skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But it's basically impossible to judge the talent of a software engineer by looking at their past code -- there's too much context required.

I'm not really sure how this is true. I find that I can judge a software engineer very accurately based on his previous work, and intuit from the code a great deal of the context.

In fact, if I can't determine an engineer's talent without having more context, they are likely an average to below average engineer.

> I think the sports analogy is better in this respect, because it's much harder to separate the the record of a sports superstar from the team that they're on. So it is with non-trivial software.

I think what you're actually doing here is elucidating the difference between a 'superstar' and a 'team of average'. A senior high-quality engineer will have a considerable amount of new code that they've architected and implemented, whereas a team of average will have a considerable amount of code they have maintained.

Like most software organizations, our projects are divvied up into components and subcomponents, and individual engineers own components/subcomponents individually, with conformance to a broader set of development standards. The more junior an engineer, the more likely that they'll be assigned maintenance or improvement work rather than writing a component from scratch.

It would be very easy to evaluate the senior engineers by evaluating their components, whereas the junior and/or average engineers can only really be evaluated in context by the senior ones.
I disagree; as I indicated, it is easy to find one equation. Once you have one, enumerate all possible equations up to the length of the equation you found, and check them. Assuming a finite alphabet, that set is finite, so if checking whether a function's plot resembles the target text is computable, finding the set of shortest solutions is.

If checking a candidate is not computable, Kolmogorov complexity would rear its head, but I do not think the problem of finding the shorter equation is well-defined in that case.
I think the point people here are trying to drive home to you is that if you want people to risk their reputation by recommending your product to their friends then you need to let them use it first.

it's like a chef saying, "sure i'll cook at your private event. But first you have to recommend me to all of your friends."

What if the product is awful, why risk your reputation? Atleast give us something to try out first:)
I don't. Why would I want to upgrade my fixtures twice a year if they're working and look fine? I'd be happy to keep the same set for 20 years, myself.
| The failure of GoF, in particular, is that people took it as a golden rule for every environment

+1

Back in the days of C when assembly was still important, calling conventions represented patterns that ensure the stack got cleaned up properly. We may no longer talk about it, it is still there, doing its work silently. The design patterns were harvested from a language that didn't support lisp-style macros or continuations or closures.

Patterns are helpful for people who have to work with particular languages, but are not particularly useful to language designers. But then, they [language designers] already know that.
Quote of the year:

"If I had $8 million worth of easily convertible currency, there is absolutely no way I would store it on a public

website like Mt Gox, no matter how secure I believed it was.
If I had to store that much there, even temporarily, I would use a password so long it would make War and Peace look like a Twitter message."
First there were witches, then there were terrorists then there were the hackers. But as every child says those who accuse are the ones who really are.
HP's TouchPad available for pre-order on Amazon
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/09/inside-apple/

To get the full article, you have to buy the Fortune ipad issue or buy it for a buck from Amazon. I thought it was worth the buck, FWIW.
I wonder what's the next coin when people get bored of playing with bitcoins?
Huh? What have apps got to do with web browsing? I could own all those apps and still spend 90% of my time using an ipad for browsing the web.
Have you been to a fertility clinic? There are some treatment options available.
Yes, but I think you missed the point... I was talking about how the Unreal Engine uses a third-party development environment, makes portable content but some of their games are huge success cases on iOS. Basically I was replying to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2674382

But I agree 100% with your second assertion.
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No problem, hopefully his contact is of value -
Minecraft mapping: Reading Minecraft files
Since the regulators have no "skin in the game" and will never be imprisoned for a dangerous decision - why exactly do they care? What's their motivation for decisions?

Whistleblowers are far more likely to be prosecuted than the regulators.
I have some bytecoins over here. They're worth roughly 8x a bitcoin.
Thanks. Still no luck, don't use Chrome day to day, and the original GreaseMonkey script that it's based on doesn't seem to work for me. Might give it a crack myself some time.
Didn't MtGox say they'll rollback all transactions from that time period, including the legit ones?
"If I had to store that much there, even temporarily, I would use a password so long it would make War and Peace look like a Twitter message." - Brilliant
The end user is not fine. He is more likely to see results that he actually agree with. See, the original confirmation bias will cause you to seek opinions you agree with more often than others. The search engine will then conclude that you are more interested in the kind of sources those opinions come from. That would be true, by the way, but then comes a point when a quick glance at your search engine result will show you more of what you agree with, and less of what you disagree with.

Now go use that as an estimation of popularity and veracity. I bet many people do, without knowing the result is strongly biased by their own prior behaviour.

Search engine, as the sole entry point of the web, do bias it. Page Rank for instance, could trigger a feedback loop: if a site is more prominent in searches, it will get more links. That will get them more search prominence, and feedback and foom.

Now is the popular bias better than the personal bias? I think it is. One would at least get to be exposed to other's opinions, instead of just his own.

If you just care about the economy of the web, in the sense of selling, advertising, promoting, buying… then of course the personal bias is currently best. That's the most efficient way to milk the tear$ out of eyeballs. The easiest way to reward the brains behind those eyeballs. When it's all about money, there is absolutely no problem with the method. But I have other values besides money. A very important one is respecting curiosity and search for truth. The personal bias doesn't.
This is an interesting article about an interesting ruling.

Of course, the overriding fact determined by Judge Pro was that Righthaven did not have standing to sue. Good for Judge Pro.

Also:

> "Righthaven did not present any evidence that the market for the work was harmed by Hoehn’s noncommercial use for the 40 days it appeared on the website. Accordingly, there is no genuine issue of material fact that Hoehn’s use of the work was fair and summary judgment is appropriate,” Judge Pro ruled.

That sounds to me like he is saying that Righthaven just wrote up the wrong stuff. They did not address the things that the judge considered to be the major issues.

But all that aside, there is, IMHO, one very striking thing in this article:

> “While the work does have some creative or editorial elements, these elements are not enough to consider the work a purely ‘creative work’ in the realm of fictional stories, song lyrics, or Barbie dolls,” he wrote. “Accordingly, the work is not within ‘the core of intended copyright protection.’”

Seriously? The judge is saying that a 19-paragraph newspaper editorial is not covered by copyright law??? That sounds huge, to me.

IANAL, so I have a couple of questions for any actual lawyers who may be reading this.

(1) Am I correct, that the above statement is, as I said, "huge"?

(2) Since that statement was not required for the support of the actual decision -- due to Righthaven's lack of standing -- does the statement that the editorial is not within "the core of intended copyright protection", have the force of legal precedent?
Yes, of course everyone is entitled to an opinion. I'm not saying they should shut up, I'm saying I'm baffled as to why they pick the core strength of the fastest growing companies and say "this is wrong".

Perhaps it's that they are in the business of trolling, they get more eyeballs if they state very counter-intuitive things, like John Dvorak from PC Magazine.

You know what Twitter is doing wrong? Limiting its users to 140 characters. People need more characters to express their thoughts. Twitter needs to be more like Wordpress, a vehicle to really transmit your deepest thoughts and not meaningless chit-chat. And embedded pictures for those who like sharing their thoughts in a non-text medium. That would capture lots of market share from WP and Tumblr.

Just wrote Fast Co's next article.
Whom are you targeting? I have never heard of a gift registry, so unless you are targeting only people that already know the term, try to describe the general purpose of your app. Copyblogger is a nice resource on how to write marketing texts and headlines:

http://www.copyblogger.com

For example, your headline (Welcome to..) is basically meaningless. Instead, try to describe your service in it. AirBnBs headline says "Find a place to stay". Maybe yours could say something like "Manage your gift-getting"? (Wikipedias description of a gift registry).

Also, read up on typography, a few small changes can have a great effect:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/tag/typography/
http://www.alistapart.com/topics/topic/typography/

For example, your headline (Welcome to..) doesn't differentiate itself from the text and therefore doesn't grab the viewers attention. Try to squint your eyes and move back from the screen, you can't see if it's a headline or a part of the text. Try making the font larger and bolder.

I wish you good luck on your endeavor.
I'm sorry, but a "View Customizations" link is nowhere near as clear as a simple statement like "These search results have been personalized." right on top of the search results page, where you can't miss it.

But the real solution is to use a search engine that does not track you. Even better is to use it in such a way that it can't track you (ie. through a Tor proxy, while taking other reasonable precautions).
I would take the 1,000 and come up with 199 other projects, five of which would be oversight of the other 194, and two of them would be to come up with crazy new ideas. Monitor the progress and I guarantee I can find another 5 brilliant programmers in there. Meanwhile, I'll iterate over 1000 projects and blow your socks off with 5.
It's reasonable and it tells you something about the organization's values, but it only goes so far. Overhead costs are a poor way to judge a charity's effectiveness. More:

http://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a-...
iPhone programming tutorials including some on cocos2d for iPhone
This report was widely discussed, in recent days: http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/06/17/report-the-most-common-w...
I would say exchange them for some farmville coins. Or a farmville goat, and hope it makes enough milk.
Bloody scabs! At a time when unions worldwide need solidarity and they're undercutting them. Nice one. I guess this is the lovely caring capitalism we've been hearing about.
Unless apparently it is from a group criticizing the government. As we see in the article, that's the real crime.

Read it again, or better yet read the linked Reuters article, which RWR just re-wrote and sexed-up. There is no causal connection made between the call for increased sentence maximums and criticism of the government. The only connection made is that the two things are mentioned in the same article.

The idea that you've come away with is not based in fact, but in poor reporting.
The poster makes some good points about the inconsistencies in Mt. Gox's handling of things, but it seems to me that he's ascribing to malice what is well explained by incompetence on the part of the person or people running the site.

The security practices are appalling, and their lack of clarity on the counter-party issue is damning. If I were Kevin---or, indeed, any customer of that exchange---I'd take my money and go elsewhere.

Still, it's pretty astounding how myopic the rest of the Mt Gox forum users appear. They're taking a situation that's beyond a doubt the fault of the Mt Gox admins and getting ready to lynch a dude who seems to have acted rather reasonably (intentionally not exploiting a known loophole to exceed the withdrawl limit, reporting his disposition immediately to the site's maintainer, et cetera).
Is there a place one can play with HFT (or just automated trading) in the bitcoin market?
That's a good point... we are using Launchrock's default settings to figure out how to send out invites. I've also been asking people who don't want to share to DM or tweet us at @vizualizeme if they want super early access. Everyone will get a beta invite eventually, though
The Atlantic: a debate on alternative medicine:

--------------------------------------------------

"For years, the medical profession kept a cool distance from alternative medicine, which most doctors dismissed as the province of hippies and snake oil salesmen. Now that's changing, as David H. Freedman explains in a new Atlantic article. More and more physicians are recommending alternative therapies to their patients and many now say that acupuncture and meditation work better than expensive drugs at treating major chronic diseases.

Is alternative medicine really ready to claim a place in the mainstream? And what does the popularity of alternative treatments tell us about the weaknesses of modern medicine? To answer these questions, we asked seven leaders in the field as well as vocal skeptics to comment on Freedman's essay. We’ll be posting one response each day over the next couple of weeks."

http://www.theatlantic.com/debates/alternative-medicine
That's true about everything else too, not just technology. We just happen to be agitated because that's what we know best. Opinions are a dime a dozen.
Have you tried using the virtualizing listbox?
I've been the lucky rider of a Mercedes AMG the three times I've used Uber in SOMA.
My bytecoins are worth 9 bitcoins each because they are parity-checked.
There is hnsearch now

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=javascript+...
I think if you attempt to hire 1000 pretty good programmers, it is likely you'll end up with a least one exceptional programmer.

If you were to divide up the 1000 pretty good programmers into 200 teams of 5 people each, and give them the same high level of difficulty task as a team of 5 exceptional programmers. What are the odds that the exceptional team produces the best result?

The ratio in developer ability is a bit hard to get a handle on. The study seems to show that for analysts the environment can also play a big role in individual performance. That is also true in software development. Good leadership, strong peers, and the right cultural fit can probably make at least a 2X improvement in individual performance over tyrannical leadership, mediocre peers and a corrosive culture. Domain expertise is another element in performance, often just in avoiding obvious but still costly mistakes.

Some companies thinks they've hired superstars, but really only hired a bunch of arrogant pricks.
I am sure we are hearing only one side of this story, however it seems to me that this is the beginning of the end. I say this because the trust, which is everything for partners, seems to be gone, and you have been proven replacable (and thus only marginally valuable). I'd suggest save the friendship (whatever is left of it), and move on as quickly and painlessly as possible. See if you can keep some equity in exchange for your initial work, but not play an active role anymore (you will not be happy with him or with the company after your demotion, you will see it as something you helped build and got kicked out of). You can turn this around by getting some equity, thus being a silent and inactive stakeholder, and exiting quietly (you got more than you ever wanted - experience plus money, and he got rid of you without giving away too much).
Although I can completely understand why this guy (the sumbitter?) disagrees with MtGox's solution, I thought it seemed perfectly reasonable.

Even though MtGox never stated they'd interfere, being hacked is unexpected enough to allow some leeway with follow-up. If the flashcrash happened organically, I doubt MtGox would revert the trades.
Groupon should buy foursquare and roll it into their system to help keep consumers coming back to their customers locations.
Almost feels like it's one of the MtGox accounts itself. Transaction-wise, it has been making easily 200-300 BTC a day. Perhaps also doing some personal buying and selling...
Agreed on shipped vs. sold (Though I DID have a conversation 2 months ago with a B&N employee - says they went out of stock a couple times).

Agree also about the recipe for success: Find a niche and optimize for it.

If even Apple doesn't yet know what their tablet is for, how are we supposed to know what their inferior knock-offs are for? But it sure is obvious what a Color Nook is for. It does have an app store but the apps are for the most part related to reading, as you'd expect.

The fact that the Color Nook can be converted into the least expensive half-decent Android tablet is just an interesting aside.

EDIT: typo
And then Authority came and forced him to give it all back...
Big Changes on SkyDrive
That's an already debunked mistranslation; the article you link to has a correction. I don't know why some people don't want to admit that the Tab did pretty well but the evidence is that it did. Not just the numbers but the fact that they made another one, and those same retailers and wireless companies are gladly stocking it yet again. They wouldn't have done so if they says were "quite small" as many media outlets were happy to (falsely) report.
My ex, and accountant and, shortly later, a CPA, was never asked in an interview what sort of outside accounting projects she worked on. Companies didn't ask for a 'passionate' accountant, they asked for someone with who could reliably get the work done on time. The companies she worked for sent her to training and testing on their dime and time.
The "17.8" on that splash page... that's from the Feltron report, isn't it? (Just checked: it is). Is Nicholas Feltron involved in this?
Anonymity has real value, both in comments and elsewhere
You can usually get a deal with hw/drive vendors to train and certify your in house staff to declare drives dead and then field destroy with replacement credit.
So - are people just supposed to not leave their house because taxi drivers decide to not work on a given day?

This is San Francisco. Public transit sucks, and owning a car sucks(though less than public transit). Many people rely on taxis for their livelihood and they will be screwed over if they can't go places tomorrow, regardless of the reason why.
This reminds me of a conversation I was having with a friend a couple of days ago about network affects. Once a system gets too big, the nice people that started it start getting screwed by the people who don't understand (or care about) the founding ideals.

The problem with a trading house like Mt. Gox is that some people assume that all of the players are altruistic (these "some people" being "me", somebody with a technical, non-financial interest in bitcoin).

What happened here is just natural selfishness: the person that executed this buy order knew that the market was crashing, and that something was going wrong, but decided to exploit it regardless.

Then trying to withdraw $5 million USD from Mt. Gox?

I guess it's just crowd psychology. "If I don't exploit this market, somebody else will!"

It's sad, and it's just my naivety showing here, but bitcoin looks like a nerdy sandbox from the outside (casually reading about it on HN); it's a place for crypto/economics geeks to play around with finance.

Of course it isn't, and the actions of this [very greedy] person demonstrate that.

So why do I want to use bitcoin? What advantages does it offer me over USD right now? Before seeing this crash for the last couple of days, it felt like the advantage was that bitcoin users were mostly geeks, and mostly trustworthy. The regulation that bitcoin is avoiding is starting to look pretty darn appealing.

How stupid/childish of me is it to daydream about a world where somebody saw this crash happening, did exactly what he did (or maybe put in the buy order at exactly $0.02), held the bitcoins until the crash ended, then just gave them back to the sellers at cost?
Take a piece of technology like memcached which has gotten really popular in the last few years. It's an incredibly simple piece of technology really, a server with a simple protocol that allows you to set or get bytearrays by a key, and smart clients that deterministically map a key to a server. Together, you get a lineraly scaling global cache.

I've worked with web technologies for 15 years now, and I've worked with some pretty smart developers, but not smart enough to piece something like memcached together. We've done lots of different cache systems, but not as good.

But once we saw memcached, the great developers I worked with instantly got the brilliance of it, and went "Duh, why didn't I think of that?".
We use Erlang at Smarkets.com for a lot of things including a trading exchange
Actually, bytecoins are worth exactly CHAR_BIT times 1 bitcoin. Check limits.h.
Iteration (aka trial-and-error) occurs on three levels, with feedback from users; to pivoting; and he's elsewhere said YC was initially a way to learn about angel investing, by having many investments, turning over quickly. Like geneticists studying fruit-flies - or Christensen studying the disk-drive market.

One of the disappointing things he's elsewhere said they've learnt through this is that smartness is less important than they'd thought. I wonder why he's fallen back to "smart people" in this interview - maybe it's code for "good people".
#5: http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html
@anonymousDan

My reply was more targeted at this part of his comment:"apps that are essentially just iPad optimized web pages, and games that could have been done in a properly touch-enabled Flash (which may not exist yet, but will come eventually)."

But if you want evidence for people not spending majority time using browser on iPad, here is Flurry's analytic data:

http://blog.flurry.com/bid/63907/Mobile-Apps-Put-the-Web-in-...

My conclusion stands, his experience is not very typical.
That sounds like 2Passwords to me.