skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Topic maps are not about keywords, although you can search for keywords used by topics.

Topics represent subjects (your concepts) and are a gathering point for information about that subject.

For example, "record linkage," "list washing," and "database hardening" all refer to the matching of records of different origins that are about the same subject. As an aside, record linkage originated in epidemiology, which needed to study mortality records across different record keeping techniques. Typically, the records are all converted to a common format/terminology for processing.

Contrast that with a topic map. The terms "record linkage," list washing," and "database hardening" could appear on a single topic, so that if you searched for any of those "labels/names" you could find all the information a topic map had on that topic. Such as a bibilography that has publications that use all those labels/names and others.

Distinguishing URIs between Identifier vs. Locators and modeling relationships are also strengths of topic maps.

I am the editor of the Topic Maps Reference Model (an ISO standard) but more accessible information can be found at:

http://topicmaps.org/

Or you can contact me directly, Patrick Durusau, patrick@durusau.net (http://tm.durusau.net)
AMA: I am a Senior Agile Developer / Team Leader for Mindflash.

I have worked for Mindflash > 10 years. We recently moved to Palo Alto and our latest product was built within three months using agile / ux / scrum.

Agile is a business mindset. Everyone benefits when conversations are driven from all sides, especially the customers.

UX is a way to understand outside perspectives. Breaking your assumptions after watching user feedback becomes addicting fast.

Scrum fosters conversation between the working teams within a time frame so you can iterate and see working results.

Any questions?

:)
Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings. Inquire within.)
Hi. Every once in a while, I like to offer my time to help other passionate people be a little more successful with their goals. If there's anything I can help you with, just ask here. No strings.

If you'd like my help: Be specific about what you're trying to fix/solve/accomplish. The more details you provide, the better I can help you out. Also, I should be able to do your request within 10-15 minutes (a soft time limit so I can spread the love a little quicker).

I've done this before, and it's worked out well for everyone. Check out some of the previous "No strings" sessions I've done to get an idea of how I can help. (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mikegreenberg)

Cheers
I've been involved in a lot of interviewing/recruiting especially of recent graduates. I don't have hard numbers, but it seems to me that the candidates who have masters degrees tend to do worse.
This post by Jeff Atwood might be of interest to you if you haven't read it:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...
The hyperbolic indignation is not needed. This is not Reddit.
Why get the Macbook Air over the Pro? Are those of you that have the Air really traveling that much and using it on the road? I would think that for most developers and entrepreneurs they are in their office or setup somewhere at a desk, even if on the road. Seriously curious...

I have a MacBook Pro that is a few years old -- recently swapped out my 500GB regular hard drive for a 300GB flash drive. Biggest improvement of performance ever! Runs so much faster - bigger jump than when I have upgraded to a new MacBook in the past. If you do development, go out and get a flash drive NOW ... get and external HD for movies, photos, and music. Your apps will run SO much faster.
>I want to make the point about the unix pipe point, and that with gui's this is impossible.

There is a GUI programming paradigm, called Stream Processors. One of earlier Haskell GUI libraries was developed over those processors.

Take a look at Fudgets: http://www.altocumulus.org/Fudgets/

You can pipe them, you can arrange them into DAGs and trees (as in DirectShow or Gstreamer). You can create cyclic structures.

I haven't seen Intents. But I think that Stream Processors are closer to (and even surpass) command line pipelining.
Microsoft Office likely to get the Metro treatment
In a language that requires TCO then you are right, it's not about optimization it's about correctness. In a language (like c) that has no such semantics it is 'just' an optimization. In scheme however it is a correctness issue.
> You have to keep this in the context of the non-tech mass market. For them, the content is on TV now.

Some of it is, yes. If we were talking only about television programming, I'd agree this is mostly true. I mean to be referring to content in a broader sense though, although I might not have made that point explicitly.

> Turning on the TV is easy. The studios aren't making content harder to get as long as it's available on TV.

Right, it's easy to turn on the TV, but is the content you want on? At a time when it's convenient / possible for you to watch? I mean, one reason things like VCRs, Tivo, Netflix, bittorrent, etc. became popular in the first place is because the content wasn't conveniently accessible by simply being in front of the TV at the right time.

> Netflix/iTunes/torrenting is not easier than turning on the TV (for most people).

I don't know... sometimes I think us geeks overstate the difference between "us and them" where "them" are "the unwashed, untechnical masses who are deathly afraid of technology" or whatever. I mean, yeah, there probably are more people who aren't using, say, iTunes, than people who are... but I'm guessing that penetration of this kind of technology is growing and that a larger and larger group of people are starting to care about the kind of convenient access you (can|could|whatever) get from iTunes, Netflix, bittorrent, etc. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's just my perception.

Most people don't consider turning on the TV to be a difficult hoop to jump through.
Those partnerships were converted to publicly held equity because this was less risky for those partners and allowed the companies to achieve larger scale, momentarily conveying cost advantages.

Yes, the partnerships went public to transfer risk away from the partners, to externalize it. It was the only way. How else do you maintain profits when the economy has flattened out?

Yes, it is economic cannibalism, but what's the alternative? They can't change to a steady state model, and they are too strong to just give up and fail. So, they burn the furniture.

You know, I really hope it doesn't get any worse than this. I am afraid they won't stop with just the furniture, that they will continue to burn and burn until there is nothing left, and we have a violent revolution or something. And I wonder whether there is some disruptive technology on the horizon that will change the game--a distributed source of energy perhaps? My crystal ball is very cloudy.
We’re hiring for developer, designer, and operations engineer positions
Can Starting A Business From Home Generate Leads? - YouTube
I worked for a bit on the mid 90's on a distributed real-time risk management tool that was based on simplified VaR calculations.

From what I recall, the calculation of a "risk" value for an individual trade isn't too bad but it gets exciting when you try to do this for a lot of trades across a complex portfolio - especially when you have to factor in other kinds of risk (e.g. forex).

I was the lead software guy and it was fascinating to work with the ex-traders who were providing the financial knowledge. A shame that the product died horribly due to litigation on contractual issues.
Luna - TJ Holowaychuk's new language inspired by Lua, io, Python, and Ruby
Physical objects only ever do exactly what they're 'told' to do, period. Rocks don't have a mind of their own, and physics isn't magic. Yet I don't want to live in a world where we don't spend time twiddling with dials and poking around.
<?php
echo strlen(preg_replace('/[^aeiou]/i', '', 'hello world'));
Joel completely nailed it - if you can get on stage at a big conference, do it.

Another question is: Should you go to a conference like TCDisrupt but present at Startup alley?

We (FeeFighters) did that. We aren't launching anything sexy that TC would like (We are in payments and even if you are making money and have saved businesses (including Fog Creek) $75million it isn't sexy unless Jack Dorsey is running the show) so we didn't bother applying to Disrupt.

We're launching next week at Finovate instead. So we decided to present at Startup Alley. It isn't cheap. We had to fly out there, it costs $2k for a table, etc. For us, its good to get out to SF every so often to visit with friends, investors, partners, etc anyway. Early on, not that many folks came by our booth (we were in the 500 startups alley, not the main one, so we were a bit away from the crowd).

Ultimately though, for us the exposure was worth it. We had several good meetings and customers came out of it - often it was often from folks we met at an afterparty who stopped by our table the next day. We also did a few guerilla things that helped us gain even more exposure: http://feefighters.com/blog/3-ways-feefighters-disrupted-tcd... Who else can say that top VC's tweeted about them from the bathroom? We then followed up with some of the VC's who said they love our scrappiness and have had several email conversations (we aren't actively raising money, but never hurts to meet w/ VC's).

There are ways you can maximize your opportunities and I think far too few people did those things. Generally though, if you can afford it, I think it is worth going even in the alley - but you have to make the most of your opportunities... We saw folks sitting behind their table, and people who just weren't very friendly/outgoing. That doesn't work at conferences. Send your most extroverted people out there. You need to be able to talk and relate to people instantly.
Poddb: Podcatching for nerds, Zen minimalists, and Unix fanatics.
Use this next time you need to help friends and family with computer issues
Most projects are abandoned due to political reasons. Very rarely do they get dismissed because someone didn't code to whatever standard of the moment.
US Energy Dept. finds myriad challenges to building culture of network security
The code was unacceptable from line 1 onwards, and would not pass code review with me on watch.

For one, for loops have invariants.

Next up, you are altering the loop bound in the loop. I do not care if the code works, the code is hard to reason about when it goes all non-linear like that.

Finally, there is a goddamn Clear method.

That is the kind of code you see the next morning and delete; hoping none of your peers review the version control log that closely.
He said in the article: "Look… some products need a Launch... But for a lot of businesses, it’s better to get there as part of a product-driven process."

All your examples are social networks that need a critical mass of users before there is any point. You can't have a social network without people.

For many products, the user experience doesn't depend on other users, so they don't need the same level of marketing.
ansy comment here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3000383 is clearer then both articles in my opinion.
most people go to google because they're looking for something. that something isn't typically the subject of the google doodle.
Maybe what they think of as "market rate" isn't justified by any fundamentals, and will continue to decline as people become more aware of the alternatives? Especially if people find illegal/free downloads via bittorrent to be more convenient than the legally available services.
Ok in that case then they're a no hire as that's just a fundamental part of developing software. Although I must admit
that this problem surprises me more than people's inability to code. I mean if you can't break down problems you're just ill suited to the field.
RIM and the lamentation of the analyst
I'd be totally rapped if you could help me get some more people to come experience wicked beats with me at my new turntable.fm-like site: Vye VJ -- (http://vyemusic.com/vj/#/Astral-Hellcat/) -- or even if you just check it out yourself :)

Any feedback you have on the idea/design/execution would be incredibly helpful and greatly appreciated also.

HN Post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3004684
True for arrays. Very wrong for singly-linked lists, as in lisp, haskell, erlang, etc.
Every time FizzBuzz problems come up among engineers, people race to solve them and post their answers, then compete to see who can write increasingly more nifty answers for a question which does not seek niftiness at all.

I'm all for intellectual gamesmanship, but these are our professional equivalent of a doctor being asked to identify the difference between blood and water. You can do it. We know. Demonstrating that you can do it is not the point of the exercise. We do it to have a cheap-to-administer test to exclude people-who-cannot-actually-program-despite-previous-job-titles from the expensive portions of the hiring process.
The author can't decide if he's criticizing Windows 8 as a PC OS or as a Tablet OS.

That seems fair given that Microsoft is still in the process of discerning those lines in the OS.
The Forehead Slap Test for Startups
There. I wrote it too. 3 minutes, 1 major error in initial impl due to lack of sleep (used / instead of %). 8 lines of ruby. I would be quite surprised if someone could not do this in < 20 lines (of assembly) :P. Damnit now I want to whip out my x86 assembler and muck around.
This is something we've heard a lot of from professors - not sure how it will play out in the long run (we only launched a week ago, although we already have submissions from ~60 schools - more audio than we can process!!)

Perhaps the solution is to cut them off at the pass, as it were. Record your lectures yourself and make them available online, so students won't even be thinking about making bootlegs.
Sigh. I really wish the media would start covering things like this. Imagine the nation panicking over caged science - no publisher would be able to withstand the onslaught. Instead, we're stuck with reality show politics.
cryptoz: Remember that your statement is completely false.

There is nothing what is true about what you said.

This is what is correct: There exists an error.
This is what are acceptable behaviors for a browser:
- It may choose to crash
- It may ignore the error and continue on its merry way

Now assume that that you said that "a browser should not crash to faulty code". Given that a browser implements something like that, then there can exist a severe faulty security hole.

If anything, IE was correct in crashing. It's just not very humanly-desirable for it to crash. And if it crashed, perhaps, it should just crash the "part" that was affected and restart it.

That is the only decently "perhaps correct" solution.
So who decides what "genuine charitable" activities are?

The IRS, actually. Google for 501c3.
Agreed. I teach lower down in the academic chain. Dyslexic students often ask if they can record (audio) lessons. We teach in small groups and I encourage people to ask questions, and take over the whiteboard &c.

The deal with students recording the session is that the recordings are for personal use only. Noone has broken that understanding as yet so far as I am aware...
MERIT LIST KATHMANDU MEDICAL COLLEGE (KMC) 2068 RESULT PUBLISHED
Online Marketplace Helps Professors Outsource Their Lab Research
I'm not even sure it is legal in the UK - we have laws against "unfair contracts" [1], and there are also some statutory consumer protections that can't be waived. Of course, this is about security breaches, and IANAL, but I'd say this doesn't stop all potential lawsuits.

[1] http://www.oft.gov.uk/about-the-oft/legal-powers/legal/unfai...
We now insist on resumes being accompanied by the answers to set "homework." No answers, no interview.

We get about half our interviewees unable to solve problems that are similar or easier during interview. Whether that's nerves/stress or simply an indication that they got someone else to do the homework for them we don't know.

One candidate even phoned a friend during the coding part of the interview to get some answers. For some jobs he'd be hired, but not for most.
So it's eval, and they skip all the dire warnings from everyone about eval being bad by calling it Compiler as a Service.
I suspect that it's lower than average due to Error establishing a database connection
Some blogger about 1.5 years ago asked readers to include some unusual word, like "mongoose" in their comment, as a test of reading comprehension, and the first 30 or so comments failed to follow that instruction.
1.8 Times?
Thanks for the demonstration of the mindset I'm talking about. Some people want children, other people want pets, other people want houses, other people want cars, other people want jewelry.

All of these things cost money, none of them are charitable, but it's somehow less ok to get in financial trouble over them, the further you move toward the end of that list. Why?
Or you can go visit your local library, which has access typically to most journals in digital form.
I think that the lower the percentage, the more you need to improve your screening prior to getting the candidate in. It's just wasting your time and theirs.

I would love to say that you can tell from a CV whether or not they could pass FizzBuzz, but it's not true. I've interviewed MScs and PhDs that could not do FizzBuzz. Seriously.

The phone screener is your friend.
Would JSTOR have released these had the Schwartz action not occured? I suggest not. Does this then justify his actions? I don't know, but his actions have certainly proven advantageous to scientific study and breaking of the anti-science monopoly.
Didn't know about Canada - thanks!
Secondlife for facebook.Nice!If secondlife was done right, maybe there wouldnt even have been FB!:P
Give em a laptop. Those are a dime a dozen (we got a ton sitting around the office). Have em code in front of you. Hell I'd install any interpreter within reason to let em solve it.
Getting kind of far afield, but that's exactly what the Android "Intent" framework is: any app can register handlers for any data/url. So your app now appears next to "youtube" when the user selects "share" on a video, etc...
My parents didn't have kids until they could afford them. They were in their mid-30s when I was born. If I'd been raised in poverty because they had kids at 18 and dropped out of college, I would be entirely within my rights to question their judgement.
Well it was hard to break a habit of a lifetime

I used to have google bookmarked, I clicked on it then did a search

I was too lazy to go to the right and do a search from there. When I got Chrome earlier this year because Firefox was crashing all the time, the search box disappeared and I was left with an address bar and no bookmarks toolbar, so I did not click my google bookmark and do the search. I then realised you could search directly from the address bar.

That's the story and reason I started searching from the address bar!

Love Chrome, never looked back since ditching buggy, unstable Firefox!
On paper, and without any syntax errors.

But, to their advantage, they can select any language that they want.
That summarizes the familiar high-level world of recent times. (But then I'm also old enough to remember when compiler gremlins were ubiquitous.)

The lower-level world can be quite a bit more unseemly, what with the unpredictability of occasionally marginal voltages or power supplies, of RAS recovery and the occasional RAS and ECC errors, of sections of system buses lacking ED/EDC protection, the "fun" that is radioactive RAM and embedded alpha emitters (particularly "entertaining" if you don't have solid EDC), bus transients, and a host of other hardware gremlins.

Looking at the lowest levels of these boxes, I something marvel that these modern computing boxes even work at all, much less as well as they do.
Multiple Inheritance and Traits in Java
@aplusbi

Let's say I interviewed you. I had asked to implement the fastest algorithm to give back the largest palindrome of words in English dictionary and compare it the largest palindrome of the french language. What the best solution you can come up with in 45 minutes.

After, that I asked you, write a simple ftp server, in the language of your choice. With your first solution, I asked you implement a SSL library and add it to the ftp server to make it sftp.

Based on that I can judge how good of a programmer you really are.

Sorry for being sarcastic, but I think most interviewers are on a power trip. They ask questions that if they heard for the first time, they couldn't come up with answers either.

I think your better off really talking about and going in depth with the programmers experience. If your experienced yourself, you should have no problem.
Nice Work, I've was working on a service sorta like this for HN but it got put on the back burner for more important projects. Mine is a little different than this, but essentially same idea.
What if someone changes "int" to "uint"? It wouldn't even infinite loop / crash... It would remove exactly one element!

I can't see that. If i is a uint, at the end of the first cycle, i-- changes i to the maximum uint, then i++ changes i to 0, then i < Count compares Count to 0. It is identical to, if uglier than, the following:

while ( 0 < this.MyControl.TabPages.Count )
{
this.MyControl.TabPages.Remove ( this.MyControl.TabPages[0] );
}
Thou Shalt Not Sue Sony
Defaulting a search engine isn't evil. But it's substantially less good than providing user choice the way google does everywhere else.

But not providing that choice based solely on a user's location, that's worthy of criticism.
Good questions. I'm not sure myself, but I suspect the lure of $$$. Someone who's good at playing a sort of game I loathe can prey on companies that don't do good screening and keep a job for as long as a few months and sometimes indefinitely.

Heck, look at how much cargo cult programming goes on at companies from top to bottom. PG pointed out that one of the main reasons for dot.bomb failure was not being able to technically execute (sure, the company may still have been hopeless, but they didn't even get to test their sales proposition).

And a lot if not most companies simply don't focus on technical excellence or even simple competance. E.g. look at how the powers that be at Friendser let it wither on the vine because they assumes the tech was in the bag while their persued big deals, all the while ignoring for years (I think) that the system had gotten so overloaded it was essentially useless.

And, heck, if I had the time to mentor you and you were interested, I might take you on even at your current level. You "know your own limitations" today, but you're still, say, better than 70% plus or minus of the people who call themselves programmers. If you can execute the little stuff, I can teach you the big picture (with the aid of a book or two and some hard work).
The First Years Bassinet
Very cool. Lets see if it works.
I can't imagine anyone who writes code daily who couldn't get this right in under 5 minutes

Yes there are people who apply for programming jobs and do not write code daily, or even cannot code at all. FizzBuzz is designed to quickly identify them and filter them out.
I'll admit, sometimes I skim posts and go straight to the comments on HN. Sometimes I find the discussion here to be more scintillating than the link itself.
for(i = list.size; i--;)
list.removeAt(i);
Mind expanding your thoughts there?
The percentage of people who can complete a basic coding challenge during interview is more a testament to your phone screening than to the population of candidates.

If you're not weeding out these people with a 10-15 minute phone call you'll waste a lot of your and their time.
Could you suggest some ways to improve the first impression of http://testplanmanagement.com?
Mark Zuckerberg's genius ability to take other sites' best ideas.
Thailand Tourism and Travel Tips