons of protein and still be missing out on some essential amino acids.

> Also, the third world diets that you advocate tend
> to be

Huh? Where did I advocate that? I was using 'rice + beans' as an example. Also, where did I say anything about Whole Foods? You seem to be constructing a bunch of straw men arguments based on the idea that I'm some person that fits into some sort of 'bucket' with other people you disagree with.
It seems like an easy way to make a few extra dollars. I'd like to try it, but my validation email hasn't come through yet.

Edit: Well, the email came through and I tried nagging someone (who I believe is the OP). It seems that there aren't many nag requests on the site, meaning there's a supply problem.
I lived in Hoboken for three years while working in NYC. First, I'd recommend living very close to the PATH station. The buses are very hit or miss, depend on traffic, and don't run frequently on weekends.

Also, if you're out in NYC on a weekend and want a cab home to somewhere like brooklyn, it'll only cost you like 15 bucks. However, if you want one to Hoboken, it'll cost you around 50-60... Really a pain when the PATH only comes every half hour after midnight.
Hacking on rails these days, probably won't go back to F# for a while.
Anywhere in midtown, village, it's going to be at least 1600 for a studio for the most part. Just spent a month looking for a place in greenwich village. And it's hard to find a place without using a broker, who's going to take 15% of the annual rent (almost 2 months of rent) as a broker fee.
That's a red herring.

Your participation in government and society is still contingent. If you don't want to pay taxes, go become a monk and take a vow of poverty (yeah you will still have to file returns, but whatever).

If you participate in society, you are going to have to pay taxes. Just the same way that if you want to get access to the internet, you will have to pay a company like comcast.

And, when it comes down to it, the oil and automobile companies, as a practical matter, have done a pretty good job of ensuring that Americans have to have cars, and have to pay for gas in order to live in society. That is for all intents and purposes the same thing.
I got 3 interviews via Craigslist with decent companies (startup, SEO company startup, magazine) before I got a chance to even look somewhere else to apply. A week later, I began interning at the startup.

Also, I started looking for internships after I got out of school (late May, early June). That's pretty late, I think.

That said, there are probably better places to look, but Craigslist is pretty ubiquitous. I don't think everyone recruits through HN or StackOverflow or any other similar site. It'd be nice, but a lot more people know about Craigslist... right?

Although, word of mouth is hands down better in every way. So you say there are lot of these meetups, eh?
I find this kind of performance regression and the blasé response extremely frustrating and disappointing. What could the MRI team be working on that's more important than fixing a bug that quadruples startup time for the most popular Ruby applications? This should be fixed in a quick patch to 1.9.2. There are tens of thousands of developers wasting oodles of man-hours frustrated with this. It's bad for Ruby and bad for Rails.

Why is this not the #1 priority for the MRI team?
To answer your question more directly: There are a ton of people applying for these jobs. Like, crazy amounts.
And why wouldn't there be? It's a great field to be in right now.

But thanks to things like the Mythical Man-Month[0], engineering is a field where people would rather have 1 incredible engineer than 10 mediocre engineers for the same price. So for someone with talent and the right reputation, there's arguably no better field to be in than engineering.

So basically, if you're good at what you do, engineering is one of the hottest job markets in the country. (In NY, the hotness is particularly exaggerated, because the startups there are the companies most likely to want to keep their teams small, and hire the best - and they have to compete with the financial sector, which provides large numbers of engineers a steady job with high pay.)

If you're not good at what you do (or even if you just want to get better at what you do), don't assume the hotness of the market will get you a job. The market is hot for engineers, but I'd say it's only hot for good engineers, again, due to the Mythical Man-Month effect.

But don't be discouraged. Just by being proactive getting internships and participating on Hacker News, you're probably better than 80% of the applicants your age out there. That's why so many of our answers are assuming that you're a good candidate - because odds are, you probably are. :)

[0] If you haven't read this, take a few moments out this summer to do so. It's a quick, breezy and incredibly informative read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
Works on FireFox. Very cool :) Hope to see continued development on this.
"Even the first year investment bankers usually make at least 50k base - and that's the "don't worry about the number you'll make more in bonuses" number."

Don't rely on the bonuses!

I've been in and known of too many companies which work your ass off with the promise of a big bonus, but when it comes time to deliver the bonus they always have some excuse for either giving you a low bonus or none at all.

Many Wall St firms are also like revolving doors and sweatshops, which treat a many of their employees like crap with the rationale that you're lucky to be working there at all. This is especially true of entry-level employees. But if you can tough it out to senior level, you'll probably do a lot better.
Looking at gender differences at Twitter
An analysis of the differences between male and female tweets. While you're at it, you can also check out the patterns according to the time of the day: http://www.tweetolife.com/hour/
Hacker News now has 3 slashtags on unscatter.com. /hn /hnstories /hncomments
Why not Linux logo?
haha amazing idea!
Makes maintenance simpler; any resource cleanup can go through one point and you can see that it is correct when modifications are made. (C++ gives this to you with destructors, mostly).

Also makes it easier to step through code ("I'll just set a breakpoint and see what this function returns...").

I usually advocate using early returns for near boilerplate things like parameter checking, then a single return that does cleanup and exit, with 'goto' encouraged as the proxy for a return-in-the-middle. I think of it as similar to what a C++ compiler does for you.

These days I code for maintenance, since someone /is/ going to go in and start adding early returns and subsequent bugs. Plan for code rot.