skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> civilian demining which demands a 99% clearance rate.

Is that an actual official classification? It seems a bit low. "There were 1000 mines here, and we found 990 of them. Good enough, I say. Move in, and bring your kids!"
I agree with everything you've said, but this still doesn't address why you think that diversity is good in and itself apart from blind faith. As I've alluded to in other comments, I have a feeling it's more to do with alleviating some sort of cultural guilt about racism. If it's not about that, then why aren't we complaining about the other ways in which the ruby community is not diverse?

With numbers as they are, it's just as likely that the organizers could pick a random sample of people qualified to give talks and still come up with an all white male audience. If you were to pick an entirely white-male sample out of a bag, would you resample because the results weren't sufficiently diverse? If so, I'm trying to find out why.
Nice work, great design. Just one thing imho, the font size of "Athletable" is less than the description so your site name doesn't really "hit" me. The first thing I read on your site is "Pool, ping pong ...". I would recommend making "Athletable" a bit larger.
Doesn't work very well in sand.
I couldn't help but post, I run a very similar business model to the one that is described in the article and i can confirm that it is a very successful model. We are slowly at the stage of try to scale out.

The "terrifying cashflow" problems are very real, we take the model of taking a modest wage as to not cripple it the cash flow. We also have put on our first staff member which we are pretty excited about.

Its interesting to hear that others are using the residual cashflow to create a product. We have tried to generate a couple of differente products but it hasn't out performed the consulting arm.
Why not just send him money as-is?
I'm not so sure about this bit:

> Resumes should be summaries, with more detail for recent positions, less detail for more distant ones. If you’ve been in industry for ten years, you can have a second page. No one needs more than two.

I agree with this in principle, and strongly 'implemented' this approach as well in an earlier version of my CV.

[To be fair, I'm looking for a product management role, and not a dev job, so maybe it's different here?]

But recruiters just kept asking me for a more detailed version so often, that I just gave up and made a 2-pager. I personally believe it goes into far too much detail than is necessary, but the difference in response is quite stark from both startups and BigCos alike.

From the other side of the issue, when recruiting PMs or analysts, I always made a conscious effort to ensure that CVs that fell afoul of 'industry standard guidelines' weren't overlooked solely for those reasons. As in, I honestly didn't give a shit if it was one page, or two, or six, as long as it gave the information I was looking for. (However, I suspect I may have been in a minority then..)
That looks pretty cool. I don't think it's correct to advertise it as "clearing" minefields though. It looks like a useful tool for identifying them, and making them a bit less miney.

My understanding is that manual, low-tech demining is not actually that dangerous. It requires some training and caution, but generally speaking anti-personnel mines aren't likely to do you much damage if approached carefully from the right angle.

Whereas the approach of getting machines to jump up and down randomly is expensive, likely to lead to a false sense of security and may even cause mines to get pushed into positions that make them more dangerous.

You could get a lot of Afghan workers enthusiastically doing low-tech demining for not that much money. Every now and again one of them would lose a finger or two but maybe that's not such a bad outcome considering the alternatives. People tend to get much more excited about expensive, higher tech solutions because they're sexier and the people who develop them (often the same people that made the mines in the first place) are better at selling them.
The main LLVM codebase includes a BF compiler as an example: https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/trunk/examples/BrainF...

See BrainF.cpp in particular.

It's a decent first illustration of the great level of abstraction LLVM offers.
Whilst putting up a building at speed is a great marvel, it should be noted that what holds this kind of prefabrication back is not generally technological innovation but the reality that transporting prefabricated components to site is often more expensive than just building them in place. If this ever really gets built and isn't one giant PR excercise ('tallest building' proposals have a long history as such), it will require a huge factory space of temporary workers not far from the base of the building basically doing all the usual building tasks and won't be any cheaper than a traditional slow concrete construction which requires long times to dry (unless they are hiding something more fundamentally important than the headline from us).
The actual figure is 99.6%.[0] That's the statistical confidence level for clearance required of contractors and to declare an area safe, because it's impossible to prove beyond any doubt that there is no longer a single mine left in an area. Demining teams still aim for 100% though.

For instance, Mechem's sniffer dogs have displayed a 90% success rate on target filters, so statistically having three dogs per team perform cross-checking paths on the field should produce the 99.6% confidence level for the type of mines the dogs can detect.

[0]http://www.un.org/Depts/dha/mct/rptwg2.htm
If you want to fail assume that people care about brands
Prime Number Diagrams in Python and SVG
After reading #44 through #50 it's completely unclear what problem you could have with the way the information was presented.
Musk has replaced Jobs in the public mind as the Ultimate Genius Entrepreneur. And he's going to ruthlessly use it to inspire people up to Mars.

Actually, the Musk/Jobs comparison makes me think of the Famous Jobs/Sculley quote ("Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?"), with Jobs in the lesser role this time.
Counterpoint: I'm 27, know the movie, but definitely consider it an older movie that most people don't know. I know it through older cousins who insisted on showing it to me.
Noam Chomsky Explains Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
This is the craziest programming language I have ever seen.
Redis Live dashboard
Ban 'Killer Robots' Before It's Too Late
Just registered on your site and wanted to say it looks great! May be using it in the near future!
Hamiltron == shudder
Hello fellow kiwis!
Recovering from segfaults in Ruby
Hmmm good idea. I might have a play with those sizes and see what I can work out.
> there's the risk that someone writing a software just for sake of the task will just argue ...

It's not a risk, it's a certainty! That's why the the last point is about conducting reviews.
But then why is this post still on the front page?
I was under the impression it was mostly regulation holding prefabrication back (presumably less of an issue in china). Here in the UK many (admittedly somewhat low-quality) prefabs were built immediately after the war to replace lost housing, and it was seen as the way forward - then they suddenly became illegal once they were no longer such an obvious necessity.
That's quite a brutal response to the pretty common sentiment. Also fairly nonsensical.

>I assume you shorted or put INTC to profit from your insight.

Just because you realize a company has made a big mistake doesn't mean you're in a position to short it. I realized MS had a vision problem after hearing Ballmer speak in person years ago, yet shorting MS at that point would have hurt me, not them. It's taken years for his lack of vision to begin to be a problem and even now no one sees it as critical as I do.

>The people in charge of Intel are intelligent, incentivized, and they've given the problem a lot more thought than you have.

You have no idea if any of that is true, you just assume it is. The people in charge of Intel could well be blinded by something they need to be true that isn't. If people at the head of companies are so infallible why does any company ever fail?

>I realize our economies are ludicrously inefficient, but a single comment on HN is not going to outsmart an Intel board member.

Now apply that logic to human nature and tell us what you intended with your hateful comment?
LV機車包
I take it you've never worked with sheep on a farm then...?!
You know "elevator doesn't go to top floor?"

My Internet doesn't go out of prison. I guess my reality in this afterlife a bubble of sorts.

God says...

C:\Text\WEALTH.TXT

though the price of the greater part of other commodities being
influenced by so many other causes, the rise in the value of either
gold or silver coin in proportion to them may not be so distinct and
sensible.

In the English mint, a pound weight of standard silver bullion is coined
into sixty-two shillings, containing, in the same manner, a pound weight
of standard silver. Five shillings and twopence an ounce, therefore,
is said to be the mint price of silver in England, or the quantity of
silv
It's an interesting point - true "recruiters" are typically much more limited in their ability to evaluate resumes, which is why hiring managers do the resume review at TripAdvisor (I wasn't being precise in my usage). In reference to your point about universities mattering, though, I'd love to see more resumes from Penn... ;)
Different pitches for different people/situations. The problem is, people don't all have the same pain. It gets worse. Some people have gone numb from the pain and aren't conscious of it any more. The irony is that our rating system would be perfect for matching the right pitch to each person.

I've more or less mastered the 1-minute demo, hard not to since I've done it a thousand times (and a thousand different ways too). Trust me, I used to suck a lot more.

As for the "externalize opinions" line, just trying something new.
Every single person, whether they are a recruiter and project manager , a guidance counsellor or your mother has a different opinion about how long your CV/Resume should be and will have all sorts of reasons justifying why they are correct.

So the only sensible thing to do is go with the length that you feel sells you best.
If the organizers had said "We contacted groups involved in women / minorities in computing, and they knew of no-one who was of an acceptable quality who could talk about Ruby", then personally I would accept that, and have no problem with an all white-male set of speakers. The runners of the conference seem to have made no attempt to say that is what has happened, but it is hard to see what has gone wrong.

Personally, it is not an issue of cultural guilt. Personally, I knew people as a young child who were poor, and I believe would have made excellent computer scientists if they had had better opportunity. My wife knows females who gave up on computer science because they could not fight through the male-dominated area (there is a whole other long discussion to have about the issues they faced, this is perhaps not the place).

In general, given my experiences with women and the poorer members of society, I extrapolate (only by my gut instinct I will admit), that there is no reason for the distribution of people in computing to broadly follow the distribution of people in wider society. I think computing is great, and people should not be held back from it for real or imagined reasons (or course, some people might not like computing. That's fine to). If we need to occasionally push people to make sure they aren't just going along on auto-pilot, keeping the status quo, then all well and good.

If computing was already (for example) 50% women, then I would feel much less need to push particular conferences or events.
In this flat terrain it will be much more simple and efficient just to drive tanks in strict patterns and blow the stuff below them.

Or you could just create a fleet of cheap ground stomping robots with armored feet designed to deflect the blast wave that are powered by cable and remotely controlled.
It's not the price of a Mac Mini that I care about. I already have a Mac Mini.

The thing is, my workstation is Ubuntu. I feel comfortable with it, all my tools are here within reach, its setup is streamlined to get out of my way, etc...

To develop for Windows or for iOS, I have to go out of my way and use another environment in which I don't feel comfortable.

I don't get why Microsoft and Apple don't release cross-platform SDKs. I don't really care about XCode or Visual Studio, I just want a bunch of tools with which I can compile and publish projects from the command-line. Actually, I only care about publishing on my own personal phone and I don't really need an emulator either, as my own phone can substitute for that (provided it has a way to get some logs and stack-traces back). Apple makes this especially difficult, since you can't (legally) run OS X in a virtual machine (this was true last time I checked and the VMWare instance I managed to setup was extremely unstable).

So that's why I brought up the OS X argument. Monetary cost is not the only cost. Google did a smart thing with Android, because even though you have to endure Eclipse, at least it doesn't pull you out of the environment you use daily.

Also, developing with HTML and Javascript is even more kickass, because you can start mocking / messing around with just a browser like Chrome or Firefox with Firebug installed or something similar.
One of the things which terrified me most about landmines was seeing signs all over pointing out that it was a violation of UCMJ and huge fine/jail/etc. for stealing land mine marker signs. I always assumed minefields were all either professionally laid (and marked) or had been marked by subsequent forces (and thus could be avoided), but I hadn't realized anyone would be stupid enough to steal the markers.

In practice the best way to clear most mines (to a military standard, which is far lower than civilian) seems to be explosively generated overpressure -- they launch a bunch of explosives, usually a linear charge, in the direction of travel, and it drops and blows up, clearing a path.

Using trained rats to clear mines (cheaper than dogs) seems to be the best upcoming way to meet the civilian standard. It's labor intensive, too, but most countries with landmines have relatively cheap labor, and the training to be a rat operator isn't as difficult as to be a full EOD tech. It's definitely one of the charities worth supporting.
New UK mobile operator donates 10% of your bill and 25% of profits to charity
_djo_ I like a lot of what you have to say. I'd also like to know more details around why rougher terrains are a problem? As an idea .. say you had a number of these things, small and heavy with a cheap protected motor and gps guided ... would that have a chance of better clearance? more in the 99% range?
I think the solution mentioned in the clip might indicate a starting point. no?
Yet Another Ruby Shootout
Ouch, not so much fun. I should have been much more specific that this post was about getting interviews at companies, not getting agencies to put you into their mill. There are some good recruiting agencies, but the problem is there's no way to know which is which unless you've worked with a lot of them and have context. You're right, this would be a good area for disruption (or maybe a good new feature for GlassDoor).
جنازة شقيقة الرئيس محمد مرسى بالصور والفيديو يوتيوب اليوم 20/11/2012
True (I hope), true, and VERY true. :)
Exactly and this is what i said in my comment in a roundabout way. You should solve problems which interest you and not even think whether that will become a startup. If you want to create a startup, then you should think of solving other peoples problem and not your problem.
That was a good read, but I don't think it's relevant to HN. Therefore, I must not upvote.
Essentially it sounds like what you are claiming to be able to do, is recommend movies I like better. The 3-axis movie rating system or whatever is just how you solve that problem [and that might not work so you'd have to be open to trying a new method to solve the problem].

It's difficult problem to solve, you need lots of users and a good algorithm to improve on what IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes provide. In general I find that I'm happy with the ratings on IMDB and generally I will like the high rated films on that site - though I can imagine there are a lot of people that doesn't work for.

It would take a lot to convince me that someone had solved this problem (many have tried and failed), like a bit of hype from everyone or some rave reviews. However, in absence of that and seeing that you had done 1000+ pitches, I looked at your site and it has an invite form on it - so really you haven't even started yet.
During hiring, I have looked through dozens, if not hundreds of resumes over the years, mostly for Unix systems administrator positions.

You can tell a lot about what someone knows just by how they put together their resume, over and above the work experience. A question I used to ask on interviews was, "Have you ever worked with Gnu programs, like gcc, Gnu make etc.?" Hiring Unix admins in 1998, when you couldn't get your hands on an experienced one, you'd be surprised how many blank looks I got at that question. Once I got a resume which was very well-written, and he even had the Gnu tools he knew listed. Considering how dismal prior candidates had been, I almost wanted to hire him sight unseen just seeing that. We did make him an offer, which he turned down. It's more than just what buzzwords to put, it's knowing what buzzwords to put and not to put. Most of the time, people who don't know what they're doing don't even know what will sound good on a resume, even if their resume is BS.

In terms of my own resume, in 2000 I had a lot of buzzwords on the top. But then people would ask me detailed questions about some of that software, some of which I had not touched for three years. So I removed those words from the top of the resume so as to avoid those questions. But then I stopped getting as many calls. So I put them back. Better to look dumb in an interview then never get the interview I figured.

For you young ones - tech guys like me generally just care if you know the stuff or not. Managers, HR etc. are generally more formal - they want to know what degrees you have, they like to see buzzwords and several years of experience, especially at large companies, hear from references, know why you have a gap of two months in your employment record and so forth. Non-techies have no gauge to tell how well you know your stuff.

A caveat about large companies - at startups, an older person who has worked a long time at a big company - this can be held against you. You have to make clear you'll be OK with the fact that there is not yet a backup system, or code revision control system, or whatever. You have to say, "I understand you don't have this stuff, and I am fine with you not having it yet, I'll help you build it out as the company grows".
Martin Odersky (Scala eXchange): 10,000 People Promoted the Coursera FP Course
It needs to mark where it's been and where things exploded. You literally need that thing to go over every part of the terrain.
UK start-up Luluvise slammed by Forbes
Entrepreneurs must celebrate their failure, it will temper their character and pave the way for great success, but this failure must be an outcome of quick failure. Learn how to fail quickly :)

Thanks!
Sure. The biggest change is that it's moving from object marking to bitmap marking[1]. This makes it CoW-friendly, which should make forking far less painful (and much faster; copying all those memory pages takes time!). Bitmap marking can take advantage of parallel marking; Narihiro Nakamura (who did the new GC work for 2.0) has said in an interview[2] that as a result of parallel marking, he's managed to reduce GC time by 40% on dual-core machines, and the hint is that it may be possible to reduce it even further on machines with more cores.

I don't have benchmarks to share, but Nakamura is a very smart guy, and if he says he can get it, I have no reason to doubt it.

[1] http://patshaughnessy.net/2012/3/23/why-you-should-be-excite...

[2] http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/01/bitmap-marking-gc
Startups,  When Do You Hire Your First Hacker?. 
When Do You Hire Your First Hacker and how much would you pay(average)/Year?.
I would appreciate if you could give some details
Thanks!
I’m wondering what’s your opinion about how does it affect to have on your resume some great places to work at, but that might not be so well known in the US tech world as they’re not the usual Google, FB etc.. I’m talking about places like CERN, Fermilab, Max Planck Institute for Physics or the MIT Medialab. Do you think these matter as much as Google on a resume?

How about having ‘old boring’ companies like IBM or Oracle on your resume?
If Opera went payware again I would happily pay for a license. Of course I would feel they were then obliged to listen to my crazy ideas about browser 'improvements'.

Opera is the only piece of non-OSS I can't live without.
Nokia 'Here Map' arrives at the App Store
Thank you so much for posting this, I have been overpaying for my cobra health insurance for months now just because changing seemed so daunting and confusing.
It's more down to the sorts of roads. If you're doing 37mph it's usually in residential areas and extra-urban areas. These are notoriously full of traffic lights, other cars and humans which result in braking regularly and therefore costly energy sucking acceleration. Also engines are usually have peak energy transfer from fuel to distance at certain speeds due to gearing, revs, torque etc. This is by design.

If you're doing 60mph, you're probably on a relatively obstruction free A-road where the only energy required is to offset friction to maintain speed. I have driven from London to Leeds (195 miles) with not one single change in speed (apart from to take a piss and get a Burger King at Leicester Forest services!)

Also roads are a hell of a lot smoother and have less friction in Europe compared to the US. That makes one hell of a difference!

For ref, my car is a 1.9l diesel as well. These Citroen engines are super-efficient which is why I own it. I also have low rolling resistance tyres which make a 2-5% difference.

American cars are poorly designed guzzlers usually, even the ones they ship to Europe.
Honestly,

I shall never understand why a work like this (useful and to the point) needs a 'Conclusion' section. There are no conclusions, just a list of practices.

I know this is an absurd rant but can we stop this nonsense?

Conclusion: please stop concluding something which is not an argumentation.
where can I read how that Vim command works?
Some of my friends served in the IDF engineering corps and cleared mines in the Golan as part of their service, I assure you they're not goats :)

(Many mines are also designed to be triggered under a certain weight, so goats can walk freely on them and not get hurt)

One interesting method I read about is seeding the area (from the air) with a certain flower. When it blooms, the contents of the ground affect the color, so on an aerial photo you could locate the mined areas.
How To Install MySQL 5.6 On Ubuntu 12.10 (Including memcached Plugin)
Cassandra Thrift to CQL3 Upgrade Guide
Is there a cheap way to add a chip to help map the precise route taken? It would increase the cost but I'd think it would help to know that an area has been covered several times.
Even if it is zero-sum in dollars, it can be positive-sum in aggregate utility.
Lol. I wasn't saying goats are the only methods! Merely a cheap passive solution.

Dedicated and skilled engineers best of course.