skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While we're waxing psychological, I should also point out the Just World bias[1]. Sometimes, capable people have difficulty getting jobs they're qualified for due to reasons outside their control. And having been on both sides of the table, I can say that identifying good developers is hardly a precise science (I mean, you're judging him based on emoticons and whether you see any token modesty), and many if not most people who are genuinely great at software development are terrible at demonstrating it.

Also, you need to consider the possibility that the author doesn't show any signs of self-reflection because he/she is so frustrated. I've spent 3 months looking for a job all the while seeing people complaining about how hard it is to find developers, and it is incredibly frustrating.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
Version 2.0 (current version is 2.1). Apparently upgrading is not trivial (due to Spring framework or whatever... I don't know, I'm not familiar with the Java stack).

You mention an example where JSP fares best; there are a lot of examples that don't come out looking too great though, such as time/date/decimal conversion, the obnoxious syntax for if/else, etc. A lot of Django's other filters just don't exist in JSP.

But that aside, there are larger scale issues -- composition of templates via blocks in Django/Jinja, which is a lot easier and more flexible than Apache tiles; the lack of auto-escaping in JSP; and the forced XML syntax, even at the expense of valid HTML (see what it does to script includes or empty divs, without a <!-- --> in between).
Drat. If I'd known they were going to do that, I'd have made sure I was in the top 1000.

edit: why is this getting voted down? I would expect there are a fair number of people here who took the course with a casual approach, like I did. E.g., I usually watched the lectures early Sunday, then did the homework that night. Then, for those topics that I enjoyed and wanted in more depth, I read the sections in the book on them. This approach is relaxing and fun, but does increase the tendency to make silly mistakes and not catch them (which I in fact have done a few times now).

I am, it turns out, enjoying the material enough that I think I would like, if I ever find myself looking for a job, to find one where I can use this stuff.
"""And you know anything about my socialization how?"""

Well, duh, from YOU, when you stated: "online is where I do 99% of my socialization outside of the office."

"""Where did this backwards (and utterly ludicrous) idea that one can only socialize in person or via voice come from?"""

I don't know, never heard of that idea. Mine was: if you're doing "99% of your socializing online" there you're not doing much at all --especially if people you could contact think phone calls from you are "distracting and rude".

"""I'd expect a commenter to a site named "Hacker News" to have a more hacker-esque mind set."""

No, I don't go for sheep mentality. Try ESR's blog for a truly hacker-esque mind set.

"""Having the phone ring is much, much more distracting to someone who is occupied on a mostly mental task such as coding than an instant message or even a SMS."""

I'm a programmer myself and have lots of programming friends, from work, for old workplaces, from uni, you name it. No one has a problem answering their phone --as long as you don't call them every other hour.

There are tons more distractions in a day than a friend calling you (meetings, for one) --and you wouldn't call them at work time, anyway. OTOH, if all their/your time is work time, i.e if 9pm you're at work coding, then, they/you're not really socializing anyway, you're just commenting on other people walls --other people you will almost never see in person or interact with.

"""I'm happy you have all the time in the world to organize as you see fit. I am not so lucky."""

I sure don't, but if a meeting in real life took herculean effort, I'd consider my working schedule a failure, and would try to find ways to amend it.
Honestly the hn community has degenerated into nothing more than a bunch of snobbish behavior that up/downvote things needlessly based upon that person's likes or dislikes, rather than on the validity of the content. Don't get me wrong, every site similar to this with voting eventually gets there, but lately it has started getting worse and worse. Which is why I am posting with this account because I am sure this comment will get plenty more downvotes! lol

As I saw in another comment here I agree that trolls usually help make a community better. The voting system being used on comments rather than just the initial post to rank listing is much more of a hindrance to a community than trolls imo.
My bank account is just an int in a server somewhere, but that doesn't make it unimportant. Obviously my karma isn't important, but that's because it has little effect on my outside of HN. Being bits on a server somewhere doesn't make it unimportant.

Similarly, when someone posted a fake obit of Steve Jobs (well before he died), it caused quite an impact despite none of it mattering.
OP, you might want to change the title to show that this article is from 2008. That was confusing to me, and a few other people in this thread.
Road etiquette would be worse if it weren't for the chance of death for messing up.
That's interesting because I think the interviewer was unintentionally doing this. But the problem was that I couldn't have a conversation with him. He just kept on telling me I was wrong with no discussion. I didn't give in. He never changed his answer or tone. When I say monotone, I'm not kidding.

So if he was trying to use Joel's technique, shouldn't he have at least engaged in a conversation? If he was doing it, he was doing it very badly. I'm pretty persuasive when it comes to technical issues. I'm frequently wrong and lose many a battle but I win them too at least as often as I lose. I can tell you I wasn't getting any feedback that he was interested in resolving the conflict. Just that he wanted me to acknowledge that he was right. He wasn't.

If the goal was to challenge me, it backfired. After this incident I had little interest in continuing the interview. It turned me off on the company pretty conclusively. And then I was angry because I felt my time had been wasted. Not a good outcome for me or them.
He says he finds it cheaper to buy drums of water from a petrol station and pay a sanitation company about $14 a month to remove waste from his "porta-potty" than pay the combined sewer and water rate bill, which some months can reach $300.

What really happens at the very end after all of the brouhaha about derivatives, crooked politics, and mortgage disasters? The people go back to using outhouses. Pardon the pun: Shit just got real.
I think your view of trolling is colored by your participation in it.

I would like to participate in and read honest discussion. Trolls poison honest discussion. The "none of this matters" line of thought is a red-herring. Trolls get in the way of what I, personally, get out of forums.
The French had them long before that (in fact they had them before the automobile). But I suspect you are right: it was tax to maintain the roads that required each automobile to be numbered and registered.
If you've ever been annoyed by a sexist comment on Hacker News, you should donate to the Ada Initiative. We're working hard to change the culture and attitudes in open source and free/open culture.
I can recommend checking out Blender Cookie, it has a small series of "Get Started With Blender" video tutorials and a lot of in depth tutorials (of which a surprising amount are free to watch).

http://blendercookie.com/
Your first line of deduping will be cookies. When there's no cookie present, also check against (user agent, IP) pairs; remarkably unique at web scale. The chances of two people with the same browser on the same OS with the same plugins behind the same IP address hitting a random website are very small, and collateral damage is limited to not letting two people at a very IT-homogenous corporation vote on the same item.
I went camping with a group of lawyers once, and they were a lot like this too. They wanted to constantly argue and debate. They would even assert things that I knew they personally disagreed with, just to start an argument. If nobody was arguing, they'd get kind of tense and nervous as if some calamity was about to happen, and then starting a debate seemed to relieve everyone's tension. Seemed strange to me.
Of course, it was my first instinct. It became clear quite quickly that this wasn't the case. He believed he was correct and was uninterested in having a conversation.
hey go fuck yourself pg. trolls will infest this site just as they will infest all sites. also, you are worthless. in 25 years after your death, almost nobody will remember you, or care if someone who does brings it to their attention, and in 50 absolutely no one will. you'll be remembered the same as the founder of ibm is today, which is, you won't be.
Agreed. I'd also note that ECB, CBC, etc, have basically nothing to do with the _algorithm_ being used (in this case, AES).

The idea of an IV, ECB, CBC, etc are just techniques to be used to make the results of block ciphers more secure, regardless of what algorithm they use.

That's my bigger problem with the "AES is broken on iOS" claim based on IVs. The two things are only loosely related.
The obvious problem with this is that it only allows the interests of those willing to pay to be represented. Not everyone has the means to financially support a politician or cause. Also, as a permanent resident, don’t even get me started on the fact that I can’t even vote in local elections! I pay the same taxes... More if you count the bloody USCIS fees - how many times do I have to pay $85 for digital fingerprinting?
Interesting post.

I find unsubstantial / uninteresting / obvious / superfluous comments (like "I love it!" <send>) worse than very controversial or insulting comments. As long as the general information in the forum stay interesting and enjoyable.

Also isn't the "naughtiness" (some pg essay used that word I think) part of what some of the best contributors here have in common? And aren't entrepreneurs trolls, too, according to the OP's definition?

They disagree with something, they choose a path that is more fun than an ordinary life, they want to leave a mark.
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I doubt it would be any different. Do you remember the license (gah, for some reason I hate spelling that word) plate of the last car that cut you off? If so, you are in the minority. Even if you knew the number, how would you correlate it with a face?

I don't think the license plate number gives much in the way of identity. In fact, it gives less identity than your average username--it is usually completely random, created with no input on the part of the driver.
The strength of Opera mini are Opera's servers that precompute and massively shrink any web page for you[1] using their proprietary OBML. So did Bolt[2]. Firefox on PC don't use any Mozilla servers to render the page for you. Neither does Firefox on Mobile. These really are two classes of web browsers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#Functionality

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolt_browser#Data_compression
18 Facebook Commerce Facts You Should Know
I like honest discussion also, but also enjoy discussion that's "playful" in various ways, especially when it's on the gray-area border between serious and trollish. You can get interesting sides of people when they have something of an alibi because they aren't "really" saying something (but aren't "really" not doing so, either).

I do think it's probably better if it's in areas where there's at least tacit agreement that those are the local discussion norms, though. If you post somewhere like SomethingAwful's FYAD (though I haven't taken a look in a few years), or 4chan, you can hardly claim to be surprised or misled by the conversational norms. On HN, the local culture prefers a different style of discussion, and I like that in its own way as well. Though I also liked some subset of Slashdot trolls in their heyday, even though they weren't officially welcome at Slashdot: OGG THE CAVEMAN, the BSD Troll, and a few others were some of the more interesting posters, some mixture of net-art and actual discussion.
I hope your bank account isn't stored as just an int(!)

But seriously, it is a representation of something physical. Money. Money which can in turn be used for other physical things. Reputation "karma" isn't. It /is/ meaningless in this context, because you can never log into HN again and your life will go on.

I don't think the argument was "anything digital is pointless."
That sounds like fun, I love debating
interesting idea, but haven't formed an opinion yet. Tagging's always such a personal preference. I like hierarchical tags (e.g. code:ruby), but that's just me
Blender has been around for decades, and enjoyed a fair bit of popularity in the 90s when it was a great point-of-entry for budding 3D artists.

Since then, it's fluctuated in its rate of evolution relative to the industry standard. It always had cutting edge features, but they were trapped behind a troublesome UI, while the big competitors made their tools ever easier to use.

In recent years, the gap has been drastically closed due to a ground-up rewrite, completely new approach to the UI, and a tremendous effort to modernize.

Unfortunately, Blender still has a bad reputation, a legacy from the previous design. What's more, many studios and schools have firmly entrenched workflows, or depend on custom extensions written for a specific tool.

On the other hand, Blender seems to be enjoying popularity in the booming indie games community, where it integrates well with other free tools like Unity 3D.

With the new design, I wouldn't be surprised if Blender's best and most-popular days were ahead of it. I see share growth coming from individuals looking to make great graphics on a shoestring budget, as opposed to big studios or schools adopting it instead of Maya or Max.

I would argue that it is now roughly equivalent to those other tools in terms of features and usability. So, no real reason to switch (which requires expensive adjustments to existing workflows), but great incentive to adopt it in the first place (because it's free).
I haven't visited the SA forums in over 6 years, but last I remember, trolling in non-troll forums (FYAD) was usually met with a ban, resulting in a loss of your :10bux:. This was loosened a bit with the introduction of the... what's it called? Prison? Time out? that prevents a user from posting for X number of hours.
Not sure I agree with the correlation that the 'most talented engineers' are those that 'scored highest on the AI class HWs and Exams,' but I certainly wouldn't refuse any of the folks who were able to solve the ApproximateAgent PacMan Search problem in under 30 seconds from joining my team ;)

Its wonderful that Sebastian & Peter are reaching out like this after all they have done so far. Congrats to everyone that slugged it out, and good luck on the final this weekend!
Your interpretation is that trolls are court jesters.
I wonder how scalable these services are. Currently ZeroCater is in the Bay Area, and GrubWithUs is in Chicago. They might get around to competing eventually but I'm not sure if it will ever be a serious problem.
In a way, an IV is similar to the idea of the salt used in Hashes. It's supposed to make it harder to find patterns in your ciphertext (or with a hash, harder to generate the hash for every known character range you care about).

So in that sense, just like it's good to have a different or random salt with each hash, you'd want a differend (random) IV for each session.
I could be missing something since I don't see a link to the Github repo in your post.
By the article the dev center will be located in Matan which is an incredible place located in Haifa. It's location closed to the Technion brings the best brains to work for the dev centers of most of the international enterprises located there. (The Technion institute brought 3 Nobel prize winners in the last 7 years with a yearly budget of about only 200M$)

So it's like the silicon valley except the size. The size of the Matam area is less than 2000ft^2 and in this small area there are dev centers of Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Elbit,NDS, Philips, GE, Zoran and many more. Now, get back 2 lines before to read about the size of the area where all these are located in. And if this isn't incredible then I don't know what is!
Honestly, your karma doesn't have much impact inside of HN either. It's just a number that lets you know you are a reasonable fit with the community.
Is there any way to know how well you are doing (before the end of the course)? I thought I wasn't doing too badly, but with 100000 enrolled students there are bound to be lots who have 100% scores.
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Hope you enjoy the bay, if you haven't already, I highly recommend grabbing a slice at cheeseboard.

In my experience, even mentoring works better in person.
There are actually laws about the corporation doing that exact thing already. Unions are a little trickery because they do use member money to do such things, but the principal is the same. Lock a few executives up when they pull this stunt and reward the whistleblower.
Trolls try to undermine a working system solely for their own enjoyment. That has only a superficial relationship to entrepreneurs, who try to create a new business.
That's the point. And it's not linked to "pages with images". It actually just returns the image as Content-Type header field reveals :)
Ballmer can play as much musical chairs as he wants. The problem is him. Despite a massive Microsoft talent drain, there are still smart, capable people at Microsoft. What Microsoft lacks is a cohesive vision about where they are headed. Bill Gates' vision was a PC running Windows on every desktop. Everything Microsoft did had to be reconciled against this.

What is Ballmer's vision? That's his responsibility as CEO. In fact, it's pretty much his most critical one. At this point, he's too high level to do much else. All I see from him is somebody that installs a really smart person in some new vertical that Microsoft all of a sudden deems super important only to let this person take the flack for things not going properly a couple of years after they start.
Pragmatic Bookshelf's Programming Erlang book (written by Joe Armstrong, the inventor of Erlang) is a good starting point. If covers the basics of the languages as well as introducing ETS, OTP, and Mnesia.
Well I guess if your goal is to have me not take the job but to have a "co-worker" learn then they accomplished their goal. If it wasn't that, then having a bad interviewer on his own was a complete waste of my time and of the other 5 people who I interviewed with that day.
That's a good idea. Having that, plus an 'expected wait time' would be really useful. When I push the button, if it tells me I'll need to wait for 4 minutes and 23 seconds for the next elevator, I can use that time more effectively ... maybe go grab a coffee and come back, or perhaps even take the stairs instead.

I don't think owners of office buildings realize how painful it is to have slow elevators. We moved our office out of a 30 story building with 4 elevators, because the unbearable wait to get in and out of the building during peak times.
I've worked with blender since 2001 (version 1.9.x, when it was still shareware), and its growth over the past ten years has been outstanding. I'm not a 3d professional but, instead, use it for all kinds of things: Demo and Mock animations / movies, creating icons for apps (almost all my apps' icons were created in Blender), cutting videos (iMovie is a great app, but for quick and short movie edits, the one in Blender is actually superior). It even has a built-in game engine and can be connected to various open source 3d engines. Blender is really powerful.

Blender is, in a way, similar to VIM or Emacs, in that the user interface is highly optimized for keyboard navigation. A lot of things can be done with the mouse and the keyboard without ever having to move through long and convoluted menus or hierachies.

It's also scriptable in Python. It's one of the first apps I install on my machines.

Edit: Typo
Which one was the PacMan question again (unit/homework number)?
In October, there were 120,000 unique IPs/day.
FYAD isn't what it used to be, but I agree that it's part of what made SA great. Not necessarily the actual content of FYAD, but the fact that it kept everyone outside of FYAD in check. The other forums did a great job of keeping the post quality high (no AOL speak, etc.), and FYAD did a great job of making sure they didn't get too full of themselves. Even if you were the most popular poster ever, there was always one forum that you would never, ever be accepted in.
With the recent adoption of voting systems in forums (like this one) we are seeing troll comments often buried, and this will perhaps continue to discourage that behavior. On a bigger note, articles that draw clicks with bold conclusions or headlines (like that nerd baiting article we saw on Gizmodo) are still grabbing eyeball share and thus will continue to propagate instead of real news/information. How that fight for eyeballs is resolved is one that I don't really see a solution to yet.
I think it really depends on the company you are hiring for. At my present one, personality is absolutely as important as skill, so if you sound like a pretentious snob we probably won't be interested in you. At my last company (a fortune 500), if you sounded like the OP, we definitely wouldn't get back to you.
So You Think You Want To Be A CEO: What You Should Do?