skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Go back and read what I wrote again. What you are describing is a market with artificially constrained supply, not a free market.
When you evaluate a candidate's social skills, you really end up evaluating whether they're a good "cultural fit" or not, which usually means you aren't hiring a very diverse team.

No. I know what you're saying- that a lot of startups encourage fratty behaviour and so on, which is true. But communication skills are entirely separate, and important. It's impossible to be an effective team without communication- that's not a "cultural" thing.

Investing time in learning a completely different stack for every job you apply for seems like a very inefficient use of time

True- I did it just once, for the job I wanted. But you could also quite easily look at what kinds of technologies companies are using- there will be general trends that can help you.
Hm, thanks for the nice remark on the game stuff, I kind of like that.

While agree with your primary criticism, I think the principle of locality applies well to this problem. While there are 24 million places (supposedly, never checked that from the paper), I'm positive that most maps queries are served to the areas with higher population density. Therefore, it might make sense to use the look-up table approach for densly populated areas to reduce the search time. (OTOH, the computer scientist in me reminds me that the 7ms might pale in comparison to latency times for mobile phones receiving the map information...)
> Is there any evidence or even a credible physical hypothesis why fast food processed mystery meats would be meaningfully less healthy than the roughly similar unprocessed cuts from the same animal?

The typical processed meat product contains additional ingredients that are not just meat. Particularly nitrates and added sweeteners.
How many place have you applied for a job as a programmer ? Have you done any programming since 2008 just as a hobby. I am not talking about some big open source project but enough to show that you don't hate programming. If you do hate programming, its very hard to do the job. If you like it, you should apply at least 10000 places before giving up and doing house cleaning work.
Have you tried oDesk and other online service, they don't care how much gap you have in your career.
If its depression thats holding you back go get help from a doctor.
Dear 500 Startups. We hacked passes for your passbooks last night.
Randall is a great guy with lots of really nice stuff. That said there is an absolute glut of xkcd stuff on HN compared to other sites that get mentioned here. xkcd links handily outnumber even wikipedia. One of the HN originated memes is the obligatory xkcd link.
Those might be valid health concerns in general, but what do they have to do with insulin and diabetes?
Cases like this set a bad precedent. This means Apple needs to be even more on the offensive than it has been: to not let this issue arise in the future.

This encourages companies to register every single trademark they might ever need - right now. This is sad news. It means they will register tons of trademarks they may never use. And this will stop you and I from being able to use these unused trademarks.

Strict trademark rulings hurt everyone in our community...
As someone who has been spending time this year learning to code, I just wanted to say this essay is EXACTLY what I have been yearning for. Thanks for putting this together.
I'm a huge Github fan, but this blog post is complete fluff.

"[Github] helps people build software together... it doesn’t do this by accident - it’s by design. It’s intentional. It takes work. And it pays dividends."

Ok....
^This! When I'm jumping into a new area, I go through the basics, and then it starts to get hard to see what I've already covered. Something that would make it easier to see that I've missed a section due to the "Squirrel" effect, or just the density of what I have seen, would be a major help.
There is more to social skills than culture, and there is more to culture than race & gender (not that you said that, but the article did). I've never worked anywhere that was less willing to hire women & minorities; if anything it was the opposite, sometimes explicitly. But you do need to hire people who can work together and (depending on the job) engineers who can interact with clients.

I had a hiring manager tell me once he was worried I wasn't talkative enough (though he did make me an offer). I thought that was dumb, partially because I know I'm not reluctant to communicate & debate with my team, but more because it seemed like an uncritical devotion to the cult of culture. On the other hand, I once managed an engineer who found a reason that every one of his tasks couldn't be done (in my opinion as cover for lack of competence). I wouldn't want someone like that on my team.
The New York Times recently seems to be willing to give up its journalistic reputation in the medical stories on its hosted blogs and go straight for eyeballs at any price in credibility. The Alzheimer's Association has a good fact sheet about diabetes

http://www.alz.org/national/documents/topicsheet_diabetes.pd...

The order of causation may be the other way around for whatever association there is between diabetes and Alzheimer disease, if a hypothesis about a genetic variant in insulin processing related to Alzheimer disease holds up.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18445701

But right now it is much too early to say yes to to the question posed in the headline of the submitted article. The underlying study

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22810099

has several desirable design features for a human nutrition study, but it still needs to be replicated, and it's an observational study, not an experimental study, so we don't know what kinds of interventions are likely to be of most help in preventing Alzheimer disease.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

See another thread just posted by another HN participant

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4578600

about how rarely supposed breakthrough medical discoveries are even replicated. Don't believe the easy, breakthrough answers until they have been verified.

AFTER EDIT:

The comment responding to my The New York Times recently seems to be willing to give up its journalistic reputation in the medical stories on its hosted blogs and go straight for eyeballs at any price in credibility is of course correct that the New York Times has disclosed that the writer is writing as a blogger, not as a journalist. I think it's regrettable that he nonetheless is able to slap the New York Times brand on an overly speculative post that assumes matters of fact that are not well verified. I'm not sure if all readers are as aware as many HN participants that some long-established journalistic organizations host blogging webpages that have no editorial oversight. I think it would be helpful for readers to be able to distinguish at a glance what sources are professionally edited, and which are people doing their own personal expressions of opinion.
The Veritable Guide To E-Commerce Newsletters
All that work and not one mention of this: Engineers usually really don't like recruiters.

Not being found by recruiters is a feature, not a bug.
Homeowners Insurance Miami - GEFS Insurance & Investments
Stop Overpaying For All Your Insurances

We will compare various insurance companies and get you the cheapest quote's in Florida for your Home, Car, Boat, and Commercial Properties as well as Life, Health and Dental Insurance on your Person(s). We can also assist in securing your financial future through sound retirement planning, investment planning, pension planning, and employee benefits planning.
Getting around San Francisco just got a lot more fun
You don't need to hear to produce your own videos AND add subtitles to them. Some people create, others criticize.
> You're being pedantic about the definition of culture.

Not at all. We're trying to encourage HN posts that provide insight or information.
Pretty sure that Apple tried to trademark it as soon as they launched the new iTunes icon. It's just that they've now gotten the final decision that they can't because one that is very similar to that already exists.

If only the Patent Office worked this way, too - rejecting many more new patents because there's already prior art for that. The problem with the Patent Office is that it's not strict at all about what they validate and approve as a patent. Pretty much anything goes it seems, from what we've seen recently.
This is a wrong move. Recentism trashes bidirectional accessibility. Stable standards are not de facto useless.
Wordpress is only reasonable fast if you use APC, memcached and the MySQL query cache. I never liked the caching plugins. If you use nginx just use the fastcgi_cache module and make cookies part of the cache key or omit the caching of pages where the login cookie is set.
This is a very important post about the many gee-whiz reports we see each week about some new medical breakthrough. Stories like the ones analyzed in the post kindly submitted here regularly make it to the front page of Hacker News, and we all need to practice fact-checking such stories. The low rate of replication of eye-catching stories suggests that if a story reports a great breakthrough, it's better not to submit it here until the breakthrough, if it really exists, is just one more well established fact of medical practice found in medical textbooks.
"Ethics are irrelevant as to whether it's malware or not"

I don't agree. I could understand how a website operator would consider megabox's software "malicious", and I could understand how a user that sees no value in advertising would not since the net effect is the same in the end.
There is also this project:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/b9creations/b9creator-a-...

they also seem to make an optical 3d printer and seem to have actually shipped some of them already.
Snapjoy Adds Brilliant "Copy" Feature
Hm, you're right. There's also the scripting languages in Office, which were definitely management-driven. They share something with JavaScript - a strategy to differentiate an already dominant platform from competitors.

That said, managers usually have little say in defining what the actual language is going to be like or what its other applications will be, because so much has to be deferred to the language designers. Even though Netscape's execs specifically requested a Java-like language, they got something rather different.
I suspect Alzheimer's may turn out to be another symptom cluster, like cancer. The manifestations may be similar, but the etiologies diverse.

There definitely seems to be a genetic component. Whether or not this is an interaction and/or amplification of the dietary/insulin connection ... TBD.
Especially since YouTube makes it really easy to add either a caption file (more work for the uploader, they need to put in timestamps), a transcript file (just the text of what was said, YouTube figures out how to match text to the video), or just do auto captioning with speech recognition. http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/static.py?hl=en&gu...
"Straight from the American Diabetes Association's website"

The American Diabetes Association is sponsored by Kraft Foods and other junkfood sellers/manufacturers, so it might be prudent to take their advice with a grain of salt.

Especially since the idea that sugar doesn't cause diabetes is fucking ridiculous.
I see the optical drives (a very geeky name) being called "burners" instead at Dell and many people call the thumb drives "sticks". I'm not saying people don't use the "drive" terminology just that it is on its way out. Laptops have been outselling desktops for several years, and thin/light ones don't have burners. iPads have been a phenomenal success.

Many people already don't distinguish between transient (RAM) and permanent (HD/Flash) memory. (And that distinction is only something that developers should have to care about anyway.)

So while some people may be aware of drives, it will increasingly go the other way.
"I've never seen a definition of malware that includes hack or DOS tools."

I did a quick search on "stuxnet malware" and the articles linked to in the third and fourth results (by Computer World, and Christian Science Monitor respectively) both call stuxnet malware. It's not a very old word, I don't see why its definition can't evolve or change over time.
I've been administering Wordpress blogs for almost a decade now; hosting for ... 5? 6 years? I'm not sure any more.

Anyhow. I started with Apache. Apache probably works fine if you load the mpm-oh-you-didnt-know-about-mpm-so-sorry module.

My next stop was lighttpd. A fine piece of software, with a persistent bug that caused it to drop into a 500 state if FastCGI instances were ever unavailable.

So now I'm on Nginx. And with some fancy footwork in the rewrite rules to support WP Super Cache, it can serve static files and gzipped HTML straight off disk.

Unsurprisingly, in this configuration, it runs like the clappers.[1][2]

One thing that always surprises me is seeing configurations where Nginx is merely a proxy or load balancer into a bunch of Apache instances. Are you nuts? Stop doing that. Just use Nginx and FastCGI -- thank me later.

[1] At least, it used to do this, until I updated everything and it silently stopped working the way it used to (which I only discovered while outlining my current config in comments below). I mean, thanks to memcached and closer servers and running Percona on a separate server it's still pretty fast, but this change bugs me and you can bet I'll be fixing it later today after work.

[2] Two optimisations I've dropped are the MySQL query cache and a PHP opcode cache.

The query cache because I don't think it buys me enough versus using memcached (just a gut feel, I've got no hard numbers to back me up) and because it often turns into a contention point in read-heavy MySQL instances. Also, by dropping it I can free up more memory for InnoDB.

The opcode cache because they tend to be flaky. I've had bad experiences with all three major ones. If you ever pop Wordpress up on a profiled PHP instance you find that its time is spent overwhelmingly on waiting for MySQL, concatenating strings and then streaming it out to the webserver, for which proper on-disk/in-memory caching is the answer. Time spent loading and compiling .php is minimal by comparison, so why put up with the hassle?

I don't use varnish because the whole philosophy is to let the OS select what to cache in memory, and ... well I already do that. Plus getting ESI to work on frequently updated objects like "recent comment" widgets is a hairy pain in the arse and I just can't be bothered.
Really interesting article. Thanks for posting it!

Lately it seems almost everyone of his articles has been really well thought out and insightful.

Does anyone know if this is what he does fulltime? I assume so seeing as how he said he spent a solid month and a half on the money chart.
http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=xkcd&st... shows 285 stories and 1,303 comments matching 'xkcd'.
> Therefore, it might make sense to use the look-up table approach for densly populated areas to reduce the search time.

Yes, that's my favorite way to apply hierarchical path finding. In the two-level path finding system I wrote for my homebrew MUD as a kid, I precomputed all pairwise shortest paths within each zone (a zone had on the order of 100 rooms) and then all pairwise shortest paths between zone-to-zone transitions (a typical zone had around 5 transitions and each transition belongs to two zones). With these tables, here's all you need to do to find a shortest path between a given pair of rooms:

If the two rooms are in the same zone, consult the intra-zone table for their zone and you're done. Otherwise, for both rooms, find the shortest paths to all transitions in their current zone using the intra-zone tables. Let's say there are 5 transitions in both zones. Then for each of the 20 transition pairs, consult the inter-zone table to find the shortest path between them. That gives you a small set of candidate paths (at most 20 in this example) and you pick the shortest among them.

That's 5 + 5 + 20 = 30 fast table lookups and a comparison of 20 numbers to find the shortest path between any pair of rooms.

The storage cost for this is (100 * 5 / 2) * ((100 * 5 / 2) - 1) / 2 bytes ~= 30 kilobytes for the inter-zone table and 100 * (100 * 99 / 2) bytes ~= 500 kilobytes for the intra-zone tables. That wasn't a trivial amount of memory in those days but it wasn't prohibitive either. Compare that to 10,000 * 99,999 / 2 bytes ~= 50 megabytes for directly storing shortest paths between all pairs of rooms. You couldn't store all that in memory and having to read from disk would more than wipe out the 30:1 advantage in the number of lookups versus the two-level approach.

I'm sure you see the analogy with road networks and highways: a transition is like a highway exit, etc. The important point is that there is a way of decomposing the connectivity graph into subgraphs such that only a small number of edges enter and leave each subgraph.

You can see in my calculation that almost all the space is taken up by the intra-zones tables. It would certainly help to compute intra-zone shortest paths on demand with caching, as you suggest.
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 clone arrives in the form of the FuWote 10.1 Tablet
Matz on Emacs
"Why the f*ck should you care?"

If you want to use the word fuck, use the word fuck. Don't take the cowardly angle of making me think the word while dancing around saying you never actually used it.
Why Your Customers Want You To Be Fun, Transparent, and Even Weird Sometimes
We should all have a choice because we're all exactly the same. We're made of the exact same stuff that's floating out in the universe. There is no universal code that says one group of humans (or individual) should control/rule another. It's all made up by humans and it's going to kill us in the long run.
I'm trying hard to not be that snarky jackass guy, but if you truly "live and breathe design" why is your reasons list full of mystery meat navigation links?
> A live-coding Processing environment addresses neither of these goals. JavaScript and Processing are poorly-designed languages that support weak ways of thinking, and ignore decades of learning about learning. And live coding, as a standalone feature, is worthless.

Woah come on Bret, we're getting there give them a break! I distinctly remember that this was the work of a couple of interns with the help of Resig.

A couple of things - I still don't have live coding for the vast majority of my programming environments - so that little text box is about 10x better than the vim/eclipse + run loop with print statements that most of us use.

Second javascript is brilliant - lazy ways of thinking are brilliant - you will not believe how motivating it is to just get shit on the screen as a learner. I myself have wasted inordinate amounts of time setting up compilers, interpreters, environments, graphics/audio etc. when all I want to do is bloody program the thing in my head. Who cares where the files are? Who cares where the images are? The environment should be designed to get out of my way - not the other way around.

Most importantly of all - javascript is the most forgiving language I have ever seen - and this is gold. There's a reason Google started with python, Twitter with rails, and Facebook started with PHP - no one gives a shit about "strict thinking" or "brutal languages" - that stuff should come way - way later when you actually need it.

Strict languages for learners are a case of premature optimisation. My little brother absolutely loves the new Khan Academy coding environment/system because of the fact that it isn't strict.
I didn't find this especially interesting. Of course, for every interview I have ever gotten, I have been offered the job. I don't have any secrets to offer. I just go for a chat. In fact, from my point of view, the interview is more about learning whether I want the job than worrying about trying to convince them to hire me. If they don't like who I am, then I probably don't want to work for them, either.

My trouble is that I find it extremely hard to get the interviews in the first place (which makes the advice of going to a lot of interviews for practice somewhat laughable to me). I suppose this implies that I am not good at resume and cover letter writing or that I don't network properly. I haven't found any advice on the subject lately that was of much use.
How does it work when the pages have different javascript & CSS links on them?
Interesting, I read the introduction and could only think of three steps myself. Apparently you and I think of hashes in a different way. I went directly from 'list of urls' to 'hash table of urls' (with a very minor note of 'we only need to store yes/no so make the bucket size one bit'). This skips a large part of your train of logic entirely. From there it's the same 'use a couple hashes to avoid collisions', 'use overlapping storage because it's more efficient'.
Well it is average req/s so peak should be much higher, and they probably can average much more than what they are doing now in case of spikes and other such things.

But yeah the title is pretty much useless.
I started using Ruby because I heard the inventor of the language also wrote the Emacs mode. I haven't regretted the choice.
Show HN: I built an app to help discover interesting Street Art.
Or you could check out his site and notice "tangle - explorable explanations made easy", which is a Javascript library that implements the very sorts of interactions he's talking about.

http://worrydream.com/#!/Tangle
At least here in the Midwest, deer and other animals pop onto the road suddenly. Even with robotic, split second reaction times completing the perfect action to avoid an accident, you're still going to have an accident. Children still run into the road. Things drop off trucks unexpectedly. Road conditions change extremely quickly as it rains in the winter then a gust of wind suddenly freezes the rain under your tires. Vehicle malfunctions still happen to cause a sudden blowout, loss of control, or accelerator/brake seize.

Cars may never crash into each other again due to driver error. Cars will still need to be safe for the passengers because crashes will still happen.
yes, packing icu with every lua distribution or standalone app is bad, and we don't even need to think about OS's Unicode capabilities. So every lang deserves to be suck at unicode handling. Because, you know, ICU is big.
Looks like a nice way to stand out. Good work guys.
Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama
To his defense, at least it was short, so just a bit of my time was wasted. A journalist would span the same non-information over 4 pages.
For sure ! Bringing real life hacking to the mass could help people understand hacking culture in general !
When I pull up the pass in Safari, it says "unlimited beer, chocolate, and high"

Is that really how you want to promote your start up?
Yeah, the vulgarity seems off to me. I love a good curse word here and there, but you have use them wisely (or else you just sound like a jackass).
Thanks for your kind words. I'm going to be looking into oDesk soon, and finding work to do in whatever spare time i have.
That is what the kiddies are into, I guess...
Meerkat telescope project has lifespan of at least 20 years and it's control-and-monitoring software is being written in Python.

This is to answer your direct question only because I fail to understand how your paragraphs fit together.