skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But the point of test (exams) is simply to separate people and decide which candidates are best suited for further development. Tests should absolutely try to cover as many of the essential skills necessary for the various careers open to pupils, regardless of how easily those skills can actually be taught by schools.

It would probably result in identifying pupils with potential that previously would have been ignored in favour of pupils who were only superficially superior. It would also encourage pupils who possess more ability in that area to put more effort into their academic careers in general. And would help pupils with other academic strengths to identify fields which will be more difficult for them (there was a former maths teacher on my IT postgraduate conversion course who was really surprised that she struggled with programming, since she thought her maths ability would have made it a shoe-in).

And, to say spatial intelligence cannot be taught seems to be jumping the gun a bit. Have we really even tried to teach it?
How is it different from faye? Faye is also eventmachine ruby code. Faye is 'simple' and NATS is 'lightweight' ?
Indeed, recent versions of VC++ don't use reference counting.
It's already happening now. SOPA is the present day war against general-purpose computation.

Uninstall that program citizen before armed men break down your door and take your device. Drop the device citizen, don't make me taze you. We need to invest hevily on infrastructure and devices that make the war against general purpose computation very difficult to block everything from a central location.
The 'consistency' I speak of is the idea that, if I assign alloca(0) to a variable, it's either NULL or non-NULL - I can't look at that same variable two different ways and get different answers. From the sounds of the article, this requirement might be violated by this bug.
Google, Amazon, Facebook considering self-imposed blackout in protest of SOPA
> Providing services directly to a terrorist organization is one thing; trying to restrict the speech of a supporter of terrorist organizations is another.

In the context of US law - is there much difference? Doesn't the law just count publicity and vocal support as aid?

The UK doesn't have anything like a first amendment protection of free speech. So it's much easier[1] over here for this kind of thing to be blocked. That does lead to some weird situations - for a few years leaders of political groups appeared on news broadcasts with their voices dubbed by actors[2]. (Something that ended in 1994.)

[1] not saying it's good or bad, just easier.

[2] (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/broadcasters-welcome-en...)
Charging less would help.

Purchasing the game is significantly more convenient than downloading one from the community which may or may not have bugs or malware installed. The only reason that torrenting is competitive with the legal game market is because the price of a game far exceeds the added value it provides in the eyes of the target market.
Displacing MySQL with Solr
> While you would expect a comparison to another pointer to be legal, I don't believe it has to be consistent. That's the whole point of undefined behavior. In one sense, it's like the question of whether NaN == NaN. In many implementations, that expression is not necessarily true--even though based on your pointer example logic it should be.

Right, this is a question of whether alloca(0) is undefined behavior, an unspecified return value, or implementation-defined behavior. And I argue that alloca's behavior is implementation-defined in the first place, so it LLVM-gcc wants alloca(0) to be UB it needs to define that :)
For people talking about the lack of face time for remote workers, might I suggest proposing to potential employees that they spend 80-90% of their time offsite, and 10-20% of their time working onsite?

I live in Ohio for example. At some point I really wouldn't mind working for a company in NYC, SF or Boston. Actually, I'd enjoy it since it would give me a chance to escape the midwest with a greater frequency. I'd have zero problem working a week a month in one of those cities. I just can't move to a new location fulltime right now. I have good friends in all of those cities and don't need hotels every time (just pay for my transit costs and I'm set).

Yet, hiring employers view location of workers as being a binary of 0 for always offsite, and 1 for always onsite. The most reasonable thing appears to be striking a middleground.
Much nicer, thanks. I've just shared a circle (to that circle) of everyone listed as of a few minutes ago.
Countdown 2012
الاخوان المسلمين: سنستجوب المشير أمام البرلمان
I love the 37Signals guys and opinions, but this is where I greatly differ with them.

Case in point. I worked at a place where at one point, everyone was remote but me. I could have been remote, and sometimes I like working from home or a cafe or wherever. But for team morale and even with phone or video conversations with the other devs, it became totally demotivating after a while.

I was contracting with that company and joined years later as a ft employee. Engineering consisted of about half a dozen and we were growing. We started to notice that it was 'hard' to hire anyone local, so they just gave up (accepted maybe?) and ended up going with a contracting company and almost doubled the team with everyone new being offsite. Standups became something that was no longer fun because there was so much emphasis on looping in the remote people - screwing around with the video camera, trying out this video service, etc, etc. Come tomorrow (1/12), everyone at that place will be remote and they'll have lost pretty much all of the local devs for various reasons, me included.

Building a team can be hard. But I don't buy the "we can't find anyone local" argument and if I was building a team, I want people local. It's definitely a programmers market right now, but if you want to hire local, then you have to go out and get creative - go to user groups, meetings, etc. It can be done and I've seen it both ways. Local, to me, is just hard to beat. I want people engaged with each other and don't want to have to Google+ someone on video every time I have a question for them.

That said, I'm fine with some days a week where local people work remotely, but to have everyone or some 100% remote is not a good idea in my mind. You don't develop 'company culture' that way. If everyone's remote, there's no one to have a beer with after work and talk about the latest coding issue, problem, point of interest, socialize, or whatever. Guess that's just the difference with getting the work done vs. enjoying your work and the people you work with.
2. Yes, I agree, nice to have the "view" created automatically when you change schema.

Codd's idea was also that applications needn't be aware of the change (a view appears as a plain table)... but (in contrast to your approach) the views were managed by the DBA who was making the schema changes. So I think this feature was present from the very beginning, being the initial motivation for relational databases. [I looked up MySQL because that's the DB I have access to, but it's a general feature:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_(database)#Read-only_vs._u... ]

I would expect automatic versioning to be available too, perhaps only in the older and more expensive RDBs. I've come across quite a few research papers on schema evolution in relational databases - some from big RDB vendors. I don't recall any on automated versioning, but I wasn't looking for that. So this is just my guess.

However, if you're not seeing databases with automated versioning, then (even if some highend RDBs do have it) there will be customers who also aren't seeing it (or it's not applicable e.g. it's too expensive). A market for you. And if you can make it truly painless (or even just less painful), that's really something.

I don't see any problem with your other features. The one feature of mapping for back-compatibility is of interest to me, which lead me to study Codd's original paper in great detail over a few weeks. That's why I've been hassling you on this issue.
I've asked this of recruiters before... Instead of flying me in to do a full day of white-board technical interviews, why not just give me a short project and see what I produce?

It's mind-boggling how broken our hiring practices are, yet how easily it could all be fixed.
Could somebody explain to me how to use this? I'm assuming if I wanted to make my own HN circle I'd have to click on each profile and then add?
Calm down. I know of direct download. I hoped their manager would figure out which drivers would need to be downloaded.

I'm not complaining about the manager, I'm just curious as to why there needs to be so many steps. A better design would be to take my service tag and offer a zip containing the exact drivers I need.

Did you make a new account just to rant at my rant?
Often the customers aren't the end users.

I suppose a job can't always be considered to be done well, just because the customer is provided with what they felt they needed. Sometimes the customer is asking for the wrong thing in the first place.
Be careful doing this, as there are official rules whether someone is a contractor or not, not just 'because I call myself one'. You can in theory get hit for payroll taxes.

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=99921,00.h...
We’re auctioning ten beta Raspberry Pis
Funny thing I've found though, a company that will gladly drop $3k to change a few colors and a font on a web form will sometimes throw a fit over reimbursing a $350 plane ticket. Not all dollars are equal.
Chart: The worlds biggest employers
I'd always try with a single guy.
Communications Providers Social Commitment for Privacy
I can't agree with you more.

But let me briefly offer an insight about why I think things won't change: management itself exists to perpetuate the things on the left hand side of your equations above.

Traditional managers in established (i.e. large) companies are terrified of letting their staff work from home because they perceive (correctly) that if those staff are still productive then there isn't really any reason for them to be employed in their own role.

The things on the left hand side of your equations are a proxy for success that the manager can use to justify their own usefulness. As soon as you start measuring "real" progress the need for non-productive members of staff disappears entirely and most middle management instantly becomes surplus to requirements.
Wait, for a n00b like me can someone explain what is this? My best guess is that its a list of HNers who are on google+? if thats true then what is the use of this? almost every HN reader would have a google profile.
I actually really like this set of rules. It keeps nit-wit bosses from calling you a contractor and then micromanaging you like an employee. On the balance they favor those who really do want to be contractors.
That's it at the moment, if anyone knows a better method (while still keeping it secure), let me know.
Yes. Agreed.

Too many times we programmers view programming as if it is a transfer of bits over a wire somewhere. You shove a pizza under the door, email some requirements, and out pops a solution.

It doesn't work that way at all. Most of the really cool things that happen with teams can't be predicted ahead of time. You just put some really smart people together in a room, throw a tough problem at them, get out of the way, and watch the magic happen.

The magic doesn't happen when nobody has met each other and communication is limited to telephone, email, and IM. I'd rather have 5 guys who weren't so smart all working together in an awesome team than 10 guys who were rocket scientists all plugged in remotely.

Having said that, there are ways to get where everybody wants to go. Hire locally and then let folks work remotely from time to time. Hire people who have already worked closely together and have developed a great relationship. Hire in clusters, etc.

I like 37Signals, but too many times much of their blogging and communication consists of "look how awesome we are!" I am all for people self-promoting, but this schtick starts to become annoying to me after a while. It sounds a bit like pandering and easy sophistry. Things are not that simple. We would not all be awesome if we worked like 37Signals and things would not be better if we all suddenly switched to remote workers overnight.
Fine use of Twitter Bootstrap.

I'd like to make a feature request. Please add a field for HN username/profile so I can better stalk my new friends :)
This is exactly the sort of stuff RMS was saying decades ago, but most people wrote it off as "unrealistic" and "paranoid". Its looking more like the right to read every day.

Control of Computers/information systems is going to become one of the only real ways to exercise control over people in the future, because it will encompass everything else.

Its sad to see people welcome locked down shit like apple products, here with open arms.
"You just put some really smart people together in a room, throw a tough problem at them, get out of the way, and watch the magic happen.

The magic doesn't happen when nobody has met each other and communication is limited to telephone, email, and IM."

Someone should tell the Linux Kernel (and other Open Source dev, where a lot of terrific "as magic as it can get" sw dev happens) guys.

No, I am not saying that OS dev is the same as commercial dev, or even that what you are saying is essentially wrong.

I am just challenging the absolute nature of "The magic doesn't happen when nobody has met each other and communication is limited to telephone, email, and IM." Plenty of "magic" does happen every day when people who know each other only by their irc handles or email ids work together on a codebase.

Whether such activity can be harnessed to help a commercial dev effort is certainly debatable (and there are many good points on either side of the issuel), but the idea of confining "magic" in software dev to only dev teams working in the same room is somewhat dubious (imho, ymmv etc).

That said, time to party here in Bangalore. Happy New Year, everyone!
Chinese Manufacturers Form Alliance To Defend From Apple and MS Patent Lawsuits
Great (and speedy) work. No bugs as far as I can tell.
So people on HN can share and view content with each other and make like minded friends.
Google's Compact Language Detector for node.js
Don't get me wrong I like REs, its just I like them like salt in my food. It is very easy to ruin the food by putting in too much salt, but put in the right amount and delicious.
To add an anecdote:

I was recently contacted by a recruiter helping out a company in an area in the south that wasn't in a very hot market talent wise. So they were expanding their search for senior level developers for a 6mo contract. A few emails were sent back and forth, and obviously the recruiter always wanted to know my rate, but I kept deferring until I had more info...

eventually it seemed like a pretty good fit, so I gave them an hourly rate I'd expect that was reasonable - It was about market for my area (DC) and below some of my other contracting rates.

I got a curt response from the recruiter explaining the company was only offering an amount that was over 30% below my quote (A pretty good tell this is a recruiter I don't want to work with anyway). The message mentioned my rate was quite high for someone not on site. (It was very clear this was for a remote position, and I would not be relocating)

If you are going to hire remote, does it make sense to expect a discount? Especially when you are reaching in to more expensive markets?
Fair point. I over-generalized as well. Just note that I am all in favor of remote work. The trick is reproducing those teams that kick ass. I've seen a lot of configurations, and from what I've seen it usually doesn't work that well. The dream is awesome, and it's the future. It's the damn execution that's tough.

The trick in addressing technology development is to choose the right level of generalization. At some point, you're going to be communicating in leaky abstractions no matter what you say. My overall critique of the article was that the few paragraphs the author provided wasn't deep enough and led to a false impression, not that remote work is somehow unworkable. I could easily post some HN click-bait like "SOPA is the Devil!" and watch the votes climb. What would be tough to do -- and much more useful -- is to provide some kind of analysis where both sides were presented, along with some possible solutions. The first kind of article is a waste of my Saturday morning. The second kind gets me to thinking some. I like that a lot better.
It exists but I don't think it's as bad as previous consoles. Several things could be at work.

1) The anti-piracy systems in the consoles are more advanced; got cracked later than before.

2) Online is more prevalent and it's much harder to play online with a pirated copy; getting your online account banned for piracy is punishing due to trophies/gamerscore. This is definitely the way that the games industry is heading, with a really strong push towards adding online value, DLC and IAP to even single-player games.

3) Games are usually not region locked and worldwide releases are more common: one of the major reasons to chip a console was to play import games, which would then allow you to play all those cheap knock-offs.
The best things and stuff of 2011 by Fogus
I don't think so. Only one comparison is being done in the example code. I'd bet that if you e.g. printed out the value of the pointer before the if statement, the optimization would no longer kick in as it does.
My docs got dropped in the Stratfor leak
Humans are hard wired to eat, fuck, fight and flee; everything else takes deliberation. That said, you may be right and I'm not inclined to quibble this particular point :)
When I say syntactic abstraction, I mean Lisp-style macros.

Python's decorators do a weaker version of the same thing.
"the assumption that free(NULL) won't corrupt the heap."

That's not an assumption, that's how the free() function is defined to work by the language standard. It never ceases to astound me how many otherwise good C programmers think free(NULL) is an error.
Ask HN: Convince My Friend To Learn Ruby, Not Java, As A 1st Language
A bit about my friend: He's absurdly good at chess, has a BA in English from the University of Chicago, and really, really wants to learn to code.

I'm a PHP and JQuery guy myself (in the process of learning "real" JavaScript), so other than making some blunt generalizations about Java programmers vis-a-vis Ruby programmers, I'm not of much help.

Some things he'll want to know: Which is easier to learn? What're the employment prospects for skilled developers using Ruby vs. Java? If he decides that Ruby isn't for him, how easy would it be for him to learn Java's syntax with some Ruby under his belt, and vice versa? If not Ruby or Java, than what other languages should he pursue learning? (I recommend JS, but he knows I'm biased.)

Anyways, after a few weeks of talking with him about learning to program, my friend seems pretty dedicated. He's willing to put in a lot of time into this. Any resources you can post for a newbie programmer would also be much appreciated.

Thanks, HN!
OK. So you are traveling and your plane goes at 15:00 (with this hypothetical clock, I would drop the PM stuff). Do you have time for lunch beforehand? Should you try to?

Similarly, you are on holiday and someone tells you a museum is open till 04:30. Can you go to dinner first?

I guess that a main question is what kind of query is more frequent: "What time is it now in X", or "At what time is X where I am now?". I thought the former was way more frequent, but now, I do not know anymore.

Maybe the best thing to do is to drop absolute references altogether. IMO, "Shall we meet in 3 hours" is easier for handling across timezone discussions, and will work equally well for "in a different timezone than the one I am used to".

Of course, your SMS/ping/twitter/email client would have to automatically count down such timers for you.
But the Linux community didn't appear overnight. It's grown very slowly over twenty years.
Make customers love them. Lower the price eventually.

People I know who pirate games say they will only pirate the ones that aren't "worth buying". When a company makes something impressive enough, they like to reward that company with their money.

When those people have bought your game and sales drop off, lower the price! You'll never be able to get down to "free", but there are a lot of people who would buy a game for $5 who won't ever buy it for $60, no matter how long the price stays there. I have dozens of games on steam that I wouldn't have bought if they weren't 70% off.

I think console game makers would fare better if they did the same. They get mad about used game stores selling their old games for cheap when there's no reason they couldn't do the same thing and take that market back with the sales pitch of "hey, its new" and "you're supporting us by buying from us instead of GameStop".

All of that being said, I don't think it's quite as big of a deal as some would make it out to be. The game industry's already bigger than movies and music. I haven't heard of a company that made games everyone loved, then went under because of piracy. Anyone got an example?
Witch hunts are characterized by the indiscriminate targeting of mass amounts of people who may not be guilty of anything wrong. This is a well deserved public shaming of named individuals.
I look forward the the day when managers catch up and "get it".

So do I, but telling a corporation whose entire culture is built around facetime to "catch up and get it" is, in the general case, like walking up to a flightless bird and waving your arms and shouting "fly, you fool, fly! Don't you realize that the future is in flying? Your cousins that can fly are made of the same parts as you; rearrange them and fly!"

As PG memorably put it:

http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html

When I say business can learn from open source, I don't mean any specific business can. I mean business can learn about new conditions the same way a gene pool does. I'm not claiming companies can get smarter, just that dumb ones will die.
You could have people add a code to their HN profile in order to receive the list (and perhaps require X karma).
hrrmmm, It might be MITM. Looking into it now.... thanks for the help
Two dozen tools for tracking new year's resolutions
I worked remotely for a year and half and later worked from home for my own business. From my own perspective, I found it unsustainable.

Mainly, there are the psychological benefits of working around other people that the internet can't replicate. These were the stages I went through when I landed my remote job back in 2004:

1. Euphoria. I was finally free of cubicle hell! I couldn't believe my luck of landing a job working remotely. I could start and stop work whenever I wanted. I could even take a nap after lunch

2. Contentment. I was more productive. I was being judged on results only. All is good.

3. Isolation. I started to feel a little left out from from the happenings at the main company office. I would hear stories about company gatherings and events. When I was at the office, I wouldn't get any of the inside jokes or stories about the "crazy" night I wasn't there for.

4. Insanity. Must...get...out...of...the...house...

Also, career development is really hard working remotely. Most people are fine being an individual contributor early in their career but once you've been in the industry for 10 years or so, you'll start thinking about what's next.

I'm more satisfied coming into the office at a company that gives me flexibility to be myself and work the way I want than I was working remotely from home. YMMV.