skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A probationary period is common in Canada too, but it is always mentioned up-front and I have never heard of a company trying out several potential employees in a series of probationary periods.

Maybe they weren't happy with her at the end of her probationary period, but are too weak to outright fire her?
We should sell them AK-47s and grenades.
Probably higher profit margins.
Linux IS a desktop OS.

I don't understand your point. Are you asking someone to make a Linux distribution with a OSX or Windows like user experience? If so, your best bet is to buy one of those operating systems, get proficient at it and be done. Is it because you want Photoshop or Portal on Linux? Let's face it, that isn't happening soon, even if Google, or any other company, decided to make a distribution. There's still too much perceived sunk technical cost invested in the other platforms to make a port in the next several years IMHO.

On the other hand, you could try out the copious distributions that exist and see which one does it best for you. If none of them fit the bill, make your own. It's a glib response, but that's the way Linux works.
"You can be fired for any reason at any time."

I see what you are trying to say, but it's not entirely true. You can be fired for any reason, as long as it's not illegal (discriminatory, because of a disability, a pregnancy, whistleblower, union organizer, etc).

This is why often, when you get fired, the company is better off not telling you why (cover their asses). At least that's what counsel of some companies would say.

I've seen the other side of the coin in countries that have employee protections in place. Where it can be abused (ie, everyone is an independent contractor), employees lose as they have no benefits. Where it cannot, employees lose out because it's not worth it to invest in hiring people. Overall, IMO it is bad overall to give employees too much protection. In this aspect, I think the American system is as close to perfect as it gets.
About School Research Paper
School research paper writing should be a passion for every student. This paper can be attempted at any level in the academic process.
I find it quite believable that a poor immigrant whos entire economic security depends on his shop is going to defend it with is life.
Fashion Jewelry Online
Shop online Fashion & Handcrafted Jewelry including necklaces, bracelets, rings and stones. Serving all USA.
While I have your attention, I've long wondered if it's possible to do for PHP what CoffeeScript did for JS. A more aesthetically concise and pleasing syntax that compiles directly to PHP. There's a few projects (PHP-Snow, CoffeeScript for PHP, etc), but they all seemed to have been abandoned.
Designing Female Equivalents to Team Fortress 2 classes
It is. I did a Sega system on an FPGA in 2003 as a one-semester senior design project. Using a modern HDL (bluespec, or something like the proprietary language my company uses internally) on current FPGAs, you could probably do a much higher level implementation in 1/10th that time.

An SNES would be much more annoying to do, but probably no more than an order of magnitude moreso, so I doubt it would take more than a semester, even for someone who'd never touched an FPGA before.
Travel Belize-Like A local
Found: A Batch of DNA Molecules That Seem To Have Originated in Space
Ask HN: Interested in a freelancer peer review service?
Here's an idea I had, and I wanted to run it by HN: if somebody hires a freelancer for a web devel job, how do they know if the work delivered is any good? Sure it works, but what if it has non-obvious security holes or is completely unmanageable later?

Well, you could pay a couple other freelancers for an hour or two to go review the delivered code, then score it on different topics such as readability of code, security precautions (i.e. are user inputs sanitized before entering into DB?) and more.

Reviewer reputation could be proven by hooking into their Github and/or Stack Overflow accounts as proof of community validation.

Could this idea find traction?
Apple set to surpass ExxonMobil as large company in the world
Apple Leads Notebook Market (If You Consider the iPad a Notebook)
Top Most Followed On Twitter
I've been follow Byuu's progress on BSNES for a couple of years, and I would like to state for the record that the amount of effort he had put into this project far exceeds the majority of "hobby" projects.

Just in the past few months, several SNES co-process chips that remained un-emulated for years, have been deciphered and fully emulated in BSNES. Without Byuu leading the charge into the last bastions of SNES emulation, I absolutely believe that some of these devices would be lost to history.
This is correct; more precisely, you can pay all you want, but reimbursement is for a reasonable cost.
HN is definitely full of capitalist muppets if you're downvoting eff privacy. WTF is wrong with you peoople?
Apple to add seamless glass to 5th Ave Apple Store
RIM hacked after promising to help identify rioters
From Ireland to San Francsisco to Intern at a Startup
> Predeclared variables are just as prone to typos, which will also break your code

Not so: declaring variable name & scope ensures immunity to the "I wanted to change this variable, but I'm creating a new one instead", and this can be checked statically even in dynamically typed languages.

> There are no situations where shadowing a variable is desirable.

While I do not agree with this assertion, I can see where you come from and explicit scoping is still superior to implicit for this: if there are no situation where shadowing is desirable, you can make the language statically forbid shadowing. There, done.

> It's always best to be able to reach any variable that exists in the current lexical scope, should you find the need.

It is not, however, desirable to reach and unknowingly alter an existing variable in an ancestral lexical scope when you did not mean to and just happened to pick an existing name in a callback 2-levels down the stack. The result of this is silent corruption of program state, and it is a risk in any implicitly-declared scoping system with mutable bindings.

> The only ambiguous situation in which you'd want to use a "var" on purpose is to explicitly shadow an external variable of the same name -- if you accept that shadowing is undesirable, and choosing a more descriptive name for the inner variable is preferable, then QED.

Then QED nothing, since as I pointed out it is perfectly possible to make variable shadowing statically illegal, ensuring that no variable is hidden and no variable is silently reused or replaced either.

> Dynamic languages should not have variable declarations.

Nope.

Furthermore, explicit scoping significantly increases readability and lowers cognitive burden: readers don't have to wonder whether a given assignment is local to the current lexical scope, it's spelled out for them. And if it's a bare assignment (not a new variable), explicit scoping makes it easier to find out where the variable is first used. Not to mention it allows the language to protect against in-scope reuse (in cases of debatable-quality imperative code with scopes more than a screenful long), as the second declaration may (and generally will) be statically marked as the redeclaration of an existing variable, and will be refused by the language's runtime.

And all of that for the cost, in most languages, of 3 characters. Almost nothing. All the issues you mentioned (since you didn't mention typing) are not issues of explicit scoping but with specific implementations thereof.
PetFlow's cash cow: $1 million in monthly sales
Duplicity in the Double Vowel: From Taazr to Proxino
Discussed extensively here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2863544
Each item on the OP's achievement list is valuable. It may seem daunting, but you don't need to do the WHOLE list to level up. One step at a time...find something on the list to do, and do it, if you want to get better.

Having achieved about 90% of his list, and having worked with many, many other developers, I can say that I've been in the 99th percentile wherever I've worked, and typically have been the top developer who everyone else came to for help.

And almost every other top developer I've known has had similarly broad experiences, so I don't think it's a coincidence. One friend is a notable exception; he refuses to learn any language but C++ and Flash. His experiences go in other directions; the list certainly is not comprehensive.

BUT, I also have a life away from the screen. I play a very fast competitive sport (badminton) that gets me exercise and keeps my reflexes sharp. I wouldn't say that it gives me practice in critical thinking, but the exercise and movement keeps my brain healthy.
Hate Lines and Live in Mountain View? We’ve Got an App for You
Android and iOS both fail, but Android fails better
Holy crap, that bulls-eye graph makes pie charts look extremely useful in comparison. Yuck yuck yuck.
My best guess would be less than a dozen, based on my experiences using RankTracer. But I haven't actually looked it up.
Same. Not to mention the fact that you aren't even seeing the real story anyway. There are always different versions of events and interpretations of why things happened a certain way.
* This is the groundwork for bringing high performance predicate dispatch to Clojure. This is under explored territory for dynamic languages.

I really like the way how pattern matching (in Haskell, etc) is transformed into a bunch of case expressions, which can then be compiled into code where each argument is evaluated only once and each "then" expression is compiled only once (no duplicates).

However, to my best knowledge, it requires some static type information to make the compiling transformation possible. E.g. the Haskell compiler knows that a Maybe Bool can have only three possible values: Just True, Just False or Nothing.

How do you do this in Clojure with dynamic typing? This really intrigues me and you're really pushing the boundaries of dynamic languages and compiling here a little bit. Very interesting indeed!

* For the uninitiated: you can find good description of compiling pattern matching in Simon Peyton Jones's book here:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...
This seems to be the quick summary.

Gamification coerces in that an organization can leverage the phrase, "we made your work more interesting, you have to do more."

It conceals in that the author feels there is no value add.

It impresses in that it's such a fad.

This tends to ignore Jane McGonigal's work on games as necessary because reality is broken. I'd be very curious about the author's thoughts on her work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_McGonigal
Surely public companies have no need to care that much? Once your shares are sold, they're out there, you don't care all that much if they decline in value.

The people for whom this is really bad news are the companies who were planning an IPO in the near-to-mid-term future.
At least one of the items (the only explicitly martial one) appears to have been pulled, #2 as of my viewing, "Military Police Telescopic Tonfa - 21" was up 4,291% to #136, now 404s and doesn't return from search either. Doesn't seem to be the case of just being out of stock, as another one of the bats in the top 10 just shows as unavailable/out of stock.
To me this sounds a bit scary. Is the Galaxy Tab really that similar to the IPad? What about the Xoom? If the Galaxy is banned, why should the Xoom/Asus Transformer be excluded?
Free Your Mind - Internalizing the Lean Startup
I'm pretty sure Thomas is tired of explaining why again and again, but short version is that the javascript environment (in a browser) is such that one can quite reasonably claim that it is impossible to implement crypto securely in it.
I hate this whole trend of "gamification" or "game mechanics". It's profoundly ignorant and just the latest thing for consultants to hype. Because, due to some high profile successes, it is now easy for them to suggest that if you just add a layer of game-like-ness onto your app, you can make a loser product into a winner.

I don't hate all the sites that are touted as successes of gamification, though. StackOverflow is great. But there is a profound difference between StackOverflow is doing, and what Farmville is doing.

StackOverflow is trying to produce community resources of lasting value. Their "game" system is merely a way of recording that value, and allocating resources. It is fundamentally based on the judgments of the community.

Meanwhile, Farmville is clever at making an activity which simply enriches the game's owners look like the construction of community resources, or look like competition to display valuable skills.

My view is that there is no "gamification". The metaphor is backwards. Games are mere simulations of the kinds of things humans like -- to compete, to be valued, to be trusted, to build things, to have rare resources. It's far better to make your site more like a community, than more like a game.
Web Harvesting - What Is Web Harvesting
Web harvesting is the technique which is used as a web scraping technique through which different sites can be visited by the person. For the use of the web harvesting, in most of the situations the w
BragBet. A social network for the 'lads'. Group gambling.
What ought to be more concerning to the company than Wired's speculation is the blackmailed threats of bodily harm and property damage against their employees in the UK by TeaMp0isoN: http://www.zone-h.org/mirror/id/14614130
Want free coffee and got an iPhone? Use Jonathan's Card
Shipping LLVM bitcode is a bad idea. The bitcode format is constantly changing from revision to revision, its JIT is huge and slow so you'd have to rewrite a lot of it, .bc files are enormous, the bitcode format is non-portable, the type system is missing a bunch of stuff like unions, etc.

And modern JavaScript engines largely make it fast enough anyway.
Tesla's first ever quarterly shareholder letter
This is the timeless geek UI solution: Just throw more information at the user.
"Maybe it has to do with the problem domain, but I have a hard time accepting that."

Your profile says that you are a web application hacker. I think that explains why you may not feel that data structures or algorithms are important. I was the same way myself (started my programming life by building Perl cgi scripts, made a nice little cms, definitely didn't use any fancy stuff to do that).

You should take it from me though. You will suddenly develop a deep and profound appreciation for understanding algorithms when you have a problem that requires having to comb through over a hundred thousand records, perform some type of operation on them, and sort by the results of that operation - all within a fairly narrow time period.

I think that it actually is a question of problem domains. If you never encounter this type of problem, then not knowing about things like big o notation and the various sorting algorithms will never impact you. However, when you do, that knowledge quickly pays for the time invested in learning it.
It doesn't matter. CA is an at-will employment state. Work contracts are not enforceable.
‘So’ Pushes to the Head of the Line
Write code in the cloud
never know wedding costs that much every yr, better than engineering earning ha!
Just to balance out the nightmarish images of London, here is a video of the community rallying together to clean up the mess the day after http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz7WGzsaHQE
A rioter caught carrying a baseball bad would be in serious trouble. A bat is hard to conceal on a person. Anyone carrying one will become a target to the police, as they will know the rioter is a trouble maker.

A shopkeeper can hide it under the counter.
Sergey Brin is so Funny
Why would you call this a scam? She got fired, that's all.
You Should Measure More Than Just Your Website
Writing a Prolog-style interpreter is one of the most fun computer science projects I've ever done. I wrote it at the uni as a project work for an AI course. I did it in Haskell, and my professor got really interested in the language after evaluating my work.

So here's my little logic programming interpreter: https://github.com/rikusalminen/slolog
Goobuntu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobuntu
I completely disagree. Algoritms are exactly the kind of things that don't require any creative thinking, besides identifying when they may be applicable. That's easily outsourced to whoever charges the least.
What happens next?

Easy - The bubble pops.
Sadly for Samsung, Apple's injunction is going to severely harm the company's financial outlook. The device is now blocked across Europe, Australia, and Apple is currently attempting to block the import of all Galaxy devices into the US.

It is sad for Samsung that sales of the Tab are being blocked while the court case is settled, but were they really expecting so many sales that this will “severely harm the company's financial outlook?” I don’t see the Tab as a bet-the-company move for Samsung, this is probably more of an embarassment and inconvenience than a fatal blow.
Looking forward to download the latest code from github and do some work and which I thought would add some highlight to the application, when I was associated with Foradian and being a Fedena developer.
Surely aluminium is the way to go?
Tell HN: Help funding (web)font autohinting project
Ehhh.

Continue, break, return at least are well-formed with respect to the local environment.

GOTO has no such restrictions (well, in older languages allowing arbitrary GOTOs)... that's why its considered harmful.

The single-return principle is used for flowcharts & formal analysis ease.

It'd be mildly interesting to do a retrospective of compilation & static analysis algorithms to see what more current research turns up with respect to the single-return rule's use.
Thanks! I am checking these sites now:

http://www.adafruit.com/blog

http://www.facebook.com/makemagazine

http://www.flickr.com/groups/hack-a-day/
Poll: Your Google Plus usage and observations?
I am noticing a drastic decline in how much my online acquaintances are using Google Plus. From my viewpoint it feels like G+ is failing to gain momentum. What are you seeing?
Usage of Google Plus for me and my friends is increasing
Usage of Google Plus for me and my friends is decreasing
I am increasing my usage, but my friends are using it less
I have an account but have never really used it
I don't have an account and have no interest
I'd start using Google Plus if I felt like the service was achieving critical mass
I've wondered that too. One of my favorite I assume was plotted by the film maker, though I've done no research on it, as an insane amount of well-timed events happened. If you're remotely interested in things like this, you owe it to yourself to check out The Besieged Fortress: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV4AaV0AGOA
Tribune Co. Working With Samsung On (Free?) News Tablet
Allied Star Police for iPhone Apps
After seeing Korean shopowners in action during the LA riots in 1991, I'd always been curious how this scenario would play out in a country with gun control laws.
Also this will be a comeback for myself to Rails world after an year and make some improvements on my own code that I have written for Fedena an year back and submit patches. Playing around with fedena will surely be giving me lots of confidence to get back to Rails community.
A LinkedIn app end to end: JRuby, Frontier, and Voldemort
Interesting that ASP.NET is second only to PHP and holds a huge lead over RoR.
And for the record, "alien life" in Mormonism means other earths very similiar to the one we inhabit, populated by people like the people that live here on our earth. Not usually what most people think of when they hear of aliens.
Microsoft Execs 'Typical' Carpool
How to Launch Your Startup
If you notice that it's a horrible market, the sensible thing to do is to return the investors' money. Look at Carl Icahn recently.
Disaster-RX
Once you have armed weapons you can’t make sure only the ‘good guys’ have them.

The trouble is that anyone with basic machine tools can make some pretty fancy weapons, and the career criminals by definition will make them with impunity. Hence the saying that if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.
because developers have no sense of humor.
The web development language percentages only add up to 53.96% since it just shows stats for 3 languages, which probably aren't the top 3 most popular, as Ruby usage only comes in at 1.96%. The infographic could be improved to show usage percentages for say the top 10 most common languages.
I blame Blackberry on the current financial crises too. I hear those bankers and politicians are using BBMs to collaborate.
you'd also be surprised at how intricate and involved the process can be. :)
7 Steps to a Kick-Ass UX Portfolio: Your career as a design problem
I usually prefer:

foreach(x in list.reject(unusual_condition(_)))
x2=perform_data_transformation(x);
x3=perform_data_transformation(x2);

I find collections and their functional methods are great for clear expression of intent[1]

[1] http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/closur...
Next day delivery if ordered before a certain time (5pm I think, might be 7pm). I'd place money on the riots still being around by the time an order placed today arrived.
This is a big deal.

Seeing this project to its completion would ultimately lead to a far greater adoption of advanced web typography and a better looking web in general. See [0] for the original announcement on Typophile and the discussion that follows.

As you may or may not know, there is a big issue with how bad a lot of fonts look in Windows-based browsers and this project is meant to address this issue by automating and simplifying the process of font hinting [1], which is essential to making a font render decently on Windows.

----

[0] http://typophile.com/node/84404

[1] http://www.typotheque.com/articles/hinting
I'd say you need both. Coherence is important for the usability and maintainability of codebase as a whole, while algorithms often run key components of a system (eg A* pathfinding in a video game). Data structures are fundamental and if you don't know them your code is probably buggy.
So, we refuse to sell bats to people who want to play baseball in the middle of the summer (the item's main and intended innocent purpose) because other people want to use them for other purposes?

If you don't explicitly do that, you need to figure out a way to identify the potential nefarious users from the potential good ones. Do we allow a bat as long as you buy a mitt and a ball too? Only to people over the age of 25 because most of the looters are under 25? By postcode?

There's no way that any business should be expected to do that - it's a police action. If parliament wants to make bats illegal, or controlled items, that's one issue (resting with parliament, not Amazon and just as contentious). To refuse to sell sporting goods in case they're used for offense is just silly. Do we then refuse to sell cricket bats, or broom handles, or 2x4s, or javelins or kitchen knives if there's an upsurge in their sales?

Ultimately, the people responsible for the use of these items are the people who use them. Let's not try to increase the UK's tactics of using enterprises to carry out work to which the government doesn't want to admit.
This still doesn't solve the problem of helping users discover what tags are out there. I didn't even know about tags like 'discussion' or 'support' until I read this post, and I wouldn't have thought about typing them in to see if other people are using them because they seem somewhat obscure.
Indeed, quite the refreshing change from the usual petty punditry.
I agree with much that's been said already, but I'll add this: your friend needs a hug.
Shooting a gun arbitrarily in the air, even at an angle is criminal because what goes up, must come down somewhere and there's no way you can be certain there won't be people there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire#Falling-bul...