skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[To preface this, I'm assuming you're in or about to enter college]

If you're really motivated, I would recommend looking through previous years' lists of participating organizations for Google Summer of Code [0]. These organizations post lists of project ideas for GSoC, but of course you don't have to participate in GSoC to actually do them. In fact, I would guess that a lot of the project ideas are never even worked on at all. Go ahead and search through the projects for something that interests you and then shoot someone an email or hang out in their IRC (if they have one). Most people would be happy to have you on board.

IMHO, OS stuff is really tough. I just recently graduated college, and I wouldn't dare bother with the time commitment required to get involved in OS development (I'm looking at you, linux kernel). It's just not for me. Maybe you'll like it though. :)

[0] - http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/accepted_orgs/google/gsoc...
Can't you just tell them to stop contacting you? Works for me thus far.
What would be good would be to have new laws sunset over a shorter period of time, say 5 years, and then they would renew for a longer period of time each time they were renewed.

Kind of like a generational garbage collector.
It's not highlighted specifically, and it's weak on specifics, but the article points repeatedly at the failure to scope the Shuttle program realistically, and/or to re-scale the program once its true dimensions (costs, risks, launch frequency) were apparent.

The author definitely has an axe to grind. "Failure" is a qualitative assessment, though it's objectively true that the program underperformed on the bases listed above.
Last time I looked, MacPorts had a more paranoid approach to dependencies. That can be good and bad. Homebrew can be easier to use, until you run into a corner case that trips it up. MacPorts can be frustrating in how many dependencies it will insist on installing its own version even though the system-provided version might have worked.

I've gone back and forth. For a while homebrew could install a working GHC for me while I wasn't having any luck with MacPorts. Later something else caused me to switch back to MacPorts. Neither is perfect. Even MacPorts only allows dependencies at the package level, without regard to variants, or versions, if I recall correctly.
Yeah but when you do currency speculation you can hold the assets in banks and be protected by deposit insurance.
Here's the thing that I think some of the engineers in this discussion might be missing: A company shouldn't consist of only engineers.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a software developer, and I'm a bit of a software snob. I have trouble (though I've mostly overcome it) seeing Managers, CEOs, marketing people, sales people, "designers", etc. as doing "real work" because they're not engineers.

Maybe designers feel the same way about me. They should.

But the reality is, good companies need good designers, and with experience I've discovered that designers can really blow your mind sometimes.

But the hiring process for a designer is not the same as the hiring process for an engineer.

One area where I've personally been very dissatisfied with google is the lack of customer support. I can't imagine asking programming questions to a customer support person who was expected to help people with their adwords account.

The person being interviewed here, and who wrote this blog post is one of those "customer support" type people. Not pretending to be an engineer.

If you only hire engineers and your hiring process is engineer focused, you're going to miss out on a lot of really good people, and you're going to have non-engineering roles staffed by engineers who just want google on their resume so they can go get an engineering job later.

And these are not the people you want helping others with their adwords account.

(Of course I'm not familiar with the internal structure of google, so I'm giving examples meant to be representative of the problem, but that might not actually be true.)
but what exactly is that set of capabilities, i've heard anonymity touted as one, but according to this article anonymity is clearly not a given.
You had a bit more leverage going in than most, be fair.
An expanded and slightly edited list from the same author. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=331531

The key with all of these principles is to remember everything in moderation. Otherwise you abstract things so much that to go from webpage to sql database you need to create 5 files and 1 stored proc, this is an extreme example of course.
Does anyone ever actually see an improvement in their creativity from a system like that?

I'd imagine that most people just get stuck in a loop, reaffirming that those are, in fact, the necessary elements.
>Yes, there are some cases where people are recruited with specific expertise to fulfill specific roles, e.g. John Barton of Firebug or Sebastian Thrun for the self-driving car. But this is the exception and not the rule.

But they make such good cover for people who want to play apologist for Google's hiring practices!
This old saying comes to mind:

If you give me six lines written by the most honest man,
I will find something in them to hang him.
-- Cardinal de Richelieu
This is also a good perspective, albeit old:

http://www.spacefuture.com/vehicles/how_the_west_wasnt_won_n...

"This country was bounded to the West by a desert. One day a telescope built on one of the country's mountains revealed what looked like sea far away beyond the desert which would have to be crossed in order to discover if there was habitable land on the coast. So the politicians got together and established a government agency to send some people through the desert. They called it the National Agricultural Frontier Administration, NAFA for short, and charged it with a dramatic task to demonstrate the vigour of the nation: it would carry out a 'mission' to send people right through the desert to the West coast of the continent and bring them back safely, within a decade."
I totally agree.

There has been some criticism of bitcoin's technical aspects. I just wanted to post a thought I've been having for the last week or two, given your great answer (perhaps you could respond):

If someone creates a better cryptocurrency than bitcoin, they should lock in a 1:1 exchange with bitcoin - so give 1 bitcoin and get 1 of the new currency back. At any time, one can recall bitcoins with the new currency at the same 1:1 rate. This way current bitcoin holders don't lose out to the new currency. There might be a minuscule commission to the creator.

One issue in uptake is trusting the issuer of this new currency to stick around to make good on their promise.

One weakness I see with bitcoin is speed of transactions across the network.
Isn't this the reason why doctors give people with ADHD amphetamines? So that they would feel content leading their somewhat mundane lives?
Sindhudurg_Tourism
Banks are annoying, but they provide an extremely valuable service (deposit insurance) and interest, which is why people tend to store wealth in banks. Are there any similar institutions for BTC?
1) Brew doesn't hide my stuff in /opt/macports/opt/package/ports/port/python/etc/etc/etc

2) Brew packages are simple to make and inspect. Many people make and inspect them. Bug fixes happen quickly.
Design: House N by Sou Fujimoto
Isn't it Cap'n Crunch???
Maybe things have changed but I switched from MacPorts to homebrew in the early days of homebrew (2009?) because it was way easier to install.

MacPort's package installer tools mystified me. Homebrew could be improved too, but is better.

Finally, homebrew seems more open to contributions and because they use GitHub, it's very easy to contribute new packages and the high level of activity on Homebrew reflects that. I briefly looked at what it would take to contribute to MacPorts and it was harder.
"TCP/IP won because we focused on writing the software, not the documentation" - Vint Cerf [1]

Hackers write code. If you write code and documentation, you're an engineer, good programmer, etc.

Think about what you are you saying when you're "hacking on some code" -- you are intentionally writing code that is bad, but cleverly bad enough to get the job done. "Thoroughly documented hacks" are about as nonsensical as F. Scott Fitzgerald exquisitely writing about how great it feels to take a piss.

[1] While I really want to get this confirmed from the man himself, this is unfortunately sourced from a twitter post and not entirely verifiable at the moment: http://twitter.com/#!/pcalcado/statuses/74071761897005056
What really disappoints me is that we apparently have people who have been trusted with enormous power by the citizenry (the prosecutors) who seem wholly incapable of taking a step back and asking themselves, "is this discretionary action I'm about to take to prosecute these people going to make the world better or worse?" and then acting reasonably.
Brew doesn't install the whole universe and take hours to install a small utility. MacPorts does.
It's better to be controversially beautiful than universally cute. Well done, guy.
True story: in my interview I was asked how I would extract entities from an HTML page. I suggested using OpenCalais.

So you're interviewing for a job as a programmer for a search engine, and your answer to a simple parsing / text processing question is, "I'm going to use some proprietary black-box third-party API to do the parse", and then you refuse (on moral grounds?) to elaborate on how that service could possibly be implemented? What?

I could understand something like, "Oh, I did that last week, and we used the OpenViagra API." OK, cool, but the follow up question is going to be, "but if you had to do it yourself, how would you do it?"

This is a good question for many reasons: for one, it's a basic "how do you handle parsing" question. Parsing comes up all the time in programming, and it's good to know if the candidate knows about regular expressions, parser generators, parser combinator libraries, etc. It's not about "do you know how to get HTML entities", it's about "do you know about parsing".

There's also something weird about relying on third-party APIs for simple programming tasks. Sure, if you need to know your current location, you have to depend on a bunch of orbiting satellites with precisely-set atomic clocks. But if all you need to do is /&([^&;]+);/g, then write that one fragment of code and move on with your life. The simplicity is well worth not having to set up a TCP connection, wait for it to be established, generate a request, send it over the network, wait for a response, time out and throw an error if you don't get one, parse the response, and finally return the answer to the calling code. Think of all the bugs you're going to have to fix with this approach!

I'm going to start asking this question, just to see where it leads. If the answer is more than one sentence, it will give me valuable insight into how the candidate solves programming problems. If they answer, "well, I refuse to do that", then that's valuable insight, too. All in all, a great interview question!

So anyway, technical interview questions are not about getting things done, they're about thinking through problems. Parsing HTML is a solved problem, and of course you're going to delegate to a library. But tomorrow, you're going to have a very similar problem to solve that is more nuanced and difficult to explain in 30 seconds. And that's what the question is really getting at; if you can parse HTML, you can parse the weird config file format you invent tomorrow.

Google's interview process makes me want to work at Google!
Ask HN: What has been your least profitable side/weekend project to date?
jallman,

You're right, we are making a few assumptions, which to me is natural given that this is v0.1.0. It hasn't been used it production because it never existed before now.

I fail to see how enabling clustering and connection pooling via configuration is over-design. Perhaps you could share some more detail on that?

The first line of your code sample is making assumptions itself. No, you can not omit the parameter to RiakCluster, the section name in the configuration is not fixed and is configurable by the user. This means you can have multiple clusters if you want to and configure them both in your config and specify them by name in your code.

The last two lines are exactly the same as what we have.

So really the only difference I see in your suggestion is the way that the configuration is wired in. Here's where your assumption comes in: you have assumed that the configuration is always in the same spot (ie. an app.config or web.config). There are no guarantees that this is the case.

Yes, we could probably change the interface so that it does search common configurations by default, and that is a suggestion that we're more than open to. As I said, this is v0.1.0 and it's just been unveiled. After using it, I'd be interested to see if you consider the configuration/wiring (which is still quite small, and a one-off task) painful.

We seem to be quibbling over one extra line of code, which ironically is substantially shorter than the comment that either of us has posted.

Having said that, we are always looking for ways to improve this kind of stuff, as I too hate unnecessarily verbose configuration. In our case, for version 0.1.0, we wanted to make sure the ability to configure and wire up in many different ways was available. In future revisions we'll no doubt look at home we can make this simpler.

With all this in mind, along with what I said in previous comments, how would you go about enabling this level of flexibility in the library without, as you put it, making it "drastically over-designed"?
I was apparently lost in the shuffle, so when I contacted them a week before my start date to ask what was going on, they came back three days later with a single team.

I met with the team, and told my recruiter that I didn't mind working with them (though it's not clear what would have happened if I had). I was then given a form with room for a dozen teams, and asked to rank my only choice on a scale from 1-10.
Un fsck’ing the JDK on OS X 10.7 Lion
No,that is where the whistle was found. :)
Looks like a recoloring of a photo of Rachael Leigh Cook.

This search result is only good for 72 hours but http://www.tineye.com/search/8177b52b0e52f8b05e164b65ed2428f... Some of the links from the search page are NSFW. If that's dead just paste the URL of the image you want to search for (http://www.alittlebitofsomething.co.uk/images/folio_rlc.gif) into http://www.tineye.com/ .
Here is Google's webspam report tool.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en
equark,

I don't think you were being overly negative. It just tends to be common for people on HN to be more terse than necessary and sometimes things can come across the wrong way. I have taken no offense :)

The sensible defaults thing is definitely something that should be in place. For v0.1.0, the goal was to provide the flexibility out of the box rather than the lack thereof. No doubt for v0.2.0 (already in the works) we'll have adjusted this to make it simpler for the more common cases. We didn't want to limit people out of the box.

Configuration of this kind of thing is hard when you can technically have multiple clusters, so somewhere along the way when wiring up the cluster you do need to specify something :)

At least we have the ability to do whatever we need. Now, with help from the community, users, and commenters like yourself, we can improve things to keep as many people happy as we can.

Thanks again for the comment.
Indeed, how were SpaceX and Scaled Composites able to do so much with such limited resources, 30 years later and having benefited immensely from NASA's pioneering work?

NASA could definitely be run better but let's compare apples to apples. I'm sure any given engineer at SpaceX has a computer on his desk superior to the entire world's computational capacity at the time the shuttle was designed.
Facebook Glitch Revealed Thumbnails & Descriptions Of Friends’ Private Videos
It was called Shopkeeper, and I don't remember the name of the app they purchased but it was subscription-based (this was long before the in-app subscriptions) and supported more than just Shopify.

Developing for Shopify was great. Their API is good to work with, and they're very developer-friendly in general.
Show HN: Drop and Give Me (Fitness for Android)
<rant>

Names are just Unicode strings, which you should not fold, spindle or mutilate. Why do you care which bit is the family name, or if this person has a family name, or even if there is such a thing as a family name in their family's culture? Why even try for a canonical form?

Even better, make name a _list_ of Unicode strings, so people who have multiple names (Chinese/Western, pre/post marriage, pre/post op) can give you the whole list to search on.

If asking for their credit-card details, ask "Name As Printed On This Credit Card" and store that as well so you can bill them. That's really a property of the card, not the person.

And then just add a "Informal Name" field so you're not stuck guessing which bit is the informal name, or writing "Dear Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan" which does sound kind of dorky ...

</rant>
Loved this pitch. I think people miss the point if they want to see more of a portfolio. The goal of the site is to get clients, not showcase his work. I wonder how many people think that showcasing great work will get them more clients? These things are not (sadly) related.

I loved that this web developer is pre-selecting his customers from the initial interaction and setting expectations. It is bold, but he crafts a clear story about himself and the work he does.

Lots to learn from regarding sales and communications with this single page site.
For the most part, the author is correct: by most objective measures, the shuttle was a disaster. One point I disagree with is his criticism of "the teachers who spoke about it in admiring tones to their students".

Is it really that wrong to try and get kids excited about engineering and science?
Being cocky is one way to try and sell yourself if you don't have a particularly impressive portfolio yet.

Considering everyone has to start from square one at some point, I hardly blame alternative tactics to "Look at these sites I designed, aren't they awesome?". Not everyone can have designed... whatever sites you think are good.
Twice the height of the Empire State - massive solar tower for AZ
>The solution to this problem is very simple: No government agency with control over space. Outsource everything.

Blackwater.
滨州房产信息网
@font-face is pretty widespread, but licensing is a many-headed beast, it's true.

Typekit, however, has really extensive browser support (http://help.typekit.com/customer/portal/articles/6786-browse...) and, of course, appropriate licensing built in.

There's too many great solutions for web typography to have images be an acceptable solution these days.
I agree with the point about the ConnectionFactory. That is something I still don't like. It's there, at the moment, to make it easy to test certain parts of the app. We'll look to add an overload to this so that we don't have to specify it for non-testing scenarios.

As a quick side-node something as simple as:

var client = new RiakClient();

is nice, but has to infer a _lot_ from the world. We could write a lot of code to make sure that it's smart enough to pull all the details from the default locations or we could let people tell us where to look. We went for the latter, as it's much safer to be told than to pull config from the wrong spot.

Again, we'll look to improve this, particularly as we get more feedback from people using the library.

Thanks!
Thank you -- I appreciate both your answers!
I'm not convinced that Cocoa and Objective-C are the best approach for anything.

The only reason I use them is because they're what you have to use to make good apps on OSX/iOS.

There are debates on both sides when it comes to things like ruby-vs-python-vs-node or rails/django/aspmvc and reasonable people can take opposing views on those.

I don't see much of a case for Objective-C/Cocoa being a better language and platform than any of the others except for the fact that it's the only one we've got. (And yes, maybe I'm being unreasonable on this)
Much as I'm glad to see something along these lines, I'm a little taken aback that it took this long to publish. Even the original post refers to "last Oscon," and O'Reilly runs a lot of conferences. Last Oscon wasn't the first time "something happened."
So if you're a tester or a UI interface person or a sysadmin whose work shouldn't really mean worrying about the big O order of algorithms - should these people also be asked questions about algorithms?

The comments at the end of the blog post talked about a tester with years of experience being asked coding questions after she told the interviewer that she wasn't a coder.

Another comment mentions a sysadmin applicant being asked similar things.

The impression I get is that Google hires a lot of smart people to make technically hard things work very well (e.g. search), but fail in other areas that require a softer approach (e.g. Google Wave).

So perhaps instead of focussing on algorithms, would it be wise to talk about problems that an interviewer (say a tester or sysadmin) might be facing in their daily work?
Mostly I see improvements in my creativity when I stop letting myself get distracted. And when I spend a lot of time immersed in whatever domain it is that I want to "be creative" in.
That would just be a centralised version of bitcoin which is pretty much equivalent to PayPal or any of the many clones.
You are destroying your brand. I know literally dozens of people that have enthusiastically come over from FB who are deeply freaked out about what you are doing here.

Yes, you can remove someone from your service if you like. But you must let them retrieve their materials. Otherwise, please trust us: We will go somewhere else. Behavior like this from FB is why we came here in the first place.
What you're saying is currency speculation is usually safe.

You should be familiar with the old tradeoff- safety (aka risk) vs reward. Traditional currencies do not fluctuate very much. Bitcoin does, and being a fledgling currency, has the potential to explode in value.
well it seems like social isolation works sometimes and sometimes you need people around you...i am going to try cafes from next week....although the problem is not many places are open all night....thanks for the response..:)
You are fixated on deposit insurance. The folks letting lots of cash float in Bitcoin are not using it as a bank. You need to shift your mental thinking from banks. "Investing" in BTC can probably be likened to stocks more than banks.

P.S. The concept of deposit insurances does not hold much meaning with Bitcoin. Deposit insurance applies to banks, which hold on to & handle your money. Bitcoin is money. Now, if a Bank of Bitcoin was founded, because maybe you are afraid your PC will get hacked, and you deposited BTC with them, then deposit insurance would be meaningful.
Doesn't matter what the TOS says. They are destroying their brand. Last week I had some trust, now I have less. Next week I may have none. I can say that I am already looking for alternatives.
Wonderful if it works as described! That's quite a bit of power. I'd be very interested to know comparisons in terms of how long a traditional power plant takes to become profitable, and also how much initial investment this project is requiring.