skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More on Grace Hopper..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
in my days it was called embrace extend extinguish.
Japanese TV show and comic book about a school boy who writes names into a notebook given to him by an angel of death. Writing names in a notebook kills them.

I'm not sure why it's on hacker news-- so I called them tv shows and comic books to offend the otaku.
I wonder why they added so much crap to it lately then :P
A few of these points seem really petty, a monospace font in the editor? Deal with it.

I don't use Wordpress. I am on Facebook, do I think they care how their site should work? Why should they care what my opinion is? Because i am a user, I get to complain and get my way?

This attitude that users dictate how products and sites should function only brings to mind the Henry Ford quote in the Steve Jobs book. If Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.

Apple has made a very successful business out of not building faster horses. If you want it your way, start your own business.
Related - my friends were discussing the difference between professional bowlers and the really good amateur bowlers. One of theme bowled averaging 160s/170s. An amateur bowler can bowl in the 200s on their home lane but a professional bowler can bowl on the road, in any condition - any oiling pattern. Yes, they have many bowling balls (for the conditions) but the professionals can perform in any situation.

And, that is kind of the difference, between the rash of amateur coders and professional coders. Amateur coders (it is great that some of them have never code before) get a thrill from just writing something (the proverbial Hello, World or more) while professional coders can code in the context of a larger system and integrate that code. To code when the conditions aren't so great (e.g. deadlines, pressure, existing architecture).
I don't mean to hijack the thread, but being a big fan of Starbucks who would like to be a moral/ethical person, can you explain why you are not a customer of Starbucks or provide a link or two? Would be much appreciated thanks.
Pretty sure they already do:

http://www.rense.com/general7/whyy.htm

Also, I have no real way to confirm, but I've heard (via friend of a friend: suspicion +10) quite a big part of a high-value flavour science is not just now it tastes, but that it is hard to reproduce faithfully, by means of unnecessary extra additives, novel process control requirements, and unusual synergistic effects.
I've been through a couple of Google interviews. My last one, I didn't even apply for, they contacted me a couple of months ago, asking if I wanted to interview. Why the heck not. I guess my previous interview was good enough such that they didn't require a phone interview, so I skipped that. Although it's perfectly reasonable to think that they were just trying to hurry the process up for everyone so that's why they had me skip the phone interview, and there was nothing particularly special about me.

I had 5 interviews, and I didn't end up getting the job. I didn't do that great, and I knew it. I spent 2 weeks preparing and covered what I thought were my weak points, and still of the 5 interviews, 1 I nailed, 2 I did pretty good, and 2 I did just okay on, but not horrible.

I can understand why this got me rejected, though. I'm not whining that it's not fair, because obviously they have a particular type of person they want to hire, and I didn't fulfill the qualifications. I think I'm pretty smart with pretty good experience, but nothing entitles me to a job anywhere, especially at Google. The questions were extremely hard, but fair, because as I said, I guess they're trying to hire candidates who can answer them.

The thing I didn't like, however, was how some of the interviews were conducted. One in particular was a guy who asked me a fairly hard question, something that I hadn't seen before, and I was stumped for a bit, so I wanted a couple of minutes to think it through in my head. As I was trying to answer it on the whiteboard, he kept interrupting me, and kept steering me to HIS solution, not my solution. So because it wasn't my solution, I kept on trying to guess at what he was trying to say, and because of that I didn't have the benefit of having thought through it completely. This meant that I had a couple of bugs in my solution, because I spent most of the time trying to figure out where he was steering me to, and I didn't get the benefit of having thought through the process in my own way, where I probably would have caught the bugs.

It was also obvious from his tone that he was annoyed at having to provide me with the answer that he wanted to hear me say. This left a rather bitter taste in my mouth.

I would rather have finished the interview with a completely blank whiteboard because I was totally stumped, rather than play mind-reader and trying to guess at what the interview was pushing me towards. At least a blank whiteboard would have been a more accurate portrayal of my answer, instead of some half-baked solution because the interviewer kept pushing me towards a solution that I didn't get enough time to think through.
In that case, hiring a recently-wed or someone with a baby is also worse than hiring a 60-70 year old?

Also, how about energy? Do 60-year olds really have the same energy to keep up with new stuff as a young boy does?
Someone will build the first quantum computer. I highly suspect that that person will also have to have a strong knowledge of quantum physics. Either way, it seems like a promising career field unless the theory for a quantum computer suddenly becomes impossible (which doesn't seem to be the case).
yes this is exactly right, its POST for compatibility reasons, rails puts a special parameter in the form submit to map to PUT (for resourceful routes)
Doubt it would work out that way most of the time. You wouldn't have the same experience/knowledge/insight.

The same people could probably re-do a company smarter though. Foursquare is Dodgeball 2.0. Twitter is sort of Blogger evolved.
The Bowling Game Kata explored
Not the good kind of innovation. Some nerds won an argument about HTTP semantics. Rails used to understand the importance of convention. This just seems silly and meaningless, change just for change.
Spacebar doesn't work in chrome/win7... unless I'm in incognito mode. I'm not sure why.
I would love it if Google spent some time re-interviewing a bunch of their current employees, to see how good their interview process is compared to random chance.

I know their best employees would likely pass the interview with flying colors, but my hunch is that there would be a large percentage of their employees that would fail. If they did a thorough analysis, my hunch is that their hiring process is likely determined by who their interviewers are, rather than who the candidate is.

I'm not bitter because I was rejected twice, but I do believe that their hiring process is a lot more random than what they believe it to be.
My god man. Please just fucking go back to reddit. Stop polluting this place with your intellectual hipsterism bullshit.
And the app can pop up on the Amazon market or other markets, not to mention that you can download and install .apk files directly to your Android.
A big problem with this kind of topic is that, as you say, people have strong, irrational responses. In other words, it is toxic. It brings out awfully unpleasant people and brings out the worst in otherwise decent people. This is why we are especially unwilling to indulge this particular diversion from topic. It is harmful to HN. I don't fault you for your interest in discussing it, but feel very strongly that it should be elsewhere.
It may not actually be bias but fear, that this may get flamey if discussed in the HN-wrong context(israel v palestine).

Coincident: A leading human rights figure got a lot of flak for writing a newspaper article saying that our (kenya's) next president will not be from the same ethnicity as the current. Not a wrong fact just a speculative opinion but because people are touchy when it comes to talking(in public only) about ethnicity since the last bloody elections, people were calling that an incitement and (this is now a media buzzword) 'hate speech'. Question is: can we hn-ly discuss a related topic without getting into the touchy and flamey parts? Far shot but if someone noticed something hn-worthy(like a data pattern or a behaviour pattern) in something as off-HN as say lolcats, will it be impossible to talk about it?
We have justification and apologies for violence right here! This is part of the problem, because similar arguments from the other side will probably be grounds for well, you know what.
I started watching this show a while back, at the beginning it was really interesting and I got really invested in the entreprenaurs fate, but the more episodes you watch, the line between real business and reality show kept on becoming more blury, until eventually you couldn't see any business but a murkey form of reality tv show.
Amusements In Mathematics
Scurvy might be devastating, but it's ridiculously easy to prevent. Especially nowadays.
Sounds like me in a way... I love to talk to someone interesting one on one, but I don't tend to interact as much as a group.

I do have a theory that a lot of the people who engage you in smalltalk also have similar dislike for the practice, but they've been assured again and again that this is something they must do.
Facebook loses massive lobbying support
It is incorrect to classify the attack as an attack on civilians when in fact it was an attack on the headquarters of the British military.

Do not put words in my mouth.
I really wouldnt get offended by Kevin or anyone elses comment. Business is called business until we sleep in one bed together. Otherwise we dont have to like each other. Sure its great when you love your business partners but I dont find it that big of a deal, especially when it came from Kevin's mouth (as with any other show they put totally character-contrast cast to make things spicy - Kevin vs Barbara, i.e.)

You have to learn about him to understand what kind of deals he is performing. He is amazing on selling anything to everyone even if its ice to Eskimo. In his example he had some huge, hm poisoned water delivered here and there :) [1] But I give him credit for fucking up software deal to Matel and having huge balls to being proud of it and shoving it in everyones face (at least on the show: his favorite quote was something like "millions of dollars? thats a rounding error, a statistical noise in deals i have been doing!"). Don't get me wrong: the guy is a genius at making money and just proves that you will get dirty by making plenty of money. I would like to live his live, sure, but definitely wouldn't like to die as Kevin, given you believe in things like God, Heaven and Hell.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_OLeary_(entrepreneur)#Con...
"Why would we expect patching vitamin C to be hard or come with consequences?"

Because most such things are hard, and come with consequences?

Hell, even erectile dysfunction drugs have consequences ("if erection lasts more than four hours, seek medical treatment"), and we found those by accident.
As an interviewer, to indicate things are going well, you can smile, nod, give happy words of encouragement, get excited, etc.

When things are going poorly, you can frown, say "not quite", give sour words of encouragement, linger on the same unsolved problem, etc.

While HR / Legal usually have policies prohibiting direct feedback ("You're a 5 of 10 and we have 30 candidates who are all better than you. Also you went to Yale and that's lame."), there are many ways to provide feedback to the interview candidate without opening the company up to legal trouble. There are no laws against being human during an interview.
I think outlining the fallacy of applying moralistic thinking ("well people just SHOULDN'T DO THAT") to systems design was the more interesting part of his post, though.
He's not ignorant or lying - you just need to look at Irgun's activities in the '30s and '40s to know that. Those guys were bombing a bus practically every day at some points (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irgun_attacks_during_th...), which makes the hand-wringing from Israel doubly pointless.

Perhaps the problem is that the Palestinians are slacking? They should blow up more things, not less...
SchnitzelPress, a blog engine for hackers and fools
Starbucks's founder/CEO sends money to Israel.
I don't want my coffee money to subsidize him doing that.

http://www.bintjbeil.com/articles/en/020614_fisk_starbucks.h...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Schultz
Ultimately, I ended up solving the problem categorically by not having roommates. The other solution is to dump the dirty dishes in his bed.
Next time someone asks 'What do you do?' (and it is obvious they are just going through the motions)

As an experiment, I recommend you try this: 'Do you really want to talk about that? Let's talk about something we both find interesting'
Rails never used PUT correctly to begin with. Everybody uses update_attributes which does partial updates.

Ideally you wouldn't need to do partial updates and just send the entire resource; your resources shouldn't be so big that that's an issue. It's much simpler than making the front-end decide when to do full versus partial updates and which method to use.

Rails can't really do that though, too much legacy code out there, too many people set in their ways. Resorting to PATCH is their only option if they want to use HTTP correctly.
I don't get it - do I keep taking these 1000mg Vitamin C supplements or not?
I'm not going to defend Irgun because it's indefensible. It is simply a matter of fact that the attack was on the headquarters of the British military.

Edit: Your subsequent edits are quite sick and disturbing. You should consider reverting your text to the original comment.
Looks like it was just a mistake to launch. We have to wait until Monday for the real launch. Why do we see so many developers accidentally launching apps early for iOS?
The benefit of a tangle of dependences or lack of separation of concerns is that you need less energy to drive the organism. Analogously, the benefit of having thing look like a nail when all you've got is a hammer is that you only "need" the hammer.

I'm approaching the tautological thought that organisms are by definition perfect for their ecological niche because if they weren't, they would be something else (given enough stability and time in that niche)

Random fun trivia: dogs do synthesize vitamin C.
Culture fit is judged by the candidates personality. Some of the signs of bad culture fit are arrogance, lack of curiosity, or a combative attitude. These kinds of traits usually becomes apparent during general conversation in the interview.

(I am an ex-Googler)
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This is my first response, so I'll try and make it information>noise.

This is a typically non-biological / ecological dunce post for Ycomb, n/and an ignorant post that I see commonly espoused by the bottom layers of the 2.0 / transitional ideological parties.

The lack of a genetic ability to produce Vitamin C is neither a bug nor an issue for the mammals that do not possess it. In all cases, either the mammal in question gains from the lack [i.e. the lack has driven forward other behaviours that have proved more beneficial whilst searching out sources of Vit C, e.g. dextral abilities to harvest fruit from trees in the case of some early primates] or is neutrally aligned to it [i.e. Vit C is already a mainstay of their diet, so there is never a lack of it, e.g. fruitivores].

The proof? They. Fucking. Survived. For. Millions / 100' Thousand Years.

This is only a "bug" when you add in a modern [last 3000 years] lifestyle where fruit / veg is a "limited resource".

>> The "bug" is not the inability to produce Vit C, the real bug is living in a system that doesn't allow easy access to Vit C. Living on a ship off worm-riddled meat for a year? That's an environmental problem. Same goes for inner city "food deserts" where Walmart has stomped on any and all local garden produce.

Category error. Sheesh, I'd have hoped you people were more intelligent than this.

[and for the record: producing Vit C chemically is a hella lot easier than genotyping in a fix, you fucking moron]
This is a beautiful dashboard very excited to start using this!
Written in Ruby, so guaranteed to spiral outward into madness if you read the code. Also, pretty sweet looking stuff. Trying soon!
> For evolution, the person who died at the age of 29, with six children, and the person who lived for two hundred years and won six dozen Nobel prizes, but never had children, it considers the latter person to have failed.

That's not necessarily true. Since our genetic programming can also dictate social behaviors, the fundamental genetic unit isn't always the individual: there are a lot of organisms where they've evolved to have a large percentage of the population not reproduce, yet are absolutely vital to the species. For example, worker bees aren't a "failure". Whether or to what extent such things influence human evolution is hard to speculate on.

I don't get the point that the author is trying to make about gut flora either, but it also seems misguided. Humans have evolved in symbiosis with our gut flora. Why would we want to eliminate them? There seems to be a built in assumption that having foreign cells in our body must be inherently bad, but that has no basis in science. If a foreign, symbiotic organism can perform a task efficiently inside of the human body, what is the advantage of having it instead done by that person's cells?
No, I don't think it's unusual. I've watched a former colleague (now the state superintendent of schools) successfully identify not only pepsi from coke, but coke, diet coke (which he drinks regularly), and caffine-free diet coke from each other in a blind test.
> why put focused effort into patching something as easily remediated as the inability to synthesize Vitamin C, given the opportunity for unforeseen side effects?

I think you're missing the point: Why should there be a huge opportunity for unforeseen side effects?

If you were grading an undergraduate programming project with the property that fixing an obvious bug makes who-knows-what else break, what grade would you assign?

Further, what does that observation do to the idea that "Natural is better than human-made"?

> I think he just doesn't want to eat his applesauce like a good wittle man.

This comes off as really, really condescending. How does it add to the discussion?
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IEM vs OEM?
It's not that strange if you take into account the law of accelerated returns, that suggests that change itself happens at an ever faster pace. PC's used to be changed at 3-5 years, laptops at 2-3 years, and now smartphones and tablets at 1-2 years.
What i love most about this is how very simple concepts can sum to produce very complex systems.
PlayBook apps and what they are written in
Benny Morris's book Righteous Victims seems to be a reliable source of information about the conflict. He's a an Israeli history professor, not exactly a virulent antisemite. It's worth noting that he describes the trigger for unrest leading up to the 1929 massacre as the growing understanding among Arabs that "...the disproportionate growth of the [Jewish community in Palestine], nurtured and sustained by [British colonial] measures, promised to turn them into a minority in their own land."[1]

Anyway, bringing up the 1929 massacre in this context seems like a non sequitur. You might as well justify the second Arab-Israeli war in terms of the massacre innocent Palestinians by Israeli militants at Deir Yassin[2], a considerably more cold-blooded, treacherous, strategically terrifying, blatant war crime that played a critical role in driving Palestinians off their own lands. (But I'm not making this justification.)

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=M7tr9_rCwD0C&lpg=PP1...

[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=M7tr9_rCwD0C&lpg=PP1...
IPad 3 shipments already en route to U.S.
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> there are a lot of organisms where they've evolved to have a large percentage of the population not reproduce, yet are absolutely vital to the species

It sounds like post-hoc rationalizing to apply this logic to humans.

> Humans have evolved in symbiosis with our gut flora. Why would we want to eliminate them?

It complicates the system to have to maintain a balanced internal ecology; look at the probiotic yogurts out there to see how often it gets out of whack in the real world.
The attack was on a hotel - that's also a matter of fact, and similarly indefensible.

And I edited about 30 seconds to a minute after my initial post, to make my points clearer. I don't think that's unreasonable, much less "sick or disturbing".
Ok, look back at the wiki.

Do you know <i>why</i> you can't internally produce Vit C?
> In effect, attributing the worst case scenario to the general case.

I don't think that's a fair statement. If you watch "R-rated" depictions of brutal violence, the probability that you will be adversely psychologically (or socially) affected by those depictions is pretty close to zero. This is not because you have committed acts of brutal violence yourself, but rather because you are capable of dealing with such things in a mature and rational way. Similarly, the argument here is not that high-schoolers will be unaffected by this film because they have practised the behaviour depicted therein, but because they have dealt with it and understand the implications of such behaviour.

Language is a particularly important case because people outside the school system (and even some inside it) tend to believe that children are unspoilt bundles of verbal innocence, whereas in reality the sort of language practised on a day-to-day basis by your average 13-year-old is probably considerably more offensive than the language used in this film. It's ironic that a film like this one should be crushed by the very veil of ignorance which it attempts to lift - social norms change, and the MPAA can't expect to be able to stick its head in the sand and assume that a ratings system based on a fairly static set of "family values" will be relevant forever.
> I'm approaching the tautological thought that organisms are by definition perfect for their ecological niche because if they weren't, they would be something else

Meditate on what a simple hill-climbing algorithm does when it finds a tiny foothill right below a major peak.

> Random fun trivia: dogs do synthesize vitamin C.

From Wikipedia:

"It is made internally by almost all organisms although notable mammalian group exceptions are most or all of the order chiroptera (bats), guinea pigs, capybaras, and one of the two major primate suborders, the Anthropoidea (Haplorrhini) (tarsiers, monkeys and apes, including human beings)."

That's one reason guinea pigs are used as, well, guinea pigs.
That's not true at all. Very few candidates are being considered for positions known in advance.

Applicants' real competition is not other applicants, but other Google employees. As Peter Norvig detailed[0], the bar is set by the Google employees: as interviewers, we should reject any candidate who isn't clearly better than the average googler. And, in my experience, that's a pretty high bar.

[0] http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobeg... "First we decide which candidates are above the hiring threshold, and then we decide what projects they can best contribute to."