skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've recently completed a masters thesis on EEG based mind reading, and I think I have a fairly good grasp on the state of the art in this field. I also have a copy of Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near by my bed, and I'm usually strongly optimistic about technology. But if IBM are talking about EEG based technology here, I would have to bet that they are flat out wrong on this one. I'll explain why.

Something like moving a cursor around by thinking about it, or thinking about making a call and having it happened requires a hell of a lot of bits of information to be produced by the brain computer interface. With the current state of the art we can distinguish between something like 2-6 classes of thoughts sort-of reliably, and even then it's typically about thinking of particular movements, not "call mom".

Importantly, what most people look for in the signal (the feature in machine learning terms) are changes in signal variance. And there are methods to detect these changes that are in some sense mathematically optimal (which is to say they can be still be improved a little bit, but there won't be any revolutionary new discoveries.) There may be other features to look for, but we wont be getting much better at detecting changes in signal variance.

Some methods can report results like a 94% accuracy over a binary classification problem. Such a result may seem "close to perfect", but it is averaged over several subjects, and likely varies between for example 100% and 70%. For the people with 70% accuracy, the distinguishing features of their signals are hidden for various reasons. And this is for getting one bit of information out of the device. Seems like such a device would need to work for everyone to be commercially successful.

In computer vision we have our own brains to prove that the problems can be solved. For EEG based brain computer interfaces, such proofs don't exist. There are certain things you probably can't detect from an EEG signal, meaning the distinguishing information probably isn't there at all. I'm easily willing to bet IBM money that who I would like to call can not be inferred from the electrical activity on my scalp. (Seriously IBM, let's go on longbets.org and do this.)
Yes, but it can only produce x64 code; it can't produce x86 code. Mind you, I'd love to be wrong about that...
Sure, but they were far from being a place I'd like to revisit, especially not on election day. The Internet is the community commons of today just as much as a library or city building was 30-40 years ago.
Why does CoffeeScript have so much "debate" around it? Why don't I see articles saying "Hey guys, stop writing in Erlang! I don't like it! Stop it!" Why does this guy, or anybody that takes the time to write such an article, care what I write in?
>Otherwise, everyone would communicate with that, instead of inventing common languages.

How would we communicate with it? By directly linking our brains together? I don't see why it would have a direct translation into sounds.
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Remember when we had to "program" our VCRs? I kind of share the feeling that "our word", in this case "code", is being abused and overly simplified, but overall I don't really care. People are taking the mental effort to design something in their heads and then realize it by directing the tools available to them (with some guidance of course); the more of that the better. The main danger is in leading people to believe that what they did is it.

Sure it's like calling the making of a tune with one of those "press this object/key to make this sound, that object/key to make that sound" apps ( http://distoorted.livejournal.com/10914.html is the most recent one I saw ) "composing", but I can't even work those apps let alone design a pleasing fugue or canon. Taking 8 hours to be instructed in some very basic musical theory in that context would probably be beneficial anyway.
A recent post on Win Rumors mentions that a future beta release of Windows 8 will include .NET 3.5 - http://www.winrumors.com/leaked-windows-8-pre-beta-install-s...

"Windows Media Center will also return to Windows 8 beta alongside the typical Windows games, DVD creator and .NET 3.5. All were missing from the developer preview, made available in September."
Another more actively maintained list of courses/lectures is available at Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses
A. Oh, I wish I had seen and checked the box, that initial tweet didn't get sent out.

B. Oh, I wish I had seen and unchecked the box, I was surprised that a tweet got sent out.

Which way do you think the vote would go if you asked people their preferred scenario?
Both the classes and type system are not inherently obvious: there are plenty of valid arguments for both prototype-based OO and dynamically typed languages. I personally like prototypes more than classes and am ambivalent about static/dynamic typing.

JavaScript does have packages and modules--check out CommonJS, for example. There are some issues with them in the browser, but that's a different story.

Generics and interfaces make no sense in a dynamically typed language. Abstract classes don't really make that much sense with a dynamic type system either, and they make no sense with prototype-based inheritance. Mix-ins don't make really fit into a prototype-based language either.

Properties would be nice. I don't know about tooling--js2 mode on Emacs is infinitely better than any IDE I've ever used (and I've use a bunch). I've never had issues managing JavaScript code--less issues than Java, for example--but I've never worked on anything particularly big.

JavaScript performance is now quite good. Besides, performance is not a function of the language but a function of the implementation. You wouldn't think of Scheme as a particularly fast language, but I remember recently reading about Stalin Scheme which made it as fast or faster than C.

Really, most of your arguments seem to stem from not liking prototypes and dynamic typing--these are just preferences. Complaints about JavaScript's lacking interfaces are like complaining your Tesla doesn't have a gearbox.

Your argument really makes it seem you would like nothing more than Java/C# in the browser; I personally would like little less than that. This is probably at least partly due to the name: JavaScript makes it seem like the language is akin to Java when it really only shares a superficial resemblance.
"Neurofeedback" already exists it's just still under the radar (it's like teaching yourself to roll your tongue). I've been trying to pull some demos together to demonstrate that the web browser is the place this will take off: http://vimeo.com/32059038 (sorry I haven't pushed more of this extra-rough demo code yet). Consider using something like the wireless PendantEEG if you're going to be doing your own development OR be prepared to pay excessive licensing fees required from a few of the vendors mentioned here. If you are interested in helping develop this stuff mentioned in that video (and don't mind springing for some reasonbly cheap hardware) please ping me. I'd also like to plan a MindHead hackathon/mini-conference this spring in Boston (my personal interests are improving attention and relaxation, peak perfomance, and BCI).
>This statement is so ridiculous I don't know if you mean it seriously or not.

he probably did, I only don't know if it's lack of knowledge or personal political views.

I'm not an expert in Hungarian politics, but at least there is common stuff that we 'neighbors' share and happen to understand these situations a bit better than someone on the other side of the ocean. Our second major political party here in Poland are fans of Fidesz agenda, who said that wants Warsaw to be like Budapest. Well, luckily for the moment our nation spoke (during recent elections) that we certainly don't.
Being an eastern block country citizen who happens not to be a right wing lunatic, one will probably understand that even post-communist nations need a strong left wing, even if only just to remain sane. This 'payback' stuff is mainly a far-right-wing agenda all around the region, european politics are not a cold war movie and the world is not black and white.
Stanford planning to offer a free online course in Automata Theory in Spring?
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Buddy, we're going around in circles here ... Yes, JavaScript lacks a way to easily call "super", but that doesn't mean that the concept doesn't exist.

Calling "super" means calling the immediate parent's version of the same function. CoffeeScript is just making it one word:

super

... instead of the usual JavaScript prototype hoop jumping:

Parent.prototype.method.apply(this, arguments);
Sure.

I aim to have our interview cycle take under a week, although in honesty, I think it takes about 10 days. I often take on a little more work myself (especially in the phone screen) if I believe it helps speed up the process and saves others time. Speed is important. Keeping momentum during hiring really makes the experience better for everyone.

For background, I work for a startup lab in Boston (we build prototypes that we spin out into companies). We're about 35 employees.

Oh, and let me start by saying that while all the pre-interview work you've listed above does take some time, the real time cost to hiring is from the interview process itself since it involves multiple people.

1.) Resume review: 3 minutes. It took longer when I first got started. I used to agonize over "call/dont-call." But you'll usually have a gut reaction to the resume, and you'll eventually learn to trust that (for better or worse ;-)

2.) Code samples/Exercises: I don't bother with them, although another manager I work with uses them to good effect. Unfortunately, they can add between several days to a week to the process, so I do a more involved phone screen instead to keep things moving.

3.) Phone screen: I spend up to 90 minutes in the phone screen. This seems to be fairly unusual. 90 minutes is a lot of time to invest, but the key is, I only spend that long with the candidates I think I'd like to bring in. The call is setup so that I can cut it short at any point. Even still, I spend a lot of time here. I get to know the candidate, feel out their passions, and actually have them write code, live in an EtherPad derivative while talking to them.

4.) Almost 6 person-hours. Our amazing director of talent greets the candidate, and spends 15 minutes giving them the lay of the land, paperwork, etc. Then two different two-person teams interview the candidate for an hour each getting to know the candidate, sharing what life here is like, and working on one large technical problem. Then our CTO and I spend 45 minutes with the candidate answer questions, talking about the direction and strategy of the company, and gauging their interest in what we do here. Interestingly, the interview process we've been using on the UX side of things spends more time working on a single practical exercise (using computers, not whiteboards) and finishes with a broader meet-and-greet. Since I'm constantly experimenting with this process, I'm planning on trying a variant of this on the software engineer interviews as well.

But I aim to have the whole process from resume review to offer letter done in a week.
"jihad"... Apple has indeed an islamic mindset : they have a prophet you cannot criticize without violent reactions (like being permbanned from forums).
Thanks. For what it's worth, I'm in India - I know the bureaucracy around here will make it tedious - but on the other hand, everyone has a mobile phone and sms is very popular (and cheap) - the market for phone-based apps is potentially very huge.
This article / talk is a collection of relatively random python things of which only a few are unarguably good advice such as not using deprecated terms or checking for exact types. The rest is not a good basis for pythonic best practice that I would recommend.
"I insisted, politely, that they humor me, because it's something we make everybody do, nothing personal. They failed. Hard."

I'm sensitive to that argument, but I also think the parent has a point. Coding the solution to a toy problem on a whiteboard has only limited correlation with the ability of a candidate to solve real-world problems. We use the tool because it's one of the best we have, not because it's a great tool. And if your interviewers can't summon the energy to make eye contact with a candidate...well, they're one-tool cavemen. Most software engineering demands communication skills and culture fit, yet we're still screening as if individual mental horsepower were the most important factor.

The danger in dismissing someone because they can't stand at a whiteboard and barf out the code to print the levels of a binary tree is that it has next to nothing to do with real work. That's just a fact. I probably couldn't do it correctly on a whiteboard, on my first try right now, and I write a lot of code. And I'm sure some hiring manager would eagerly dismiss me as "another frickin' PhD that doesn't know how to write code."

The point is twofold:

1) As in all things, good judgment is key. Sometimes the candidate can bork the technical question, and still deserve a hire.

2) If you find yourself depending exclusively upon the outcome of coding puzzles to screen candidates, you've already failed.
I had the same thought, and I tested it; I believe (but am willing to believe that I am wrong, as I didn't watch the network traffic itself) that it is actually hijacking the http(s):// URL.

What I did: I went to one of my websites from the Kindle Fire, and sent the same Accept and User-Agent headers (the only ones that seemed to be special) to https://market.android.com/; there was no redirect returned: it simply gave me the home page. However, going to that same URL in the Fire browser application immediately loads the Amazon App Store.
That's a lot of us.

Social proof is important, see joshfraser upthread mentioning Sendgrid's numbers give him confidence: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3371877

They do nudge me too.

See also: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/27/social-proof-why-people-lik...
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I personally write stuff like this because the act of writing out my thoughts forces me to think them through clearly. In this case, I actually do agree that CoffeeScript is a “little” language, but writing an essay in this form was an exercise in clarifying what is and isn’t a language and what that means.

Other reasons for writing essays to convince people to use or not use a language like CoffeeScript might include a very natural desire to get lots of people using the tools you prefer. If you prefer JS, but everyone else write cool stuff (like Katy!) in CS, you will be annoyed trying to read their code or step through it in your debugger.

Conversely, if you prefer CS, getting momentum behind it ensures its future and increases the probability you will still be able to use it in the future.

I can certainly appreciate why people might want to evangelize either position. For me, it was an exercise in taking an interesting position—that it’s about the JavaScript it generates not the grammar or syntax—and see if I could make a credible argument.
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Joel, I dug this write up, the points resonated.

I feel like I've read similar articles, though I can't seem to find any at the moment. Either way, I'll read the article, and then I'll check out what the person is working on. Frequently, I'll land on their product and it's pretty unimpressive. In the end it's good that they've learned to build something in their spare time, but also a little unnerving - could they have built something substantially better if they'd had a little more resource.

In your case it's exactly the opposite. I signed up for bufferapp and am amazed at how much you've been able to do "in your spare time." It's a great example of how efficient, motivated people can take it to the next level. Cheers to your hard work and continued success!
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I agree, novelty is not a factor here but the performance is.
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I prefer to say "automatic ATM machine" myself so nobody misunderstands me.
I highlight text while I'm reading it on a regular basis, almost never to copy paste it or do anything else, it just helps me keep track of where I am in the article. I pretty much never want highlighting to have any action except highlighting. Even if it didn't, it's breaking consistent behavior because highlighting on page X suddenly has completely different behavior than on page Y.

There should at least be a cookie that can optionally disable the service that can be set when it opens up. Would be pretty easy to implement and it would at least allow an out for people who think the experience is awful.
Indeed - it's just weird that they're focusing on capturing low grade kinetic energy right when photovoltaic solar is at the tipping point of beating grid power with under a 5 year payback period. Expect (in sunny climates) to see a switch to solar panels on the level that we saw from CRTs to flat panels a few years back.

But the really interesting thing in energy in the next 5 years is going to be price drops in storage. We could conceivably see the first lithium-air batteries for cars, which will finally get costs down to within striking distance of petrol. I also suspect we'll start seeing widespread grid storage installations - possibly using sodium-sulphur batteries to absorb and redistribute inputs from distributed renewable sources. The 2-way grid is the next big story in energy.
I remember being told as a child that jupiter and its gravity protected us from the various asteroids and other mineral interlopers of the solar system, but the following google search suggests that this is now in doubt:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=jupiter+protection+ast...
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https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ is one way the Ruby community solves this. I'm not a huge fan of their font choices, but the interface provides an easy way to see which gems in a given category are the most popular or most active.

For example, if we were looking for an asset management package like the OP, we would quickly see that Jammit is the most widely used: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/Asset_Management
This feature is largely useless, anyway. An example is, I receive text messages from Amazon when an order ships and is delivered. The "system and method to cause a computer to detect and perform actions" then highlights the tracking number and order number as though they are phone numbers, which it immediately dials when your finger comes nearby. This is very annoying because they are not phone numbers, they are tracking numbers. Lacking this feature will make me like my phone more.
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I think the point is that your product by definition breaks the browser by interrupting the users workflow. You product adds no benefit to the user of the website, and most people don't like it. If you made it opt in, those who enjoy what you're doing will be happy and you won't break the web for the rest of us.
what a shame you chose to do this in Coffeescript. Would have looked much more beautiful if written in JavaScript.
What if you compiled it something like this:

for i in [a...b]

becomes

if(a <= b) {
for(i = a; i < b; i++) {
// Code
}
} else {
for(i = a; i > b; i--) {
// Code again
}
}

Or otherwise moved the extra conditions outside the loop so they only get computed once?
I understand the author's frustration, but I don't think this is an issue with npm - rather, it is an issue with the culture.

Most node packages are small - rarely more than a couple hundred lines, and rarely do more than a single function (and do it well), in terms of functionality. Given that, it's easy to understand why people tend to reinvent the wheel - it's fun, exciting, and many times you think you can do it better.
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Although I don't believe that you finished reading the article -- that's not what "this guy" is saying ... you are raising an extremely good question.

Part of the answer is explained by JavaScript's inherent popularity as the language of the web -- everyone has something at stake, when JavaScript is involved. To paraphrase myself from a similar thread last month:

Most esoteric programming languages are non-threatening. As a hypothetical programmer working on web applications, I can feel safe and comfortable in my ignorance of Haskell, Erlang, D, Io, Arc, and so on. They're far enough outside of the realm of possibility of adoption for my company that I can shrug them off with an "oh, that sounds interesting", and little more. Wanting to adopt one of them would require a whole new development and deployment stack, a new or ported codebase, and new integration costs with the rest of our system. You wouldn't expect to see an article talking about how people using Erlang are creating a "knowledge gap" for Java programmers.

CoffeeScript feels threatening precisely because it is so close to JavaScript, because the code can run with identical performance as hand-optimized JS anywhere that JavaScript can run, because any CoffeeScript library can interoperate seamlessly with any JavaScript library, and vice versa. It forces you, as a reasonable JavaScript programmer, to answer the harder question: Why should you be limited to a language that hasn't changed (IE6/IE7) since 2001?
Ask HN: Best practices for market research?
Hello,

I'm developing an online paid service with the initial target audience being restaurant/bar owners.

I know a couple of people in the business, and so far they've provided me with great feedback regarding my product and I was able to take their input into consideration.

However, I would like to expand my reach and engage in disucssions with other restaurant owners. What is the best way to approach this? Do I cold call? Visit the establishment in person and ask to have a sit-down with the manager for 10 minutes? I will not be asking them anything too private, definitely nothing about their business numbers, finances, etc. What should I expect? Should I just come in with my list of questions or should I already be trying to sell them on the product with a pitch deck?
I can't decide if the fact that I scored 10/10 means I follow startups too closely, or that I played too much Pokemon when I was younger.
With regards to "Ducks in a row", I don't think the answer is try..except. You either have a code smell, or you should use type-dispatch multimethods. (I think Guido's "Five-minute Multimethods in Python" was recently submitted here, but anyway: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=101605 )