skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Recently I asked a question on SO that was closed for not being specific enough. I couldn't recreate the problem for others, I think was the issue, and I was hoping to get some general "try this" answers just to steer me in the right direction. But it seems they don't want that, they want specific questions with exactly 1 correct answer.
The point in the article is more subtle than that. AIUI that's what happens in Hungary too. But he has to hire someone else whilst she's on maternity leave (and though it's not mentioned, that recruitment process itself could potentially be quite expensive), and then, when she comes back, he now has to fire that replacement person (which is slightly tricky, as Europe doesn't have 'at will' employment practices, so either there'll be severance payment involved, or he could hire someone on a more temporary basis from the outset, but that's almost certainly going to be at a higher rate). And then, the mother has accumulated holiday days all the time whilst off on maternity, so will either take them all off at the point of official 'return', and thus he'll have to be paying two people for the job at that point (or else she doesn't take them all at once, but takes them in large chunks over the next few months, making it even trickier to have someone else cover).

How does Canada handle those parts?
I notice the lists are mostly games. I wonder if that shows Linux's lack in entertainment compared to other platforms.

I'm arriving at the opposite conclusion: not too long ago it used to be that the only game available on Linux was TuxRacer (✝), now there appears to be a plethora of choices and people are actually downloading and even buying them.

(✝) I'm exaggerating a little bit here. There was also FreeCiv and Battle For Wesnoth.
(Questions closed, but 79 answers)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/hidden-features?so...
Beijing Calling: The Trouble With China's New English-Language News Network
Furthermore, make it free and issue a huge marketing push to get people to download the app. This is the hard part as the programming part was deterministic and easy. People are strange.
Also, don't blame the boss for having his own interests at heart, not the company's. It's the company's fault for encouraging him to act that way.
First Experiments in Web Design
Tizen source released
Has Hollywood Lost Its Way
Testing With web2py
Restartable exceptions
Can someone use this data to figure out how much it would cost to make SOPA go away and then setup a kick starter project?
"continuing an old elective program is hard enough, let alone starting a new one"

Anything that is an elective gets pushed to the side in schools. One way to make it easier to teach programming in schools is to identify ways to reach core academic subjects through programming. One way I am doing that is allowing anyone who has had an intro programming class to do programming-related assignments in math class. For example, students can work through Project Euler challenges to earn math credit. We need flexible ways to grant credit; for example, a student who has worked through so many Project Euler problems should be able to earn a certain amount of math credit, regardless of whether it was done in school or at home.
> so come back and read this in 30 days

This was the best part of this great insight, thank you, Ed.

Always take the time, because time changes perspective.
Yep. I've encountered plenty of cargo-cult programmers who know how to copy-paste code examples but who are SOL when it comes to troubleshooting.
SOPA Makes Strange Bedfellows
Good luck at your next meeting with the firing squad!
I would like to make the point that Dr. Norvig nowhere in this article says, "It takes 10 years or 10,000 hours to be a programmer." Dr. Norvig himself refutes that notion explicitly here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3278080

In a brief email exchange I Had with him, he even suggested he may rewrite this essay to address the fact that it is often used (inappropriately, obviously) to bludgeon new programmers into thinking that they're not actually programmers.

I think often on HN this essay is used to create some kind of caste system based on longevity in the biz or number of hours coded, which is horse shit.
Articles can be resubmitted after a given time. Google shows me several submissions of this article from years ago but none recently, though citations of it do show up often in comments.

Why does it get to the front page? Because it's relevant and good, of course, unlike almost everything that is merely new.

I'm pleased to see more classics turning up on HN; Periodic reviews of the classics are the only way to get new visitors onto the same page as older ones.
How to Raise Inquisitive Children to Become Inquisitive Adults
It's not a contradiction. Note the word why. If in the analysis it turns out I fail to show that git is indeed superior, I would have to agree mercurial is superior, or they are equal.

That was not the case.
I found that one odd as well. Maybe the author felt that it would set a specific tone for that person's relationship with the rest of the team?
> ~my cable provider's my best broadband option"

We're witnessing non-death throes of a more-intelligent animal.

When the music industry was disrupted completely, their Plan B was a white-knuckle-grip onto Plan A (their traditional business model). The cablecos were foresightful enough to turn their TV monopolies into broadband value-adds. They've done a drn good job at it, despite the bellyaching we can do. While providing "the best available internet access," they're no dummies, and entrenched cableco interests will ensure cord-cutting's not easy.

HBO is balancing the beam effectively (for their business, if less so for their "audience"). They have zero plans to make their "HBO-Anywhere" service available except to cable subs.

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-hbo-to-cord-cutters-youll...

Competition is still Good. Cableco monopolists were in no hurry to improve things until DSL and fiber-to-the-premises services became available and attractive. But they've responded.

Re TV programming itself, cutting the cord is more difficult when kids are involved. Even with timeshifting as second (or first) nature, you need the source to switch from.* As for torrenting, etc., "it's only 'free' if your time has no value" comes to play.

Per the cited article, and per comments in this thread, TV is a lean-back, consumption-oriented time sink. I like to have that even knowing it's a less-than-optimal use of time.
Michael, I suspect you've been using been using the South Asian numbering system all your life . Surely you write 1,2,3,4,5 as and not I, II, III, IV, V ;)
Solar Kindle Lighted Cover
Electrical stimulation in sub-cortical nuclei to treat depression
Al Franken is a joke. Initially I thought he had good intent, but then I realized he's just another shit "actor" turned "politician". Unfortunately those words are more interchangeable than ever and reflects the current state of dismal affairs that is the United States government as a whole.
I'm not from the USA and my knowledge of your political system is mostly based on the daily show (& colbert report), so it always seemed to me, that SOPA is something that the republicans would be crazy about.
One powerful feature I don't see being used very often is simulating typeclasses via contraints on generic types:

public static IEnumerable<CalculatedTax> CalculateTaxes<T>(this T t)
where T : IOrderItems, IAddress {}

This adds an extension method to any type that implements those interfaces. Using this technique I have been able to make my interfaces much smaller and have generic functions which apply to many different types.

Here's what it would might look like in Haskell:

calculateTaxes :: (OrderItems a, Address a) => a -> [CalculatedTax]
Saying "the author failed" is easy. Presenting a case that demonstrates so is not.

What I said is that they are basically the same, except for the handling of branches, not history rewriting as you suggest.

I assume you agree that they are basically the same, now, if you disagree that the handling of branches is superior in git, feel free to add a comment in my blog, but after 160 comments, nobody has managed to contradict that conclusion.

So no, nobody has managed to prove where exactly is the bias. It is possible that git is superior, and that's what the evidence suggests.
Thanks for sharing this.

I am wondering if startups would sponsor some of their developers to go into schools (20% of their time), give back to the community they live in and teach young people how to hack.

Also, what about starting your own startup on the side, testing ideas and making some small apps that generate revenue for you to provide the doubling of your income?

Interesting problem nonetheless...
Unfortunately, if you actually use it as the broadband connection they advertise, they'll throttle you so hard you might as well be on dialup.
On an 8,000 people responsibility
Note to self: Never work for enry_straker.

If I'm onsite with your team working on your code-base, someone damn well better be paying me for it. Not to mention those kinds of shenanigans are downright illegal in some parts of the world...
Sadly they are mostly games -- I wash hoping to see how well Gnome Do was doing (as it is an awesome piece of software).
Another bit of advice: Launch in Europe, where population density is much higher.
I also think that instead of backing down from supporting legislature like SOPA in the future with all the backlash, they'll just stop supporting it publically.
Not to underscore the value of self-creation (I remade my own personal webfront recently using Django, and nothing's a more valuable coding experience than making something you use yourself) but I think the primary advantage of CMSes like Wordpress and especially Tumblr to designers and developers aren't the bundled, predefined designs but the ease of publication: you can absolutely rip apart a tumblog's design (or even create one from scratch: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_themes) but you have simple, easy methods of creating and disseminating content.
Summary: certain ant species are shown to carry latent genes that produce supersoldier ants. This can be activated with hormones, or importantly, by certain nutritional or environmental conditions, even in species that are not known to produce supersoldiers normally. This implies applications elsewhere (for example, crops) where beneficial latent traits could be activated.
Sorry that you are so dispirited.

If you can bear a suggestion, perhaps release many different apps/sites branded with the city name. Like, "Grooovy NYC". Or, perhaps even better, try a lot of apps/sites each branded with the name of a university.

Social sites, as far as I can tell, need small "nucleation" points. In many cases it is the developers' friends and family. But in your case that won't work, you need a seed audience that also shares a schedule.
Victorinox to launch 1TB USB / eSATA II flash drive with built-in LCD at CES
I'm perfectly aware of that. But a lot of that code ends up shuffling and moving stuff around in buffers and that ends up as work in the C modules. I don't think the distribution of work is as obvious as you make it sound but I'm prone to believe it. As I said: I'm unsure, if my assumptions are true.
Tagdef.com cache and speed strategies
Lua is probably the most useful one to know that has that.

See also: Actors, async and reactive programming
No, there's no extension in mercurial that makes branches behave like git branches. That is clear in the 160 comments where I even created a challenge for anyone to try to do the same in mercurial, and curiously, people have criticized my videos, scripts, and every little thing possible, but none have actually shown how it's possible to do the same in mercurial.

So no, you can't do the same, that's the whole point. If you think you can, you are most likely mistaken, but feel free to show how in the comments of the blog, and expect a prompt rebuttal.
I prefer GNU Screen for the nethack mode. It is a shame that Screen does not ship with a nicer hardstatusline by default - you can do some really amazing things there.
Background checks are being restricted in CA (by laws that became active in Jan '12), but even before that, I doubt it. Background checks are more like credit checks than employment history checks, except they include law enforcement activity.
I did not mention "history is sacred", Google did, in his analysis.

And I didn't pick any example, as I clearly said; they are basically the same, the only real difference is in the way they deal with branches, and obviously, I concentrated on the difference.
That's why it should be a cool, fun project. It's hard for me to see how one might get exploited by contributing as much time as he wants to an open-source project. Remember, the prospective employee uses the same experience to gauge what it's like to work with his prospective employer.
Well tbh, the question is really how would you go on about knowing about failed startups. Especially not the big ones, since typically no one covers a failed startup that no one has heard about and they just go out without even a puddle in the water.
Background checks are nowhere near that accurate, they usually rely on information you, yourself have put out there, they don't have some sort of direct pipeline to your w2 forms.
If some other people have also problems with IE, facebook and session cookies, have a look at this reciep, i wrote. The solution is pretty easy. http://recipes.wearekiss.com/view/platform/problem-solutions...
Lua has built-in support for coroutines. Python and Ruby have (limited?) support for coroutines via generators/iterators (via the yield statement).

But why not Icon? It has plenty of neat features on its own, such as goal-directed execution (which I've never seen in another language). Plus it has several pretty solid (and free) introductory e-books: http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/books.htm
Living in China, let me tell you what life is like with restricted internet
I have begun to think of TV as a lossleader for DVD sales. At this point I mostly spy on what kind of shows people in the US talk about, read up on them and select one for my parents birthdays + christmas. My parents love this, I have no trouble buying them gifts(thanks to Amazon.co.uk) and there is a new market for HBO.

But yeah, HBO will earn more money when they get off cable-only.
This is genius! Thanks for sharing it!
MacOS KenDensed: Apple’s Textbook Rumors & Creepy Steve Jobs Dolls
...and so one of (the many) goal(s) of cancer research is to find out if all of those letters come from the same alphabet.
Ok no, I think now I'm wrong=) this is even, the die is cast once when the players choose to start or not and after, the game is made.
This is what contracting is for, no one in their right mind with any sort of real experience is going to spend 2 days on-site working for someone for free.
The story of how trainyard beat angry birds
This argument holds little water these days: it is next to impossible to hide information about the true state of a country when access to information is so easy thanks to the Internet.

It's actually quite easy:

Step 1: recognize that gathering macroeconomic statistics is really hard. One example: if people previously spent $3 on salsa, but now they spend $5 on guacamole, what is the inflation rate for mexican dips?

Step 2: come up with a catchy title for a statistic, and make sure reporters know all about it. E.g., "the burrito index, which measures how much good mexican food costs."

Step 3: tweak the definition of the statistic until you get the result you want.

Want more inflation? All mexican dips are equal, so inflation is up 66%. Want less inflation? Guacamole is 2x better than salsa, hence dips have actually dropped in price 17%.
Minor bug-report: when you keep clicking on the 'Send' button continuously it will occasionally show the JSON response in-browser instead of updating the UI.

And no, I'm not crazy. I was trying to test GitHub's rate-limiting. ;)
Pasting in Vim with indentation adjusted to destination context
Five Reasons Internet Business Blogs Hurt You
FTA:

"Memoization is a computer science concept to optimize programs by avoiding computations that have already been done and to reuse it. This is achieved by storing the computaions in a lookup table and retrieving them if a need for it arrives in a future computation step."

From Wikipedia:

"In computer engineering, a cache (/ˈkæʃ/ kash[1]) is a component that transparently stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster. The data that is stored within a cache might be values that have been computed earlier or duplicates of original values that are stored elsewhere. If requested data is contained in the cache (cache hit), this request can be served by simply reading the cache, which is comparatively faster." (Emphasis mine.)
Netflix the DVDs one season behind.
I'd consider it much more important to stay truthful than to descent to such blatant propaganda.
A lot of capitalists also promote growth, but growth is not a necessary condition for capitalism.
In some countries this information turns up when you do your taxes for the end of the year. And not all job markets are as huge and "anonymous" as the U.S. job market - some (like Israel) are relatively small (a few 10ks of programmers probably) and word gets around. Besides, if you get asked on an interview about what you've done in the recent past in terms of looking for work you're basically lying if you're not mentioning a brief period of employment. Not a huge deal, but still it's not honest and some people would rather not.
Watch Free Phoenix Suns vs Milwaukee Bucks Live NBA Streaming Online HD T
The latter part is simply not true - I run Apache with mod_php for a number of sites and web services on VPS's with little RAM without any problems, and that's alongside MySQL, Exim and SpamAssassin.
just asking..cant you change the name and relaunch it?
I have started work on my own projects, which gives some satisfaction. But I am really tempted to do it full-time. I am a pretty good teacher, because I work hard all day long and think critically about my practice, and I work with a really strong staff. I can't help but think that if I put that much energy and focus into working in the startup world, that I'd do really well and enjoy it. I am really satisfied every day, though, that everything I do all day long is really meaningful. So I will be pretty picky about finding a startup with a mission that is meaningful, rather than just providing a service or product that people will pay for.

I am really curious to see where I end up in the next three years.
Do you have some limits in place, or can I just expect it to proxy all of my web traffic when I want it to (which I can do with one JS statement right on this page)? Magic WebKit Inspector is going to ruin your hosting bill.
Ask HN: Am I hireable for a tech company if I don't like complex stuff?
I don't really like complexity nor do I like fads. That doesn't mean I don't like working on hard problems though. I just like trying to keep things simple.

I've noticed lately that almost everyone of my fellow programmers seem to be immersed in fads and other like things. The rest seem to try and make some of the most simple problems in the world into some of the most complex problems in the world.

Then I look at Ad's out there and it says they are looking for top programmers and these 'rock stars' out there. Not only do they ask for that, they also seem to give out these super brain teasers and ask questions about overcomplicated specifications like they are the holy grail of good programming and I should be writing programs like them! (In my opinion, the only reason I see a lot of specs end up that way is because two people couldn't agree on something so they compromised on the worst of the two ideas to move on.)

Well, after spending hours listening to people talk about stuff way over my head just to realize all they are talking about is something rather simple - I feel very unhireable by my fellow programmers except for the lowest level programming job or simple CRUD jobs.
Elements Of A Trustworthy E-Commerce Web Design
There is some FOSS alternative if I recall correctly but I forgot the name. I think it was written in Java.
I used to use Gnome-Do, and it is truly excellent. It always seems to know exactly what I'm searching for with no missed suggestions. However it was also the only Mono-based app I used.

I just got a new computer and installed a fresh Linux, and am giving the pure-Python Synapse another try. It seems to have improved since I last tried it, and while still not quite as good as Gnome-Do yet in its prediction accuracy, I think it's a good enough replacement to make the switch.
Context is true. It's totally different to see someone work _with you_ on a project than to rummage around their commits to project you don't really know. The point is to see how it is to collaborate with someone, and that has to be a first-person experience (or take the word of someone you really value, but that's not what you get form random GitHub projects). And also there are tons of developers who never really contributed much to open source. e.g. in the Microsoft world this is not so rare, and you'll miss these people if you _require_ a GitHub reference...
I had trouble doing just this, mainly because of how IE handles cookies on 304. I used this Gem for a Rails app (~1 year ago): https://rubygems.org/gems/rack-p3p.
If happiness is what you want to practise, why is the exercise you do "imagining bad things"?

I put it to you that the exercise you really do is misleadingly named and that it is actually "what's the best that could happen, given this setback".

The worst that could happen includes losing a paying customer who then finds his business in trouble when he can't get a stable alternative, blames you, sues you under an obscure law which you didn't know of and you lose your company, job and go to jail. Or your site goes down and you can't fix it and your company sinks and your friends ostracize you and your cofounders rubbish your image publically. Or a disgruntled user hunts you down and murders you in your sleep.

You're not doing "worst that could happen", you're doing "least worst that could happen" or maybe "most likely thing that will happen" to get away from the above thinking.
It's a necessary condition for a functioning capitalist economy. I can go into more details if you want, but the fact that the key economic indicator is GDP growth and that all economies go into turmoil when growth approaches 0 should tell you that this goes beyond the opinion of a bunch of people. It's an emerging effect of the rules of capitalism.
@njs There's a start on hackage 2, but it hasn't hit 0.1 yet

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/o5iov/modern_reallw...

@peaker I think each of your issues has prior art. The author of yesod has had his gotcha/critical-list, and a response from a Simon!

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/k4lc4/yesod_the_lim...

and partial functions in prelude

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/lf71l/deprecate_pre...
This is useful if you are on systems where curl is not easily available. Helped a few times!
I read your link and nowhere does he refute that. In the context of his essay I believe he means it takes 10 years or 10,000 hours (more or less) to be a really good, experienced programmer. You can start playing the piano in a couple of weeks but it will take several years before you get really good. That is the spirit of his essay.
I believe that he's using term social to describe individuals outside your work (e.g. no lunches with personal friends). As you state networking is very important when you first start a job and the rest of the tips are geared to network effectively (find the organisational chart so you know who are the right people to meet).