skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You might have a "potential capability" to do something, yet you could miss some key aspect to actually do it.

For example there are a lot of people you have a big creative potential, yet they are too lazy or lack of patience to actually do stuff for real.

What does that mean? Are those humans "capable" of achieving these feats? Or the fact that they didn't actually do anything proves that they aren't?

Cognitive science doesn't seek to judge the value of individuals, that's already our day job as social humans; we all do that constantly every day, that's what we ever did, since the dawn of time, judge other human fellows to praise the worth, and dispraise the villains; and of course we cannot refrain from extending this attitude towards others, other communities, tribes, races; let alone another species.

A scientific quest to discover the origin of our cognitive abilities has to seek for similarities and not entrenching ourselves in our superiority in achievement.

Of course, sometimes this might sound as if the claims are exaggerated, but you should always read the conclusions in the right context. It reminds me of somebody who told me "you know, Mayans were extremely advanced in astronomy", I asked back whether they had developed an heliocentric view of planetary motions, and he andwered "I told you, they were incredibly advanced!"; but this doesn't mean that they had a heliocentric view; advanced w.r.t what? I don't actually know, but I would be surprised if Maya had developed a heliocentric view.

Being "advanced" in prediction of sun and star position doesn't mean more than what it means, yet people tend to use some assertions out of context to state things like "study demonstrates that apes are just like us" etc

PS: w.r.t to apes and teaching http://www.livescience.com/7064-case-closed-apes-culture.htm..., and you can find a lot of data about how apes transmit behavior (in some occasions also tool use etc)
I'm fond of native languages too and would like to believe that they're making a comeback but I really just don't see much evidence for this so far.

I've dabbled in OCaml and Haskell but my current favorite is Go. I'm still looking for a good excuse to use it.
Big O notation for the rest of us(ruby)
TomEE is great news for serverside Java developers. Lightweight Enterprise Java, finally!
Most of us are in the position that we can actually chose for whom we want to work. We dont have to beg someone.
Doyne Farmer on the Physics of Beating Roulette
I've always claimed that C++ exceptions are just awful. C++ gives exceptions a really bad name, and many never move onto, or back to another language that does it well. I've had excellent experience with exception handling in Python and Haskell. In particular in Python, exceptions contain fully debuggable stack and traceback information, and a complete set of statements to work with exceptions properly. try/else/except/finally. The exception hierarchy is also much better defined. C++ lacks a finally clause, and other niceties, and forces its half baked OO model onto you if you want to use exceptions "properly".

That said, exceptions are one of those language features that just begs to be misused. I agree with Martin in that the fact that C lacks many of these dangerous constructs is one of its greatest appeals. He, I, and many others would prefer they just weren't available because they are inevitably deployed by some colleague or other.

The (poor) use of C++ shows in zeromq, I've always found it highly volatile, and its interoperability suffers. Cryptic error messages the result of unhandled exceptions abound in my testing of it.
I think you're comparing to fundamentally different companies, so your conclusion is invalid. Facebook's higher valuation is based on the fact that it's traffic is much more engaged then Google. That's valuable to marketers and business who will pay for targetted and engaged users.
Leveson - Death By A Thousand (Paper) Cuts
Finally Turned Our Box Product Into SaaS (Beta). What Do You Think?
What I would like to see is a (convincing) list of why use C++ (in new projects) at all.

In my opinion (and experience) when you need the performance advantages of C++, you are usually within the domain where C is good enough (and perhaps a better choice for its simplicity). When you need the features of C++, you are probably better off with something like Python (not specifically, but in the same "league").

Seeing how easy it is to use a higher-level language combined with C for critical sections, I just don't see the point of C++ anymore.

Disclaimer: I don't really like C++. The only pleasant experience I had with it involved ignoring the STL completely and using Qt (http://qt.nokia.com/). I like C though.
I'd go as far as saying that this question makes your interviewing process to be more "cheat-friendly" - the chances of an interviewee not knowing of the problem and solving it on the spot are a lot lower than those of him having heard of it and pretending to solve it on the spot.

The first time I heard of it I was surprised about how counter-intuitive it seemed, but it didn't baffle me completely because I have a strong information theory background. From an information-theoretical point of view, it's not completely counter-intuitive that new information can change probabilities a posteriori, particularly when there is mutual interdependence.
Reading through that page, there's a lot of discussion that it may just be some sort of bug.
How I manage my todos, priorities and calendar
Your comments in this thread are informative and polite, I have no idea why someone downvoted all your comments...
Zoos are a barbaric tradition from darker ages, it's very surprising to me that there aren't more outraged people that we keep animals against their will in confined spaces just so that we have something to gawk at during weekends. I understand efforts to preserve animals threatened by extinction, but this is not the case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo#Surplus_animals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo#Condition_of_the_animals
Developer's need to stop thinking "If I build it they will come".

Even the "dream" companies like Dropbox mentioned here had someone on that team who knew how to sell even if they were working as a developer.

Selling doesn't always mean knocking on doors sometimes it means figuring out how to make the first couple of deals with investors or working with a smart person who can help you develop a viral referral model etc.

Thought experiment: Today think about all the physical items in your life and how they came to be in your life. Beside the people most of those items were sold to you by someone or you bought them because you saw marketing about them. Very few of them did you buy because you woke up one day and said "I have to fly to LAX and buy a Widget".. You had to know that Widget was there and realize you wanted it before you could take the first action.
Very cool. One issue I saw was that the shadows actually show on top of other objects.
Ah, you must be me!!

I used to take this a step further. The split second one of the silly questions popped up, I'd stand up and very politely end the interview. Reactions were priceless. Interestingly, I'd often get invited back, or on a couple of occasion offered the job after a follow up phone call, where I give the sort of responses you have given.

The problem I have is that these types of question suggest to me that the company doesn't really know what it wants to hire, and there for is not one I would want to work for.

The problem most people have is that they really need the job and feel compelled to play along, which I can only assume these interviewers take as positive feed back.
Libskypekit and Skypekit – C and Ruby interface for Skype
Reminds me of the joke that goes:

What is the difference between a salesperson and an engineer?
An engineer knows when they are lying.
Thanks for sharing.

Seems like Asana is getting a lot of love lately. Is it that great? I mainly use Workflowy & Trello but I'm always shopping for a better tool :)
More an ability to be exceptionally stupid when drunk.
As an answer to your question regarding an icon for search. How about an eyeball? Searching is very much a visual process. Both binoculars and magnifying glass requires eyes to be useful in practice. Combining an eyeball with other icons doesn't feel impossible.
One other valid problem I've heard raised about git-based
deploys is that you can end up with cruft in your working
copy that sticks around like .pyc files where the
original .py file is deleted and there is the chance that
this file could still be imported even though the
original .py was deleted.

I'm shocked. If a py file is modified, the pyc is rebuilt. So we know it's poking at the original source file. Why not fail to import if the original source is missing?

Maybe this behavior is meant to support binary-only distribution of Python applications, but there really should be an option to override this behavior.

Edit: Did a bit more research and found this:

(1) http://docs.python.org/release/1.5.1p1/tut/node43.html

It is possible to have a file called "spam.pyc" without
a module "spam.py" in the same module. This can be used
to distribute a library of Python code in a form that is
moderately hard to reverse engineer.

Makes sense.

(2) http://docs.python.org/using/cmdline.html#cmdoption-B

If given, Python won’t try to write .pyc or .pyo files
on the import of source modules.

So you can mitigate that behavior by removing existing pyc files and using "-B".
I played the demo and the dialog at the end really rubbed the wrong way. It felt like you were making a big joke about raising $100,000 and that the demo was just a ploy to get another $100,000.

You should consider the effect you're having on all the people who've trusted you and given you the first $100,000. The dialog at the end makes a mockery of their belief in you.
Web Development
Today, web development procedures when applied in a methodical system with the help of laid down methods allows higher efficiency, performance & good results.

Perfect Analysis:
This is clearly the first and most important part in the whole program of developing your own web page. When you begin talking about your needs and objectives with a web development company, the very first factor they will do is perform an initial research of your need. In your day-to-day business, When your web page is going to perform the key part, it is essential for your companies to gain quality on your field, the requirements of your potential viewers and role your web page is going to perform for your company .
I found Trello too complex and WorkFlowy under-supported. Asana is just the right mix. It's powerful and flexible but it gets out of your way.
> "how many golf balls can you get in a double decker bus"...
> 1) i don't have enough information and 2) its not relevant to this position.

Whilst I agree somewhat with the sentiment, I don't think that's at all an unreasonable question.

1. You do very clearly have enough information to make a decent informed guess.
2. It is a relevant question.

It's relevant because it assesses your general sense of numeracy. Whilst that won't show how quickly you'd be able to deal with a database issue, it does give an indication of how you might go about making broad judgement calls in the absence of any hard-and-fast numbers. For example: Is it worth looking into this database issue, or is it likely to be insignificant compared to the network overhead?
The IP part is not correct - on hpcloud you can assign any number of IPs to a server. I'm not sure if ec2 interface supports it, but openstack one definitely does.

But a shared block storage? You mean a read-only one? Otherwise it's a bit difficult to synchronise access in any useful way. I don't know of any FS that could handle a shared RW block storage.
Evenwichtig Dieet Tips
> energy source

Algae based bio fuels sounds promising.

> replace plastics

If we stop using oil for fuel, there's plenty left for plastics. Oh, and carbon fibre is promising.

> What are you going to feed your 20 billion?

Food. There's plenty of unused room for it, and even then, there's hydroponics. Solve desalination, or hook up a cheap abundant energy source to what we already have, and there's even more room.
Sounds like a good strategy. That's the main point - having a strategy instead of running round like crazy.
Free-floating planets in the milky way outnumber stars
I'm intrigued - what lack of support did you find in Workflowy? I use it a lot, and never needed any support, and now I'm wondering what I'm missing!
I think "how many golf balls can you get in a double decker bus" is a fair question for assessing whether someone can apply basic maths to a to a real life (i.e. not perfectly defined) problem. If that's a skill the job needs it's a perfectly reasonable question.
let's say you write a search engine, a route planning system, a database, rule-based NLP (for most ML-based approaches fast, native math libs + python may be great enough because nearly all the time is spent in the math part) on HUGE datasets, etc, etc

pretty much any system involving long list- or set-like types with a decent level of complexity. Most other languages enforce far too much indirection, padding et. al for collection types. Especially generics fail miserably compared to templates for that particular matter. C, on the other hand, will make everything MUCH harder. Especially proper use of RAII and (const) references allow (almost) zero overhead and almost no error-prone pointers (especially zero pointer arithmetic) in the whole system.
This comment (http://habrahabr.ru/post/143615/#comment_4814888) says:

"As an official representative of "Beeline" I'd like to notify that the carrier was NOT blocking Twitter.

Since yesterday's evening when twitter page is opened the message "Page is blocked by a carrier" is shown. Similar symptoms are reported not only by Beeline but also by MTS and Megafon customers. Most cases are reported by Opera Mini and IE users. In IE there's 403 error.

Based on the reports we conclude that the issue is observed in specific locations only. When a user moves from one area to another the problem often disappears. It's not limited to Moscow specifically: reports are coming from all over the country.

From our side we contacted both Opera Software and Microsoft and also sent an inquiry to Twitter head office in California. We're waiting for these companies to respond and we'll keep you informed."

User Ekaterina Turtseva is an official representative of VympelKom (the company behind Beeline brand) and she's an admin of official company blog on Habrahabr.
Sorry if it's just my tired brain not getting it. What was the solution they were looking for?
Another silly generalization of developers and business people (here called sales men). Maybe the drawn stereotype matches many folks out there but this view is aged and not valid anymore.

Both the pure biz guy will die soon in the woods without any technical mindset and the dev will die soon when just waiting and hacking at the campfire. And together they won't be stronger. The picture the OP draws is from the past or taken from large corporations.

Successful entrepreneurs are both sales and technical. Non-technical people are considered illiterate nowadays and won't achieve anything as people who can not hunt. Best proof is Instagram founder Kevin Systrom. And that's what is so great about Hacker News—here you find the highest density of tech founders both business-driven and technical.

So, if anybody still wants to talk in stereotypes then distinguish between hunters and non-hunters and not between tech and non-tech.
developer and salesman: I miss the marketing guy from this story. (Or at least either the developer or the salesman should also wear the hat of a marketing guy.)

I think the rule of thumb is this: if you sell to the 'masses' you need great marketing, if you sell to only a few clients you need great sales.

I think of Steve Jobs more as a marketing guy than a salesman.
Easily forgotten, a lot of today's demos' complexity lies behind API calls to graphics drivers and OS system calls, whose implementations don't count to the byte limit.
C is good and simple but C is not expressive. There are a whole hosts of situation where code has to be duplicated or slightly modified. For instance, it's really hard to do good generic data structures in C without ending up with casts everywhere. Polymorphism is even worse.

For me, that really is the edge that C++ holds over C.
There are piles of magazine archives on Google since quite some time:

Google blog entry when they introduced the feature:
http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/search-and-find-mag...

(and old partial list with links: http://duvet-dayz.com/archives/2008/12/11/1037/ )

the full list of English magazines on Google Books:
http://books.google.co.uk/books/magazines/language/en
This story sounds familiar. Are the names of the salesman and developer Bear Claws and Jeremiah Johnson? :)

http://youtu.be/FcsXC2xFis4?t=2m50s
In the other threads there was the widespread opinion that lawyers would be a waste of time and costing a big chunk of the $10k. That few people adviced that he even counsel one hour with one lawyer is sad.
> "The only counter point I can think of is that, for a certain chargeback/total charge ratio, it does seem Square could take the risk and absorb any funds deficit."

Would attract fraudsters if they took this approach. The law of unintended consequences unfortunately.
Actually, I don't think that's at all probable. See the comment on the Torrentfreak thread about all that. There is a tremendous amount of expense in running TPB.
There's something about the story that, in its telling, feels a little leaky.

The developer is getting the cabin in order, the salesperson is out bear-hunting, and we assume the bear is the potential client.

While the developer is still building, the salesperson is trying to find bears. He then lures the bears into a cabin which, from its description, was not built for the purpose of capturing bears.

So why was the salesperson hunting for bears when the more appropriate target might have been deer? Or other hunters needing a place to stay? Oh... he got bored before it was even finished, so doesn't know who the ideal client is.

By the same token, why was the developer unpacking everything nice and tidy when they were going bear hunting? Shouldn't he be at least partly aware of how the salesperson works, or what he's going to do? Did he know to prepare the cabin for a bear, or for themselves (or other hunters), or just make the assumption?

There's a clear problem with communication, that has led two people, aiming to do the same thing, down two very different paths. The trip was bound to fail right from the start.
David against Goliath on the South China Sea
Asana is amazing. The product has matured to the point of excellence.
Completely off topic (or is it?) I find myself being quickly turned off by all these blogposts which 'casually' mention Steve Jobs on every single occasion the author comes across. Taken individually, each of these articles (like this one) would have a prefectly defendable reason to mention it. I'm annoyed with the trend.

I have mentioned this issue before in other comments threads on HN. Am I the only one annoyed by that? Yes Steve Jobs was a beloved public figure and an outstanding entrepreneur, but mentioning his name ("casually") won't add value to just any blog post. Unless I'm reading something written by an official biographer, or any other expert on the matter, I don't like reading Jobs name in a completely unrelated articles.

So this is my plea for bloggers: Stop doing that. Stop mentionning 'tech startup' celebrities in your posts; in my view it dillutes your point instead of adding anything to it. For the record, I'm reacting to the mention of Jobs' name because it's the trend of the moment, just like Zuckerberg's was a few years back. It's the celeb name dropping that bothers me, not the work of Steve Jobs.

Also, I apologize for the harsh tone. I really enjoyed reading everything else in the article and felt that it presented a serious miscommunication issue between builders and sales people in an otherwise very straight-to-the point yet witty and amusing fashion. Good post!
Firefox 15 now supports in-content preferences
Or ~4096 bytes of Kolmogorov complexity...
That's my work... and the site is far from being ready. It'll be ready for recon :-)
Why is the answer of asking a friend not acceptable? Since it's an open ended question, any reasonably open ended answer would do.
There was a big bug with not being able to add/edit tasks once you had sorted by a hashtag. Probably fixed now, but it was a show-stopper for me.
Because Amiga demos never exploited the way low res CRT displays looked or used the SID chip right?
I also think it's a fair question, but more about logical reasoning and estimating than basic maths. As an engineer, you could be asked to estimate the number of load balancers needed for X traffic with Y latency - similar problem.
From my experience humour is not tolerated on HN, everyone takes themselves very seriously. If you tell a joke you risk being downvoted into oblivion and/or banned. So yeah, your comparison with a concentration camp might actually be appropriate in this case, at least in terms of atmosphere.
Www.jordanretro4-cavs.com
Startup sales: #1: Map your sales process
Cool, but I think my favourite 4k demo is still Elevated, which is much less obviously procedural. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE)
Purebred Breeder help on complaints
Purebred Breeders was a pleasure to work with, and the process of adopting my new little puppy was easy and enjoyable. I got the best dog and I didn’t face any complaint till now.
Hm, this book has also lot of criticism.
Programming Python, Android, HTML5 Applications
I would be much more comfortable if I could see all of the emails with each side clearly stating their case, and then the developer's calm and rational ultimatum to go to the public.

That's the problem with whistle-blowing. Usually, there's a period of negotiation that occurs before it gets to that point. The situation has been developing for weeks or months and nothing else has worked. Suing is too expensive, so the wronged takes the matter to the public.

It can be damaging to the whistle-blower's reputation because, from the perspective of almost all of "the public", it's the first time they're hearing this news. They don't see the months of failed (or even bad-faith) negotiation. It seems like a drastic, hair-trigger decision to expose the matter, because it's the first time they are hearing about it. And people like to kill the messenger and don't like to hear bad news about reputable companies.

If the case and ultimatum were clearly communicated, Miso would have been prepared for the negative PR by releasing their version of events.

Sounds like a Ned Stark blunder. Experience has taught me that threatening to do something like this is a bad idea-- it gives your adversary time to prepare for it. Don't threaten; just do. If you're in this sort of fight, you want them to be surprised and capitulate in 12 hours. Saying, "this is exactly what I plan to release about you" is a bad idea for several reasons. First, your adversary has time to prepare. Second, it can become illegal (extortion in some cases, although most likely not in this one since there was a pre-existing contractual agreement).
I was an intern at a game company last year. I showed the CEO some of the stuff that is going on in the demoscene. He got really worried and told me to not show that to any of his staff. He was afraid that it intimidates his highly paid coders and designers. I found that rather disturbing. How are you going to kill Hollywood if you are afraid of algorithms?