skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Children are betting at learning than we are at teaching. You can try teaching 2+2, but if you're uncomfortable with math, then your children will not only learn 2+2 from you, they will also learn "math is hard." And having to un-learn that lesson is a very large, very difficult barrier to have to overcome. When you teach your kids math, don't just teach them 2+2, also make sure that they learn math is fun & easy.
Simple releases reports to help you track and graph your data
Can anyone quickly sum up the benefits of trust funds over other forms of savings? Is it just a tax deduction?
Obama took it quite a bit further and acknowledged cocaine use. I was honestly surprised at how little backlash he received.
'Hitler' clothing store stirs anger in India
I take your point, and I certainly wouldn't burn any bridges, but surely there is a way to politely draw an interview process to a close without offending the people concerned?

I once interviewed for what I thought was a PM role, and started getting asked lots of in-depth business analyst questions about pricing derivatives. After the first couple of questions, I interjected and said that I had been told the role was X, they clearly want Y, and that's not me. They agreed and I wished them good luck in their search.
"3:00 pm" is in the middle of the night, the time to wake up for work will always "change"..

well, one time .. but do you !really! care about how the folks in +600 yrs measure time? I'd guess they invent some kind of "glacial-period-light-saving-time" by then...
"LIVIN' THE GOOD LIFE, CHUMPS, sittin' here on this dirt floor at subsistence level. GOT IT MADE."
Why ask children "Why can't you run?" when they just learned to walk? You have to start somewhere and it's really not easy to learn several languages at the same time, especially not your first. Eventually you'll want to run/learn more languages, but there's a time and place for everything.
Why does the consumer gain anything? Windows Phone 8 will be released, no matter what the court says, and Nokia will release phones with it.
> I agree that one should make code very readable but comments can be very useful. Just because someone uses the tool incorrectly doesn't make it a useless tool.

Actually, I think the problem is people tend to make comments which attempt to explain the function of the code at more than a high level. This is the mistake.

Your comments should explain the "why" of your code but seldom go into the "what", because the "what" will almost certainly change. And in fact, in many cases the "what" may not be entirely determinable from a single point in time with properly uncoupled code.

You can sit here and say "Oh yeah well its the developer's problem to update the comments don't blame the comments." but the observation that "what" comments get out of date is so universal that we should probably accept it as the norm.
Sony announces VAIO Duo 11, a hybrid ultrabook with NFC running Windows 8.
Use them to send embedded screen captures at work. Could be an attachment, but then its hard to put into context.
I was expecting something more like Swatch Internet time.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Why must time be be earth centric? Imagine how hard it must have been for Copernicus to convince everyone to use his model. Lazy programmers isn't as compelling argument, but it has similarities.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution

Non-rhetorical questions: Does the Mars Curiousity rover use leap seconds? Does it have Martian time too?
It doesn't matter. Both snippets do the exact same thing, except the first has two attributions, the second just one.
Carbs bad.
Fat good.

By far the most compelling argument is made by Gary Taubes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTUspjZG-wc

This literary changed my life. By changing ONLY what I eat, I've managed to loose weight. Without any effort! I wasn't fat per se, but man, I feel way better now!

No need to eat "fresh" (salads, fruits...), but you MUST eat fat!
TAI for the timekeepers and as an internal representation, UTC for display, much like how many computers keep time in UTC and apply an offset to display local time. Just because we have to deal with the legacy of POSIX doesn't mean this isn't the right solution.

Yes, there are the obvious problems like the uncertainty of scheduling future events in UTC because the insertion of leap seconds aren't known in advance. But such things should be scheduled in TAI, anyway.
Nice to hear :) I'm assuming it was on "Monday Morning Coding" ;)
WinMo doesn't exist anymore, it's Windows Phone or WP.

Can you explain why you think WP isn't a differentiator? It is clearly and significantly different visually from the other mobile os's.
Also worth mentioning, surf: http://surf.suckless.org/
> I suppose one could say that noon should always be noon ...

Yes, but by allowing our clocks to go out of sync with the natural time of noon, a relationship controlled by orbits rather than clocks, this proposal would prevent that. Over time noon (highest solar position in the local sky) would drift away from noon as given by a clock.

I especially like the part where this proposal's advocates dismiss those who use a sextant to locate themselves on the ocean. I personally required this clock consistency to navigate my boat during my around-the-world sail, after my hi-tech satellite receiver expired.

This is not to argue that there's only one good argument here -- both arguments are reasonable. Unfortunately, they differ in the most basic way.

If we stick to 86,400 seconds in a day and don't allow leap-seconds, eventually daylight will happen at midnight -- either that or we will require leap-hours or even leap-days (as happened in Europe during the transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendars).

If we continue to allow leap-seconds, all sorts of chronological record-keeping will continue to be more complex than it needs to be.

As with all truly interesting problems, there's no easy answer.
Why I'm not a founder
Here's another free anecdote for you. You seem pretty smart, but you need to think hard about your model of the world. Cancel that Economist subscription (I subscribe, btw) if you need to. :)

Anyway, at an NGO that tries to build skills among the poor, the middle-class employees were all talking happily about how nice it was that it rained the previous night, because it had been a hot few months. One of the trainees then quietly said during the conversation that people like them don't really like the rain, because it pours in through their shanties and RUINS THEIR STORED FLOUR (!!) that they use to make rotis.

The last part was that the thing that nobody (including me) had ever thought about. That takes the suckage due to rain to a whole new level.
I see a lot of comments about how you shouldn't burn bridges. I agree, I still think this was right thing to do. I would excuse myself politely and walk out as well.

Maybe person should ask to talk to lead dev or whoever, explain him that he doesn't believe he would fit, thank him for opportunity and leave. In other words say, it's not you, it's me ;) and still leave and enjoy rest of the day.

I generally don't believe in daylong interviews, I don't see the point in multiple rounds, everyone on the team talking to you endlessly. It is a waste of everyone's time and energy, to me personally it shows how people are uncertain in their decisions and need support.

One more thing, this is opportunity for company to leave a good impression on you as well as you to them, them being disorganized (often the case) doesn't really help much.
If you're hardcoding it, n will be around 400,000.

That's a lot of iterations.
They don't like being rejected. How dare HE tell THEM he wasn't interested? He should be falling all over them to work there. It's just arrogance by that company.
We have way too little to go on to actually decide which way the candidate went. We have one side of the story second-hand filtered via our own interpretations. Thing of it is, given just what we know I could spend ages listing out credible ways it could have gone given what we have.

Assume that the candidate did give something closer to my latter statement. Perhaps the lead wanted a better explanation of what made the fit so poor. Perhaps the lead actually could not comprehend anyone not wanting to work there. Perhaps the lead didn't believe the explanation given. Any of these could feasibly lead to the same account we're given, as could simply leaving abruptly or literally saying "fuck you, fuck this, fuck everything".
I find this attitude moderately disgusting and I would decline to do business with anyone who thinks about the world this way.

The reason is: it shows a worldview where everything is about your personal advantage and not making things bad for yourself. It comes across as selfish and petty. That final paragraph is just kind of gross.

I want to do business with / hire / socialize with people who care about the good of the world, hopefully more than they care about their own small situation. It's hard to describe what that looks like -- it is different for everyone -- but it almost certainly does not look like this.
What are your definitions of "cannot be fixed" "Many" and "Problems"? Biological clocks and cellular metabolism are tied to daylight, amongst other things. Talk about programming that cannot be fixed! Does that make 6 billion astronomy purists ;) ?

Edited: For levity
This article is flawed because manufacturers have been making WP devices, but those devices haven't been marketed and therefore are selling poorly.

WP needs a marketing push to get into the minds of consumers, before it will sell in significant numbers.
You just have two accounts. But you have that anyway if your company using is Google Apps. I think the assumption that people have a work email and a personal email is generally pretty reasonable.
>> Some of those people at that company will be at different companies in the future.

If you live in a big city and apply for positions to a broad set of industries, there's a decent chance you'll never encounter anyone you've had a bad experience with. If you're focused on working in a smaller community/field, then you do have to spend more time managing your reputation.

>> When in doubt, don't burn bridges. Don't be rude. Don't be a Prima Donna.

I have a different piece of advice:

Always be professional, polite and respectful. If you've acted appropriately and people are still offended or outraged, then that's really their problem.

>> Someday the tech economy will be very different, ask anyone who lived through 2000 - 2003, when a lot of people had to get out of the industry because there were NO JOBS.

I lived through that bubble, I don't know that it's really that different.
Does someone who opens a trust account in 60 seconds on a web site really understand the legal, financial and tax implications of what they're doing?
If you cannot read and write a trivial math equation as code then I really question how you got here. That formulation for approximation of irrationals is one of the reasons computers exist! If you can't do this, go into a cave on a mountaintop behind a waterfall in a hidden vale and proceed to train until you can. It's not an unreasonable or un-useful thing.

Of course, it's actually trickier than you might think on modern computers if you go out much further than 10 decimal places or so.
How I hacked Gogo inflight wireless Internet with Chrome
Sorry, I still can't agree with #1. It assumes that all workplace programming is gluing things together, fixing/maintaining legacy crap, or writing generic CRUD apps, which is untrue. I know some great programmers who never code in their spare time, and some that do that are, quite frankly, very uninteresting people to be around due to their lack of other hobbies.

I know the current trend in startups is all about "show me your github", and I admit that it has some value as a filter, but I feel like I'm seeing people writing fairly uninteresting code snippets and blogs just to put it on their resume, in the same way that high schoolers join a bunch of student groups to beef up college applications. There are plenty of programming jobs that require writing complex code and having deep domain knowledge, and to discard those candidates because they can't show you their code and have other hobbies outside of work is just not smart.
You know, your comment really hit me for some reason. I'm working at a place now where the boss is really quite rude to some of the junior devs. It's gotten to the point they are afraid to ask questions for fear of his response. As a senior I see this and make an effort to talk and sympathize with the junior guys but feel powerless to stop my boss acting this way - he is very defensive and argumentative whenever I bring this stuff up.

So your comment about watching people being treated a certain way really hit home. Perhaps it's time for a more frank (and private) discussion with my boss, or even a new job.
I'm not saying I wouldn't leave early and agree that it wouldn't be rude to do so, but I find it a stretch to call the company toxic because of this.
Best I can tell, all Craigslist managed to do is put a map on the ad page. That's not very useful.

They need to put search results on a map, that's what makes padmapper useful.
> In the long run millions of beggars wouldn't have been born in the first place if free food hadn't been available.

You're right, of course, because their parents would have starved to death.

A civilised society does not allow its citizens to die of starvation. In the long run of course it would be preferable to not have to give out free food, but until there's a viable alternative, that's what a civilised country does.
Unless you look at things like app reviews. Where users are much more likely to complain than to leave positive reviews. I think the same applies for other +1/-1 options. People that don't like things run around jumping and yelling how much they hate it. Most of the ones that have positive things to say don't unless you put it right in front of their face.
Ten Inconvenient Truths about the Web
Avon sales kit
I actually think #17 is the odd one out here, in that it directly conflicts with #1. "Programming is just a job", yet "Code in your spare time"? I think you're right that #17 conflicts with silicone valley mentality, but while this mentality isn't for everyone, I think it's absurd to claim it's wrong.

Ask yourself the following questions, keeping in mind that different people will answer differently and that's okay: Do you have a passionate desire to do what you do (whether your motivation be to build a better future, change the world, or create cool technology, etc.)? Or is programming really just a way to make money (i.e. "just a job") to afford the things you really enjoy? (Or some balance in between the two, usually.)

IMO for those who are truly passionate about their work, their work is NEVER "just a job". Thus while #17 is true for a great many people, it's not true for the few who tend to accomplish the most - at least judging empirically from historical results.

For these people, it's much more than "just a job". For every highly successful person who made a huge impact on the world, it's never "just a job." Just ask Elon Musk, or countless others, if they consider their career "just a job."
> Does the Mars Curiousity rover use leap seconds? Does it have Martian time too?

Both the Mars Curiosity rover, and its operators, use the Mars day duration (which is 24h 39m 35.24409s), but with time measured in "normal" seconds. The JPL people directly responsible for this project even switch to a Mars clock in their personal lives.
Disputing feedback when people give it is a surefire way of making sure that no feedback is given in the future.
Google sees itself as the only tech company in the world, that people who wanna work there desperately want so and have nothing else to do in life.

That's the vision I have after looking at their hiring process.
How can people code without knowing math ? Atleast to the extent of knowing the value of PI? ( I am not asking for a 10 decimal places value ..How about just 2 decimal places )
I read through nearly the whole article before I realized this was from 2005. What ever happened to this proposal?
There seems to be a double standard in the comments here.

Companies regularly cut short interviews (speaking from personal experience). They've all been polite about it and explain why, usually saying "it's not the right fit". There are some companies that ask between multiple interviews if the candidate is still interested in talking to the next person.

A candidate should be allowed the same ability to "walk out". From the OPs story I got that he cut his interview not during a round but before the next one was to begin (the reason for moving him into another room). Thats the perfect time to do it. The reason the candidate gave is sufficient, he doesn't wish to waste anyone's time. The response of the company in this case is actually arrogant and unprofessional.
It's also ridiculous, you don't have to spend more than 100$ for an excellent hacking keyboard, don't buy the brand, buy the feature.

http://www.elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=leopold,fulls... or if you really need them to be weighted for god knows what reason:
http://www.elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=topre_keyboar...
I'd assume this is where the Trust Egg company is making money.
I think the use case you describe is that you create a Google account as yourself, along with each of your colleagues. Then you create a G+ Page and make them all administrators of it. You can act/post/etc. as the G+ page and not as yourself, e.g. https://plus.google.com/+TheCorcoranGroup

Not saying this is ideal or that you should like it, just that I think that's how you can do what you want to do.
Depends on how the interviewer(s) have treated you. I walked out mid-interview one time, after the 2nd time the manager was called away to fix a production problem. I could see the room he went into, full of programmers just sitting around waiting for the boss to fix it. I decided this was a sick department and just walked out w/o saying "Bye" as I didn't want to interrupt the debugging session. Another time, in a tag team interview situation, each person kept showing me photos of the calf the team was raising for eventual slaughter for a team cookout. I love meat, but their glee at the prospect of killing this particular cute beast made me not want to work with them. I allowed for the slight chance they were flesh-eating ghouls, and just scampered away during a break.
My first question when considering outsourcing a task is this: is it a chore or a project?

A project is some usually non-recurring task in a field that I enjoy and/or would like to get better at. A chore is some usually recurring task in a field that I either don't enjoy or see no need to improve my skills in.

My advice is to outsource chores (to the extent that you can afford) and prefer a DIY approach to projects (to the extent that you have time).

Chores can usually be outsourced at a profit, since they can often take advantage of economies of scale (e.g. a lawn maintenance service can afford really nice mowers that work even on long or wet grass and that do the work of two or three push-behind mowers).
This is not literally true. The period between solar noons oscillates and varies up to tens of seconds away from precisely 12 hours, thanks to the differing orbital speed of the Earth between perihelion and aphelion. What you're referring to is "mean noon", true solar noon averaged over the course of a year. See "mean sun" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_sun

More complications arise from the position of the Moon. The Earth's rotation is affected by tides (stronger when the Moon is at perigee), and by the Earth's orbit around the Earth-Moon barycenter. Precession of the Earth's rotational axis is also a factor. And many more astromechanical effects also subtly affect the timing of the apparent position of the Sun.

Locking our timekeeping to the actual position of the Sun actually proves to be an intractable problem. At some point, we need abstractions to simplify and assume that that the relation to the Sun is good-enough. Famously, the Julian calendar was good-enough for millennia until the relation to the sun drifted off true by more than 10 days. So arguing over leap seconds could be seen as rather trivial.
How to Move up the Career Ladder..and More
Same thing on the iOS App Store. I submitted a new app which took 12 days to go in review. It was rejected for a valid reason (I was saving temp data in Documents/). The fix took 20 minutes to implement but I'll likely have to wait another 12 days.

I wish Apple had a system similar to Debian's lintian which would look into your code and gave your warnings for bad stuff.
"A day long interview is a good signal the company is full of bull already."

Totally agree.
Google App Engine supports JavaMail.
That was my feeling too. I kept reading through the list and nodding, wondering where the "controversy" was supposed to be.

Regarding your criticism of #2, I think you're arguing orthogonally. The point to me seemed to be against TDD and the idea that code written "to" a test is inherently better. The point is to write and execute tests, not to fetishize how those tests are written or run.

And your point about #10 is just plain wrong, sorry. Arguments of the form "debuggers are easier than hacked-up logging" always presuppose that the "hacked-up logging" is hard to do. The fact that you feel more comfortable typing into gdb or whatever than you do adding a line of code and rebuilding tells me that you don't feel comfortable building and running your code. If that's the case, then you have already lost. Debug via printf works better because projects designed for debug via printf are inherently better. This applies to fancy tracing tools as well. They have their place, but if you can't whip out a printf then you need to fix that first.
> Yeah but in reality no-one writes it down. I actually use Google-Auth for my Gmail, but I forgot were I wrote this number down(it was a couple of years ago). Keeping a scratch code for each new server is a pain.

This is your problem. I keep mine (for multiple services) in my wallet, and it's worked out excellently.
The formula is

p(n) = p(n-1) + 4*((-1)^(n-1))/(2n-1)
n = {1,2,3...} and p(0)=0

I think that p(n)-p(n-1) must be less than the precision you want (0.00001).

*Mental note: never start reply math on iPad ;)
I'm definitely looking forward to this debate when/if we ever have a permanent mars colony. Will they still use earth/solar time? Use mars/solar time? Some compromise between the two? I imagine someone living on mars could give two shits if the earth/solar time was off by a few seconds, and I definitely don't want to be responsible for handling two entire time systems in my code.
Exactly. The tools themselves are rarely the source of anguish.

I'd MUCH rather write a language I don't enjoy in a clean, well-architected project than use my favorite language in a bandages-on-"quickfixes"-on-bandages project.