skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found this interesting:

"We see absolutely no evidence of any significant cheating taking place in the use of our assessments or that the cheating is substantially affecting the validity of the assessments," says David Scarborough, who helped develop the test and works for its owner, Kronos Inc.

Of course, that's what he would say, but what if he's telling the truth? If anyone stands to gain from research into what tests correlate well with job success, it's these guys.

It's entirely possible that the test still measures qualities correlated with job success, even when the applicants cheat to pass it. It's also possible that having any prescreening test -- even a totally irrelevant one -- improves the quality of employees.
...don't have a real education in it I am very behind in many areas...

Who isn't? Don't sell yourself short.

No matter how long you play guitar, you're not going to be Jimi Hendrix.

You don't have to code like Jimi Hendrix to be a great programmer. (Oddly, I suspect that if I had to maintain his code, I'd probably be going nuts.) You just have to get your job done, work well with others, and leave something maintainable behind. I have a feeling you're already there. I also have a feeling that everyone reading this has done something cool that neither one of us has ever even thought of. In our field, not knowing something isn't a problem, it's an opportunity.

I understand your sentiment, I really do. But I would be careful of calling misinformed people lazy. I would bet good money that there are "standards" I am breaking with my code that I don't even know exist. If the books I read or the sites I visit haven't told me about them, I wouldn't call myself lazy.

I agree completely. I'd give you an extra up vote for that response if I could.

...are you benefiting from the years of education and experience you have?

Of course. We all are. Not benefiting from any education or experience you have oughta be a crime.

It's not like I can wake up tomorrow and choose to be an expert programmer.

Right. Give it a week or two. If you code as well as you comment here, you're probably way better than you give yourself credit for.

In the back of my mind, I thought there was a chance my remarks would be controversial when I first entered them. Sometimes it's fun to push the envelope here. (Remember, I'm in the middle of Day 4 of regression testing someone else's crap.) You proved me right.

As far as OP is concerned, I still think of frameworks and 4th generation languages as "crutches" for a lot of us. So they serve their purpose. But at a cost many others have talked about here.

Thanks for the great discussion, chez17. I'll make a point to look for you in future posts.
Clojure is running in a live system in a big veterinarian hospital
Good idea. We like text a lot because it is so unobtrusive it can be used in a lot more places than voice. But obviously the way we've structured it, it's not that difficult to integrate and is definitely on the roadmap.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=416056
maybe she's good at selling companies for high prices... who knows?
Definitely agree, just had a long conversation with a coworker about MS's need to apply research to real-life products. FYI, here's the "post to Facebook" feature, it's still in beta and was done by an intern this past summer. I believe eventually the photo program will come pre-installed on every Dell, hopefully this plug-in will be as well. I just started using it and it's pretty slick.
Such a long time ago....
Millennials were brought up with so much praise early on that I think this is hard to avoid. For example, when learning how to spell a student could spell something totally incorrect but they would still receive a "gold star" because they tried and guessed the number of correct letters in the word. Yes, a lot of students don't want to work hard. Is it 100% their fault or should some responsibility fall on this over-praise from teachers?
Corporate bureaucracy is a creative vacuum.
However, in this case other businesses with a presence in a state (say, Target) must pay the tax [...] while Amazon [...] doesn't.

An important difference is that a virtual store does not cost the local community money when it operates there. When Target physically locates in NYC, it uses physical NYC resources such as:

1. Fire protection service.
2. Police protection service.
3. Planning commission service.
4. Streets.
5. Mass transit.
6. Traffic enforcement.
7. Sewer.
8. Water.

The NYPD annual budget is $3.9 billion, with 37,838 officers, 76 precincts, 12 transit districts, 9 Housing-Police service areas, 3000+ police cars, 27 police boats, 7 helicopters, 120 horses, 31 German Shepherds, and
3 Bloodhounds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Police_Department How much of that need is likely attributable to the fact that Amazon.com does business in NYC?

It's a similar story for the Staties. How many extra New York State Police (NYSP) troopers are required to be on duty, because of the virtual presence of Amazon.com in New York State? Here's the count: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Police $0.668 billion budget, 5,572 employees (4,667 troopers and 905 civilians), and 12 troop facilities.

If Amazon.com did less or zero business in New York State, could the number of NYSP troopers be reduced?

If Amazon.com did less or zero business in New York State, could the annual state budget be reduced? (General Fund: $2.2 billion; All Funds: $4.1 billion in 2009-10) http://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+state+budget+2009+bi...
You might also want

(setq sentence-end-double-space nil)

in your .emacs. Its a variable used for filling defined in paragraphs.el.
I was expecting this to work the other way 'round, receiving a little fortune-cookie sized piece of paper in my mailbox every time someone @-ed me.
well in the world of tech.. nothing is SECURED!!!!
If we go through another great depression, perhaps a new generation that has true grit will have better clarity and perspective on what it takes to succeed.
it doesn't look ugly for a wagon, but most people would prefer a sedan. Or something like a Mazda6 hatchback
The answers to some of the statements are not totally obvious. If we assume the "answer key" mentioned in the article is correct (http://melbel.com), we are supposed agree with "You have no big regrets about your past" but also agree with "You look back and feel bad about things you’ve done". Likewise, we are supposed to disagree with "You are good at leading people" but agree with "You are good at taking charge of a group" and "You like to take the lead with others".
Wireless Electricity Is Here (Seriously)
> I just don't understand why there is almost no pessimism in main-stream media.

Read any articles about the economy recently? Plenty of pessimism. Now, if you're talking about cynicism - I love cynicism, at least when it's done well. Most people think being cynical means being petty-minded and always running down other people's motives and achievements. Far from it: a good cynic is someone who genuinely loves genuine achievement, but is prepared to articulately, pugnaciously and mercilessly draw attention to those who fall short. Good cynics are basically weary optimists.
Wouldn't you want a superstar as CEO, that would get people excited about your company again?
Definitely would love to implement searching for shortcuts from messages. It's a great idea, we'll put it in the queue. Thanks a lot.

P.S. Yup, we're encrypted.
Wow. What an indictment from someone in a position of respect. I'm not sure exactly what he's talking about. A few examples would have helped. On second thought, I'm not sure I wanna know.

OTOH, maybe this is an great opportunity for him to be the first good teacher many of these students ever had.
Unfortunately, LaTeX is the only typesetting system I know which is accessible to non-professional typesetters and its not very widely used. I wish MS Word and OOo were as good. At least then people wouldn't be against paragraph justification as they are now.
Most people only order take-out from a few restaurants, so having a different app for each restaurant is not a major burden on the users (and far easier than getting any large collection of chains interested in doing some sort of meta-order app.) A web app will also have more difficulty in getting the users current location, information which this app can use to direct the order and user to the nearest restaurant location.
I don't know much about Bartz but I've always been impressed with Autodesk, or rather the products 3DMax, Maya and the pro video tools.

Max is the first product I'd heard of where the developers were not tied to an office, they were all over and met once a year. When Autodesk bought Maya many thought it would be merger slash and burn but both 3D products are important in the market and have ongoing impressive development.
I feel the analogue here is a bit off.

I'd say a framework is more like a factory that produces a variety of fixed-size spice racks (among with other products). You have to learn what button to press to get the right ones, and the spice racks produced will never be exactly how you want them to be.

If you want to quickly generate lots of generic spice rack, then a spice rack factory is all you need. But if you want something really outstanding and unique, then a factory may be anti-productive, and you are better off building it with your own hands.
The Youtube clip is from an interview with Branford Marsalis in the documentary film "Before The Music Dies". The whole thing is definitely worth seeing, if you have any interest in music or business. It's available for $3 as an indie download.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0760307/
http://www.beforethemusicdies.com/blog/b4md
An Apple Ergo tip for Macbook users
Microsoft's Cheap-Looking-On-Purpose Wall Street Journal Insert
> remind me why we are using the Factory pattern here, again?

Because everything in J2EE, including design patterns, is driven by salivating greed, megalomania-level egos and lemming mentality (I have a similar comment in the original thread).
I'm actually surprised Dominos tracks each pizza with that granularity.

I was a pizza delivery girl for Domino's for many years -- they basically had to make it into an efficiency science, since their niche is in speedy delivery.
I don't know. After seeing some pretty unbelievable crap in VB, php, and javascript, I bet it's more a matter of numbers. The kinds of people who program in Python or Ruby aren't off the assembly line because the industry demand isn't as high. If one of those languages manages to become as widely used as Java, plan on seeing fugly spaghetti.
Fantastic! Now if only Domino's pizza didn't taste like wet newspaper smothered in ketchup.
Talking Together - Government Technology - PIER Systems
it's true: 100% of children from north american middle-income families are gifted. They go to schools where the teachers are not allowed to mark their work with a red pen, not allowed to draw an X or circle an incorrect answer, and not allowed to call a wrong answer a wrong answer -- it's a "good try."

I dont think the teachers are to blame, tho, they're also stuck in the system. You think they dont' want to grab an arrogant "gifted kid" by the shoulders and shake him, or to tear up poorly written essays in front of the whole class? The good old days....
IO handling is just one of the uses of monads in Haskell. List comprehensions (like in Python) are another use. They are also used for parsers, asynchronous programming, exception handling and continuations.

I wrote a answer on stackoverflow which tries to explain monads with some practical examples: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/44965/what-is-a-monad#194...
This is to hacking what The Cure's "Disintegration" is to popular music.
You don't need to pay to watch the whole movie.. it's available on google video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-856606244008931882&...

It's a great little movie. Taken out of context the quote is a tad pessimistic, but the movie is actually quite uplifting.
Other statistics might show this (if so, please post them), but my model proves little. I could tweak it to get 67% second marriage failure rate (first marriage has no effect, good or bad), or 60% failure rate (first marriage adversely affects the second). More complex models are possible too.

My point is simply that the numbers provided prove nothing.
I'm not so sure. Googling around on this brings up a lot of statements to the effect that Excel is not Turing-complete. (I mean, of course, excluding VBA.) I haven't found a proof either way, though surely one is out there.

This paper claims to prove that the authors' spreadsheet is Turing-complete in contrast to Excel:

http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~burnett/Turing/TuringMachin...

Actually, it would be more interesting if spreadsheets were not Turing-complete, given how much people are able to do with them.
Her only quality it seems, is that she looks hot for a 60 year old

How utterly obnoxious. How many industry-leading software companies have you run for 14 years?
I don't think all students are completely full of shit. I believe the distribution is a bell curve. ;)
Same story here (Seattle). The Prius is to the urban liberal the same thing the SUV is to the suburban conservative -- a premium-priced vehicle projecting an image.

Most of the time the suburban conservative would be fine in a Civic, and most of the time the urban liberal would be fine on the bus. But in either case it would be a slight trade of practicality and a large trade of social status -- not going to happen.
Apple also aggregates payments. I use my PayPal account (somehow that lets me avoid sales tax...who knows why...) for iTunes. Typically they'll bill me immediately for the first song (presumably to make sure my PayPal account still works), then they seem to aggregate anywhere from 1 day to 1 week worth of purchases up to about $30 before billing again.

They did this aggregation when I just had my plain old credit card number linked as well, although I don't think they ran the first charge immediately (probably just reserved funds).
Sorry, forgot the little winky emoticon:

;)

Is that better?
> If Rails were a toolbox, all of its tools would break under duress.

That sure sounds like personal conviction to me.
I was impressed by a six hundred year old former cod-salting wharfside building in Bergen, Norway. Most of the original wood was intact and accessible - you could touch the old tool marks. The building now houses a mere motorcycle dealership, which is pretty mind boggling for an American. The bike salesmen thought I was pretty odd.
.. until the next bubble/depression.
New Era of Lean Startups - Mike Maples [pdf]
Agreed. I just think the problem is bigger than "Students are full of shit".
Project Voldemort - A Distributed Database
Dell Mini 9 released on 3G network
"I'm not a cynic, I just have high standards."
Each of his students is now thinking to himself, "Wow, I didn't realize I was his best student."
Boxee as Media Sherpa
I've been working on something very similar. As an excuse to pick up python, I've been working a more robust SMS interface with google calendar than the one provide as well as an interface with Yelp. I love using SMS on my phone (its my predominant form of communication) and I like what you guys have made. Looking forward to giving it a spin.
Motorola's Android team safe from layoffs, employee says
Seems like there would be a market for colleges that make it very difficult to get good grades because those degrees/grades would then be more prestigious.
The case in question concerns New York state

To be clear, I believe the sales taxes in question are both state and local:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123186764434777801.html?mod=...

The judge said New York's law doesn't broadly tax "any and all Internet sales," but instead requires companies to collect state and local sales taxes if the company generates $10,000 or more in revenue as a result of commissions paid to persons in New York for sales referrals.
Its a peculiar kind of "just because we can" irony. I call them YPBWWWT's" (Yes, Pinky, but who would want to?!) after a particularly applicable episode of an old WB cartoon.
Would an OS exclusively for web apps not need a virus checker, firewall, UAC, etc?
A company such as Google could provide essentially the same installation for everyone. So security issues that come about when installing software are gone.

Moreover, user data would be stored on remote servers, so there is less chance that an attack could find sensitive information on your computer.

It's actually rather strange to have naive users worry about securing their system. Security should be handled by experts.
I think this is just a cycle the world has to go through. You have a society right now that feels entitled and thinks very highly of themselves despite having done very little. These people go around acting on those assumptions and basically crash and burn (For example, all those people who thought they deserved houses they couldn’t pay for and now have no house at all)

Then their kids have to work a lot harder to succeed because their parents are (a) too narcissistic to provide emotional support and (b) too poor after they’ve crashed and burned to provide financial support. So the generation of people who thought too highly of themselves and did very little work spawns a generation of hard working, motivated people.

Sadly, what tends to happen after is that the hard working generation lavishes their kids with praise and financial support to make up for all the things they didn’t have as a kid which creates another generation of spoiled kids. But what can you do.
Hot redeploy not working for this app in development.
Everything looked fine, but for the sound of silence. I hit play and it stayed on 0:00.
That's actually quite interesting, it does seem to fit gender profiles quite well in that women are (generally) much more emotional than men, and the prevalence is 4:1 for presenting in males against females.

I also wonder if the old "Children should be seen and not heard" helps with autistic children. I mean I know when I grew up it simply wasn't tolerated if I behaved badly, yet (I especially noticed this when I was still in school) I've noticed that people just a few years younger than me don't seem to have been taught to behave. I see people 15 years old (I'm 20) talking back to their parents in public, that's something that rarely happened when I was 15 and the people who did do that generally came from crappy families to begin with.

I feel sorry for any child growing up today because I seriously feel they're not going to be disciplined correctly, and I don't mean like beatings as I never got hit once. I never got grounded once as a teenager, because by the time I even hit 10 I had a healthy respect of what my parents said. Come to think of it, I rarely even got punished between 11-17 years old (I say 17 because thats when I started work with my father, there was probably more work-related arguments between 17-20 than there was in my entire childhood) because I always did what I was told, it was sort of ingrained in me. Plus I think between 14-16 guilt worked 10x better than discipline.
Thinking outside the box, and doing things in the non-approved way, is what gives you a competitive edge over your competition.

If it makes sense to hack up a project in assembler, do it. It may give you a massive advantage.
The market does not have a very good track record of late, vaksel.
there's no way to say for sure without knowing more details on a specific OS. maybe it would need that stuff, maybe not; maybe some of them but not all.

worth noting, though, is that there are plenty of malicious pieces of software whose goals have nothing to do with obtaining data on an individual computer.
Calling All iPhone Developers: Support DMCA Exemption
There are a number of other cloud management consoles currently popping up including Amazon's own free management console. However, I am only aware of one other management console that currently supports multiple cloud providers (RightScale).

We realize though that management consoles are somewhat of a commodity and therefore there will be a number of options for users to choose from. Our mission is to try and bridge the enterprise data center and the cloud. The first step in this process is our SaaS Management Console.
Their toasted sandwiches are excellent.
"most programmers are bad programmers"

You should hang around better programmers.
The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update
Quote of the day:

We live in a country that seems to be in this massive state of delusion, where the idea of what you are is more important than you actually being that.
this is no doubt tangential to your original point, but you should stay away from mod_python. You're walking into a version coordination nightmare (apache+DB+python). Debugging is a pain and your apache processes now load a python interpreter (each!). I suggest you take a look at wsgi.
Right, there are no smart hard working kids anymore just bastards? WRONG. There are the same number of smart kids, just many many more students in college who probably don't belong anyways and will eventually fail.

Sounds like a bunch of bs to me.
That's just.... ridiculous. The main thing that keeps women out of the industry is the fact they don't want to be in the industry and for you to suggest otherwise, is sexist.
Ask HN: Review our (reviews) Startup
http://www.rateitall.com

Hi, I've learned a lot on HN and would love to get some feedback.

We are a six person team out of San Francisco and just launched a new UI today.

Four features in particular we are proud of:

1) News feed format - build out a custom reviews feed by subscribing to keywords, categories, or people

2) Global add button - add anything to our database for instant review by our users ("write a review" link in header)

3) Compatibility quizzes - rate stuff in different categories (movies, beer, music) and get matched with folks that share your tastes

4) Read / Write API - full access to our millions of user opinions (api.rateitall.com)

Thanks,

Lawrence
Co-Founder, RateItAll
One extremely useful service that comes to mind is being able to track a flight on any given airline
Really? I'd find it hard to believe that it isn't Turing complete. The only reason I can think of would be limits on nested functions or otherwise, but I dunno, I've been googling around myself and some say it isn't.
Well, next thing to do: implement a Turing machine in Excel. Or Google Docs. I think I'm going for the latter.

Edit: Spreadsheets have no state. This is hard. If only I could delay evaluation :P
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The Honda Insight has been superior technically, and was released earlier, but it has nothing like the mindshare of the Prius. We're hard pressed to account for this with anything other than branding and design.
If you installed Windows 7 Beta...you might want to back up your MP3s
The Real Story of the Electric Vehicle? Not the Vehicle
I thought it was weird too, until I had kids in school. Then I saw the the kids were writing stories in Kindergarten, a good three years earlier than before. It seems that the part of the brain that can handle stories and cause/effect develops earlier than the part that handles details (like spelling).

Instead of waiting until they were old enough to spell correctly, they started letting them do what they could do earlier.

They do the same thing with physical fitness. To achieve the presidential award, you don't have to be as strong or as fast in third grade as you do in sixth.
Google has new favicon...ugh.
New bill in congress would add cigarette like warning labels to video games
I don't know which schools you are talking about. The public schools my kids have been in mark plenty of things wrong, pull kids out of courses that they can't handle and put them in lower-level courses in the middle of a term, and fail kids who don't perform to a minimum standard.