skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would someone 'enjoy' watching someone's sincere effort and dream die? Weird post.
My current job, they asked me one of those. I pretended to think about it for about 15 seconds, then asked for the answer (it had an answer).

The guy said "You want me to tell you?" I said "yeah."

I've been here a year.
Jacques is right-on. For a lot of the work in my life, most of the effort was coming up to speed on a domain rather than just technology. Much of my work has been in 'artificial intelligence' (for some definition; never liked that term because it is too general) so domain knowledge is central if you are trying to get human level or better performance in some narrow domain.

Having to spin up on new domains also keeps work and life interesting.
It shows the weather in the window, and graphics change (for example if it is raining the character grabs a umbrella).

Also if you tap any text, speech happen.

The purpose of this is teach kids the meaning of the numbers on this context.

This is why it has two clocks too (one analog and one digital)
I think using a whiteboard to test someone's design knowledge is probably a good idea. I like to draw diagrams on a whiteboard when I'm designing a solution to something. However, using a whiteboard for a CODING exercise is stupid. When was the last time you wrote any significant amount of code on a whiteboard? Give someone a laptop if you want to see their coding skills. Even better, have them pair-program with one of your developers.
Dialects of Lisp
The Open Cloud Has New Pricing For Bandwidth And Storage
Want to gain weight fast? Zyprexa
Here's one data point: I just started playing the demo video and my little boy came running. He was smiling and really into it.

Definitely got something right with the sound effects and voices!
Thanks :)

Right now we got suddenly bogged by OEM work (ie: some manufacturers want to ship our apps on their stuff), but as soon as we finish that we will release a new version of the Matryoshka (with 9 dolls instead of 3, plus a challenge mode of sorts).
>I have 8 GB of Ram and SSD

Me too.

>but it's less of an issue with Play than in Rails or Django or whatever

>It's worth noting what Play gives you when compared to Rails, Django and the like.

Perhaps for some, but we have no interest in dynamic languages or frameworks written in them. We were evaluating frameworks for decent languages only. I was only commenting on the compilation speed issue because they constantly brag about fast iteration when it is no faster than a typical bloated J2EE monster.
That wasn't my point. I know they use PowerVR GPU's, but they never use the latest ones. In fact they always use very old PowerVR GPU's. They had nothing last year that was even close to the other GPU's let alone the ones in iPads and the iPhone 5, and they will have nothing this year to compete with Apple's PowerVR Series 6 GPU. Their PowerVR drivers suck, too.

Why even bring the Intel HD 4000 in the discussion? We're talking about Atom here. Not a $200 17W TDP Core ULV Core i5 chip. If you want to compare HD4000 do it against Nvidia and AMD's own chips in laptops.
I remember a correspondence between Knuth and Dijkstra about a deep problem involving four (!) stacks in the recursive solution. One or the other of them stepped back and found an iterative solution that was much easier to understand.

However, whether or not your example shows something that is not inferior is likely a matter of opinion, not fact.
That doesn't answer my question as to what argument is supposedly attempted to be invalidated by pointing out hipocrisy.

But to answer anyway: being born into the same nation doesn't have as much to do with it as inheriting, as person, as corporation, or even as nation, the fortune/power accumulated, by means which are then made forbidden to others. It's not about any random American citizen, so pointing out the fact that "they aren't all hypocrites" is a strawman; nobody ever claimed they are.
I have heard google is a big violator of this?
Maybe I'm not "getting it", but what is the difference between:

After(@useCase, "askForName", => @gui.showAskForName())

vs.

@useCase.askForName()
@gui.showAskForName()

?
Well, he said "real code" not "real world code". I would imagine you can just write something simple for them.
The computer that can’t crash
A new solution to piracy
Makes sense. Although for your last comment...

http://semiaccurate.com/2013/01/02/apples-silicon-design-cap...

For those without a subscription. That site is spreading a rumor that Apple has bought out a top-tier AMD grpahics team. Considering that Apple is now designing their own chips, and just headhunted an entire AMD (former ATI) team, we can see where Apple is going.

Apple does not want to be relying on commodity parts. They are positioning themselves to build a custom GPU a few years down the line.

So Intel currently can catch up to Apple GPU performance by just buying the latest PowerVR graphics. But will they be able to do that in the future, if Apple creates their own top-tier custom GPU?
How Secure Is the Papal Election
the programming languages as the different philosophies of a virtual world

I would rather consider programming paradigms to be better equivalents for "different philosophies".
[I] got asked how to do something in JavaScript on a white board. The specifics are vague, but it’s crystal clear how stupid it made me feel and how little it had to do with the actual job.

So did I. (Well, it was C then, but same idea.) The prospect of scrawling code on an inapplicable medium while people stared at every move is, of course, irritating.

Instead of going to the whiteboard, I pulled out my notebook computer, fired up a code editor, and told the several guys present to continue the interview _while_ I worked on the challenge. Time was saved by multitasking, I did the work in a sensible normal manner, everyone was comfortable with the situation, and they were happy with the resulting code.

I got the job. And turned it down.
How do I refuse to pay when they take it directly out of my check?
> I think it is just a people problem. Programmers tend to seclude themselves from their customers. Whole IT departments tend to seclude themselves from their users.

My experience is that it generally has been managers shielding the programmers rather than the programmers shielding themselves.
"It's very lucky for me. Back then it was quite possible that that fax would have been picked up."

I love how this story represents the semi-random nature of success. In some parallel universe Sergey Brin is the founder of a wildly successful food delivery service instead of Google.
In Germany you can easily get >100Mbps through cable in many cities. FTTH would be nice, but overall i dont think average broadband speeds are really lacking behind that much.
I got 50/5Mbit cable at home and 120/10Mbit in the office.
You can draw a skyscraper because at it's core a skyscraper is an object that exists strictly in a 3 dimensional world.
Therefor you can convey a lot of important information about the skyscraper by showing it's shape and dimensions in an autocad drawing.

In reality however I expect that most skyscraper projects involve many many pages of writing and formulas in addition to the drawings.

OTOH a computer at it's core is a machine that sequentially follows instructions. So any description of a computer program must be able to reduce to this.

Since around the dawn of computer (or at least in the 10+ years I have been involved) there have been attempts to remove the requirement for computer programming, but in reality nobody has come close to anything as powerful as a programming language.

The most effective progress has been made via abstraction, where you allow one instruction to be used to imply many. For example making a REST API call with 1 line implies a lot of operations on a lower level (TCP/IP etc).

I think this is fundamentally because any system that you propose to replace a programming language will either be:

1) Turing complete, in which case it could be classified as a programming language itself and will require knowledge of algorithms/abstractions etc to operate effectively. This is where you end up with flowchart driven development tools where the flowchart ends up literally resembling a plate of spaghetti for any reasonably complex system.

2) Not Turing complete, in which case you lose a lot of power as there are things the system will not allow you to express and thus lose the ability to deal with many edge cases. Since you are developing software and not just using it, the reason for the development activity in the first place is probably to deal with some edge case than an off the shelf program does not.

When I was younger I used to play with various "code free" game development tools and ran into the same fundamental problem.

For example, I have a shooting game and when the player is hit with some projectile he takes some amount of damage based on the projectile he was hit with. This was usually very easy to do.

BUT then say I want to add an "armour" powerup to the game. If a player with the armour powerup is hit then he takes damage but at a reduced rate that is proportional to his armour value. The armour value is also reduced based on itself and the armour piercing value of the projectile which hits. However if the armour piercing value of the projectile is below some value proportional to the armour and health values combined then no damage is taken at all. Oh and the armour powerup cannot stack with certain other powerups except under some specific circumstances.

That type of logic was impossible to express with these tools, or required finding creative ways to abuse the tooling in ways not intended which would in turn make other functionality more difficult/impossible.
Cut even 1 trip in 50 and you can avoid building a lot of infrastructure. Netflix vs video rentals is one clear example of less trips, but there are plenty of others.
On the other hand, if I'm hiring someone for a high pressure job I don't want them to fail when under pressure.

I understand your point but I don't really buy it. I train lifeguards as a hobby/side-job (I'm in uni right now) and pressure is the number 1 reason they give us for failing their final pratical test. I can't give a kid a permit to work as a lifeguard if the pressure of an exam makes him screw up because the real life pressure of saving somebody's life is even greater.

The exact same applies here for all jobs where you expect the engineer to work in stressful situations.
Very few things have been "proven" in the sense you are talking about. People still have to make judgments about them anyway. By and large, most developers seem to have concluded that syntax highlighting helps them in some way.

Possible reasons why:

1. Distinguishing different types of operators/primitives/objects from each other at a glance.

2. Aesthetic enjoyment.

3. An appropriate color scheme may be "easier on the eyes".
Without firsthand knowledge of the Jane Street corporate environment it is naive of me to think that allowing engineering to pick the tools which best let them get their work done need not be incompatible with the requirements of non-expert review of the source code.

I would think that if the company culture is one where it is expected that your code is going to be reviewed by domain experts, but not necessarily language experts, there would be a strong emphasis placed on producing source code which would convey its meaning without a detailed knowledge of the language spec and runtime system.
I seriously doubt that 37Signals authors blog posts for the purpose of getting karma on HN.
Last time I heard, they were so poor they got more money from the EU than they paid. Category Greece and Spain. Meanwhile we're only paying...
It's a heat sink right now. Hydroelectric generation aside, efficiency for electricity generation is pretty much always below 40%! That, however, is since almost all our plants use the Carnot/Rankine cycle heat engine.

Again though, even those watts of electricity eventually get turned back into heat. Gotta love entropy...

The consequences of us having fusion?

The good, we get cheap, abundant electricity for the entirety of the planet's lifespan with almost no harmful byproducts, made by a nuclear plant that's impossible to melt down or be used in the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The bad, we have to build the plants, and possibly replace the old ones. That indicates a large shift in jobs, and makes you wonder how we can afford it (although improving economic conditions should make the latter less of a downside as fusion becomes viable).
I don't know what you think I said, but your response makes no sense in light of what I said.

Please re-read what I wrote, without skipping the sentence, You may charge anything you like for open source software.
I'm not sure if this is a place to ask questions, but here it is: How can I compare ARM and x86 CPUs based on their specs, e.g. without actually testing them. RaspberryPi website says its "overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2" although the frequency of the chip is 700MHz. Can I use 3/7 as a rule of thumb?
for domains you don't want to route try 192.0.2.x - that range is reserved for examples and won't end up with spurious requests to stuff you're running on localhost.
Have you heard about B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North)? One of the most amazing community projects I've ever heard of.

They're using volunteers to dig trenches to massively cut the cost of delivering 1Gbps broadband to rural homes via fiber to the home (FTTH). Because farmers agree to let a trench be dug in their fields (getting insane broadband speeds and increased property values in return) and the trenches are dug by volunteers, it's possible to deliver 1Gbps for £30/month.

All this means that it becomes more economical to deliver broadband in rural areas where you don't need to tear up streets and and you don't need huge population density to justify the initial costs of laying fiber.

BBC did a story about them recently:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21442348
Yeah, List is long but some books are really great. Many of books will make any list. My personal favorite is Effective Java, one of the top Java book from my list http://goo.gl/fAk2L
Trying to reinvent a == b
Facebook Partners with Big Data Co's for Retail Targeting
Use a loyalty card for discounts at the drug store? The ads you see on Facebook could start looking familiar.
It seems to be giving advice which is contrary to the very purpose of jQuery. Take:

http://learn.jquery.com/performance/append-outside-loop/

I always do something like this:

$target
.append($("li")
.class("thing")
.text(someText));

But it's not mentioned at all.

Instead they are using the verbose monstrosities from the DOM API which is exactly what we don't want to use because it sucks.

i.dontWantToHaveVerboseMethodsToAppendSomethingToTheDom(please).

Without the easy DOM manipulation, jQuery's not much more than a nice wrapper to deal with AJAX browser differences. There's some serious cognitive dissonance here.
Some things do get better, at least. The database that includes the locations of bus stops (NaPTAN) is now open data: http://data.gov.uk/dataset/naptan
Look at benchmarks. It's not perfect, but that's the only reasonable way.
Thanks! I've done similar things with online text editors, and wanted the ability to compare applicants side-by-side. I was also thinking this might be useful for recruiters who don't necessarily know the code, but just want to pick questions from a preset list to get started.
For one thing (the one that's guaranteed), nuclear power would get a lot safer [1].

If our expectations about fusion's efficiency [2] are correct then in the long run we would have to worry much less about our conventional sources of energy and the environmental price that comes with using them. The questions of peak oil and CO_2 emissions would be at least partially defused regardless of how much of a threat they really represent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Accident_potentia...

[2] http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/its_not_fissio...
Even if perfected it still wont be free. Creating it and then sending it all over the world will cost quite a bit of money. So we'll probably (hopefully!) just get cheaper energy.

And that's why I don't think it will impact economic growth that much. But it will hopefully reduce our CO2 emissions.

The reduced CO2 should make the climate colder. Continued economic growth will dump more heat into the air. But as we expect global population to peak at only a couple more billion people, would the energy humanity dumps into the air be comparable to how much the sun dumps into each square meter of the earth every day?
Looking for Junior Freelance Developers
We are looking for junior freelance developers based in the US to do API integrations and smaller projects on matchist. We're always looking for talented devs to join the network, but this is one example of a place where we have more projects than devs right now.
website is: http://matchist.com/talent
That sounds really good. It's not like that in Toronto. We have a communications oligopoly in Canada though.
> Actually, yes...they do. I work in a building with an elevator control system designed by an internal engineer.

Well then that makes a good interview question then!
Does non-aggression principle mean, that society can't have any enforceable rules, like taxes? If so, NAP is not a good idea.
Home Improvement/DIY Apps for Android
I care about three things in a candidate:

Code Quality

Productivity

Communication

... pretty much in that order.
Brain teasers test none of those things (maybe a some communication)

I've never met a coder that couldn't eventually figure out a way to hack the code to do what the PMs want. But I have met a lot of coders that take way too long and/or produce horrific code that is a buggy maintenance nightmare. Those people often do ok on brain teasers (or at least do well enough that the interviewer doesn't feel like he can give negative feedback).

A more important point is that brain teasers are a waste of time compared to a million other things you could be doing with the candidate to determine their aptitude, like actually writing code to solve a problem.
What you use as a dev client is not the point its the dev and test hardware the application running on that needs to be as close (ideally identical) to live as possible.

And the random approach to hardware that clouds use well maybe thats why they have such poor up time when compered to the carrier grade gear a telco uses.
The more important part of that sentence, which you elided, was the fact that there was a language communication barrier.

I treated them with nothing but respect in person. I always joke around and make small talk with people in the service industry. I know how far that sort of thing can take you. However, I elected to use the word "meatheads" because it paints a picture: They were large men whom couldn't hold a conversation. Whether or not they could hold a conversation with native spanish speakers was immaterial to the story.
I'm working in bringing high speed broadband to rural areas in the U.S. We are putting all energy in securing funding right now. You can't imagine how hard is for a start-up to secure funding for it. It has been exhausting. I applaud any initiative by the governments to invest in high speed internet.
The problem with hiring (anyone) is that it's really like "speed dating" - even having multiple interview sessions really doesn't give a greater insight into the candidate. The idea of "umbrella of cultural fit" is what mostly happens with hires.

37Signal's approach of trying them out for size is a good approach, but not practical for everyone else.

... someone being paid to be a programmer who can't code. But I assure you this is the case. It's shocking but true.

This is a shockingly true statement - it's almost beyond comprehensive when witnessed first hand.
That wasn't my point.

The GPU is almost a drop-and-play component on an SoC. Given that Intel could very rapidly incorporate any licensed GPU, such as the best of the best that Apple uses, what exactly is your point? You clearly are trying to hold the notion that Intel is so far behind, led off course by their energy quest that now they can't catch up on the GPU, yet they have exactly the same capacity as Apple does (actually let me amend that -- as the world's most advanced fab and chipmaker, they have dramatically more capacity than Apple does).

So why haven't they? Well thus far the only Atom-powered mobile devices have been pitched essentially to the third world. Intel is going through the mobile growing pains in the very low cost market, and when they decide to go for the mainstream I suspect that -- just like Apple -- they can decide to go for GPU performance as well.

I mentioned the HD 4000 given that you oddly decided to talk about "Intel's" and "Apple's" GPUs, and while you've quite rapidly shifted course to a more enlightened position now based upon reading other replies, I suspect you weren't quite aware of what the actual GPU sources were.
Please give some feedback?
If I can have a word on FizzBuzz?

There are a few programmers that have a proclivity towards "clean, perfect" solutions, but FizzBuzz is ugly.

Making FizzBuzz work at all is just stupidly simple; but the moment you ask yourself about the little details, you notice that you either have to make an if tree, a bunch of if-elseif's, or some other hinky thing that ruins the "purity" of this simple little program.

Alot of people take the perspective that if you go

if(i % 15) print "fizzbuzz";
else if(i % 5) print "fizz"; //or was it buzz?
else if(i % 3) print "buzz"; //or was it fizz?
else print i;

then you've found an optimal solution and you can wash your hands of it, until you think to yourself: "but an if tree would use less comparisons! Should I be readable? Or take the efficient route? But if I'm thinking about efficiency. wouldn't a lookup be faster and simpler?"

I suspect when presenting a problem like this, the interviewer filters out two kinds of people: the people who "can't code", and the people who are obsessive.
Here:

http://www.srlfacile.org/

And I managed to help get a law passed in Italy:

http://www.governo.it/Notizie/Presidenza/dettaglio.asp?d=690...

Even if it's kind of watered down and crappy compared to what we would have liked to have seen. Still though, not bad for someone with no money and no connections to speak of.

Someplace like your facebook page is another good place to post one's political ramblings to, depending on one's friends...
I have heard of interviewers asking candidates to solve various levels on mobile brainteaser apps. Something like this game https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/smart-kick-pro/id590049769?m... could work well as it involves problem solving skills and is a great fun little ice breaker.
There are power plants that hit 42% theremal and dump waste heat, others reuses that waste heat for things like home/office heating and hit 70+ efficiency. So really one of the best solutions is simply to find ways to reuse waste heat. Granted, you would still need massive shielding even with a tin can sized fusion reactor, but assuming ther safe enough to put near city's you could got a lot of winter heating practically for free.