skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, there are a lot of people that can both very well and to be honest most contractors have to be able to if they want to get work.

I don't think that the skill set required is actually that different, but your right in saying discipline is required in order to excel in both.

Then I think the key point is those that do possess both skills and the discipline/drive to excel at both are usually either doing very well doing their own thing and aren't looking for work.
Getting a "502 Bad Gateway The server returned an invalid or incomplete response." for a couple of hours now.

Hope it is fixed soon, want to try it out.
But surely you don't need ~40 words to communicate the difference between two options.
The best designers will know HTML+CSS+Javascript pretty intimately for a variety of reasons.

Can you name a few? I work with an absolutely brilliant designer who can't write a lick of HTML/JS/CSS however he intimately understands how his designs will translate to a browser.
Awesome! Thanks for validating that :)
Not myopic, but I do have some eye problems that limit the correction I can get. This may make me in the minority, but it also means that dark background defaults are not a positive experience for me. Text on light backgrounds is is crisp, while dark backgrounds looks like it's been badly anti-aliased.

With regards to brightness of the monitors, I keep it reasonable - about 25% of what the monitors could do.
this just doesn't make sense to me - why would they need such infrastructure? they can't even have that many daily pageviews; backend deal management and CRM wouldn't require huge scale or datacenters...
>> Otherwise, n is definitely composite — no fooling

This assertion is false if I understood the test correctly.

Take n = 5, a = 2.

a ^ ((n - 1) / 2) = 2 ^ ((5 - 1) / 2) = 2 ^ 2 = 4
and 4 mod 5 = 4.

Therefore the test will say 5 is composite.
The real issue is that mastering something takes an awful long time - 10.000 hours or 10 years from what I have read (Malcolm Gladwell, Peter Norvig, various research). Most people aren't willing to put in this effort and most people aren't willing to suck at something for years, therefore they focus on the thing they are good at.

Maybe we could become awesome at multiple things if we are willing to invest 10 years into learning something instead of investing a few weeks.
Could somebody who has knowledge about data centers make a quick estimation how much such a data center might cost?

I am asking since I am not a data center/architecture expert but the Groupon site should not be that complex from my perspective? Also the content should mostly be static, so caching should solve many problems.
This is lovely, I'm going to give it a shot. Thanks for the link :)
> There will be problems in the Computer Language Benchmark.

???

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/jruby.php

> Ruby 1.9 smokes Python away!

"I ran a recursive Fibonacci function..." Really.
Thanks for the suggestion -- I just purchased it. I'm not big one videos, but I'm getting so much out of the book I'm purchasing it in support of the book (and it looks like I'll receive a copy of the book whenever it's done along with the udemy purchase).
I already have a paid account, i can invite you two as admins too.
Using Fonts for Icons...CSS-Tricks
Evaluate my Startup: Simpapply, Connecting Students and Startups
SimpApply is a service that delivers job opportunities to eager individuals and helps employers find people that can make an impact.

Work on SimpApply began in 2010 by Abhishek Nag, Yilong Yao and Norman Pai, who, while finishing up senior year at Rice University in Houston, Texas, were fed up with convoluted job application processes and big companies passing up talented peers. We are continuously growing and want to find others excited about making life easier for people to find jobs perfect for them.
Westerners always raise the question, why don't the people rise up against the injustice?

I think this is a fascinating question, but one that's not tied up in culture at all. It's not just the Koreans and Chinese that have succumbed to this, but also the Russians, Germans, Yugoslavs, and South Americans that I can't name.

In any case, your reference to linguistic differences probably doesn't hold up.

- - - Quote [1]

Whorf presents a moving target, with most of his claims coming in both extreme and in more cautious forms. Debate continues about his considered views, but there is little doubt that his bolder claims, unimpeded by caveats or qualifications, were better suited to captivate his readers than more timid claims would have been.

When languages are similar, Whorf tells us, there is little likelihood of dramatic cognitive differences. But languages that differ markedly from English and other Western European languages (which Whorf calls, collectively, “Standard Average European” or SAE) often do lead their speakers to have very different worldviews.

- - - End Quote

and also

- - - Quote [2]

...the strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that language determines thought, is also thought to be incorrect. ...

Among the most frequently cited examples of linguistic determinism is Whorf's study of the language of the Inuit people, who were thought to have numerous words for snow. He argues that this modifies the world view of the Eskimo, creating a different mode of existence for them than, for instance, a speaker of English. The notion that Arctic people have an unusually large number of words for snow has been shown to be false by linguist Geoffrey Pullum; in an essay titled "The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax", he tracks down the origin of the story, ultimately attributing it largely to Whorf and suggesting the triviality of Whorf's observations.

... A recent study by Peter Gordon examines the language of the Pirahã tribe of Brazil. According to Gordon, the language used by this tribe only contains three counting words: one, two and many. Gordon shows through a series of experiments that the people of the Pirahã tribe have difficulty recounting numbers higher than three (Gordon, 2004). However, the causal relationship of these events is not clear. Critics have argued that if the test subjects are unable to count numbers higher than three for some other reason (perhaps because they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so) then one should not expect their language to have words for such numbers. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary. Moreover, a more recent study suggests that the Pirahã have a basic understanding of geometry despite their language.

- - - End Quote

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/supplement2.htm...

[2] http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis
Strange. With Python 2.6 I get [None, 7] while with Python 2.7 it is [None]. Looking at the OP codes the 2.7 one's look weird.

Python 2.6:

>>> dis.dis(f)
1 0 LOAD_GLOBAL 0 (g)
3 LOAD_CONST 0 (None)
6 YIELD_VALUE
7 CALL_FUNCTION 1
10 RETURN_VALUE

Python 2.7:

>>> dis.dis(f)
1 0 LOAD_GLOBAL 0 (g)
3 LOAD_CONST 0 (None)
6 YIELD_VALUE
7 CALL_FUNCTION 1
10 POP_TOP
11 LOAD_CONST 0 (None)
14 RETURN_VALUE

In essence the Python 2.7 compiler decides to throw away the result of the g() function call and replaces it with None. Does anyone understand why?
Happened in November 2010 in the timespan of 4 days. (I think there were even more but this is what I remembered I can quickly grab from http://goo.gl/FgcAv)

11/4: Quantas Airlines Grounds All Airbus A380s After Engine Fire Over Indonesia
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/04/qantas-airbus-probl...

11/5: Engine Problems Hit Second Quantas Aircraft -- This Time a Boeing 747-400
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6A435P20101105

11/8: Quantas Uncovers More Engine Problems
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/11/08/3059568.htm
I have to agree with the first comment on the page. Most of these are just the author + coworkers acting likes asshats.
Sounds like you dodged a bullet. The founders probably weren't going to give their first employee the kind of equity they were going to give themselves, despite the fact that their first employee would have to be more qualified than they were.
I'd say the closest anyone has come to this was Steve Wozniak. He of course built the first two Apples but also wrote the BASIC for ][ that would be used for its thriving game ecosystem...and he wrote a few games himself.

I know the article in question is talking about front-end/back-end design...but I'd argue that software and hardware engineering are just as peripherally-related-yet-substantially-differentiated enough.

So, just find yourself another Steve Woz...
Will do. And I just purchased your udemy C course. And WOW! I'm looking ahead in the pdf and you're going to cover a lot. Perhaps the same is reflected in the HTML version -- I 've not yet looked ahead.

Folks, if you're a Python, Ruby, Javascript, etc. programmer and you're interested in learning C, this is the book for you.
Using horn antennas with a nice bronze patina might add some steampunk flare though.
Mint Digital (based in London) did a great one a few years ago.

I got sent a moleskine which had the words "Amicus Menthae" embossed in it.

If you google the phrase, you get this website: http://amicusmenthae.com/

An image of the moleskine is also there if you're interested.
My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition)
Thanks for the awesome example of putting one of paul graham's essays into action.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
It seems thar Apple does not care about the negative PR lawsuites like this generate for them. Apple owes a lot of their success to being cool and innovative. Lawsuites like this make apple neither.
Email is still effective, even though it's the most cost-effective way of sending spam. This is due to spam filters.

On Android for instance call blockers are allowed on the marketplace (versus iOS) - https://market.android.com/search?q=calls+blocker&c=apps - many of those apps allow you to have a blacklist of phone numbers, or you can just specify that you only want SMS from your contacts.

Better filters can always be built. Also, even though the sending of SMS may be free at some point, getting new numbers will not be free and getting your numbers flagged by blacklists will get costly.
The documentary 'A State of Mind' is available for streaming on Netflix.

http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/A_State_of_Mind/70038815

Excellent documentary that follows a couple of young gymnasts through family life and training for a big event.
I am a designineer. The problem is that it doesn't make you an expert of all skills. Jack of all trades, master of none.

While I took AP CS in high school, I can't rattle off the to O-notation of most algorithms. While I took plenty of art and design classes over the years, I'm no Jony Ives.

But, its not about what I can't do in my mind, but what I can do. I learn most things very quickly. I'm decent in Ruby and can get stuff done. I can get around Photoshop decently. I'm good at understanding what the customer wants and the product needs. I know how the pieces glue together. I don't mind meeting with VCs, talking to customers or interviewing people.

Yet contrary to popular belief, I don't find people bashing down my door. I don't have the sexiest Github account. The startups I've worked for aren't huge. When I'm asked what I do I reply, "Coding, marketing, product and design". Then they ask if I'm a Java or Ruby coder with 4-7 years of solid experience and a CS background.

Maybe the difference is I don't see myself as being a "full stack" guy, but a "full company" guy. I understand what everyone needs to be doing, and I have (often good) ideas of how a problem might be approached better.

I personally see myself as a huge asset to any company. I often end up doing the productivity of 2-3 people with more traditional backgrounds, but its a really hard sell honestly. I could try selling myself as a manager I suppose, but I'm not sure.
Engineering and designing are much more similar than they are different.

I recently completed a four-year graduate design degree (architecture) after a lifetime of math, physics and not a whip of art or design experience. Here's my take on this issue.

Engineering and design are both fundamentally processes of creation. While both creations must meet one or more objectives, the types of those objectives often differ. Engineers tend to optimize for quantitative objectives and criteria; designers tend to optimize for qualitative objectives and criteria.

I think this difference has two significant consequences:

1. The solution space for designers (or anything with qualitative criteria) is much larger than for engineers.
2. There are many more opportunities for mediocre design than there are for mediocre engineering.

By point 2., I mean that not only is the solution space of design much larger, but there are also many more "attractors" of solutions. In engineering, the attractors have a strong pull and are more recognizable as such. And, because the solution space is more quantifiable, the relations between those solutions are more well understood and comparable.

In design, the attractors are more fuzzy and their locations in the solution space are often unknown. This allows anyone who can find a mediocre design solution (especially those who find "pretty" visual ones) to become a "designer". But good designers must do much more. They must understand the design space enough so that, from any starting point, they can justifiably navigate towards that same design solution.

This involves crossing certain thresholds -- bifurcations -- in which the nature of the design solution changes. Recognizing when to cross these thresholds is, in my opinion, a task perfectly suited for analytical thinkers. You don't need to be able to create visually pleasing designs to find the best design solutions. Visual aesthetics are simply one component of optimizing the already discovered design solution.

So my advice to engineers is this: forget about visuals. Design analytically, question the existence of design components and their relationships. If you cannot justify their existences and relationships, you need to somehow change their nature (bifurcate the design) until you can justify it. Often starting from the bottom-up is the best way to accomplish this.

Once a design solution is in sight, optimizing its visual aesthetics is much easier -- you've already framed its problem so well!

Finally, I must note the three tasks which are essential to the design process: research, experimentation and documentation. Surely these tasks are also vital to engineers, or anyone else involved in processes of creation.

---

(PS If anyone would like to talk about how many of the concepts of dynamical systems theory can be used in the design process (and the design itself!), I'd love to hear form you!)
China could learn a lot from India
Would you pay for a Google Enterprise-esque service hosted in Scandinavia?
Forgive me as I post this from a throwaway account, but I have been a member here for a few years:

Given the recent rash of privacy-related concerns and the increasingly-concerning intrusive behavior of the US government in the affairs of its businesses and their customers, I have seen a growing trend of many US-based companies looking to host customers' sensitive data and private information out of the United States to avoid being forced to compromise the privacy and integrity of their users.

I am a "serial entrepreneur" with a successful track record that is seriously considering launching a "Google Enterprise"-like service hosted in one of the Scandinavian nations, with the twist of focusing first and foremost on the privacy of the client.

The core services would initially be similar to the basic hosted enterprise features (email/webmail, contacts, documents, calendar, etc.) potentially expanding into AWS-like territory, structured in a way where we would be able to guarantee the privacy and integrity of any information hosted with us. There would be a very strong focus on encryption and security in general.

While I do believe that this is a lucrative business opportunity, this would be a very big step for me as I do not live in Scandinavia; but I genuinely feel that this is a concern that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later as I have seen a shocking number of posts here on HN detailing cases where startups and businesses have been unable to offer or continue offering particular services given the current political weather in the USA.

Basically, if such a service were to exist would you as a business pay for such a hosted solution? And as an individual (a la Gmail)?
View your life in a parallel universe with the press of a button
Speaking as someone who's brain has been broken by OOP, I found this article quite illuminating and would love to see more of the hardcore haskell/ML/FP guys weigh in.
This is crazy. How can they not be fired for lying? Or, at best, for being misinformed?
He didn't say CSS, he said design. That could just as easily be Photoshop mockups, with CSS lumped into the HTML job.
Given a scale of 1-10 for design skills and programming skills, it's my experience that individuals significantly over 10 are rare indeed. In fact, If you find one of Spinal Taps' mythical 11s, hire him or her now.

I myself am an 8 + 4, at least in my mind.
Who do they host with now?
Hollywood’s pirate cure is worse than the disease
Install Handbrake in Ubuntu 11.10
When applied to me the problem is probably the other way round: I like all those silly questions and solve them in my free time for fun. (I did study mathematics, because I like this kind of thing.) But honestly, that doesn't help me much in writing non-trivial programs, and there's a bunch of people I know that are worse in those interview-type questions, but better at developing software.
Well to be honest I have a different approach to sharing. If you've ever used drop.io you know mine is similar.

The idea behind mine is you can create custom urls for the files you upload hence why you have to select a name (or keep the random one generated for you).

It's a shame that some people just give up trying to figure it out without even attempting to click or interact with a site.

I appreciate your feedback but I can only dumb down the process so much :)
A blockade now would have been a solid victory. A blockade months into the future for a trivially disabled feature is pretty much a joke.

I worked on a touch pad in '99 that had this functionality, and I'm pretty sure we didn't come up with the idea.

Unfortunately we never got it into mass production, and I doubt sufficient details were released to use it as prior art. Nokia's Screen Phone might have had similar functionality.

(Search for FreePad if interested - still a few articles available)
Russia and North Korea are completely different. I don't think North Korean life expectancy has very far to plummet.
I use Josh Kill's dark "kolor" theme in Espresso and love it.

Preview: http://joshkill.com/storage/kolor-preview.png
Site: http://joshkill.com/

Squarespace also made this an option in their new CSS editor, which is awesome.
A Gentle Introduction to Making HTML5 Canvas Interactive
it's not a gui but i think you're looking for ssh-copy-id
[LIVE] Blogging the app launch for Discovr Movies
Enterprise cloud explained (funny)
Incanter is quite nice and I really like Clojure (disclaimer: I am still a beginner), but it has far less libraries than R. I also think the creators of R did a really good job in making seamless the installation of a package (install.packages(...)) and having lots of functions pretty well documented, so a statistician who is not a programmer can easily do his work and quickly come up with results. AFAIK this is still unmatched anywhere else.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17365070
I also prefer light backgrounds - for example the KDE konsole color scheme (light colors with black letters, a different background color automatically assigned for each tab).

Websites with white-on-black cause afterimages which persist for several seconds and are really distracting / tiring.
I'm genuinely surprised by this. I always figured that Groupon was an expensive business- but that it was because of their army of sales associates, not because of hosting.

What are they doing that <insert name of successful web company here> isn't?
The Truth About Vitamin D
I read these unicorn articles and at first think, hey, I'm one of those guys, meaning it can't be that hard. I am no genius, just a decently hard working individual that tends that likes to do things right. I feel comfortable in both worlds, I lead a design team and also lead the direction of some of the engineering efforts of a decent size team (20+).

That being said, it's hard to do both at scale or really well. One is going to suffer as soon as the project gets to a decent size, I notice this every time I try and do it myself. So, props to people who can produce extremely high quality code and designs, that takes a serious focus.
Tired of your boss? I have a great boss and I work in a wonderful team. Lots of C++, real-time, unix, vxworks (target). Denver (Lakewood) Medical devices. We are looking for a pretty good dev. with at least 5 yrs exp. Will be a contract to hire. (6 - 12 months). Shoot me a resume with demands/conditions if interested! Cons: No growth, salary a little below market. Pros: Very competent team, challenging projects, stable.
This is a great idea and could be really successful if executed well.
Your result image does not work for me (ff, gnu/linux debian stable)
Helvetica vs. Arial
It's probably at least partly a matter of how the rest of your room is lit. Your sight is sharpest when your pupils are small, so a bright monitor in a bright room will work best for many people.

However, if you're looking at a dark monitor in a bright room, or at a bright monitor in a dark room, your pupils may be too large for the amount of light that reaches them to be entirely comfortable, which causes squinting and eyestrain.

A dark monitor in a dark room won't have that problem, but you may still be dealing with some increased blurriness because of your enlarged pupils, which may bother you depending on how good your eyesight is.
Westerners always raise the question, why don't the people rise up against the injustice?

Because that requires a particular tipping point, which sits on a sliding scale.

With the economic crises, and the draconian anti-freedom laws in several western countries, one could ask us the same.