skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, the professor in question was Dana Randall. I believe she was talking about this topic: http://en.scientificcommons.org/42983059

Basically, yes, self-avoiding paths.

This was basically a brief aside in her honors undergrad algorithms course, so the topic was a bit beyond what I was prepared for at the time :)
Sales Source on inc.com is a good read:

http://www.inc.com/author/geoffrey-james
Thanks I thought it was just me going crazy. This is the same on a macbook running Linux with Firefox. Is there a work around?
>They aren't going to deliberately attack core routers out of spite.

Umm, weren't the Chinese fingered (by Google and the USGov) in a giant attempted incursion only a few months back?
Using Pandoc, what my habit has become is have the first line at the top of the file be title metadata:

% Title Goes Here

then make subsequent headings go ahead and start at h1 (rather than h2):

Some h1
=======

This puts an `<h1 class="title">Title</h1>` at the top, with regular unadorned h1's further down the page. So, if you like, you can style the title h1 differently from the other h1's.

It breaks the soft rule of having only one h1 on a page, but otoh looks good, and doesn't require me to go to h4 or h5 very often, so I can live with it. :)
Everytime there is a service outage it makes me feel better about using them in the future. Every outage is actually making the project more reliable since some issuess will only manifest in production. I believe they have a great team that's very knowledgable.
One of the differences between India and China seems to be that in India at least, there's a free 4th estate, and there is no way a Government would be able to block articles like this.

As a matter of fact, through the Right To Information Act, there's an activist who is currently raking up dirt on a whole bunch of politicians serially.

Makes me thankful of the freedoms we enjoy and take for granted!
With the global nature of the Internet and the universal human desire to participate in culture, it's difficult to discuss US copyright law without considering the international effects thereof.

There will always be more "copyright griping thread[s]" until the arbitrary and artificial barriers to universal cultural participation and consumption are torn down, until a Fringe fan in Mombasa can watch and participate in discussion about the latest episode at the same time as someone in Memphis.
This just sounds like a race condition gone weird.

I assume from this description that the update protocol looks something like this:

process-request:
Update-local
push to sync buddy
wait for sync buddy success
reply-with-status
mark state as synced

If the function does the local update and then gets stuck in the state waiting for the buddy to reply, one could imagine the failover daemon not handling that case very well. So while the master might not have acknowledged the transaction, the pair might get jammed trying to complete it.

EBS is a particularily complicated piece of software, and RDS is another layer of complication built on top of that.
Bugs clearly happen, and it's an unfortunate state of affairs.
Yes, you could do that. On all the devices I've played with the kernel+initrd image is a standard format and exposed as a single partition. You'd just dd your new one over it and reboot. But this would be fragile, to say the least.
>PS If y'all have more articles like this, let me know.

Here's one I was just perusing yesterday, on the origin of the concept of "less wrong".

TLDR: our education system teaches us to strive to get the right answer, or be "right". But in truth there is no "right", just progressively less wrong, and there are multiple undesirable consequences of the emphasis of the former in our education system (from rigid beliefs that can't evolve with new data, to people getting dejecting with fields like hard sciences when they can't be "right" easily):

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cult/lesswrong/lesswrong/

"People in our culture, by and large, tend to presume that someone, somewhere knows what is "right," and that each individual's task is either to be that particular someone or to work as hard as they can to learn from that someone what "right" is ... the mindset long predates science as a social activity, but ... science certainly encourages it, and so it is appropriate that science should contribute to correcting it ...

In an enormous variety of distinct fields of inquiry the same general pattern is becoming clear: there is no such thing as "right," the very concept needs to be replaced with "progressively less wrong." The difference is far from semantic. "Right" is measured by proximity to some fixed idea, "progressively less wrong" by how far people have gotten from where they started. It is the aspiration to be "right" that leads to rigid hierarchical social organizations of all kinds, including educational systems. Wanting to be "progressively less wrong" takes one (and societies) in quite different directions entirely: it encourages life-long inquiry by every individual, a respect for past wisdom and enthusiasm for contributing to future understanding, and an appreciation of the enormous value of interactions between unique individuals each of whom has unique perspectives to contribute."
It's about 38 minutes into the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alko6wQo8mk#t=38m
Interestingly India and China are pretty close on PDI, MAS and UAI, with some differences in Individualism [India 48, China 20, USA 91], and Long Term Orientation [India 61, China 118, USA 29].

But cutting off freedom of information like this would be impossible.

Perhaps it has something to do with the non-homogeneity of India? There is not as much trust and social cohesion as in China perhaps, and therefore more willingness to openly question those in power.
I think it's nice. It's super functional and easy to find information. It may not be pretty, but I know exactly where to go to find what I want.

I like that the urls are consistent. To find package documentation, I go to golang.org/pkg/<name of import>. For example, for http docs, I go to golang.org/pkg/net/http.

For most languages, I resort to a Google search to find package docs. This is true for python, c++, and even Java. I rarely have to google search something in Go.

I think the site very much fits in with their goal of simple and orthogonal. I actually wish more language documentation followed suit and made it easier for programmers to search for docs.

Sure, everyone wants a pretty site, but it's not like they need to advertise anything. It gets the job done very efficiently.
Spoliers (it's very long): he got one question correct, sadly.

I feel for him given the preparation and detail he put into it. I missed a few SAT questions my senior year but helpfully, The College Board decided to make the test easier the following year and magically recalibrate my scores to perfect. It was too late for colleges to care and the expected thousand girlfriends never materialized but it did make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
I live in SC and in the last few months complained to the SC DOR numerous times that their online "ePay" system was horribly outdated and a huge security hole. I accidentally stumbled on a possible SQL injection exploit while I was making a tax payment last month and reported it to them... No response.

This is just a prime example of the incompetence of state government IT departments. They likely paid millions of dollars in 1995 for this system to be developed (written in classic ASP and throws very detailed errors to users all the time) and just never thought to update it since? This system probably processes hundreds of millions of dollars in tax payments every year. You would think this would be the one system the state government would want to keep up to date and secure.

Also they had my credit card on file so it was one of the ones compromised that was "encrypted" (honestly I suspect since the system was designed in the 90's that original recipe DES was used).
It's simply and minimalist. Just like the language.
When Should I Use Protected Method Visibility In Ruby?
I'd tend to disagree: I think fundamental language design is very important. Optimizations after the language tree has been built are an entirely different concept. Important nonetheless, but different to perhaps what the author is trying to achieve.

Personally, I think he is going about teaching it in a non-trivial manner making such things as you mentioned above more complex than they perhaps need to be. But, perhaps that's just how I've been taught how to write compilers... fundamentals often are the hardest to "un-learn".
I doubt the "paging threshold" referred to in this post has anything to do with paging to disk. It probably just means the point at which the operations folks' pagers start going off.
Notice that neither JGC nor any of the responders here have mentioned Alonzo Church, the inventor of Lambda Calculus, and a man whose contributions to computer science were arguably every bit as fundamental as Turing's.

My prediction is that if Turing ever gains the sort of widespread recognition that JGC wants and that Turing probably deserves, Church will become the Monsieur Curie of their intellectual marriage who for reasons of political correctness will best be left unacknowledged.
FYI, Pandoc uses ~~two tildes~~ for strikeout syntax.
They just accept this as the way things are.

I can remember when this was true of people in Taiwan, as I was living in Taiwan when it was still a dictatorship. But I also know people in China who have told me very explicitly, "If China had a free press, the Communist Party would only last a week." As information flows in, desire for freedom expands. The common people in China already do not enjoy "stability." By acknowledgement of the official Chinese press, instances of social instability (street protests and even riots) number in the many thousands each year, as peasants are displaced from their homes in land grabs by the local dictators, and as official corruption and party control of the police and the courts deny people recourse when their rights are violated. People I've met in China were embarrassed by the situation there already in 1982, the first time I was there, and they are losing hope that the current economic advancement is bringing with it political freedom. That is just what happened in Taiwan. People eventually gained the courage to demand their rights. I remember lots of people in both places who told me about their desire for freedom long, hard years before that freedom was won in Taiwan. Taiwan's example will point the way for people in China. They can have democracy and a free press if they stand up together.

Chinese social scientists are deeply frightened by the huge wealth disparities between the differing regions of China, which are greater than those that existed in Yugoslavia before Yugoslavia disintegrated. When you consider that barely more than half the population of China is even conversant in the standard national language,

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...

there is plainly a lot of possibility that China will repeat its historical pattern (experienced during my mother's childhood) of being split into regions not really united by a national government with effective control of all the territory now labeled as "China."
That is why I use Spideroak for remote backup and use Dropbox only for syncing files.

Any thing important is also backed locally and at yet another remote site owned by me. I do not really trust Spideroak to not eat my files either.
Living there, I was curious about that too.

See this link: http://geert-hofstede.com/japan.html
I think the pricing right now is mostly to encourage behavioural change. A more sustainable model would be subscriptions (e.g pay $10-$15 a month like a P.O Box and get your mail on your way from work instead of delivered to your house without notifications on arrivals etc) and I think once they see enough repeat behaviour they would go there right away.

Still wonder why they don't just encourage that behaviour right away by giving people free for a number of months then encouraging them to pay once trial period is over. Will probably hasten behavioural change process (people like to make maximum use of free whilst building dependency unintentionally).

Anyway, I'm just a lowly idiot. Def don't know as much about their biz as they sure do.
Well, that's the same in any concurrent application. If you don't think about race conditions while coding, you shouldn't be using a concurrent language.

This is the same for anything. For example, a webserver written in C++ that uses pthreads might have a #define that determines the number of threads in the thread pool. If the default is 1 and nobody changes this in development, it should not break when someone changes it to 2 or 3, otherwise the code is wrong.

As for your argument about Java, there's nothing you can do in Java that you can't do in assembly. This argument is invalid. Go's strength is in making complex things simple. For example, if you wanted to build a distributed system (across machines), in Go you just use "net/rpc" it would handle it for you. In Java, you'd have like 3 layers of abstract classes that define a serializable type, you'd make some kind of listener class that receives responses from an RPC call, and do tons of other boilerplate. In Go, you just make a function call. That's it.

What exactly can't you do in Go that you can do in Go? Maybe generics, but that just complicates code unnecessarily most of the time. Sure, I've done my share of generic programming, but I've also written non-trivial, several thousand LOC programs in Go, and my Go code was much simpler and easier to read.

BTW, Java sucks for concurrent programming. I hate that stupid Runnable interface (or whatever they call it these days). I'd much rather have a bunch of functions that can be called synchronously, or in a go-routine and have simple checks in place to eliminate race conditions.
"Noise ordinances? Can't you see I'm disrupting here?"
A lot of the SAT-apologist comments here missed one of the most amazing parts of the post:

> "The correlation between [...] combined verbal and math scores and freshman GPA is .52;"

.52! And it's pulled straight from the College Board's Terms and Conditions! And later on, it goes on to explain that high school GPA's correlation is just .54! The graph he produced to visualize the scatter involved with a .52 correlation is both hilarious and horrifying.
"App" or "Application"? I searched for "App" and nothing showed in Google...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+Web+App+Design+Handbo...
Yes, but unless they can convince large publishers that writing games for Linux is a good idea, it's not much of a refuge, is it?

Having a hundred thousand people sign up for his Steam group might be enough to get the ball rolling that way, though.
Dipjar: An electronic tip jar
Ah, I remember my first job, where I worked on a huge, legacy C++ project. My first day of work was spent building and fixing linker errors. After that, to test it, I rebuilt everything from scratch, and it took about that long, 30-45 minutes. While waiting for it to build, I wrote my own PHP time tracking system (click when I got in, click again when I went home). Ironically, wasting a day on compiling caused me to save hours worth of work keeping track of hours.
Actually, the effective hiring procedures of either kind are rare everywhere, but, yes, that is otherwise a fair summary of my FAQ post on company hiring procedures,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543

which I too thought seems to fit in with several of the comments in this thread. Regrettably, most companies miss out on opportunities to use the best available hiring procedures, preferring the traditional methods to methods validated by research.
tl;dr: he got one wrong, discussed in section 14.2.4.
I read that as referring to the lexer hack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lexer_hack
I don't necessarily agree with your first two sentences, but I definitely agree with the last one. I know they're smart.

I do have some concerns that they're having too much downtime. If there's one small flaw in the system it seems that the whole thing begins to fail.

If they fix the problem, and it impacts the larger system in some other unknown way, a different equally crippling issue could present itself in the future. I'd like to be sure they're putting a huge effort into making sure these problems don't happen, and I don't have those assurances at the moment.

First things first, a better status dashboard that actually reflects how issues impact customers is needed. I'd rather have everything working fine and the status be 'red' than have servers down, support tickets, calls, emails, etc and see a 'green' on the dashboard.
Are Amazon and other digital stores trying to dupe customers?
A big, hairy problem that a YC company should take on: modeling complexity and predicting emergent phenomena like this. (Ditto Amazon’s outage.)

It wouldn’t be just for data centers, but that’s a good place to start.
Citi Analyst Fired After TechCrunch Leaks
I don't find golang site ugly at all, especially when compared with http://www.ruby-lang.org/en
Graphic Design Critic Jessica Helfand on Short Attention Span Media
I interviewed with one of the company where the first two screening round consisted of pair programming (in person, on university campus) on my own laptop. I think that was the best way to conduct interviews. Much better than the phone screens.
I'm not so sure what's needed here is a spec.

What people really want is for all Markdown implementations to be basically the same so they don't have to learn any implementation-specific ideosyncrasies to switch from one to another.

The problem though, as I see it, tends to go away under certain circumstances. And the circumstances, I think, are these:

* If you've got a strong implementation, robust, actively-maintained, and runs fast,

* is easy to obtain, install, and use,

* is well tested and well documented, and

* has just the right blend of sensible additions to the syntax (for example, tables, def lists, LaTeX math, etc.) --- done tastefully,

then folks will just use that, model their own implementations after that, and just overall start considering that to be the standard.

I think this has been slowly and steadily happening with Pandoc.

And, aside from all that, two additional "killer features" that Pandoc seems to have over other implementations:

1. it can convert to/from other doc markup formats, thus making it easy to just convert your existing docs to pandoc-markdown and then use that as your master source format to generate other formats you might need; and

2. with its carefully-chosen set of additional features, it has been slowly proving itself capable of being a replacement for raw LaTeX for certain types of longer technical documents.

My understanding is that there's even some features in the works (for the next release) for converting between markdown dialects --- which would make it even easier to convert markdown files of various flavors into plain standard pandoc-markdown.

So, if you're looking for a standard, I'd suggest that it's for the most part already here. :)
6 days ago the poster was calling it their "language of choice" and saying other nice things[1], so perhaps they're just having a bad day with debugging a deadlock.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4677022
*under-appreciated

;)
While I'm a different person at the age of 30 (Just finished my A.S. two days ago with a 3.7 GPA), I have to admit that I was extremely lazy as a teenager. As a matter of fact, I was almost certainly the laziest person in my class. Keeping that in mind, I achieved the second highest score on the PSAT in my school. I don't think that a standardized test as easy as the SATs is a good indicator of work ethic.

In my opinion, the completion of a college degree in combination with one's GPA add up to a pretty good, but not perfect, indicator of one's work ethic. Standardized tests on the other hand, could identify intelligence, but probably not in their current forms.
Heroism and humility: Meet the "Fukishima 50" from the Japanese Nuclear Disaster
My high school required students to take the ASVAB in addition to the ACT (SAT wasn't offered, so I had to go to a testing center for it).

I know a guy who honestly tried on the math section. He got the single point for signing his name, but missed all the questions. The first question is "2+2".
Sounds like the process worked. interviewing is pretty much a lost art. So it goes.
Innovation and inclusion - a matter of space and time
You don't really need to identify the correct answer; you only have to be able to find an answer that you're sure isn't correct. Of course, that's much easier if you know what the right answer is, but there's pretty commonly one obviously wrong option.
Submitting Y Combinator Application Early?
I have been editing and resubmitting my application as I find new information and better ways of explaining my project. If the early submissions get the added benefit of being viewed earlier - how does YC evaluate your application if you've resubmitted it at a later time?
What does that have to do with anything? Who cares what google does or doesn't do? That is rather the point of this particular thread of discussion, in case you missed.
> The problem, it seems to me, is a political one, and it has not been solved.

Sure. But all we have at the moment is the political solution. Even a shitty distorted market has a chance at doing a better job.
I know there are lots of smart people working there but just look at the sheer amount of AWS offerings. Amazon certainly gets credit for quickly putting out new features and services but it makes me wonder if their pace has resulted in way too many moving parts with an intractable number of dependencies.
This sounds like interesting work. Indeed I think those submitting requests need to thnk carefully about how to make compelling arguments. I'm thankful for the work you and your team are doing. saurik: As I asked "Am I missing something here?", the answer is of course "I am", but I continue to learn. I'm glad to hear you're getting involved with this.
Most tech-type people don't like WYSIWYG. I know I don't. The product that my company makes has a very nice WYSIWYG editor built into it. For a hackathon I replaced it with a Markdown editor and all the other developers went nuts (sadly, for various reasons, it never made it into the real product).

The main appeal is Markdown lets us write formatted text without ever having to use the mouse or figure out what the current WYSIWYG editor's key commands are. Often times -- like making nested bulleted lists -- there just plain aren't any key commands. I'd much rather type a few square brackets and create a nice hyperlink on the fly than invoke some silly menu, paste in my link in the window that pops up, create the display text, etc etc.
And as of now, with 18 hours to go, they're over the line at $766K.
>(Wolfram?)

Wolfram is largely considered a crackpot by actual scientists and mathematicians, and for very good reason. See: http://masi.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/
I don't think the divide between research and industry languages is as deep as you imply. Take your examples: purity and strict typing. Purity has been adopted wholesale by Clojure and has influenced C++11 (constexpr implies purity in addition to many other things). Go, the subject of the post, is stricter about type conversions than the C family languages are. Java's type-safe implementation of generics was influenced by ML.
> but it was pretty clear that to get the lowest possible score you have to know the correct response to every question.

Not exactly. To get the lowest possible score, you only need to know a incorrect response to every questions. This is a very different thing, as it is not uncommon for a question to have some obviously incorrect answers.