skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Opinions on Codechef/interviewstreet/codeeval/etc?
Hi, so I recently joined some of these websites and tried out some of the questions. At the moment I think that solving these things while reading through an algorithms text (I'm using CLR atm) may be helpful for...well, algorithm knowledge in general.

Some questions:

-How true is the aforementioned statement?

-What do you think about how sometimes these problems act as things for recruiters to look at?

-Any other thoughts?

I feel like these questions are not "practical" questions but getting an okay implementation is maybe a passive skill useful for coding in general.
I took a standardized test at school around half a decade ago. I don't remember which one. It was normalized such that 100 is average.
There is something about having a private company controlling reputation on the web that's quite disturbing to many.

And while I don't think your average HN reader places much importance in Klout scores as a measure of reputation and influence, mass media outlets are certainly starting to.

No transparency, quantity over quality, higher scores the more personal data you fork over -- this is all movement in the wrong direction.
Apple takes on German café over logo
The Price of Life, Money is the Most Valuable Commodity
Sunlight is the best disinfectant[0]

Your second paragraph is so lacking in cynicism I can barely parse it. Three[1] people have received the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush, and you think "peace" can be an apolitical concept?

[0]Belief that members or agents of the government are more corrupt than average not included.

[1]Carter, Gore, Obama
#apfelkind has become a hashtag of interest on G+, too.

https://plus.google.com/u/1/s/%23apfelkind
Great book indeed!
Trying to catch up; just starting the exercises to 1.4.

Keep going and I'll catch up someday!
Shuttleworth: Ubuntu is heading to phones and tablets
I was passing by a museum last week, and they had some exhibit in the public space in front, and on the small board describing it, there was a QR code for a YouTube video of an actor narrating something related to the exhibit. The fact that the paternalist description of the QR code ("A kind of bar-code for the future [blah blah] go into the "APP store"[sic] and search for [blah blah]...") was more prominent than the code itself detracted somewhat from the feeling of being in the future, but that was the first useful application I've seen in the wild.
Is my name on it?

Yes?

Then it's personal information, and those "real users" can go screw.
Startup Life Is
What is more amazing is how quickly someone registered his last words.com
Intelligent Agents for Analytics
Sure.

The paper mentions HList, the "heterogeneous list" package, which often gets used for extensible records and static duck typing; HList uses type-level numbers and lists, and extensive type-level computation. I've wanted to use HList in the past, but the sheer pain of the types involved made it not worth the trouble. It also includes several (incompatible) variations of internal implementations with different tradeoffs.

Several packages exist for "session typing", which allows specification of a communication protocol between functions by using complementary types. Those involve heavy type-level computation on families of related types; this extension would help greatly.

I've personally encountered multiple cases where I'd like to operate on an arbitrary function or type regardless of its arity (how many arguments it takes), but doing so typically requires writing a family of handlers for various argument lengths. This extension would allow handling all of the cases generically.
An elegant ruby script for building complex c++ projects, using cmake
Yes! I played this as a kid. Until then, I didn't realize such things were possible with QBasic. From that point, I wanted to make my own game. I remember looking at the source code and thinking I'd never be able to figure out how a program that long works.

It's funny how trivial it looks now.
> So there are certainly uses for sync iteration tools (like _.each())

_.each() is NOT blocking, anymore than "var x = 1" is blocking, "callback(error, result)", or asynchronous_operation(callback) is blocking. It introduces NO synchronous waits. It cannot magically decompile your nonblocking system calls, and recompile them as blocking system calls or insert "while(true)"s. You have to explicitly add the blocking code yourself.

> Do you know/assume that the function itself takes care of the async aspects, or do you know/assume that the caller must take care to set up that structure?

It's still nonblocking. Whether one figured out how to pass all the parameters to a function and complete their intended code is a different question then whether or not completed code is blocking. Is this code blocking? == Does this code introduce undesirable synchronous waits and stalls?

Seriously, write a simple C program and prove all of this to yourself.
As a side note, in a way it's misleading to speak of Beethoven "overcoming" deafness. All of the master composers were so well-trained at their craft that they could hear the music in their head without "trying it out" on a piano or other instrument. By the time Beethoven was deaf being able to hear was superfluous as far as composing was concerned...
How (not) to Hire a Social Media Consultant: A Love Story
I'd highly recommend using `bundle gem #{your_gem_name}` to generate a template for a new gem. This will create sensible directory structures, stub out a gemspec, create a .gitignore, and add some rake tasks for building and pushing to rubygems.org.
hmm, 5000 years passed in the west as well and presumably people were also learning in the west.

in the end, it is not how long knowledge has accumulated in a place but how open people are to learning from others.

And how open is often a crap shoot accident of history. The US forced Japan open when Admiral Perry paid Tokyo a visit. Had he only gone to North Korea instead, history would have been completely different.
Monkey Go Happy Marathon
Related: A fun story about DONKEY.BAS [1] told by Andy Hertzfeld exists where he reminisces about comparing an 8088 with the Macintosh project and how they were disappointed at the lack of ingenuity.

[1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Donkey.txt
It's becoming a tenet that digital identity and influence is everything going forwards.

What if the opposite happens? - it becomes fashionably alternative for kids to renounce social, always connected devices and online generally - and completely switch off.

Sometimes it feels like some of the things we're building make that more likely.
I have a feeling that will be a lot like not having a home phone, TV and mail service would have been in the 80s.
Ubuntu 11.10: Looks Kind of Cool But Who Is It For?
Go solution of the Dining philosophers problem
I had a similar reaction after seeing Etherpad’s collaborative text editing. I remember my jaw hitting the floor when watching a replay of Paul Graham writing and editing an essay keystroke by keystroke.

Now that I’ve seen it—I want everything to be real time and collaborative. I think it’s one of those things where once people have seen it, there’s no going back.
If you're interested in more thoughtful commentary regarding Klout or online influence, I highly suggest my friend Tom's blog: http://brandsavant.com.

"My Klout is equal to Snooki’s. There isn’t a party, gathering or room in the world in which I would be equally influential to Snooki. There’s a good thought exercise for you."

http://brandsavant.com/on-klout-bashing/
The 'brogrammer' line was my vain attempt to drop some humor into the article. I'm an engineer, not a writer, and I'm learning through comments like the ones you made to better my writing for the future, and to find out what is appropriate and what is not.

Thanks for the feedback.
Gorilla.bas is okay, but if you're going to load up nibbles.bas please fix the bug where the number permanently disappears if the Pause dialog covers it. Thanks.

(Also, the block-drawing character tricks in Nibbles were rather neat little affairs.)
Thanks! Sure, thats on the TODO list :)
If you set your email client as the handler for 'mailto:' links (it's reasonably easy, at least on Firefox), the following bookmarklet creates an email ready to be sent (one click in Gmail) with the current page URL:

javascript:(function(){var%20url=%22mailto:example@example.com?body=%22+document.URL;window.open(url);})();

Don't forget to replace 'example@example.com' with your own email address.
Well, I was searching the net for free rails books, and I came across this blog post, I am also currently reading a book called Rework (by Jason Fried and DHH from 37signals)

And this post strikes me as almost a complete opposite of what Rework preaches (for the lack of a better term), noting that I only read the first 100 pages (which are more like 30 pages considering the amount of whitespace and pictures in this book)

I am really falling in love with the ideas Rework teaches (is this a better term), and I believe that they fit more with my experience in life, which is something I didn't expect, considering I find DHH obnoxious. But I have to admit Rework is a great book

Now pointing back to the blog post in the link I shared, it's written by Obie Fernandez, which is also someone that I really don't like, I read a while ago another blog post by him, about how you should be a hustler and stuff to make it in life, and I guess he didn't change. Some people just like to do a little bit of all, and this I definitely admire, so I dislike Obie, but this doesn't mean he is a bad guy.

I guess the point here is, even thought Hashrocket and probably anything Obie touches, will be done using methods that are the exact opposites of how 37signals get work done. Both are successful, and apparently happy ... Perl was right all along TIMTOWTDI
to me, Jobs was a sociopath and he is not spending any energy in anything that doesn't lead to winning over someone.

it is silly for the author to guess how BG would act. Also he didn't mention how BG at least try to make a better world to lots of less fortunate people with his own money, rather than Jobs tries to squeeze all the money he could with so-called "smart-marketing"
I think Ender seems to fit the bill pretty well. Being a package manager for JS[1], it allows you to download and manage dependencies for each project. A bit like PEAR or CPAN or NPM or whatever, with some client side stuff to manage those dependencies in the browser. That's what I got from a quick scan, anyway.

These things are trivial to use for even the most inexperienced CLI user, mind, so something like this would likely do well for you.

I like the idea of it so I'm going to float it at work and see what people think.

[1] http://ender.no.de/
First - that post is 3 years old.

Secondly - I lived in Beijing for half a year in 2010 (ie. 2 years after this post was published). I used Google Maps often on my smartphone, and the GPS fix on the features map was incorrect (ie. I would be standing at a street corner and it would show me a few hundred meters down the street on the map).
What is the actual breakdown of costs for a university?

The College Results site is a database from which you can look up what spending there is for student instruction (according to United States federal government reporting definitions) for a variety of colleges from the student's point of view:

http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=11...

The underlying database is the federal IPEDS database.

http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/

IPEDS has its own database search interface.

After edit:

What is interesting is that most big name schools don't seem to be putting all of that extra money into bettering undergraduate education.

A few of the biggest-name schools pay more for student instruction (by the federal definition) than those same schools charge ANY student for full-list-price tuition (and offer generous need-based financial aid besides). That is perhaps part of what makes those schools so big-name and so hard to gain admission to.

http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=16...
That's certainly a good point. But I get the impression that people who feel that way aren't just talking about their employee performance reviews.

We had impersonal, narrowly-defined performance metrics for low-level workers long before computers (see any assembly line, or the increasing speed of the meat packing lines in The Jungle). That the metrics now tend to be tabulated by computer may have extended the practice to more fields, but doesn't seem like a fundamental shift.
I take issue with that 'bottom line'. I have friends who I hang out with and talk about the business side of what we do, yeah. We also spend a hell of a lot of time just kicking around and critiquing PROJECT IDEAS, and sharing the stuff we've found that we think is pretty awesome.
If you consume HD content the "legitimate" way by inserting a disc into a Blu-ray player, then no, I don't think it is. You have to put up with 7 minutes of unskippable previews in some cases, player updates that take two hours to download and install, two minute load times on two-year-old players, etc.

If you front-load the inconvenience by buying the discs, ripping them all to a hard drive, and using something like XBMC or Plex on an HTPC, then for any serious watching where you sit down for the whole show, yes, it absolutely is worth it. I wish more people had access to the convenience a media server gives; it's what content should be like in the digital age.

Edit: I'm usually about 1.5 screen lengths away, so that probably makes a difference.
Youtube (http://i.imgur.com/VIwYx.png) doesn't fare too well. It's like they've never heard of the law of diminishing returns.
Which is surprising seeing as though Google adwords was launched and is heavily based around an unobtrusive targeted ad-mix as opposed to the flashing GIF / "punch the monkey" style of ads which were prevalent before adwords.
The Internet is a Kennel
Want To Know The Truth About Marketing Online As a Network Marketer?
I really wish Google docs integrated their versioning in a visual way like Etherpad. I wonder what the team is up to these days. Are they still at Google?
Reinventing Local: A General Assembly Hackathon
تردد قناة تايم سينما
تردد قناة تايم سينما
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http://www.almstba.com/vb/t46612.html
We know that Beethoven himself was tremendously depressed by the onset of deafness and thought of it as a terrible misfortune to be heroically struggled with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heiligenstadt_Testament

But we also know that he gave himself excellent pep talks and then kept going for another thirty years, writing great stuff long after his deafness was far worse than it was in 1802. So, yes, it seems that Beethoven eventually came to agree with you!

And, come to think of it, as I remember Beethoven's biggest complaints about deafness centered on loneliness, and on his fear that nobody would want to hire a deaf composer. I don't actually recall him complaining that his work might suffer. So that's another point in favor of your argument.
Why is Klout any more odious than any number of other Twitter statistic apps?
http://tweetstats.com/graphs/nelson
http://twitaholic.com/nelson/
Sounds a bit like sour grapes. If you have a problem with something like this, you should have a problem with the fact that the data they're mining is public data and not that people are mining it.
Even today one can get the cost of a BA from certain State Universities down to under $5,000. It is just about being able to understand the system and figure out a personal path towards the degree. Sites like http://www.bain4weeks.com/ have been explaining the basics of these strategies for many years, but this stuff requires personal initiative. Most people are probably just to lazy/skeptical to give it a try or prefer walking down the same road as everybody else.
How to lose weight quickly is more than reducing the meal
UK police running mass MITM attacks on GSM networks
17 Startup Insights For Entrepreneurs
You no longer need approval to create a gem project?
If it's working via the Google Talk gateway, Talkatone does the same thing for free to an iOS endpoint.

It can't bridge to a physical device though.
Genuinely curious about the reason why this is oh HN's front page.
It's a gorilla.bas, how is this news? Or am I missing some detail here?
YT was also briefly in "The Diamond Age". :)
If the main topic of conversation you have with your friends is not how you can better yourself, you need to get new friends.

Or, put another way, if you prefer to read fiction and non-personal non-fiction rather than self-help books you need to get some new books. Why? Because Oprah said so.
Not a surprise to anyone familiar with pascal's grammer.
Excuse me, but the company decides what the titles for positions are, not the applicants. And I'm sure no one with "Software Engineer" in their title ever got laid off.
"But the article is really telling you to pick a job where you'll be considered King Shit!". Thanks for that great advice.
I agree with you and I don't feel that QR codes are a good fit for things like this (it's just awkward), but just a small nit: Windows Phones actually do support QR codes (and other bar codes) out of the box. I'm sure there are others, but that is the only know I know of. :)
I definitely agree, with a caveat: I would say that (Common) Lisp is the best language to learn computer science. If I had only an hour to teach a young child some fundamental CS concepts, I would make sure to include the concept of recursion. Common Lisp makes this, as well as a few other CS 'building blocks', trivially easy.

(The reason I'm distinguishing between programming and CS here is that 'programming' is a broad term that encompasses a number of use cases. If someone wants to learn 'programming' to throw together a few simple webapps or do some text processing, Lisp will get the job done, but they probably won't care too much about learning these fundamentals).
This is complete plagiarism from Robin William's "Non-Designer's Design Book." She identifies the four principles of design as Alignment, Contrast, Repetition, and Proximity. She even makes a reference to the fact that "CRAP" would be a poor acronym.

The author simply reorganized the principles, and that's dishonest. http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin-Willia...
I always thought of him as a sociopath. It's nice to read an insider's take that isn't suffused with narcissism and loathing, although I always did figure him for a jerk for parking that Merc in the handicapped space every. goddamned. day.
Not for me.

I've already gone to Lubuntu, and I'm starting the thought process of moving to Mint or Debian.

My thirteen year old has asked to go to Mint, we'll probably do that next weekend. "Dad, you can't even change the panel." The "teachable moment" will end up being about re-partitioning his Linux partition (it's all root at the moment), not about learning Unity. He just wants to GSD.
It's probably just too late in the day for me, but that article seemed like 90% gibberish to me. I hope the book is better...
tl;dr: Not worth a read.

As someone who has spent an enormous amount of time studying Pixar's process, and why it works, I can tell you that the author of those slides simply cribbed material from an Ed Catmull speech, and has no clue what was important from that speech and what was not.
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But also, Einstein was a genius, and he thought about light beams, and Jobs about foam models, so they must be kind of the same. And also Einstein said that God doesn't play dice, so he must be religious, except that he wasn't particularly religious.

OK sorry, my brain hurts, probably that means I am not a genius.
I just switched from a 1st gen Palm Pre to my first iPhone 4S and I cannot agree more with this statement. webOS has a great UI, but it lost all the important battles (app ecosystem, quality hardware to run on, etc). iOS is now picking up a lot of webOS goodness (notifications) and the app ecosystem that Apple has is just... mindblowing. John Siracusa, in his Hypercritical podcast, made a great case for Amazon picking up webOS for use on their new tablets, but that horse has already left the stable with Android.
Facts as concrete as physical dimensions are not really open to political debate.
I'm suggesting that insulting someone (male or female) on their supposed lack of intellect in regards to (what is perceived to be) a masculine interest is taken different than insulting someone on their supposed lack of intellect in regards to (what is perceived to be) a feminine interest. Cultural we perceive these masculine interests to be of greater importance (both male and female).
I'm a little perturbed by the glowing mention of "human capital contracts" - which sounds a hell of a lot like indentured servitude to me.
The scarier outcome would be if one of the groups reached the point of de facto legitimacy among normal people, and then decided to use it's clout and skills as a weapon.

Beyond spreading false rumors, why not go the next step to plant evidence on their opponents (arrange drug drops at their houses or kiddie porn on their computers)?

That's the nightmare scenario, IMO.
This is the biggest hurdle for those with a 'I can't draw a stick figure if my life depended on it' attitude. Hand drawing takes a lot of practice and determination to get past the initial 'this looks like sh' stages..

I agree with you as far as the experience and the analysing of shapes goes... and yes... the next step after reading the tutorials should be to go and play with the shapes and create something new, experiment and find your own way of doing things. From some of the feedbacks I received that is happening for quite a few users that go through the steps and then turn the simple circles into an owl, a tiger or a dragon. Something they would not have created from scratch with pen and paper as they lacked the self esteem and believe in their art creation skill.

I tried to go a different way in the tutorials to give the readers a simple approach towards 'constructing' elements from basic building blocks - rather than struggle with perspective and proportion.
I am very proud of my influence: http://tweetstats.com/graphs/andrewklofas
Google Exposes 31,280 User Accounts To The Government Every Year
The big FAQ, for your convenience:

--

When will the device be available to purchase?

We anticipate the device will be available to the general public later in 2011 – we were hoping to hit the end of November, but right now December’s looking more likely.
The difference in quality between ml-class.org and ai-class.org is remarkable
I love this idea of true enough, as some things we won't know, but either version shall do for us. Thank you it was a nice feeling.
A sort-of-substitute for a weak terminal is to use control keys and helper commands.

For example, control-S or its equivalent mapping will "stop" text from scrolling, and control-Q will resume it. A control-Z will suspend the process entirely, at which point (in most shells) "fg" will resume it in the foreground and "bg" in the background.

If you run the entire process through a pipe or create a file (e.g. with "tee"), it is often easier to control the output and then you can't really lose anything if it happened to scroll by too fast. Piping to "less" or "more" gives you things like page-by-page output and search.

Yes, good terminals handle all of this too, but it's very useful to become comfortable with the Unix commands and keys that do the same kinds of things.
"I really wish Google docs integrated their versioning in a visual way like Etherpad"

What did you like about it?