skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microphone Turns Any Surface Into Multi-touch Interface
They should have a way for you to officially "register" as a member of the Kopimism. That way if they sue you for copyright infringement you can actually have proof that they are "persecuting you for your religion", and you're not just declaring on the spot that you're a big believer in Kopimism to escape the lawsuit.
Great post, this happened to me in high school I got into a specialized school after being just above mediocre at a normal school. This was math/physics school in Ukraine that was basically one of 2-3 top schools in the country (whatever that means). First semester my usual mark in my math was 0/12. They only kept me because I was one of the best in programming and physics courses. Took me 5 month till I could solve one of 2 problems that they used for tests (3 hours 2 problems).

In a way it was maybe too early, in university everything was too easy (I did not go to a top school because I had trouble getting a high enough TOEFL score and wanted to start as early as I could). It took failure in graduate school, then few years of wasted 9-5 code monkey work to get me to see the light again.
Would you pay for this: A business that helps you test business ideas
I have ideas for businesses everyday, however, I lose interest in them very quickly. I'd like to be able to test and validate the ideas before I lose interest.

The problem is, launching a test site is a pain in the butt. It requires

a) purchasing a domain and directing it to a landing page
b) creating a landing page/sales page (unbounce is pretty good for this)
c) launching an ad-words campaign
d) installing analytics
e) installing a payment/signup system to see if people will pay or signup

Here's my question, would you pay for a service that

a) allows you to "rent" domains for short periods of time (with the option to purchase it later)

b) put up a well designed generic landing page (simple text/photo editor available)

c) have built in Adwords (or equivalent) tools

d) have built in analytics data

e) has a built in signup/payment form for customers

The idea is that for a flat monthly fee, you'd be able to put up X number of test sites to validate your idea without wasting time having to do all the tedious stuff.

If you have experience putting up test sites, what is the most annoying part about the process?
$25 Raspberry Pi Computer Prototypes Selling For $3,000
That was actually hypothetical - none of my current or past bosses would care. We did have a lot of religious clients at my old job, but they probably wouldn't care, either.

There are, however, places where it would definitely lead to a change in the work environment.

> It would never occur to me as something anyone would need to be private in any country

Even in countries ostensibly ruled by sharia law?
Hiring developers based on brain teasers is like hiring journalists based on how well they do at scrabble.
How to download Facebook video very simple.
Indeed, that left me wondering. If it's so outdated, perhaps they could stop hunting "the last of the file-sharers"? Or perhaps it's just some way of trying to make file-sharing look less "cool", something of the past, for the public.
Your idea needs a passionate believer
From Feng: “The next frontier is to take high-performance computing, in particular supercomputers such as HokieSpeed, and personalize it for the masses.”

This is one of my favorite things about technology. As few as five years ago I was drooling about an Intel C2D chip and looking forward to quad-core chips. Nowadays that's standard technology in smartphones. I'm amazed by the graphics performance in the new Asus Transformer Prime with the Tegra 3 chip which has up to five cores.

The biggest problem with packing more power into smaller spaces is the battery consumption issue. Maybe there's no silver bullet for that only more efficient software and hardware usage.
> Do I really want to look forward to your sour attitude every day?

This sums it up for me. The author sounds like a grumpy person who would be terrible to work for. I also suspect many of these rejections are self-fulfilling prophecies. When you're actively looking for a reason to reject candidates, you're probably going to find one.
Google’s Nexus tablet may push Android partners out of the picture
Some Online Degrees Tips You Can Use Now
Reason to learn ruby instead of wordpress - Maybe we need SOPA?
I guess it's a constant bias term.
I suspect you are greatly overestimating the power of money in managing motor neurone disease.
The best interview is a pair programming session around some 1-2 hour problem. It takes longer, and it may come later in the interview process, but it's a high bandwidth way of assessing someone.

If they don't have a strong open source background (not everyone does), earlier in the process it helps to ask a couple very simple programming tasks, such as writing a function to reverse a string in place or the infamous fizzbuzz. It will weed out people with great resumes but poor skill.
I am an employee of a company based in Virginia but work from home in Rochester NY. Been only doing this since last December, but I am loving it and will have a hard time going back to commuting.

Lots of people with prior telecommuting experience warned me about issues like isolation, putting on weight (because of proximity to food) and lack of discipline. Now after telecommuting, I feel that I have none of these issues. I have friends that I play tennis with or meet up occasionally for drinks, and I feel that more than makes up for the lack of social interaction. Regarding food, I used to eat out when I commuted so now I have more control over what I eat being at home. Lack of discipline is a problem only when you see it as a lack of discipline. I have moments when I want to stop work and read HN, do a tutorial etc. This actually helps me getting back to work in an hour or two with fresher focus on the problem.

All in all, I believe remote work is the future. The so-called benefits of an "impromptu technical discussion in the hallway" might seem nice, but in terms of getting things done, it has no advantages over interacting remotely.
Its really a puzzle why more companies don't adopt this.
> But let's say the victim is kidnapped or something at this point. Are the police going to be able to do anything?

They'll know that I was in distress RIGHT NOW, instead of two hours later when I fail to show up for that party I told my fiance I'd meet her at - and even then, she would have to wait 22 hours before filing an official police report.

The possibility of kidnapping elevates this to a whole new level.
The 32-bit ints can be solved even at the user-level library. But it's much worse than that.

Even if you only need to access 2GB (or you had fixed the Java memory mapping code) you still have a .getDoucle() or .putDouble() call for every access; and that's actually a virtual call (and as far as I can tell, even though I only ever used one kind of memory channel, the JVM wouldn't inline it -- although I can't tell for sure, because the JVM also sucks at introspection).

I had real computational code in C that needed to be translated to Java.

First attempt (no memory mapping, converting C structs to Java objects) failed miserably because my structs were 32 bytes each, and the object overhead was 24 or 32 (don't remember), which took me beyond physical memory (using virtual memory caused a slowdown of ~1000).

2nd attempt, I switched to memory mapped arrays -- much better, only ~15 times slower. But I also had to write my own sort, because Array.sort() or whatever it was called was allocating 48 bytes for each 4 byte int to sort (wtf?), blowing memory usage up again.

That's a cost people using Hadoop pay all the time -- which kind of surprises me how popular it is. You need 10 times less CPU if you do things right -- and at that scale, maintenance & hardware cost as much as salaries....
Saudi-Arabian hackers claim more Israeli CC numbers on the way
I've spent the past year building an app on CouchDB and I've really enjoyed using it. The couch.io to CouchBase transition was poorly communicated, so I'm glad Damien's made such a clear statement of intent. Clearly I'm going to have to stick with Apache CouchDB for now. I was interested in moving to CouchBase, but that's surprisingly difficult:

1. There's no easy transition for my data. I thought I could just install CouchBase and replicate from my existing CouchDB -- nope, can't be done. Huh? But why...

2. It's partly because CouchBase drops the CouchDB REST API. Which also means, none of my existing code works with it. So I guess it's no big deal that my data won't move over, because my app won't be able to retrieve it anyway.

Because there's no easy transition, they've created a situation where anyone considering a move to CouchBase is just as likely to re-evaluate all of the other document (or k/v) stores.
Hungry Academy is open education
X-37B spaceplane 'spying on China'
>in all likelihood his his longevity is mostly due to him having money.

I think you mean "Socialized Medicine"

"I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS," [Hawking] said. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived...."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/12/stephen-hawking-ent...
Java and Clojure - How data structures influence language usage
My view is perhaps even more cynical than yours: I think his longevity is primarily due to luck. He also, if I understand correctly, has a different variant of ALS that doesn't progress as quickly. While money might have been a necessary precursor to his achieving such longevity (I doubt he would have made it this far had he not been wealthy), ALS has taken the lives of many, many people poor and rich alike.

My stepfather died a few years ago from ALS, and he was fairly wealthy and motivated to fight the disease. Unfortunately, at this stage in our understanding, you can throw all the money and effort at the disease you can muster, but you're not going to beat it.
Mmmh sorry but I have to disagree with you. I can't let you tell this without some corrections, non-expert people could take it as it is.

In short, your post is mainly uninformative.

>> Normally, these are sent to the client separately and merged in the graphics card

It means nothing. You moreover can't really know what the batching and draw calls scheme is in google earth nor in this nokia 3D maps.

>> Special routines are used to draw trees (e.g. billboards).

Mmmh. Ok ok. 3d applications are complicated, there is special routines for a lot of things btw...

>> What Nokia have done here is to merge everything - terrain, surface image, buildings and trees - into the same model.

I agree with that.. vulgarly. It does not mean there is one mesh and it isn't. It can be confusing.
What you mean is there is one skin.

>> They're still using the classic chunked level of detail approach, just with more complex models, which the graphics card handles with ease.

You don't know what the chunks and lod algorithm is and i guess it might be very innovative. Or not. Well but you are talking about the global chunked lod approach so you re right, but it can be very confusing. The LOD algorithm is probably very innovative.

>> This requires more work on the server side to prepare the data, but once it is done it is really fast for the client. The main disadvantage is that the data ends up being very static - you can't move objects around, for example.

This is just false. Please don't take it bad, people may be deceived by that and this is as false as possible. There is actually no benefit to explain why but it could looks like "there isn't any more server side preparation because the mesh is not construct on the fly, this is not faster in the client - you can't say it - it depends highly on the draw calls scheme, the vertex complexity, the textures fetches etc. etc. and the data are static you are right but yeah it is highly doubtful - 3D programmers are smart, take the example of moving BSPs in the quake engine, who could have say that BSPs can move...".

Anyway, thank you very much for the links and references, they are pretty interresting.

edit: please note that I'm trying to do all the efforts to make this post as constructive as possible.
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/10/07/Robot-Road...

Quote:
Which has revealed a feature that the Tab needs: a button in Gmail called “in strange hands”. The device is profoundly shareable, but mine has my Google email, full of threads that are distinctly not for public eyes. So I need to switch to disable that while letting people look at interesting web sites or play games or check stock prices or whatever.
End Quote
I see it this way too. There's no way Child's Play is making people as happy, per dollar spent, as a good externally evaluated third world medical charity like the Against Malaria Foundation [1]. It's really good people are being so generous, but if their values are at all like mine they could be doing so much more with a charity taking a different approach.

[1] http://givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF
Or better yet, what if it's an elaborate CIA plot to convince you that the moon landing was real? Plotted by intelligent elephants, who breathe fire and crap diamonds! They're a part of the deBeers cartel, and when you're asleep, they rearrange your underwear!

How deep do you want to make your conspiracy theory go?
www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct07/vol65/num02/The-Perils-and-Promises-of-Praise.aspx

Includes references for further reading if so desired.
I used to intern at a company that manufactured credit cards. If I recall correctly, this actually is in place in South American countries. Due to relatively low fraud rates, credit and debit card security in the US is far behind the rest of the world.

Edit: Somewhat replying to a sibling comment. In countries with less effective police, they originally put withdrawal limits on the cards, but this just caused muggers to hold their victims until the victim's account was drained.

Further Edit: I couldn't find any online sources for this information, so I could be remembering incorrectly.
... and convincing my wife that I'll able to fly once I step off the cliff.

I was fortunate enough that my wife (although highly skeptical) was trusting enough to go along. Sometimes you just have to make the leap. Wish I had earlier, instead of listening to my fears and the fears of those around me.
As long as there's a "dirtytop" to watch what's going on this will make a lot of people happy.
The mapping team at Nokia is by far the best software development team in the organization (maybe with the exception of Trolltech/qt), and it's surviving the MSFT integration. It's (largely) the legacy of the successful acquisition of Gate5 in Berlin -- and somehow the team there was able to resist full assimilation into the Borg. I was talking to a Nokian today who commented that in Nokia, "Berlin is the new Helsinki".
It's hard to work remotely if the company is not willing to adapt to it. In my experience, remote working is better when lots of employees are doing it (like github for instance).
Companies like Google hire hundreds (thousands?) of developers per year, hiring policies at 37Signals are bound to be different from those at Google.

If you have to weed out thousands of candidates, trying brainteasers to estimate their problem-solving capabilities doesn't seem to be a bad strategy. If a candidate is not familiar with a particular problem, his/her solution may be suboptimal, but the process of getting to that (suboptimal) solution may be a good indicator of the candidate's problem solving skills.

Obviously, syntax-checking a candidate's on-paper Javascript code isn't going to help anyone.
Sometimes something as simple as a stuffed animal can ease the pain and suffering a lot more for a longer period than medication.

I'm not questioning the effectiveness of modern medicine by any means, and myself would rather donate for active treatments but a child with a teddy bear to hug/hold/squeeze will likely feel a tiny bit better than one with nothing when faced with pain, or loneliness for that matter.

Edit: I don't really have any evidence to back up my first statement other than a few anecdotes and personal experiences.
"You think that of all the searches across the country for [santorum], most of them are for the prank?"

I think enough of them are that it justifies the prank being among the top results.
/No career plans or vision/

The best developers I've ever worked with tend to lack career plans. If you're sufficiently happy with your life that you don't need a change strategy, that's pretty cool.
No matter what you do... someone will always find something to complain about.
I'll make one if you want to fund it. :)
The Problem With Patents (Infographic)
This is just an absurd argument. You're paying top sales people commissions because thats what top sales people demand! You dont have a choice in this matter if you want real world class sales people -- you'll be giving them more than just commissions!
If there were more engineers than jobs and we were all fiercely competing for scraps, I would say ok - it's a "buyers market" and we are forced to put up with attitudes like this.

The situation is very different however. In my experience, top talent either a) have their own company or b) are well-looked after by their current employer (at least one would hope so) so they need to actively lured away; how about you tell me why I SHOULD work for you rather than give all the reasons why I can't?

Oh yes - and the author is an arrogant dick.
It is all perspective , you like to think that role is great but maybe is not so much as you think. Maybe you just don't know better

Don't get me wrong; we all have to pay the rent. There there are indisputably times when, guess what, one just needs a damned job that'll pay the bills.

But for a lot of smaller companies with cool little projects? Yeah, I think it's totally reasonable for them to discriminate on that level.
Jan. 5, 1943: George Washington Carver, King of Crops, Dies
I used to feel this way. However I tended to find myself, on most projects, spending a surprising amount of time tweaking incompatibilities between the various lightweight libraries I was using. And it was a bit of an effort to unify things like logging and error reporting.

Which is when I realised the utility of a bulky framework; for the most part it is a suite of libraries that work together/are compatible but which someone else maintains for me :)

This was a big step for me.

(although I still use the lightweight approach for smaller projects)
The difference is that the additional effort put forth in the sales process yields direct, tangible profits, whereas coding efforts are not always as easily quantified.

Think of this from the perspective of an owner. If you are going to choose between two sales guys, one who pulls in $10 deals and another who pulls in million-dollar deals, who are you going to choose? OK, now that you've chosen the latter, how much are you going to pay him? Since there's no simple way to come up with an arbitrary worth, say you settle on a nice big offer for him. What if he stops producing stellar numbers (due to personal deficiencies or market forces)? Do you fire him or reduce his pay? Doing either is sure to infuriate him if external forces are at play, so the only alternative is a merit-based commission system.

I'm not saying it's right for companies who only pay sales commissions and don't reward coders--there absolutely should be profit sharing and bonuses for programmers with measurable contributions to the company--but this process is in place simply because sales' efforts are infinitely easier to quantify and reward (from a profitability standpoint) than are programming efforts.
The most enterprisy usage I can think of is that DirectBuffers are used by Ehcache/Hibernate's BigMemory product to cache off-heap.

DirectBuffers are also used in I/O libraries like Netty.
How to build a Spotify app
I remember reading Heroku does similar. Using applicants in a project works well.

I have always tried to push my potential employers to use me on a small real life project. I know it's time consuming (and you end up working for em for free) but it works both ways. I get to know what kind of work environment they have and they get to know me in a real deal. I find it much more comfortable because the puzzles always seem to be a hit and go. The solution may click or it may not.

I know it's a start but if this catches in the industry I expect employers to even pay for your 30-40 hours interview.
The best interview is a pair programming session

Maybe, but I've come to find that pair programming is a certifiable skill that unless you've been doing it for a while needs honing. Pairing with someone great might not seem great if they have no experience with pairing.

So once again, we're back to: there is no single best-way to fully assess a candidate.
I think they do, on their normal site. We'll see when it comes up in a few days again.
From Intern to Employee: How My Love of Barbie Landed Me A Job
You summed it up well, this guy needs to stay as far away from interviewing as possible. This attitude is why people can't find the 10Xers, they interviewing process is set up to filter them out. Your observation here:

Here's a clue: technologies change. By definition, anyone with the "right skill mix" won't have the "right skill mix" for long. Amesome people adapt. But how would you even know that if you don't hire them?

gets to the heart why they cant. 10Xers are not a technology they are personality and a attitude. Hell some of them are not ever that great at some of the technologies they use, but they know how to use the parts they need to get them to the finish line. They know the principles of elegance in clean code, and simple systems that are only as complex as they need to be.

These people are not showing up to the door of people that interview like the author, and if they do they are not taking the position and probably recommending to other 10Xers to go ahead and avoid the interview.

I get the feeling from reading the article, that the author has not learned how to spot technical talent and is growing frustrated with it.
Santorum's recent success has probably also resulted in bunch of fresh, new links from his name to the spreadingsantorum site.
Programmers are born not made
> The only reliable gauge I’ve found for future programmer success is looking at real code they’ve written, talking through bigger picture issues, and, if all that is swell, trying them out for size.

I agree with the latter. This is how I used to hire programmers, one month on a freelance contract first with a single project.
The importance of the code itself is also overrated IMHO. It's just one tiny part of someone you add to your team, what about creativity, taking initiative, never giving up, being a team player, etc. Each of them are equally important to plain coding skills.