skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quite. There's what used to be an easy test for whether you were bound by a contract: did you make an agreement with someone, someone's agent, or a corporation's employee?

In the age of EULA's, that test isn't as clear as it was, but it is perfectly clear that you can come into possession of copyrighted material without any kind of contract. Copyright limits what you can do with your possessions without your explicit or tacit agreement.

Licenses can only grant freedoms. The GPL-style licenses seem to inhibit your freedom, but only because they offer a conditional freedom: you are granted the freedom to do this thing, but only if you also undertake to do that thing. All of this is without any agreement between the code author and the code user.

Now here's a test of whether that is all clear: is an End User License Agreement a license?
CAPTCHA creator Luis von Ahn goes from a annoying text entry box to motivating a 100 million people to translate the web for free.

http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html

This guy has a great sense of humour: "How many of you have filled out a CAPTCHA? How many of you find them really, really annoying? Yeh, I invented that"
Real world experience may be king, but it won't get you past the guards at the gate (HR) as readily as a sheepskin.
Learn something new everyday -- Clarissa was a programmer! Loved that show!
Interesting. I'm in Denton also. Went to UNT thinking of studying music but ended up in Math/Physics, two of the guys I work with currently were in the UNT music school before getting into programming/tech.

Also married to a UNT music graduate who I'm hoping to lure into programming :-)
The only way to increase your youtube views 
If you are looking for a way to increase your youtube views try http://www.realutubeviews.com/ it actually works!
Pentagon Scientists Use ‘Time Hole’ to Make Events Disappear
You could probably do something like this, but accuracy is going to be a problem. Sound waves are not uniform events. If you could rely on precise clicks at precise frequencies, with minimal echo, you could get acceptable accuracy, but relying on finger thumps in varied substrate is going to be difficult. I think the reason you don't see more of this is that there are better solutions to the problem of establishing touch interfaces on suitable surfaces.
There are many cheap sites that provide credit monitoring and reporting from all three agencies on a monthly basis.

I get mycreditinform.com for free with my CapitalOne MasterCard. They're OK, they provide very detailed raw data and info that you can go through and read.
I think you can look at this another way too. How many people in other industries voluntarily embark on pet projects or hobbyist experiments that involve the same things they do at work?

How many people in other industries blog about their profession in their own time? And not just about their day to day, but about new things they've found or interesting things they've figured out.

People want to go home and leave work at the office, but it's not at all uncommon for a programmer or developer to carry on in their spare time, working on their own stuff. You probably started off your career as a hobby in the first place.

Sometimes it can be hard to switch off when plenty of other people manage it fine. It seems almost implausible to imagine a fellow colleague who wasn't interested. I also think that specialist journalism is another profession that almost expects 'extra-curricular' interest in the field.
If that price is too high, sounds like a good opportunity to undercut Uber by starting a similar service that charges less.
Read again what I wrote: there exist jobs that require knowledge of Newton's method, and in those cases this would be a valid interview question. This is not in disagreement with your "there exist jobs that do not require knowledge of Newton's method". You're likely to need to know about Newton's method for jobs in the area of machine learning, robot control, or some kind of physics simulation.

That said, Newton's method is not rocket science. The basic algorithm is iterating this line:

z = z - f(z)/f'(z)

Where f is some function and f' is its derivative. In many cases this will rapidly converge to a root of f (i.e. z will converge such that f(z) = 0). As far as algorithms go, this one is pretty damn simple. It is not in my working memory either, and I expect that many people rederive it when they need it.

The idea behind Newton's algorithm is that you approximate the function f(x) with the tangent line L at z:

L(x) = A + B*(x-z)
with A = f(z) and B = f'(z)

Now L(x) is an approximation of f(x). How well an approximation this is depends on how much f(x) looked like a line in the first place. Then instead of solving f(x) = 0 (which is our goal, but hard) you solve L(x) = 0 (which is not exactly our goal but almost our goal, and it is easy). So:

f(z) + f'(z)(x-z) = 0

Rewriting:

x = z - f(z)/f'(z)

Now the approximation of f(x) at that x is 0. Because it's only an approximation to f(x) it will probably not make the real f(x) = 0. Therefore we apply the method again and again with x as the new starting point:

z = some starting value
until f(z) is small enough:
z = z - f(z)/f'(z)

Because we're iterating, this method works even if f(x) doesn't look much like a line. For example x^2 - a doesn't look much like a line, but Newton's method is very effective at computing its root to compute sqrt. To see how outrageously effective it is, lets compute sqrt(2.0) with it. Lets start with a starting guess x = 1.0. We get the following numbers:

iteration x
--------- -
1 1.0
2 1.5
3 1.416666666666666
4 1.414215686274509
5 1.414213562374689
6 1.414213562373095
7 1.414213562373095

Note that at the 6th iteration already all 16 digits are correct.

Newton's method is perhaps the most beautiful algorithm due to its simplicity and effectiveness, and worth knowing even if only for its beauty. It is also quite probably the most important algorithm ever invented. It is used everywhere from division in hardware to optimizing all kinds of things and solving differential equations.
This is similar to how I described it to my relatives as well. They know enough about Facebook to understand - I told them that if I took a picture of a painting in a gallery and posted it on my facebook wall, the government could take down all of facebook.
How are the funding amounts quantified? For example, for Chuck Schumer, the site has this:

Money Raised
$1,465,160 from big media

$1,191,700 from pro-PIPA groups

$323,475 from anti-PIPA groups

From every other type of campaign-finance summation I've seen, big media IS considered a "pro-PIPA group" (and these classifications by the open-gov groups aren't a hard science either, of course)...so how is it that pro-PIPA groups have a lower amount than big media?
"The government could immediately shut down all Mustangs on the road"
New crowdfunding site iPledg aims to woo start-ups
"We have been spending our money innovating instead of lobbying." I'm happy you got this in there. Even though it's mildly elitist it's very true.
Am I the only one that was upset at her seeming to dismiss you as a "hoodie wearing geek" at the end there?
Yeah so instead of having a controller and a view, you have a controller and a separate formatter class which looks like this:

module ViewHelpers
def gravatar
gravatar_id = Digest::MD5.hexdigest(self[:email].to_s.strip.downcase)
gravatar_for_id(gravatar_id)
end

def gravatar_for_id(gid, size = 30)
"#{gravatar_host}/avatar/#{gid}?s=#{size}"
end

def gravatar_host
@ssl ? 'https://secure.gravatar.com' : 'http://www.gravatar.com'
end
end

I argue this will get extremely tiresome for large websites.
I agree, make it simple and something the layman could understand. I'd adjust the analogy to "If someone shoplifts a DVD from Best Buy, this bill allows the government to shut down the store."
if its for web dev, make them do something that has a web UI, give specific contraints and then write an automated integration test for it (such as using selenium), run this on the incoming submissions, only review the ones that pass, this is just a quick idea... there are ways to automate this....
Have you noticed any significant battery drain? I'm not using either because of my already short battery life.
Well, actually iTunes is not such a great example for the music industry because iTunes got them by their balls with Apple having significant leverage when it comes to negotiating with music labels. Not only that, but the music industry lost significant control over what hits to promote - because the iTunes chart is now an important validator of hits.

But the music industry is to be blamed for this - for a long time all the music you could buy from iTunes was DRM-enabled. This worked in Apple's favor, contributing to the popularity of iTunes, because once hooked, the millions of iPod customers couldn't switch to something else easily without losing the music they've bought.

So who pushed DRM on (honest) customers, punishing them for not pirating? They made their own bed, now they are bitching about it.
I'm not sure if you're trolling or not, but it sounds like terrible advice.

Yes, most of coding knowledge comes from real world experience. But a university is essential in building the foundation. Those theory and math topics do matter. CS isn't just about gluing PHP code together.

Also, most non-startup jobs out there do tend to require a bachelors' degree.
Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Having lived through a company with long sales cycles (3-6 months +), they needed to pay sales people for the first 6 months, driving them down to full commission/zero pay after a year. So the experimentation was needed whether they were being hired on salary, or moving toward commission.

This is probably completely different for lower ticket items that have shorter sales cycles (like bug tracking software). But it also speaks to the risk they took, given that they weren't wasting money experimenting on the sales staff. (their effectiveness was quickly apparent).
It sounds like you are asking for Facebook?
That could be explained with ruby doing escaping of null characters automatically in the background, although I don't believe that to be the case.
Well, it's faster than Eclipse by many orders of magnitude, so I hope that makes it a bit better :P Vi is instant, Eclipse far from it, as you well know.
Tripful Launches Q&A for Travel
Predictions 2012: #1 – On Twitter and Media
Most of the puzzle questions are straight out of a CS education. Actually it mostly concentrates on about 3 classes worth of CS, your algorithms course, your operating systems/multi-threading course, your networking class and maybe your discrete math course. Of those the most important is your algorithms course. Those happen be the harder classes too and are the core of a CS education. Unless it reveals a deficiency that you had in your CS education or some skill set they are hiring for (and even then), it's okay to say: I've never encountered that before and then try to work through it.
Sure, but they can't do what Vim can. Only Eclipse can, for example, check my code for errors as I type, as far as I know.
There are other problems with remote workers. You can't have a face-to-face conversation. A remote worker can't go into a coworkers office and help track down a tricky bug. These issues can be alleviated to some extent by email, phones, and video-conferencing, but those things require a fair amount of work to set up and still aren't the same as having the person in the office.
+1. I swear email has been "Going to die" for at least as long as it has been The Year of Linux on the Desktop.
He said that it's nice that it's ubiquitous, not that being ubiquitous makes vi itself nice.
SOPA may have zero support on HN (it's not a well-written law) but the MPAA and RIAA have more support than you might assume.
Thinking big in space
Useful for when you want to learn about the places you will travel !
I was intrigued to learn that Tony Kaye went virtually mad during the production and writing of American History X, arguably one of the top ten movies of the last 100 years, and was so dissatisfied with the end result that he attempted to disown the film entirely, even going so far as to try to use a pseudonym (the undying `Alan Smithee' and, later, 'Humpty Dumpty') just to keep from being tied to the movie.
And vi is not on that list. I'm lost...
Need some help on Codecademy.com
Hello there, i'm on codecadyme at the JavaScript Quick Guide, but i'm stuck in this one:

http://www.codecademy.com/courses/javascript-intro/3#!/exercises/7

this is what i have to do:

// Example switch statement. typeof returns the type
// of the value as a string. For example, the type of
// a string is 'string', the type of a number is
// 'number', and the type of an object is 'object'.
switch (typeof 'foo') {
case 'string':
// some code

// If you don't return in the block, you should
// always have a break afterwards.
break;
default:
//block

}

// Write a function that uses switch statements on the
// type of value. If it is a string, return 'str'. If it
// is a number, return 'num'. If it is an object, return
// 'obj'. If it is anything else, return 'other'.

and this is what i did :
function detectType(value) {

switch (typeof value) {
case 'string':
return 'str' ;
}

switch (typeof value) {
case 'number':
return 'num';
}

switch (typeof value) {
case 'objet':
return 'obj';
}
default: return "other";
}
return value;

}

</>
I'm a noob, so i don't know whats missing or wrong, would you kind people please help me? thank you.
Show HN: The Laughing Man logo from Ghost in The Shell built with HTML & CSS
One more suggestion.

Both Damon Horowitz's talks are great:

http://www.ted.com/speakers/damon_horowitz.html

Specially the "moral operating system". Everyone doing something with data should listen to that.
Easier to remember is the bisection method: essentially, a binary search for where the graph crosses the x-axis. It's what I would have pulled out if I got asked the square root problem in an interview:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisection_method
'Hole in space-time' created by scientists
I actually think the excel example demonstrates that we are unlikely to see that many more programmers in the future. As much as people use excel in their offices there is still the idea of the 'excel wizard' who really understands the functions and features of excel. It's actually quite surprising how many people I've encountered who use excel pretty frequently and still don't know many of it's basic features. The fact that there is the idea of 'excel wizard' means that for most people even the programmatic aspect of excel is elusive and uninviting.
> Another way to illustrate this is to note that the cost part of the equation is the same regardless of what happened to coffee prices in the last year: assuming they hedged, they'd probably raise prices by the same amount had coffee been up or flat for the year, too.

Depends on what their competition is (and would have been) doing.
He is also an amazing professor / educator. His class at Carnegie Mellon (15-251: Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science) is one of the hardest yet most entertaining CS courses at CMU. One of the first assignments involves a scavenger hunt with a randomly assigned team, across campus, based on challenging algorithmic puzzles inspired from many different areas of computer science.

In one semester, he found people who were copying on their homeworks by creating a website with solutions to a problem on an early assignment. Many people fell into the trap, even after he had given a very clear disclaimer to not use search engines to solve homework problems.
I prefer having my local vi open the file through FTP. If you didn't know it could do that:

http://www.marksanborn.net/software/modify-remote-files-with...
You can now do

HashMap<String,ArrayList<String>> map = new HashMap<>();

in Java 7 http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/generics/gentype...
Interesting fact: that's still a phrase very much in-use in certain parts of the world (South America and the Middle East come to mind) in everyday layman talk.
I believe you greatly misunderstood what I was getting at. I only said "hugs" because I'm tired of people assuming it's all and always about money whenever anybody says anything short of stern opposition to copyright, because that leads to infectiously stupid comments about the government poking people in the eyes, etc.

It's not about the hugs, or money or compensation of any kind. If it were about compensation, then under your scheme[1], I would be better off screening films that other people made. (Profiting from other people's work you seem to have no issue with.) But that's not what I want. I want to be able to share things I created, where I want to share it, with the people I want to share it with.

Again, it's not about the hugs. It's about your claim of public ownership extending into my private life because I didn't adequately secure my creative work against that kind of intrusion. It's about having to treat my work like a secret if I don't want someone else's hand in it or name on it.

[1] To be explicit: I presume a world in which you're allowed to own a theater you did not create yourself but where the public owns a film you did create yourself.
Why not go full Turk? Have a Turker suggest a new rule/modification. It will be paid for only if accepted by another, who must play N recorded moves of the game with a friend before passing judgment. Iterate.

Disclaimer: I've never used MT. Is this possible?
These systems run "bundle install" on the server anyway - simply make it a full-blown gem and patch it into the Gemfile.
All these amounts include links to sources.

"Big media" goes to a page where it explains that it's a career total (from opensecrets.org). I initially just added this, but then the Paul Ryan issue came up and the Atlantic Monthly article criticized the lack of data around this issue.

So I put in data from maplight.org - just funds raised specific to this issue.
Well, no, slowness was the problem they were trying to solve. It wasn't incidental.
A switch statement handles multiple cases. You have a switch statement per case. Also, you misspelled "object".

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Statem...
There are alternatives. e.g. a public final Property<String> Name = new Property<String>();

Where Property defines a .get() and a .set();

However, getters and setters are generally a code smell. It's better to be telling objects to do things rather than ask them for information. Modern Serialization & Injection frameworks no longer require getters/setters.
Maybe it was colored by my expectations going in. With no prior experience, I'd assumed that sales was an arcane art. A combination of charisma and manipulation. Working in a sales role, I felt out of my element for months. Until I learned that sales is a building process just like anything else.

Create a system where you maximize the number of people weighted by their need of what you sell. Presented at a timely moment. The client should see you as a domain expert, and someone who makes the process frictionless. Pricing is a surprisingly small part of it. If you can build a good process, you'll sell 10x what the car salesman types will.

Unconventional approaches to sales are the most successful, so a hacker mindset pays off. Once I got over my initial fears, it was quite easy to get the high score :)
In case you were wondering why, it is most likely* because `#join` is appending to a single string, whereas the `#reduce` call is creating intermediate strings for each step of the fold.

* I'd have to check the implementation of `#join` to be sure.
It's pretty common to leave out the う in informal speech.
> If they'd bet on flat prices (no lock-in) [...]

You can buy contracts to bet specifically on flat prices. And of course you can also bet on moving prices, without committing on up or down. No bet isn't an implicit bet on flat prices.
My first solo project is called iKeepm. It's a service that allows you to track your personal assets for insurance purposes.

http://www.ikeepm.com
That's what happens when a company introduces its first successful product, but it isn't the steady state for a sales team, which will bring new account managers on for a long time after the product they're selling proves itself out.

An account manager hired into a 2-year-old sales team that has been making its quarterly numbers isn't going to be eased into commission comp.
I know that schools are essential in building foundation, I should have specified in the original post that instead of university I would recommend a college that would give him that foundation but allow for him to work on his own or open source projects.

Rather than spending hours each day doing math proofs, he could have the chance to explore different areas in programming while learning figuring out what he enjoys (for example game programming vs web development)
> a lot of people at that time were probably still reading mbox files in pine through a telnet session

I'm still reading (some of) my mail in pine through a ssh session.
Upvotes for any headline with alliteration.
Esoteric algorithms would be much more useful questions, IMO, if the interviewer gave you a birds-eye overview of an algorithm you cannot possibly have heard of and then have you implement it. That actually tests your chops rather than your memory.

For example, everybody knows merge sort, but assuming they didn't, draw out a couple iterations in a graph and ask them to code it.
> He isn't exactly sure what kind of programming he wants to do yet.

I would advise both him and my younger self to take a year out and think about what they're actually interested in doing, guided by hacking together some simple experiments. I think going in to further education to bolster something pre-existing* is better than going in as a blank slate and hoping to latch on to something while you're in there. You can still change the concrete thing you're interested in, but it should always be something and not nothing.

* browsing the web and playing video games don't count as professions or crafts.
Depends on the nature of the counter part. Could be Goldman Sax, could be some coffee producer, could be a fund that's run for the benefit of little old widows but with no other connection to coffee.
Need startup ideas? US non-lethal weapon 'wish list' revealed on the net
Ask HN: Is iAds publishing right for me?
Hi guys,

I'm just about ready to launch my iPad app, its basically a drag and drop thing for kids to play around with.

This is my first app so the intention was just to get around to learning development and getting on the app market. So I'll probably release the app for free and just see how it does.

However, I was wondering if it would be worthwhile to add advertising to it. Is the return on iAds/other advertising agents good? Considering its an app for kids, is sticking banner ads on a bad idea?

Thanks
Does your company have direct sales reps at all?

A direct sales rep has a one-on-one relationship with individual named customers and works with a marketing team to target prospects directly, and spends perhaps weeks of time (over the course of a sales cycle) with each customer.
Actually not that good, when you realize that they are/were right about that in both eras.

Not much has appeared since 1945 that really is comparable to the "golden age of literature" (that would be around 18xx-1940, I guess) --just a few exceptions to prove the rule, and tons of crap.

1984 itself, is a minor work, literary wise.