skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most people might be better than the average driver, but not better than the typical (median) driver (same goes for legs).

I'd say that the typical is a better reference point than the average, since the counter-intuitive effects you describe disappear, and the reference point "1,9999995 legs / person" is pretty useless.
Configuring Your First Hadoop Cluster On EC2
My thought exactly. The 5-10 second lag involved in waking up a Heroku instance is a total drag for low-volume sites.
You can write kernels in Go, it even used to ship with a bare metal runtime and several people wrote kernels using it.

You cannot easily write device drivers for existing operating systems in Go because the existing operating systems provide a particular environment unsuited for Go and expect certain constraints from the device drivers themselves, constraints which Go breaks. In principle, it could be made to work.
The "NYT view" was a crude stereotype of the tech industry and the stereotypical male nerd tech worker, introduced to justify the article's position that the tech industry is male-dominated and sexist. There's plenty wrong with it.

And as a matter of fact, the contributions of men did heavily outweigh the contributions of women because women at the time were NOT ALLOWED to become engineers in most of the United States. In the rare places where it was allowed, high school advisors discouraged women from going to college and college advisors discouraged women from taking advanced math. Society was generally sexist and the potential for women to contribute was suppressed.

In the tech industry, women were allowed to become computer operators because it was seen as a natural progression from being typewriter operators, and because the tech industry was more progressive than the NYT gives it credit for. The heavy math, engineering, and design work was mostly done by men because, with rare exceptions like Hopper, they were the only ones with the skills and training to do it.
It's on Dustin Curtis's Svbtle: http://svbtle.com/
Can someone tell me about their experiences with it?
It looks like this library, like gfx and move.js, will accept a cubic-bezier string for easing. I wrote a module which wraps all of Robert Penner's easing equations into cubic-beziers for ease of use:

https://github.com/robdodson/amd-css3-ease

And I talk about it in this blog post, but it's really easy to use:
http://robdodson.me/blog/2012/05/27/penner-easing-equations-...

Credit really goes to Matthew Lein who converted the equations to CSS3: http://matthewlein.com/ceaser/
isAlive

Mom calls me every other day to ask "Are you still alive?" This site will tell her.

http://isalive.co
@momIamalive
There is a difference between learning a craft and learning something that is intellectually deep, profound, and significant. The underlying theory behind SICP is that computing is an important and fundamental way of thinking, comprable to mathematics or physics, and should be taught as such. From this standpoint, programs are embodiments of ideas, and the fact that you can use them to build websites or robots is almost incidental.

There is nothing wrong with programming-as-a-craft, just as there is nothing wrong with learning to do car repair or HVAC installation, but MIT is not a trade school and SICP is not a how-to manual.
If we are talking about a particular invention we can talk about specific inventors.

But we are talking about a particular invention and it's invention has been
well documented (see "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" among I'm sure many others).
If there's some alternative history here please point me to it...

part from that, saying that women did not contribute enough to the Internet, is like saying black people did not contribute enough to the invention of cars; it's mostly true, but it could be argued that that's because they were an oppressed group.

So woman *could" have contributed more to the Internet had they not been oppressed?
That's a counterfactual argument one and two it doesn't change the fact that women
didn't partake.
I first posted a snarky comment saying how this is spec work and what not. I then looked closely and deleted it, because it's not a spec work.

Your description -

Recruit web developers by having them build a web app

should really be this instead -

Recruit web developers by having them build a TEST web app

You have to be very careful with how you describe your service. You are an inch away from a much despised domain area of 99designs, and it's only sensible to try and distantiate yourselves from any spec work associations.
The “Truman Show” delusion: Psychosis in the global village
Ask HN: Code with what I know, or expand my horizons
for the past 4 years, I have been coding in PHP, JQuery and MySql.

Recently, I got really bored of those being that I generally just made CRUD apps; nothing that really tickled my fancy. So I decided I was going to learn Ruby on Rails.

I am still learning RoR but I don't yet feel confident to build a whole app in it, but on the other hand I feel like I haven't built anything in awhile.

Should I drop RoR for a week or two and just build something in PHP. Or should I keep going with RoR even though I feel like I'm not really progressing all that much?
Really?!

Lua:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/luaj/

https://bitbucket.org/xixs/anlua

http://luaforge.net/projects/luanet/

Ruby:

http://jruby.org/

http://www.ironruby.net/
OK, well I'd never noticed that blog network before. Well congrats anyway to the artist behind that - a great looking, minimalist design.
Lean Startup Isn't Enough: Use Your Personal Manifesto
Speaking of moderating power, it appears I've been down-modded for asking a clarifying question out of genuine curiosity.
Sunday Cash Reward
What’s being glossed over here, and explains a lot of the confusion around which is the best method of “solving” the multi-arm-bandit problem, is the classical bias-variance tradeoff. All of the methods presume some model of the problem, and some of those models are more flexible than others. When a model is more flexible, it allows solutions to take on more shapes and must burn more of its training data choosing among those shapes. Models that are more biased toward a particular shape, on the other hand, can use more of their data for convergence and so converge more rapidly.

Which method is “best” depends on what you know about the problem. Does its optimal solution look a certain way? change over time? and so on. If you’re willing to bet on your answers to those questions, you can choose a method that’s biased toward your answers, and you’ll converge more rapidly on a solution. The risk, however, is that you’ll bet wrong and converge on a poor solution (because your biases rule out better solutions).

If you’re not willing to bet on your answers, you can choose a method that will place bets for you based on what it sees in the data. But now you’re burning some of your data on betting. So that’s the tradeoff: you can use more of your knowledge to place bets (and risk placing the wrong bets), or more of the data’s knowledge to place bets (and burn some of your data on betting). Where you adjust the slider between those two is up to you.

Which brings us back to our original question. Which method of solving the multi-arm-bandit problem is best? It depends a lot on where you want to adjust the slider. Which depends on your knowledge, aversion to risk, and expected payoffs.

In life, sometimes one size does not fit all. If you’re going to test one shoe size against another, make sure you know which foot will end up wearing the winner. Likewise, if you’re going to compare algorithms for solving the multi-arm-bandit problem, make sure know the particulars of the problem you need to solve.
> I've founded a startup to bring them to the masses ... It will not only be informative but also help us design a better algorithm. Everyone wins.

Yes, this is how everyone wins. Those with the ability and drive can end up making a difference, largely through providing a framework or library for doing this right. This is why I think a continuing exploration of this is worthwhile. Until that time, I think the masses should be encouraged to do what works best (or at least better) for them in the present.

For now, I think I'll let this rest. I'm on the verge of ranting against a general trend (checking off boxes by following steps rather than understanding what you're doing), but this is the wrong place for that and it deserves more thought and time than I'd give it here.
I find it vastly preferable to go the other direction, converting weekly or monthly expenses into annualized sums. £10/week doesn't sound like much... but £520/year is 2.6% of the post-tax annual median income in the UK [1]. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad way to spend that money, just that you're better off thinking of it is as 2.6% of annual income. It's too easy to £10/week this, £10/week that your way into overspending, but add up 4 of them and see it as 10% of your income and you start to take notice.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom#Po... , with 20K at the 50th percentile
It would be nice if they offered a bulk download. Selecting individual photos to download is less than optimal.
What to expect at Microsoft's E3 2012 Media Briefing 
Microsoft's 2012 Xbox 360 Global Media Briefing, titled Xbox: Entertainment Evolved, will take place on June 4, 9:30 AM PT in Los Angeles at E3 - the largest gaming event of the year, and you don't want to miss it. Here's what to expect at this year's conference.
From the OP: "Our primary aim with this 'foolishness' is to create a solution that allows us to continue open sourcing parts of our stack without resorting to reinventing some of our internal wheels."

And: "we think C++ developers might find parts of this library interesting in their own right."

I think the key thing is that these are some basic pieces that a lot of FB's internal C++ code depends on. These pieces are being made available as a stepping stone to open sourcing more significant work.
I agree with you that the gentleman who runs the sushi bar must have had an eye to his reputation; perhaps capitalising on an early press article or some kind of favourable review. Small traders have an eye to their marketing as well as the craft, they are 'canny' in my experience. I suspect that zoned out coders may be less well equipped in this area.

One of my favourite examples of a very canny maker is Sakuma San...

http://www10.big.or.jp/~dh/sakuma/index.html

Mr Sakuma has spent much his spare time building thermionic valve amplifiers ('tube' in US) of a minimal and historically informed kind.

Valve technology is simple, with low component counts, and can sound excellent, but tends to be 'tuned' to a specific kind of music/programme material.
> Much better value than going on holiday

It might be cheaper, sure, but whether it's better value is questionable, especially when you define value as being the best return on your use of time, ultimately the most precious resource you have.
Is the right-hand side of the text cut off on the iPad for anyone else?
Is the 3 "o" intentional?
I've used Tsung a few times. But I have to think very hard when I configure or run it.

Gatling appears to solve the same problem but aims to be simpler.

Can anyone who has used both weigh in on how well it achieves this goal?
These tests are for a web design and branding agency.

There are tons and tons of resumes and the shop is not located in a huge metropolitan area like San Fran, NYC, Chicago, etc.
Didn't YC fund a company doing something similar to this in the last cycle?

I think it had a Goldman Sachs co founder and another business development guy. Reached Tech Crunch some time in the last 6months.

That received some pretty harsh comments for precisely the reason you mentioned. This is a easy way to game developers and have a couple of hours free consulting.
The Wikipedia article for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiraterone says that they acquired the license to produce the drug based on acquisition of a licensee. If true then they have licensed a right rather than owning "the rights".

Possibly J&J "invented" a novel therapeutic use for the drug and so gained a further patent?

As charities are required to open their accounts in the UK then presumably the amount the licensee paid to Cancer Research UK is part of the public record. It would be interesting to read the terms and the fee involved; presumable Cancer Research would only give an exclusive license for a very generous consideration otherwise they might be in the position of being locking up a useful drug that was paid for by charitable giving and presumably that would be so contrary to their principles.

I wonder if they have an SPC in the UK?
Procedures are procedures regardless of where they are written. In many aspects it can be mechanically more difficult to deal with SQL UDFs but that is a usability weakness that just needs some more treatment rather than anything particularly fundamental, I feel.

There are three common reasons I write UDFs:

* The SQL type system and dependency tracking are deemed helpful. This applies only to 'LANGUAGE SQL' functions, which are just regular queries. Unlike dynamically generated SQL from the application, type checks and dependency tracking on other SQL objects can be employed. This is hard to address in any tooling without having a complete copy of the catalogs (and many databases are not as self-hosted complete as Postgres' catalogs, so sometimes that may not be enough...) and semantic analyzer.

* Diverse language and/or library access. If there is a series of obscure rules to hold simple invariants locked into exactly one application's libraries, it makes it pretty much impossible to use any other library. This can be addressed, but it's often expensive to do so.

* Performance, in rare cases where network round trip dominates execution time and I need more than one plain SQL statement; this is only the case for the integrated 'procedural' languages. One could accomplish something similar by running the application's code closer to the machine, and I think that'd be better, actually, but requires some orchestration.
Quoting the parent article is a bad idea. It promotes arguing trivial points of the article ad infinitum. See USENET circa 1995 for a discussion style that should be avoided. (Now called "Fisking.")
$35/month for a static site? seems like overkill, no?
That site is an absolute gold mine.
>The concern is potential employers trying to bilk free work out of developers.

This is why the "assignment" that I request takes less than two hours and is a greenfield project that is not going to be used by the company -- and I tell candidates this up-front. Think something like a blog, recipe manager or to-do list app. It is trivial, but you may be surprised at the range of outputs that you get.

What is interesting to me is how the resume isn't the best indicator for how well they will do on the coding project. Also, to avoid wasting people's time, I give the coding project as late in the interview process as possible, assuming the other filters have been passed.
The thing which I think makes this actually work is some kind of affinity group (YC applicants is the one I enjoyed, but maybe university, specific interests, etc.).

You could look at the size of the meetup market, dating, etc., and go based on that (assuming everyone eats, and that the users view the cost of the meal as in-line with what they'd pay otherwise, so the meeting is "free"). That's a lot bigger than one per city per night.

There doesn't seem to have been a huge volume of meals in the Bay Area recently, though.
How the world typing champion maintains 170WPM speed
Dangerous DIY Inductive Maglev
Well if that's your position there's not much chance of reasoned debate really.

I simply highlighted that concern over the product originated from a USDA microbiologist. That fact refutes your characterisation of all opposition as entirely 'hysterical'.

At no point have I said ammonium hydroxide is unsafe, or that the product is unsafe. I simply pointed out that a qualified scientist raised concerns very early on with the product being approved for human consumption.
MBAs do, but MBPs' bottom cases have Phillips. (MBP batteries on the other hand...)
> Apart from that, saying that women did not contribute enough to the Internet, is like saying black people did not contribute enough to the invention of cars; it's mostly true, but it could be argued that that's because they were an oppressed group.

That is indeed an interesting juxtaposition, and I'd particularly note the use of the word "enough." That would suggest that in discussions on the history of technology, it is implied that there is some arbitrary threshold at which mentions of the contributions of a minority group (not necessarily an identity minority; i.e. in a women-dominated field you'd say the minority is the men, etc.) will be disqualified.

For instance, it is indeed "mostly true" that black people did not make many contributions to the automotive industry or its technological development. Richard Spikes' contribution of turn signals (http://www.snopes.com/business/origins/blackinv.asp) is perhaps notable or even significant, but not necessarily critical, so this could serve as an example of that statement. Does that mean that the hypothetical phrase "White men invented the modern automobile" in a hypothetical article about a black man being ostracized from the auto industry in 2012 is racist? Or is it merely an acknowledgment of the fact that white men get the credit because they structured the industry to give it to them, by excluding everyone else? Or is it both?
The intro video would benefit by demonstrating this. I had the same question.
This is a good article about memory for anybody who doesn't understand it.

Bear in mind that there are many ways that memory can be used, including (in the case of some applications) specialized memory allocators that look after memory within a process. For example SLAB allocation etc.
"The concern is potential employers trying to bilk free work out of developers."

If the coding exercise looks like something that is of this sort, then I guess consider whether you want to work with that employer. From an employer perspective, this is the worst source of getting something built.

A candidate should be researching the companies submits his resume/CV too anyway.

"If it becomes widespread, we'll just see phony developer put their assignments up on rent-a-coder and ask for a crib sheet to study so they can withstand a technical interview on what they've created."

If that were feasible, I'd suggest the employer would much rather hire the rent-a-coder instead of the one paying him. That's a win for the employer there too, since they'll be able to offer the rent-a-coder guy far more than the scratchings he gets as a rent-a-coder. The ability to predict in advance a sufficient range of questions as to forearm a candidate will border on the mystic.

Coding exercises aren't a mouse in a maze puzzle, they are a starting point for gauging web development ability.

The companies that use coding challenges as a way of creating production ready material are going to be amply supplied by the rent-a-coder approach you outline. And the technical interview part of the test is probably geared with a formulaic approach that can be guessed. In that case, this candidate and that employer are well matched.

But not every candidate needs a rent-a-coder to pass a technical test, and not every company uses those tests to create production ready websites and applications.

A good candidate can sniff a bad employer just as well as vice versa. If a company seems to be asking for production ready material, then walk away. If the test seems on the up, you'd better have a very good reason for refusing.
Ironically, each of these restrictions reduces the space of possible passwords for a brute-force attack, which is already pretty small given the inane 8-characters-exactly requirement.
I immediately thought of Erlang when reading the description of Gatling. Thanks for the link; I wondered if such a thing existed.
Which iPad model and OS are you on?
> What, now it's indirect argument over HN?

This has obviously been standard procedure for a while now. I see this on almost a daily basis. Afraid your comment on a HN thread won't get enough traction? Make a blog post instead, meant expressly for submission to HN (or reddit, or ...)
What is "low-fragmentation heap"? Why would anyone want "high-fragmentation heap"? (since you imply that it's an option)
> "What were you thinking when you typed this semicolon?"

When someone asks me this (or questions like it, since I don't type that many semicolons these days) I always reply "Stop looking at the trees. See the forest".

I'm not sure this makes me any more popular, but if you see semicolons (or parens, or whitespace) you are not reading the code. Sometimes, this has to be pointed out.
Or, hire a web developer by having them PROVE they have what it takes.

Or, hire a web developer with too little work experience to have any previous examples of what they can do, but still have them somewhat prove they have the appropriate technical knowledge at least handle the job ......... or something like that.

Anyway, if I had to run a developer through a test like this, I probably wouldn't be talking to him in the first place honestly. I tend to contract with people based on what I've already seen them do.

I understand that getting started is hard too, so hopefully some new developers will find themselves using this tool and it will help them get new jobs and build that portfolio.
A small gem to add to a wonderful post:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahv_1IS7SiE

Enjoy. Or get moved. Whatever works for you.
You are very confused about how SSL in the context of HTTP works. Here's the best talk I know of this subject:

BlackHat USA 2011: SSL And The Future Of Authenticity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA
I agree. In OSS philosophy, the only way to make money and stay "good" is to work on some company or through ads or providing other non-programming services. So it discourages indie/shareware model of making money through programming - the thing you actually enjoy.

The top answer on that page (by some facebook employee) confirms this.
Sounds like an anti-pattern to me. That said, I do host some static sites on heroku.
I'm still tippy-toeing in the Haskell waters .. but the availability of seemingly mature "elbow-grease" tools like profilers, debuggers and code coverage evaluators is what attracts me to Haskell.

What is the state of the art for the new kids on the block like Clojure, Scala and Go ?
SocialKey

Too much of a hassle to find medias in my social feeds, until made fun with SocialKey:

http://bit.ly/socialkey
I noticed it too - I'm on an iPad 2.
I think this is an interesting topic, but I have my doubts about the methodology of this study:

> Kaiser double counts time spent multitasking. If a child spends an hour simultaneously watching TV and surfing the Internet, the researchers counted two hours.

It sounds to me that the so-called increase could be explained simply by the addition of the internet, or ever present cell phones. If the average poor person watched 3 hours a day of television in 1999, but now occasionally sends a text or browses facebook during ads, it's now 6 hours?

10 years ago I noted an inverse correlation between socio-economic status and time spent watching TV; now it's Facebook instead. Plus ça change, etc.
Is there any reasoning at all behind the thinking that requires passwords such as this?
These sorts of rules are so commonplace that there must be some reasoning for it?