skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So the last line made me think: why do I hate the idea of the All-American Basketball Alliance[1], but support programs to increase diversity in software?

But it's not a contradiction: I have seen nothing to lead me to believe that a talented player of any race will not get a fair chance in the NBA. It's all about winning, but the opportunity is there for everyone.

So isn't SV all about winning too? Yes, it is—but we know a lot less about what leads to winning. There are no draft combines where everyone gets show what they can do. Nobody writes code competitively directly against other programmers on TV to prove they can produce at a high level. Companies play it by ear. The NBA knows how to evaluate talent. We don't.

Here's a fun example: "PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job. No PayPal people would ever have used the world “hoops.” Probably no one even knew how to play “hoops.” Basketball would be bad enough. But “hoops?” That guy clearly wouldn’t have fit in. He’d have had to explain to the team why he was going to go play hoops on a Thursday night. And no one would have understood him."[2]

Welp, guess I wouldn't have been able to get hired at PayPal. Not only do I like to play basketball, I've said "shooting hoops" a lot. You're going to turn down someone who aced your tests because of a hobby and the phrase he used to describe it? You really think that's the secret to success? You're flying by the seat of your pants in a world without good metrics and you don't know which things you did contributed to your success and which things didn't. You're actively discouraging diversity of culture (which is not directly the same thing as diversity of gender/race, but it makes it a lot harder to have the latter).

And it's that still-sometimes-present active discouragement of diversity that I find frustrating about many parts of the programmer community.

[1] a basketball league venture in the southern US that required players be white, that I believe folded quickly a couple of years ago

[2] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels...
I'm only 34, but my first hard drive had a capacity of 40MB.

I am genuinely excited to be alive at a time when people can describe having a portable computer with a 128GB persistent ram disk as "making do".

No snark intended. Technology is amazing. That is all.
Meet Infor's Charles Phillips, CEO Of The World's Largest Startup
I don't think that "creative" people would fail the test. Creativity has nothing to do with finding smartass solutions to puzzles. It has little to do with even solving puzzles.

Creativity is seeing, connecting and coming up with things other people don't. The main prerequisite is usually grunt work. We only see the results, not the messy process behind James Dyson's vacuum cleaner with thousands of prototypes, or Bob Noyce's integrated circuit. What made him so creative was his knowledge and understanding of the world of semiconductors and the ability to question things.

I strongly believe that any inventor with a similar story would score high on an IQ tests and would not manifest his creativity by making up unlikely theories. Admittedly, its a sign of intelligence to understand the question and the context in which it is being asked. The world is full of opportunities to show ones creativity. Picking one of 4 answers in a test is not one of those.
I actually tried to convince them that this stuff was very simple and that they could do it. No interest whatsoever. I think what was going on behind the scenes is that they were in talks to be acquired (or planning to be in talks) and they really wanted their product to work. They probably also had a number of challenges of their own to deal with. In that context, it may have made sense to pay whatever was necessary to get going.
Help me with the non-sequitur from buckets to front-end code.

Let me take a guess though:

Things you enjoy: [backend-code]

Things had to do at the startup: [buckets, frontend-code, backend-code]

Things you have to do at a big company: [backend-code]

Thus making the big-company more pleasant because you didn't enjoy frontend or bucket filling?
It's a nice thought, but for me at least, marketing has ruined my trust in businesses, and my initial reaction to this email would be "buzz off, if I wanted to buy more of your stuff, I'd go to your site. Leave me alone."

I don't know how you would do this without it looking like marketing spam.
> In the hands of a human, decisions like these might be viewed as biased. For a Google algorithm, they are simply a matter of numbers.

This is pure nonsense. Algorithms are written by humans and are just as biased as their creators.
Nobody should learn to code alone
It's great to see more development of the language! MoonScript is great if you're looking for the niceness of CoffeeScript in an embedded environment (Lua's semantics also behave more sanely than Javascript's). I have roughly 5000 lines of MoonScript powering my side project [1], and it's been a pleasure to write.

Any thoughts of letting the 'do' keyword support coffeescript-style 'do' semantics as well? Invoking a multi-line anonymous function is currently a bit impractical, and allowing do to invoke a single function parameter would make that a lot nicer, and allow for capturing variable's in a closure more easily. Example from the coffeescript docs:

for filename in list
do (filename) ->
fs.readFile filename, (err, contents) ->
compile filename, contents.toString()

[1] http://www.codingspellbook.com/
Ditto, but... I think the point is that it can all change, quickly.

I was around in the first dot-com boom/bust, and do understand it could happen again, but I'm less pessimistic that things would crash again as hard and as fast. From an IT perspective, there's simply more technology powering more people's lives and businesses than there was 10-12 years ago. Mobile computing, cheap computers, widespread internet have all made "the web" far more entrenched and important to all collapse at the same time. The support/demand for all the IT jobs is too broad across too many sectors.

Doesn't mean demand won't fluctuate or slow down or reverse, but not likely all at once within just a few months.

Gentle plug: http://indieconf.com is an upcoming conference to help freelancers learn about and deal with these sorts of issues - self-employment, boom/bust cycles, pricing, legal, etc. :)
Hopefully, Canadian law enforcement will respect the letter and spirit of the law and arrest only those who commit violent crimes.

When has that ever happened? In my experience, law enforcement always stretches it's powers to the limit, and only retreats when courts or legislatures explicitly set limits. Now, there are limits in this law: the protestor wearing the mask has to be doing something illegal before wearing the mask becomes a crime in itself. But who makes the determination on the scene as to whether the protestor is doing something illegal? Law enforcement. So, while the intent of the law will is to reduce the damage done by masked protestors, the effect of the law will be to give law enforcement yet another legal club to use against all protestors, peaceful or not. After all, if the Occupy Wall Street protests have taught us anything, it is that law enforcement sees any defiance of its authority, no matter how peaceful, as dangerous and illegal. Therefore, my prediction is that this law against masks will be used indiscriminately, against all protestors, peaceful or not. For that reason, I think this is a terrible law and that it should be repealed as soon as possible.
I like Summrly. It came in to my attention when it was featured in the Appstore as Editor's Choice.

I have been poking around Circa for the last two week as well and I prefer this format better.

It's more playful, more to discover. It took a little bit to get used to the gestures, but I like it.

I like this approach more than getting pushed updates on my pre-selected news stories (how Circa works). Problem with Circa is that you have to make a decision right then and there. You have to decide if you care to hear about this story in the future or not. And the result is a) i subscribe to very little subject or b) I over subscribe to many subjects and get overwhelmed with updates, and this dilutes my interest in all of the subject.

But that's not how we generally read the Newsaper or any content for that matter. We often read the side lines. the news before and after, or the surrounding industries. That's the reason why I think Circa will have a hard time converting me to a daily user of their app. Summrly on the other hand, i load it 5 times a day.

Anyway, Hearing that a young entrepreneur is behind this is even more impressive. Fantastic work!
Arctic Melt: The New Cold War
I know it's kind of tangential, but one of the MASSIVE benefits of using EC2 and clouds for hosting is the simplicity of provisioning new machines when problems occur (nodes dying, high traffic, etc.).

One attitude to take when using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is to always expect failure - nodes can easily disappear when a problem occurs and take out your entire website.

The best backup plan you can have for this is to capture the entire configuration of your stack in some version controlled way. One of the tools I use for this falls under the domain of "configuration management", with the best products being Chef[1] or Puppet[2], or just writing a normal bash script that installs your Rails stack and checks out your code from github.

When utilizing these technologies, I usually do the following:

1. Create a virtual image that has your CM tools + dependencies installed on it.
2. Add a bootstrap script that runs at boot (usually /etc/rc.local on Linux). This script will acquire and parse user-data[3] that is provided in the provisioning request to EC2[4], an then kick off your main configuration logic.
3. Capture the image and use it as your base image that you perform deployments from.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions with this method! It's a bit overkill at the learning phases of IaaS clouds and OS administration, but it will save you a TON of time down the road as a programmer.

[1] Chef: http://www.opscode.com/chef/
[2] Puppet: http://puppetlabs.com
[3] http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/2007-03-01/Develope...
[4] This user-data should contain runtime arguments that your configuration scripts can use to run properly (e.g. a specific git commit version or the hostname of your database node).
When I was offered a job earlier this year, the salary was substantially higher than my current salary, but that was not including the extra expenses I would incur.

My previous job I worked from home and traveled by air. My travel to the airport was covered by mileage reimbursement. Basically, I never paid for gas for work.

In my new job, I new I'd have a 25 mile (1-way) commute, coming to $160+ a month in gas. That took $2,000 right out of the higher salary.

On the same note, when I moved from the Bay Area to Denver, I stopped having to pay $140/mn in BART passes and worked from home instead, which was a nice savings in both money and time.

However, I did enjoy my time on BART. I had my laptop out the entire time working on code, except when I was unlucky enough to have to get on at Embarcadero and not get a seat until El Cerrito.
There isn't really a substitute for Excel if you want to use big spreadsheets (more than, say, a few hundred rows and a few dozen columns). Neither LibreOffice nor MS Office is really good for hard-core curve fitting, but Excel has a few options that LibreOffice lacks (at least nth-degree polynomial fits and maybe some others). Even when you can use LibreOffice for your spreadsheets, it's often significantly slower.

LibreOffice works just find for my word-processing needs.

Edit: Forgot about Gnumeric for a moment. It's probably twice as good as LibreOffice for what I need, but doesn't do 100% of what Excel does.
Yes, heroku will be a good option as you don't have to worry about web server, db and other setup. If you are a one man team bootstrapping your startup or project, heroku will save you a lot of time. On top of that, you can start free and later on worry about paying and scaling. I recommend to use beanstalk for git private repository instead of github that only provides free public one.
__The Five Stages of Coping With Surveillance__

1. Denial: This man isn't going to constantly video tape me for an uncomfortable amount of time.

2. Anger: I can't believe this man is constantly video taping me for an uncomfortable amount of time!

3. Bargaining: Maybe this man can be reasonable?

4. Depression: There is no reasoning with this man.

5. Acceptance: Constant surveillance is good for me. If I am uncomfortable, it is because I have something to hide.
I disagree with a few tips here. Rather than code to exact resolutions (eg: `if ([CCDirector sharedDirector].winSize.width == 568)`) build your games to be adaptive to the screen. That way when a new device is released you don't end up going through and making your code swiss cheese.

A better idea is to maybe make decisions when a size is greater than a certain amount, but still layout to relative amounts to the screen. This will make it easier to support landscape and portrait on 4/3 devices as well and not just 3/2 and 16/9 screens. Perhaps add additional HUD when you have the space.

Better yet, setup your simulator for several different sizes, and every now and then make sure everything still fits: http://0xced.blogspot.com/2012/08/prepare-your-apps-for-new-...

Later come talk to us at Apportable (YC2011 http://apportable.com/ ) and you can use our SDK to have your Cocos2D game run natively on hundreds of different resolutions and DPIs on Android.
They're talking about links to infringing content (people tweeting file locker links for movies/games) and stuff like people posting photos they don't own.
Thanks. I will have to think a bit harder, and see whether I can rescue my statement in modified form.
I've been using http://tvcountdown.com for quite some time now and I haven't been disappointed. It has lots of series, also some British ones. It's really nice that it converts the airtimes to local times, since I live in Europe and always forget how many hours I have to add or substract.
Why do these companies think it's a good idea to refuse to sell to a customer depending on where they live?

I can understand in the case of Netflix etc where they legally cannot provide access outside of the areas where they have the licences, but there is no such issue here - Microsoft is fully able to distribute their own product, and there isn't even a shipping issue since it's just online.

Even Google has this problem, where they won't ship their devices from the play store to anywhere outside of a few countries, even though they would be fully able to.
The Coming Collapse of Average Managers and Employees
What is the consequence if 3 co-founders start a company, and only find out about this requirement a year later?

See item 7 of http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html to know why I asked it.
My grandfather is 96, he's been on dialysis for nearly 2 years now. He has zero kidney function and a tumor that has literally taken the place of one of the kidneys. His mind is sharp and he's totally lucid.

He won't let us sell his cars. He believes that he's going to get better. He talks about it all the time. "As soon as I get better, we'll..."

It doesn't matter if one lives 20 years or until the heat death of the universe, everyone has the same experience. Death is unexpected and unwelcome. And completely inevitable.
If you are sending documents back and forth with clients then I still think word is better. The fully integrated review mode is nice showing the history, not versions of the documents.

Also, the only time I really focus on non-code for hours at a time is when I am flying and thats when its nice to be able to work on a) production descriptions b) sales decks and c) job posts or other docs, all of which are better in the Office application.
...I'm not alone.

I had no idea the author was 14 when he wrote it. I was reading it when I was only three years younger as my first programming book. Unfortunately it wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but it definitely helped me get started in the world of programming.
Leverage LinkedIn Contacts to Help With Task
In my experience, people drink coffee daily in order to function normally vs being sleepy. OTOH, they go for Red Bull and other energy drinks exceptionally, if/when they need an extra push.

If a large enough group of people regularly desire such drinks at work, it might just be an statistically odd group, but by default I conclude that they often need that extra boost. In my mind it suggests frequent crunch. Whether it's imposed by the company, the context, or the people - I'm not judging, especially not a startup.

YMMV, I'm certainly biased since a) I only drink water and milk, and b) I have personally seen even worse than energy drinks being offered to help people work longer and harder.
How an AWS Outage Can Cause Issues Even When You're in Multi-Availability Zones
Thanks so much for posting this. I had just recently gone through a bit of Omni nostalgia and was wondering where to find copies of the originals. It's hard to specify, exactly, but I think Omni had a powerful influence on my life (perhaps unconsciously). Reading through the first issue, I'm struck by the optimism and the almost naive -- by modern standards -- reverence for science. And yet, those feelings are largely still with me and have no doubt led to my career in software development.

Also standing out, a survey about the expected date of possible events:

1. First woman elected president.
2. Nuclear war between the US & USSR
3. US commits troops to Africa to counter Communist incursions
4. Gasoline reaches 25 cents/liter
5. First terrorist use of nuclear weapons
6. Return to pre-sixties standards of morality and the end of "Permissive Society."
7. Manned landing on Mars
8. First public paying passengers on an orbital spaceflight
9. Industrialization of space becomes an important source of income
10. Computer beats (human) world chess champion
11. World shortage of animal protein makes meat too expensive for the average american household.
12. Contact made with extra-terrestrial life.
13. A human is cloned
14. ESP is accepted as fact by the majority of scientists.
15. Average life expectancy is 100 years or more
16. Computers have self-awareness and are more intelligent than humans.
17. The majority of South American governments become communist or ultra-left
18. Economic collapse of the west as predicted by Marxist commentators.
19. Revolution in the USSR leads to overthrow of the existing regime and replacement by a liberal "pro-western" government.
20. Marriage as an institution virtually disappears within the US, with over 75% of babies born out of wedlock.

One amazing thing about this survey is that the timeline ended with 2000+. Meaning, the time we're living in now was the far out future by Omni standards. And of these, I believe only #4 and #19 (partially) came about before 2000. Since then, only #8, #10.
After being on a $75/month Sprint plan that delivers overwhelmingly mediocre service, this is the device that will get me to jump from contract to prepaid devices.
Boom: data! I take that as a great compliment. Thanks, and I hope he gets power back soon.
I bet younger people have been "funded" before but there should be a clear definition to "VC funding" that guides this race.

What I mean is that it's easy for friends and family to "fund" a child's project but that isn't a fair comparison to what Nick has done.

I'd suggest something like $250,000 from VC that isn't a friend or family member. That would still qualify Nick's earlier round of funding and give us something to rank others in this race to the youngest.
MIT algorithm predicts Twitter trending topics up to five hours in advance
Only thing which holds me back from grabbing one of these is the 4.7" screen. It strikes me that it would be a sacrifice of comfort for screen real estate (and space for high-end components). That said, I've never held one for more than a minute.

Anyone have a 4.7"+ (S3, One X, Optimus G, etc) who can share their assessment of Size vs Usability?
Why don't mobile OSes have built in help features for apps?
Inflation + population growth will result in increases unless you make a conscious decision to cut. So if you leave something alone in the budget, you'd expect it to increase naturally over time. Even if there was no internet boom, and the budget continued to rise, tax receipts would still go up b/c the economy must grow to accommodate all those kids entering the workforce each year. If you hold the line on spending increases, not eliminate the increases but put them below the rate of growth, you'll have a surplus.
New development job guidelines
9/10 really? Is this phone really better than GS III or Nokia 920? Doesn't look like.
Your list of videos below the video player keep jumping to the bottom instead of sticking at the top of the list for me.

Also, if you plan on continuuing with this project, I recommend improving your web page's performance: http://imgur.com/t02Hb (Although, great job at correctly ordering the CSS and JS files in your HTML - that is such an easy and great way to improve your page's speed.)
Agreed. That was just a quick hack for detecting that a device is an iPhone 5.
Intel, Developing a 48-Core Processor
No, this can't replace keyboards and wide screens because of incomparable productivity. More like holographic screens and input devices which can take a size of a big monitor (or bigger) and offer convenient interaction methods, while not taking really any space.

What I meant, is something along these lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKyQhriOrD0
As others have mentioned, the foods mentioned don't seem to reflect any deep thought or consideration of various diets.

I just wanted to point out that she mentions diabetics as one example of "things to consider", yet the "top 5 foods" are all carbs, except for the basically nutritionally-void sugar free red bull.
At half the price?
Worse for me on my (1024 x 600) netbook: the actual content wasn't even completely visible until I shrunk the font size several notches.
To be fair, the author does suggest adaptive strategies all over the article. In practice, it's not uncommon to mix adaptive for the general case together with special cases optimized for a few specific, common and popular resolutions.
Yeah, try playing some latest RPGs like Witcher 2 and etc. on a touch screen. Comments are welcome ;)

Those who need fast typing won't exchange keyboard for a touch screen ever. I didn't say touch screen isn't useful. But it's not a satisfactory replacement for older technologies like keyboards. It's just a useful addition. Replacements will come later.
A History of MIT's Participation in the Apollo Spacecraft [video]
Here's my anecdote:

I cut my teeth programming MC6811's with eprom storage. I'm more than happy to program a PIC in assembly to make my projects go, but I'm super impressed with what today's army of weekend warriors can do with their arduinos.
As an aside, I am amazed how much conversation CNN's story has fueled and continues to fuel...and it has been so many years! Whether it was a good representation or not, it was one of the first to really discuss the topic, and there is a lot of value in that.
I am also thinking about going over to Prepaid T Mobile Monthly4G plan which costs $50 bucks. I am not just sure what's the catch.
With price as a consideration, I think the reviewer thinks it is. At half the price, I think it need only be close product-wise to be a net "better".

That says, I think the build looks better than S3 and software potentially better than both. Completely unqualified though, just my impressions from reviews.
Makes sense. But I will give an Arduino to the next senior citizen I meet and find out for sure.
Shunning Amazon, Booksellers Resist a Transformation