skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is very true... however, I think that the solutions addressed above would be most beneficial to the bill markup periods where amendments are made and things re-written.

There could very easily be a closed door aspect to the initial drafting of a bill. So that the entire committee would get the "blame" for the initial draft.
Node performed well, but we prefer writing async code in Go, and we like compiled languages.

We'd love to experiment with Erlang at some point, at the very least to write an Erlang StatHat library.
I can't tell what your nationality is, so my apologies if you have had experience in the developing third world, but it sure doesn't seem like you do.

I used to work in the 3rd world, and I can tell you that most people who have long-term experience in doing relief and development work in developing countries will tell you that the most sustainable way forward are locally targeted initiatives, with simple machines that step a local group forward, generally along the same lines that innovations happened in the developed world. For example, in Afghanistan, the best thing to happen to the infant mortality rate in several regions has not been the creation of a new, relatively modern hospital, but instead mid-wife training programs. (I'm sorry I don't have citations at hand, I was at some presentations in country when I heard this) Especially in places like rural India that have the potential to be conflict zones, this man inventing a cheap, simple machine and selling the machine instead of selling napkins, is an overall net win, it will make him money eventually and it will increase access to sanitary napkins.

Finally, check into the Howard G Buffet foundation for modern success stories on teaching farmers to use non-industrial techniques, and check out a UNDP project, I think in Loghar province in Afghanistan, where they spent time teaching farmers some American 1930s level farming techniques to increase crop yields three fold without machinery and in a fairly sustainable fashion. (Again, I don't have a citation because this came from talking to a project guy in country, I can't even remember who he was working for now)

Basically, what this inventor is the right way to create a sustainable, inexpensive way to increase the usage of sanitary napkins throughout India. Your way might make more money, but has problems if the goal is to increase women's health, which this man's goal clearly is.

*edited for clarity in a couple spots.
I guess that one of the advantages of such an approach is standardization, in particular if your company is big.
Once you get a significant number of candidates, it may become more important to have some "objective" and quantitative way to rank your candidates by performance than to get a true understanding about how likely they are to get things done (how would you "measure" that?).
At that point, it becomes more important to ensure uniformity of judgement across the pool of interviewers. Isn't that why they often ask programming puzzles: so that they can compare performance.
If the price to pay for that is that some valuable candidate won't get an offer, they can live with that.
At least, that's how I see it.

Of course the argument for startups will be different :)
Books are information, they are only /things/ due to convenience. We still sell them as objects due to historical reasons, but that is slowly starting to change.
One problem: rubber?

Solution: Cellulose.
I think the OP meant to suggest that increase wealth of poor people and make them middle class. You can definitely not create wealth by selling 25 cents napkins.
I've pretty much switched from Facebook to Google+. I find G+ a much more comfortable place on the whole, but I get the impression that Facebook isn't really aimed at me.

What Google+ is missing when compared with Facebook is the event planning tool. The one time I find myself returning to Facebook is when someone is organizing a party or a night out.
Ask HN: Refresher course on (My)SQL?
Hello, everyone. I am a university student who recently got a part-time job working as a Web developer at the university's IT department, starting shortly after I return from Christmas break. It's a PHP and MySQL job, and while those aren't my favorite tools (Python + Postgres/Redis FTW), it's programming and on-campus, and I have done some non-database PHP stuff recently.

Problem is, all the database stuff I have done recently has been with ORMs or with non-SQL databases entirely. As such, my grasp of written SQL has declined greatly and I could use a refresher course. Are there any books or tutorials on SQL (especially MySQL) that you would recommend for someone who has database and Web programming experience but doesn't know much written SQL?
Not the case with the G+ Android application: instant photo upload, background polling, offline content caching, video Hangouts. It's certainly not a browser page facade.
I'd be surprised if Morgan Stanley think of $10.4 million as anything more than a rounding error.
Thanks David.

You make a great point, I completely agree now that you bring it up. Getting close to the users is something I didn't do with my previous startup, but was vital for getting Buffer off the ground. I talk a little about it in the "achieving scale by doing things that don't scale", such as personally emailing the first 1000 signups.

Thanks for the reminder.
It's a lifesaver for me. I normally run my emacsclient on my local X display, but in low-bandwidth situations I run nox emacsclients in terminals over SSH. I still get multiple buffers and the same emacs server session.
Which variables get set when you do X is fairly factually verifiable. How do you factually verify a data structure is cool? More helpful? What is the task at hand? If I am playing Skyrim and trying to decide weather or not to initiate followers into the Blades of Skyrim, then the link you posted is most helpful. On the other hand I am not sure what task I would be undertaking where a bunch of data structures whose only commonality is obscurity would be truly helpful.
I think buying a shirt is different from buying a book. The author got exactly what he wanted. He wasn't expecting a different book, or even one with a slightly different colour, or a different fit.

The real problem is that merchants can't state that they don't accept refunds in cases where people bought and received what they asked for but they didn't actually want the think they bought. Kind of a corner case I'd think, but one that led to the disappointment of both people in this transaction.
Reactions in more traditional societies always seem more paranoid.

That said, we don't necessarily know the whole story. Maybe he was so focused on the research he alienated his wife.
I think you'll find that much of the power that Congress wields is due to the interstate commerce clause. It is one of a few bits of constitutional authority that Congress can use to justify laws.

It would be more apropos to talk about "commit messages" that were a long list of : "typos", "bugfix"... not that I have commit messages that look like this... nope, not me...
Cornell has an excellent engineering school (much better than Columbia or NYU). Not quite as good as Stanford or MIT, but a much stronger ties to NYC.
Václav Havel: the other Europe
5 Games software developers can learn from
> The western world can afford high-tech solutions to clean up water, but the developing world cannot.

You might be surprised what the developing world can put together with electricity and a foot pedal.
I'm curious if your opinion on this would change if they made it so the browser could run Coffescript natively. Personally, I think the fact that it compiles to an intermediate language to be irrelevant to whether Coffeescript should be considered a language.

I consider it a different language if for no other reason than, if a programmer familiar only with Javascript looked at code written in Coffeescript, they would not understand it at all. And it can't be converted to Javascript without either considerable hand work, or via an automated tool.
$10m here, $10m there, eventually you're talking about real money. ;)
There's some pushback on whether that standard figure is inflated beyond what it should be in a competitive market, though, partly because it's been held up (like real-estate commissions) as this un-negotiable standard fee that just gets applied. More companies are starting to demand it be negotiated, so it's not clear anybody really pays 7% anymore.

Related op-ed from a while back about how the US government negotiated rates more like 0.5-0.75% when it floated AIG and GM, and comparing the US underwriting rates to those in Asia: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jxDEKOD...
Can you even return a car after you purchase it? That's a poor metaphor.

Sorry, but your response sounded a lot like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU
When there are so many worries in the present, many people would not really care about problems that might come in the future. You can call it a kind of de-sensitivity to worries due to over exposure to them.
Rand Fishkin and Aaron Wall debate the open discussion of webspam
>And how do you plan on getting Congress to agree to use a system in which vast swathes of them will "look like an unelectable crypto-fascist in the eyes of the public"?

Umm .. Facebook'ize it? Turn it into a "Web 3.0" App with MUD, 3D, Mobile features?

Seems to me, at least right now, there could be maintainers of the existing political output. Using version control on politics doesn't actually require the politicians to do it; we, the people, could turn version control on them already right now.
> None of these things are "language features" that compile from a language that has them—CoffeeScript—into a language that doesn't have them—JavaScript.

This is inane. Haskell used to compile to C. Were they not "language features"?
So that implies the fund managers have looked at Zynga's long-term prospects and found them to be good, right?

So why is the market acting in a different manner? Do the fund managers know something the street doesn't, or vice-versa?
You can definitely not create wealth by selling 25 cents napkins.

Are you sure about that?

If every (menstruating) woman in your village purchases their sanitary napkins from you every month because you've got the one machine within 25 miles, you may have a compelling small business, especially when adjusted for cost of living and ease of labor.
Case Study: Real-Time Recommendations with a Graph Database
Well.... I'm pretty sure Google doesn't want you doing that, so it's no surprise they didn't make it easy (and perhaps even went out of their way to make it hard)
I read the same article and it was flawed for a reason - it isn't busy work if you don't use it. You can just have 1 or 2 circles - like Family and the rest of the world.

It is extremely useful however if you want multiple channels of communication. Say, you want to post news for Ruby developers and you do that daily ... so why on earth would you want to spam your friends that aren't even developers? On the other hand posting pictures of your child should be for close acquaintances only - friends, colleagues from school / work, family, otherwise if you get popular you'll regret exposing your personal life ;)

A feature is busy work as long as you don't need it. As soon as you need it however, it becomes indispensable. Also, this particular problem cannot be solved by either ignoring it or solving it algorithmically.
Show HN: A Pinboard for Entrepreneurs, Skillow
I've been working on Skillow, skillow.com. It's a pinboard for everything startup-related. I would like to get some feedback. Anything would be helpful, thanks!
Google is making its own tablet, & in 6 months, you can buy it
This is not an article. This is an advertisement.
And when a small startup says "okay, Mr Experienced Developer With High Salary Requirements, we can't afford you (because we're very tight on cash), but take this Awesome Restricted Stock in lieu of comp", what do you say? Isn't that the big risk that is supposed to lead to the Big Payday?

That's when you hammer them on what exactly they are doing. What is their product, market, sales strategy, exit strategy, pricing, and finances. Ownership, options, etc... are worthless in a worthless company. Risk doesn't mean going in blindly.

And yes, I've turned down options and jobs before because the CTO couldn't really answer these types of questions during an interview. Interestingly enough, the one company that was most secretive and offered me the most options was the one that went out of business a month after I turned them down. Others, I've heard after the fact how they are horrible places to work. The interview process is a two way street, especially in small companies.
If this “running natively in the browser” did not involve 100% cross-compatibility with existing JavaScript code, you might be moving up from jargon to a dialect.

But as long as the underlying model is the same, and as long as it’s a leaky abstraction, I don’t think of it as a separate language.

For example, if it were to be a separate language I would look for its OOP stuff to be implemented in the “engine” and not to be strongly related to the JavaScript prototype mechanism.
Suspended License Attorney
Traffic Ticket Justice provides services including DUI, DMV hearing, license suspension, warrants, misdemeanors and more. For more information visit http://www.trafficticketjustice.com or call (800) 828-5525 or visit them at 512 E. Wilson Ave. Suite 301 in Glendale, California 91206.
Great Software Engineers
Now that I re-read that sentence, it's not well written. When replying to the parent comment, I wanted to clarify that these napkins will create wealth and help poor people move to middle class. I meant to say that you can not become filthy rich selling 25 cents napkins.
That's much less of a worry in developing world. No manufacturer wants to link "selfish" word with its name in news head lines. And that is how its gonna look if they sue.
I'm happy that the two are separate in Safari. The combined address / search bar is one of the things that I really don't like about Chrome, and part of why I don't use it. Searching and typing in an address are distinctly different tasks.
That's a sensible point, but interpreter and runtime overhead crushes any cost savings you might get from adjusting links instead of the whole array backing store.

(Ruby arrays, at least in MRI, are basically STL vectors).

1000 inserts to the middle of a 1,000,000 element Ruby array happens so quickly you can barely perceive the delay. The same insert pattern to a basic Ruby linked list sets my machine on fire.
I use a similar approach. I spent 20 years as a consultant, so I did a lot of interviews. I would send out lots of emails. I didnt do many tailored emails, but I did a carefully tailored cover letter designed to be amusing to the HR ladies. You have to get by them first.

I figured the first few interviews were throw-aways, just to get my interviewing skills back up to speed and to find what this years interview questions were. Yes, they go in fads. One year the programming task of choice was to reverse the words in a string. See it a couple of times and you get too be pretty proficient.

I keep a stock of questions to push back. I havent issued programming challenges, but I have asked, "What is your pain point? What technical issue is causing you problems?" Usually we get into a long discussion of the challenges theyare facing.
Cygwin has fork. The problem is that Cygwin's fork has to copy the entire address space into the new process, whereas Linux uses copy-on-write to make forking much faster (you only need to copy the page tables).
You are terribly misinformed. Cornell has a fantastic CS program and in general a very strong engineering school.

#5 in CS: http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...
#9 in Engineering: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...
THAT was the question people kept asking Pike at conferences. and his answer to the question is "yes, we would like to see that happen too".

and i hope Google is listening. i mentioned in many comments before, i just see it there, unlike Dart.

i am not ignoring the hard work behind Dart or anything, but it's just my feeling that i wouldn't personally move from Javascript to something that just looks like Java. Javascript to Go or Python? definitely.
Clearly my writing is obtuse. Haskell has a language features—lazy evaluation for example—with no equivalent in C. Nothing about lazy evaluation compiles more-or-less 1:1 into C code, it’s a program-wide transformation.

CoffeeScript’s features are all JavaScript features, it’s a simple translation from some shorthand into some other shorthand. CoffeeScript is like the LET macro in ur-Scheme. Powerful, handy, but not a new paradigm, more like some syntactic meta-programming on top of JavaScript’s existing model of programs.
Haskell wasn't simply sugaring the regular C design patterns. The C that the compiler generated was nothing like the C that you would normally write.

A better example would be Objective C compiling to C. And I would agree that early Objective C wasn't really a language that added new paradigms to C. It sugared good coding practices for the most part, and did little else. As a result, I generally recommended a combination of the K&R book and the ObjC language spec to learn it -- buying books for ObjC was a waste of time, since it was such a thin wrapper around C.

Coffeescript is in a similar position.
From the coffeescript website:
CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Underneath all those awkward braces and semicolons, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous object model at its heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way.

Coffeescript has never presented itself otherwise. What causes the confusion is pointless discussions about semantics and people who don't fully understand the point of coffescript teaching other people about it and writing over zealous blogposts.

All programming languages are human convenience. The computer cares not about list comprehensions or splats. It just reads hi/low. Coffeescript is a tool that enables you to write those hi/lows more conveniently. It doesn't care if its called a language or a form of mixed martial arts. It's just there to help you if you want it to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler
A compiler is a computer program (or set of programs) that transforms source code written in a programming language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language ...)
Free online schematic editor from Digi-Key
Unless the end result is a completely incompetent applicant getting an offer, I wouldn't call the system "horribly broken". Very few companies are in the business of reversing linked lists, and hence make binary decisions depending on the outcome of just that one question.

I don't think gaming the system is that trivial - an interview is a conversation, so things like computational complexity, runtime restrictions, data structures, implementation differences in various programming languages, and other things are bound to come into conversation. Now, if one can maintain that conversation as it moves along, and seem like a pleasant person to work with, it seems that they're no longer purely "faking".
To the poster below me: he is selling $2500 machines. The people he sells the machines to sell the $.25 napkins but the machine can make 1000 napkins a day. One machine properly worked could turn a gross profit of $91,250/year. He has sold 600 machines so far so that is $1.5 million that the inventor has grossed.

Maybe they aren't super rich but I am sure the napkin makers and the inventor are both doing better then they would otherwise and more importantly they are keeping the money in India.
> I personally believe the fact that Visual Studio is all but required to build on Windows is one of the single most common reasons you don't see much OSS that is Windows friendly aside from those that are Java based

You don't necessarily have to use VS to develop on windows. Mingw works quite well for a lot of cross-platform things and it is gcc and works with gnu make.

My experience with porting OSS between Windows and Linux (both ways) has been that very few developers take the time out to encapsulate OS specific routines in a way that allows easy(ier) porting. You end up having to #ifdef a bunch of stuff in order to avoid a full rewrite.

This is not a claim that porting is trivial. You do run in to subtle and not-so-subtle issues anyway. But careful design can help a lot. Then again this requires that you start out with portability in mind.
It's a case of one wealthy indian vs many empowered indians. And from the financial model of this guy (selling his machines through rural women) he obviously prefers latter.
How so? Everytime you type something in a search bar, it goes to a search engine's page anyway? So it's just shorthand for http://google.com?q=etcetc
"Specialist Eric Baker, a military police officer, said that he and Manning rarely talked. But he told the court that Manning “used the computer quite often” and said that when he’d wake up in the middle of the night Manning would be on the computer. He never saw what was on Manning’s screen, he told the court."

This paragraph seems so out of place with the rest of the article. It sounds like there was a much higher chance he saw/caught Manning looking at porn than anything else.
In the USA PATRIOT Act, "PATRIOT" is an initialism, not a word, and should be capitalized. "Patriot" is not involved.
I know. That's why I said "given the choice".
That's true. But it really could be any product. You get what you want, realize you already had one, find that you no longer have the use for it you imagined, etc.

One problem inherent to buying books online is that you aren't always sure of their content. Google Books and previews help with this, but they aren't of all books. Sometimes you get a book and realize that it just isn't what you wanted (Oh... this book on Ruby assumes you're using 1.8.6, etc).

If the seller has a return policy that accepts it in that time, and its in good condition, then the retailer should accept it back. This is how I view it to work on Amazon anyway. Other places like eBay, it doesn't work like that, but it is known.

Order a pair of shoes from Zappos. Get them. Look at them, and then send them a return note saying, "They are exactly as I wanted, and fit perfectly, but I just realized I don't need them", and you will not get a return note about how you might have 3D scanned them.

Overall, I really feel that if you're going to sell in Amazon's house, then you've gotta act like Amazon. If not, then you should consider selling elsewhere.
> Let's get back to that situation, please

That situation was an America that was mostly an agrarian society, pre-industrial revolution, pre-globalization, pre-climate-change. Are you suggesting the huge problems of the day could be addressed by a congress that meets once a year?
The 25 next-stage interviews are the only part that sounds even slightly unrealistic to me. The phone interviews are 30-60 minutes each, so 40 of them is no problem (20-40 hours of work).

The next-stage interviews are going to vary from 1-2 hours to a full day, so I assume he didn't do many full-day interviews in that 10-11 days, or probably 7-8 workdays.

But startups are often far more willing to do remote interviews, interviews at weird times, interviews on weekends... It would be a packed 1.5 weeks, though.
But I see an interesting parallel between clothing and media, in terms of "trying them out," if you will. Over the years, Amazon has (at least anecdotally -- would be interesting to confirm this empirically) adopted a try-and-return policy on a lot of clothing, taking a hit on the shipping so that people can retain the "in-store experience" of making sure everything fits. Why does that necessarily have to be different for books and other media? Is it just a question of physical weight + price?