skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
STR Electric Guitar Yellow Neck Black
Price: $330.80.Save $20 off Christmas Day Sale. Free Shipping Worldwide. In the last couple of years I've been picking up my guitar again. Peabo Bryson
> I was just trying to get HIRED for anything, anything at all

You are "overqualified". People will read your resume and assume that you will be unhappy with a regular software engineering job, and therefore not hire you for such a position.

Like it or not, you'd need to find an AI job where people needed your particular skills. (Or something closely related.)
The city politicians (corrupt and incompetent, likely both) were almost certainly black, if the situation is anything like my hometown.

But there's a long history of racial tensions in Alabama, and nowadays one of the main ways it's expressed is through the white-dominated state government absolutely hating the city of Birmingham.* A combination of under funding and interference in local matters makes it very hard for an already poor city to prosper and, some would say, fosters a corruption-inducing urban insularity.

And now the families who lack indoor plumbing and running water? Suffice it to say that if they were mostly white, state politicians would be much more interested in remedying their situation.

Take this with a grain of salt, as I'm projecting my Georgia experiences. (I will note that Alabama is, if anything, less cosmopolitan than Georgia, so I doubt I'm being too harsh on them.)

*This is a repeated pattern through the South: compare, for instance, the Atlanta/Georgia divide. It goes beyond the typical urban/rural divide.
Yep. Totally agree with you. The same is with the new Gmail. Looks great on my Apple Cinema display...way too huge on most other computers. It has got to be that these designers are using huge displays with resolutions to match.

Same thing happens to programmers...work on a very fast machine, and never realize how slow something is on an average users computer.
Well, I am hellbanned.
It’s Official: Verizon Galaxy Nexus To Launch On December 15 For $299
Thanks for the leads, guys. Yes, that job hunting when I sent those 1000 resume copies was from 1995 to about 2005.

Finally I gave up on getting hired and decided to start a business.

I'm now deep into that effort and at least for now should continue it.
You could cut up every file into chunks of 10 or so lines and then run those chunks through the algorithm. Seems like that should yield better results. You ought to be able to pull line numbers from the commits.
Inside Amazon's Playbook: How Bezos Built Today's GE
The Overjustification Effect
I'm not sure what your point is.

Yes, type systems can catch a class of bugs.

Google - like most of the software development world - has a lot of people who believe in type systems completely.

That's why they have tools like the Closure JS compiler[1], which provides type-checking for Javascript, and GWT[2], which produces (un-typesafe) Javascript/CSS/HTML from (mostly)typesafe Java.

Using methods of reducing bugs (such as type safety) is orthogonal to producing systems that predict where bugs will occur.

[1] http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/

[2] http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
I generally love this type of music visualisation, but I'm sorry, I must agree with the other comments, I don't like this.

This has captured only two aspects of music, that of pitch and timing. Whilst these are important, music they do not make. This demo is at the level of the very early computer music, some forty years ago.

I think what you fail to capture is emotion of the music. This can not be gained through a mechanically accurate replay of note values, in fact in a lot of cases, it is the inaccuracy or the movement in the timing of notes that can lead to emotion... Add to that the variances in dynamics (loudness), tonal quality and you start to gain some of the difference between a simple performance of tone and timing and start to see some of the complexity of a master performance. How to capture this in a visual display?
I cannot read beyond the first few lines on my Droid. Very disappointing.
Your last statement's the part I disagree with, though it depends on what you mean by "orthogonal". If you mean that they're two different approaches that can coexist, then yes. But I don't think they target orthogonal classes of bugs. In both cases, the goal is to employ some algorithmic, decidable method at compile-time to predict whether a given piece of code is "correct" or "incorrect", trading off the possibility of a false positive or false negative. Each approach does better or worse in different cases, but I think in a manner that either isn't orthogonal, or at least isn't obviously orthogonal (if "orthogonal" is meant in any strong sense, rather than just "two different approaches"). And I think for any one, we can at least in principle ask whether the other one could've done it: e.g., if we're noticing a lot of bugs of a certain sort, could the type-checker have caught that? The ambition, at least, of static type systems is to render accurate bug-prediction impossible, because every bug statically predictable at compile-time will be a type error.
Mobile dev company giving away a day of their time
Carnival Labs are giving away a day of their time to someone with a sweet app idea. Just follow them on twitter and submit your idea.
Nothing. It's a great question though. What do normal web hosts do to prevent such things? I suppose I would have to do something similar.
Some things from your post are spot on! Especially the riddles. Seriously, you got to tell me how many people deal with riddles in your day to day programming jobs? Do you pick up blank sheets of paper and work on puzzles a considerable part of the day.

Even if you were, I would personally never want to work at a place which has this kind of a culture. I am out looking for a job where good business problems get solved in the most practical way. Which helps both the business and me make money.

Second kind of questions are asking the candidate arcane and rare facts that can be known only through rote memorization. Like asking him to work on some concept/data structure/algorithm from a CS text book taught in semester 3 on page 345 of a text book 2000 pages big.

There is nothing great about knowing an algorithm, inventing a new algorithm is special but not knowing one. Worse case anybody can know what you know by searching.

Asking irrelevant questions to the job, gives you a very high rate of false negatives. You are missing out on some very good and productive people.

This is exactly what happens, you ask some irrelevant questions and consider the guy useless. The same guy goes works at some php shop which is solving some business problems which get him and the company good money. And here you are searching and filtering candidate as per your requirements. Meanwhile you see, your start up failing and the average guy there winning. Suddenly you shout out 'Worse is better'.

You've got be brutally honest and practical in software engineering. If you are academics its a different game.

Remember your fantasy elitism in building a dream product and plans to hire rock stars to do it is nothing if it fails. The average guy still ends up winning even if he has 1/10 decent the product of your dreams, if he has a product to sell now.
A single 100 line file will be scored to be twice as buggy as the exact same code split into two 50 line files.

I suspect that isn't the case. Subjectively, longer files are harder to understand and in languages like Java (one file = one class, ignore inner classes etc) is likely to represent more complicated and tightly coupled code.

If the same file keeps appearing, then split it in half and see what happens...
Give Mike Gunderloy's list a shot http://afreshcup.com/home/2011/11/26/my-tools-of-the-trade-2...
Remoteness isn't really a factor in how difficult it is to provide water & sanitation services, as long as it's not a fly-in only area. Unless you find yourself in a desert (or tundra), pretty well everywhere has usable groundwater, and as long as there is access by road or water to get building materials on site it shouldn't be prohibitively expensive to transport materials.

I've been to a lot of hole-in-the-wall towns with populations of less than 1,000 in rural California, Ontario and B.C. and I've never once seen a latrine.

Now fly-in Native reserves in northern Canada - that's another story.
Sorry, I had assumed you were playing the AI angle, and my heart bleeds for people who get binned as "overqualified" and ignored. I still think the difference here is "did really well in one AI course, so is likely to do well in software in general", and not that the students are being recruited for AI jobs.
I just applied for anything, and not just for software engineering jobs. The resumes I sent to Google, Microsoft, GE Research, etc. were for whatever I was qualified for.

At the time, 1995-2005 (see my post below) AI was not much on the radar of companies. It would, could, and should have been but was not.

But asking that a company need "particular skills" that are a bit advanced is, as I explained, fundamentally something of a long shot.

Net, if someone has some advanced expertise and sees an application, then they should just start a business and there be CEO-CTO-CIO, and Chief Scientist along with chief floor sweeper until they get funding and/or revenue and can hire people.
I honestly have no idea what this is. If I didn't find this via HN, I'd immediately assume it was some scam for phishing Dropbox accounts. You need some information here about what this thing does.
and what's with the circles? Trig tells us that the notes at the beginning and end of a measure will be further apart (the dot is crossing he strings at a slant) while the middle of the measure they should be closer together in time (the dot is moving at right angles to the strings). Is this intended? If not, then the circular motion of the dots is entirely a distraction, and meaningless.
Gamers for one seem to be happy on Windows
Reading the comments below, I see that you're well aware of this. I would suggest just adding a single huge sentence at the top of the page that says "by you giving us X information, this web app will do Y". No need for fancy graphics, slogans, etc, just something simple that explains what it does, in a short, effective sentence.
Definitely agree. I'm putting together something now. I think some screenshots along with a video would go along way of explaining what happens after you click submit, which I'm thinking is what visitors are wondering when they get here.
I am not surprised that you are being downvoted. In my experience, one may question the superiority of dynamic typing at HN only to the detriment of ones karma. Well, its not HN alone, dynamic languages are certainly popular and quite persuasively championed.

Now I belong to the "had been persuaded before, but now I am not so sure" category. More so after discovering absolutely stupid typos and compile time checkable errors in long running Python code that I had written. It really sucks when your code bails out after 16 hrs of number crunching because of some silly error on your part.

I used to think, "who makes type errors of all things?" it turns out that that idiot is me. I am not claiming that dynamic languages are bad, or that checked languages are always good, but I do benefit from checked code. A better programmer perhaps wouldn't benefit as much.

Rather than implementing a type checking system badly and in an ad-hoc manner, I now lean more towards compile time checked languages, especially for pieces of code that I expect will run for a long time.

I think the sweet spot would be optionally type-checked / type-inferred languages, for example Cython, Common Lisp. Strongly type-checked languages _tend_ to be all or nothing.

EDIT:
@nl yeah! absolutely, they arent by any means a bug predicting algo.
Xbox? Kinect? DirectX ?
LivingSocial Gift Vouchers Being Indexed in Google
Foreigners in Japan should also register to donate bone marrow
I play violin, so although I'm not illiterate in reading music, I find that when I look at a piece, I cannot immediately understand what the melody sounds like until I actually play it. I have trouble switching from different keys between pieces, so I cannot "visualize" the right sounds in my head. But having relative string lengths shows me patterns and gives me more insight into how the piece may sound like. It may even be more informative on where I can place my finger on the string.
Stock music library
Type systems are great. Other things that are great are unit tests, automatic code inspection tools and code reviews.

They aren't the same as bug prediction systems, though.
> What I was referring to was the Israeli Law of Return that gives citizenship to any Jew that applies.

Also known as Jus Sanguinis with the twist being that one can convert to Judaism. Judaism is a remnant from a time when nation and religion were interchangeable terms. Hence why conversion is possible.

And in case you were unaware, this isn't the only way to acquire Israeli citizenship. Non-Jews can acquire Israeli citizenship through a typical naturalization process.

> including discrimination encoded into laws.

I challenge you to find an Israeli law that discriminates against Israeli Arabs. The closest you'll find are laws which specify state-funded opportunities only provided to those who have done civil or military service.

For someone who has gone so far as to boycott Intel products because of their connection with Israel, you are shockingly ignorant about very basic facts.
Type Systems are good at catching more than just type errors. For example, booleans are much better represented in the type system.
Seems about as good at presenting music for the eyes as a traditional visualizer in iTunes.
Crash driven design. Design your software such that it can recover from a crash to a known state and continue. Make life so much simpler. Shutdown is just a matter of power off. Startup always does a recovery before starting.
Indeed. Also, typically code "ownership" is at the file level -- and that's likely to correlate strongly with defects in situations where a peron who hasn't been well trained (or is just a bad programmer) is writing or maintaining the code.
Traffic accident attorney
Had 3 people ask me if they needed virus protection on a Windows Phone if they bought one. I was really surprised by this, but I guess, given what we drill in people about their Windows PC, I shouldn't be surprised. When I tell them that WP isn't really Windows and they will be fine, all 3 seemed confused. Really a shame since they did a good job of coming up with a different UI.
iradik, now that I've read your explanation in the comments below I want to say I love the concept. A very cool way to almost instantly throw a site online and update from anywhere.

Of course I have to agree with everyone saying "what the heck" based on the homepage. Maybe just add a "what does this do?" section to start, and be sure to describe what fields like "subdomian" actually are for.

The other major hurtle here I think is simply fear of having our Dropbox data or account stolen in some way. I'm not claiming that is in any way what you are doing, but it's a natural immediate thought, particularly for this techie security focused audience I suppose.

Either way, I really do love the idea. You might want to fix up the homepage and see if the MVP gets some traction.
It would make them feel worse, it's a stupid thing to say to someone at the time they are dealing with it. But, and perhaps this is survivor bias, I don't know anyone who was suicidal who didn't eventually end up getting past that. Maybe the ones who go through with it are the ones who truly cannot deal with it, but I doubt it. Suicide is permanent solution to a temporary problem. I hope those people can get help.
Exactly,

One more important thing to notice here. There is a strange assumption that goes on, its considered if you are awesome and passionate you won't care about money and will always for little.

The attitude is like - "Greed for money is for bad people, but you are not that kind right? So, here come work for peanuts while some idiot is making twice as you".
Well done -- an accomplishment indeed.

Great content aside, I found the tone especially refreshing. Too often, it's "look how smart I am, and how stupid you all are" -- the brilliant jerk archetype.

Thank-you.
As several others have suggested, the elevator should behave differently at different times throughout day.

A smart elevator algorithm would adapt to the arrival behavior of people in a building through some clever stochastic simulation and modeling. For example, a simple model that could work quite well is to optimize for (read: minimize) the average time any passenger would wait for an elevator to arrive. But to do this, we need to model how frequently people request an elevator on each floor over the course of the day.

Modeling elevator requests
- We can assume that the number of people who request the elevator on each floor is a Poisson process with a mean of n. On a representative day (i.e. for an office building, choose a weekday), we can observe the number of people who arrive at the elevator each hour. This data would drop in as the n in our Poisson arrival processes.

Computing optimal solutions
- Using a statistical library, we can start generating simulated arrival data and apply integer optimization algorithms to determine which floor the elevator should rest on when there are no elevator requests, for each hour of the day.
Defect detection != defect prediction
Attack, not back.
Hi, Blocks8. I've taken a look at your app. I created a review via moustach.io - a full 5 minutes at

http://moustach.io/welcome/e/reviewed/Y5mKqqZ7Iy36Ldr33TuHX5...

My review is targeted at the content prior to a query. Your landing page.

Let me know if you have any questions.
> just stay silent until you have something "serious" to say

That's my MO on any new forum. I only stopped following that rule on HN as HN itself got increasingly sillier.

And really, your VC example, in reverse, is in full display on HN. There are always articles complaining about unfair shit that VC's pull, and VC's probably talk about unfair shit founders pull. The proper response, assuming you're a VC that doesn't pull unfair shit, is to say "yeah, I hate that shit and I never do that." Look at how Peroni (a recruiter) contributes to the perennial complaining-about-recruiters threads.

The OP is about using indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques to close sales. I think it's fair game to complain about indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques and the people who use them, and if someone observes that it tends to be women more often than men, so be it. If you're a woman who doesn't use indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques, you come into this thread in the same position that Peroni comes into the multitude of threads about how useless recruiters are.
If you're using JRuby you need to check out Monkeybars: http://monkeybars.org.

I'm the project owner and I need to see what ideas Seesaw might have to steal.
>The ambition, at least, of static type systems is to render accurate bug-prediction impossible, because every bug statically predictable at compile-time will be a type error.

I might not use Haskell, but I do understand what a type system does, and why it is important.

BUT, not all bugs are statically predictable at compile-time. Take things like cross-browser compatibility - something like GWT goes a long way to reducing bugs with that, but no type system will protect you from a new bug in a new browser you need to work around.

(Edit: by orthogonal I meant "statistically independent". Given a piece of code written in a type safe language, this method will predict bugs independently of a type system.)
I'm not so sure about that given that I'm from one of the countries you've mentioned. My guess is that the profile of people who've taken part in ai class would be very different from what you would see in coding contest sites. Since no rewards were promised, I would think that those groups of people who would game the system to get perfect scores would be a very small number.
Any chance of adding payment option via Paypal aside from CC?
Ask HN: Favorite language for coding webpages?
I've dabbled in many languages such as Ruby, php, and Java. However I want to choose a language to really stick to master! What are your guyses preferred languages for coding websites/webapps? If you could put benefits as well as drawbacks to your favorite language as well that would be amazing!

-Thanks for your time
"early beta?" Your first post to HN happened almost one and a half years ago

Hard stuff is hard. When you're working on something deep and new, as I believe the AeroFS guys are, you can't necessarily know how long it will take.
It has been only 11 minutes since you posted and there are only a few results even looking at those which were omitted. Either someone at Google is cleaning these up fast or there is just that many indexed yet. Good find either way

Edit: I just checked their robots.txt file and they are not disallowing it so they may to add that. Also very interesting robots.txt file. Check it out I think it is very clever of them. http://www.livingsocial.com/robots.txt
Although pleasant to look at I didn't find this visualization very enlightening.

For me this one provides a much stronger glimpse into Bach's genius: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUHQ2ybTejU
New AWS Region in Sao Paulo, Brazil
A better mobile address bar
http://livingsocial.com/robots.txt doesn't prohibit indexing /gifts/
You should provide links to where this is "explained in great detail", rather than more vague assertions.

If out of all the compromised HB Gary emails, one about sharing a license to third-party "application integration" software is the most incriminating one you can reference, that suggests a pretty flimsy case. HB Gary's entire corpus of email was compromised! Shouldn't there be at least one email from a Palantir employee showing enthusiasm about the offensive tactics, or review/approval of the deck, or something?

(And how exactly would the milquetoast not-created-by-Palantir Kapow Katalyst 'application integration platform' be "used for the tactics shown in the presentation", tactics like 'disinformation', 'fake documents', and 'cyber attacks'?)

Palantir's explanation remains unrefuted: that an employee gave the mistaken impression of participation in a specific effort that the company itself did not and would not support, as a matter of both policy and software capabilities.

Update: Looking for a good 'explained in great detail' overview, this write-up seems credible and balanced: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/the-ridiculo...

It suggests HB Gary was financially desperate to propose something big; Palantir was enticed by the size of the potential deal, but Palantir's payment demands were problematic for HB Gary. The Palantir employee(s) chasing the sale clearly knew and repeated HB Gary's dirty tactics bullet points, but it's not clear Palantir higher-ups saw the proposal as anything other than a potential large sale of their standard passive analysis stuff.

I know 'misrepresentation by overzealous employee' is a convenient excuse deserving some suspicion. But I also know that such vaguely-rogue sales-motivated oversteps happen all the time, even in much smaller organizations than Palantir.
Bugger. I had to drop out because my cat died and I fell behind on the home work. I hope they do it again.
It's not the opposite view if those 7 people are sort of like the same task. Then you are not multitasking.

Normally stuff I discuss on e-mail has nothing to do with what I have to code, that at the same time has nothing to do with what I get text messages about, and even that has no point of comparison to what I get talked on IM about. Maybe my whole life is hell... but I hope i'm getting my point through.