skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is probably why Linux has been and is such a draw for me. I've moved between FVWM, Fluxbox, Gnome 2 and KDE before finally (& happily) settling for KDE 4.9. I don't believe Windows or OS X would have give me this choice. This is not a not a criticism on their desktop environments but that their desktop environments may not be suited to my needs. Linux gives me this choice.

I would like to emphasize couple of points which have hit closer to home for me:

- Everything is not related to hardware compatibility; same hardware works fine on some distros and doesn't on others. Trying various distros may be time consuming and frustating for some.

- Its the "tinkerability" of Linux that draws people for whom degree of customization/control trumps most other factors. Ironically even when they have spent weeks getting the setup perfect, the exact same mentality leads them continuously trying new/latest things/"improving" et. all and that leads to breakage. Sometimes telling them to stick with what works and not tinker is a like asking a player to not play. Of course, this is not a generalization and there are users across the spectrum ranging from out-of-the-boxt to compulsive-tinkerer.

When Unity didn't leave me with any other choice to move from Ubuntu (and the main reason I stuck around wasn't Gnome 2 as most would say; it was apt-get), I tried XFCE/LXDE etc. For me, none of these provided the right mix of customization, aesthetics, features and stability as much KDE did. Though its eats up a bunch of RAM, it leaves plenty room in my almost 7 year old Compaq nx6320 laptop with 3GB RAM. I use OpenSuse 12.2 and not withstanding Yast etc., they sure know how to integrate KDE in a distro to provide a smooth & seamless experience.
My Android tablet is my portable calendar, piano sheet / guitar tab viewer, access point to mail and chat, and a media consumer device. It's quick to activate and easy to stop using.

My computer is the thing on which I sit down and get stuck for hours and hours. If something I'd get rid of that.
I've suffered years of non-stop spamming from linkedin.

"Your friend Bob from India wishes to connect with you". "Reminder, your friend Charlie from Canada recently invited .."

I've received hundreds of unsolicated mails, each of which was junked, binned, and reported.

Recently I started issuing DMCA-takedown notices for content I'd produced which was copy/pasted into their forums/groups.

I will be happy when linkedin ceases operations.

To keep this vaguely on-topic; most of the local friends I know who mention linkedin regard is as a ghetto, something they used to use before they started receiving connections from people they'd never met, in countries they'd never visited.
While I agree that ambiguous code can be a problem, I think it's much less of an issue in C++ than it is in dynamic languages like JavaScript and Ruby.

It's not at all unusual, although it is very unfortunate, to run into JavaScript or Ruby code where monkey patching will change the behavior of large sections of code several different times throughout the runtime of an app. This is especially true when the standard library is affected. Debugging situations like this can become very tedious, very quickly.
There was a site that did this with the quotes on top of a nice picture. Would love to see you automate the quote collecting, the old site eventually stopped getting updates.

old site: http://www.inspiremyday.com/
This is probably another way of saying Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) works best for the enterprise. They probably already know that we should have all functionality in coarse, self-contained services.

But often the plumbing required in the form of web services becomes really painful to leverage. For instance they require creating complex WSDLs and workarounds to prevent timeouts.
I am going through the same thing. Everyone says enter an existing market because you already know people are willing to pay for it. But I am afraid that the existing solutions have soaked up all the customers. How am I supposed to get those customers?
https://github.com/mojombo/toml/commit/e54978f05197d16fde3ef...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5272634
The root of the problem is the Indonesian institution hosting the book, not Google.
A search engine should show you what's publicly available on the internet with as little filters as possible, otherwise it opens the doors to a lot of abuse.
I agree Map or Dictionary would have been fine too, but it's so widely used it needs to be easy to type so two words is not great (HashMap). However I suspect it was just named that way following perl (written by an english speaker). Obviously it's far to late to change it now and I can't say it bothers me or most Ruby users. It's something you get used to very quickly.
Firefox to follow Safari, start blocking cookies from third party advertisers
Module#prepend doesn't look too bad from me from a complexity perspective - inheritance in Ruby boils down to two parallel trees: One of the inheritance chains, and one of the method lookups. Really we're dealing with a single tree of "actual" inheritance, with some of them being "hidden" in some contexts. It gets a bit complex if you want to do meta-programming or do something that depends on the inheritance hierarchy, but mostly it behaves the way people expect in regular use.

Refinements, on the other hand, looks brain-damaged to me. I see the rationale, but the outcome looks more complicated and error-prone than the situation it is trying to address...

And it looks like the type of thing that will "infect" other code, just like C++ code for a while got infections of throw specifications on member functions, that then got propagated all over the place and cause major pain every time you tried to modify code. Until most people stopped using them much again except in very limited circumstances.
If we were talking about footballers, a candidate with a college degree is likely to be seen as having a higher ceiling.

Companies often prefer candidates with college degrees because their career ceiling is likely to be higher - e.g. a receptionist with a college degree is more likely suited for advancement to management or sales than one without. Partially this is educational - he is closer to an MBA - partially it is socio-economic - he may have a more similar background to existing management and customers.

In addition as a practical matter, adding a college degree requirement allows the hiring manager to disqualify potential candidates faster and uses an objective standard to do so. The perceived value of making one's job easier should never be discounted.
Football Highlights And Football News: Benefits of Livescores Sites
David Brin's "The Transparent Society" explores this very idea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

"The Transparent Society (1998) is a non-fiction book by the science-fiction author David Brin in which he forecasts social transparency and some degree of erosion of privacy, as it is overtaken by low-cost surveillance, communication and database technology, and proposes new institutions and practices that he believes would provide benefits that would more than compensate for lost privacy."
Show HN: Tavern, Next Generation Bulletin Boards/Forums (Product Idea)
The Future of Digital Publishing Will Be HTML5
A good program is 500 lines or less.
I was in a very similar situation during the late 90s. I am still doing well, even without a college degree (I have never had a propspective emmployer even ask). However, I really wish I had just finished it while I was younger and had less obligations.
Google provides a way to do it:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
Ask HN: If you would launch a website in 4 hours, what would it be?
How does Google determine wether a link is paid or not? I stopped using nofollow at all on my personal site, because I figured if I like something enough to invite humans to go there, I might as well "vouch" for those links in the sight of search engines; and while I'm pretty sure a human would never flag the site, when reading about algorithms (in this case, without hearing how they actually work) I sometimes get a bit nervous, just because I'm doing my own thing without paying too much attention to what is "standard". Just take HN for example: why doesn't it pass link juice to the stories, wouldn't that help improve the web/search results? And if that got changed, would Google act all stupid, or simply enjoy and use the additional signal provided?
> Is that actually true that PHP is slower?

Yes, the VM itself is not fast. However, a lot of it is just a thin shim over a C call, so whether you're going to be bottlenecked by it is going to depend on what you're doing.
I picked Ruby because it was sufficiently different from C and C++ to be interesting. I got to write much shorter code, for example.

I stay away from Python because it is similar enough to not give me any great benefits over Ruby, while it has some warts (to me) such as the whitespace handling, that makes it uninteresting because it is so similar that the payoff in accepting what I consider warts is too small to warrant it.

I'd have been a lot more willing to ignore the things I don't like about Python if the differences in other areas were major.
Well, actually you can get in trouble for this but...

People are much more likely to complain about losing out of a job if they go out of their way to take an job related aptitude test as compared to being pre-screened out for not having a college diploma.
AT&T-Mozilla “WebPhone” gives a glimpse of the dumb pipe future
Free Work: My letter to dev community
Show HN: Doses of inspiration, starting with a tribute to Steve Jobs
I wish there were a video presentation to go with this. There's so much information missing when only the slides are present!
https://github.com/rubinius/rubinius

It's very relevant, and very active.
Are you serious? This isn't a joke?
I've always been surprised how little disruption there has been in the field of corporate hiring.

As other people have mentioned, many employers use a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence and/or work ethic, but how good is it really? Can't we do better?

"Moneyball" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball) is a great book about the statistical revolution that took place in major league baseball, and shows us how advanced analytics enabled one team to go beyond rough proxies and subjective judgments to successfully sign players who were highly productive but undervalued by other teams.

Assuming sports is just a simplified version of real life, why hasn't a similar data-driven revolution happened yet in business hiring? Or does the status quo work "well enough"?

While we're at it, I guess we could also pose the question of how favorably (or not) YC's own application process compares to that of most colleges and corporations.
Not to mention it's the second edition from 1997. Hasn't anything happened in OOD/OOP during the last 15+ years that would make it worth updating?

Edit: I just skimmed the table of contents (11 pages) and while I suspect there are some nuggets of gold in the book, I'm not sure they're worth reading 1500 pages. I've found that the problems new developers have with OOD/OOP are architectural and generally related to a specific language and/or framework.
All (almost) cured with Sococo's Teamspace. I work there, we worked hard to remove the friction to remote working, to provide lots of cues missing from other tools. In fact Inow prefer to take part in Teamspace meetings over in-person (butg I've been using it for 3 years).
Wow, that reminds me of the classloader magic Eclipse/OSGi does so that plugins that depend on different versions of the same library can work together in the same JVM.
Just as note: I don't really would call "len(o)" a "legacy call", as in "something it's here just for backward compatibility, but it's ugly and please don't use it".

It's more "the good way to do it" :D

len() is a perfect example of the duck typing and the "protocol-based" philosophy of python: its implementation it's something like

def len(object):
return object.__len__()

as in "just return the result of invoking the object method called __len__".

this lets you just call len() on every "len-able" object. They can be list, dict, custom objects... instead of the need to, I don't know, implements an explicit interface, or define a "getLength()", "size()", "length()", "length" (just an attribute, not a function to call), you can just define a "magic" (as in "normally you don't need to call this directly") method called __len__.

you can create your "not really a container, but it has a length!" object as something like

>>> class C:
... def __len__(self):
... return 42
...
>>> len(C())
42

As indirect effect, it enables you to go on the functional-style approach... a simple

map(len, list_of_lists)

it's more readable than

map(lambda l: l.__len__(), list_of_lists)

(probably [len(l) for l in list_of_lists] it's more readable, but bear with me...)

I'm not really sure about the "ruby C abstractions": do you refer to the use of "object-like" structs used in the C sources of the "ruby MRI" implementation of "ruby-the-language"?

regarding the GC... I don't know, but why is the kind of the GC used by an implementation of the language (or the complete lack of a GC) relevant to the "everything is an object"?

just to be clear, I don't dislike ruby :) it's just that I don't find the "everything is an object" a way to discriminate between ruby and python.
Hi guys,

We launched our weekend project about 2 weeks ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5206662). And have made a lot of improvements, including the ability to sign up to daily emails.

However, our big development is we found the layout of our site played nicely to include tributes of people who have changed the world - like Steve Jobs. So on some days, we will provide slideshows, like this one which showcase an indivduals best quotes.

So our site has morphed into a daily inspiration site but also tribute pages to those who inspire us the most.

We'd love to hear your feedback if you have any.

Thanks, sw1205 and jebarnes88
Great article, actually your whole blog is well worth reading
Presumably named after this fellow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_Panoptes
Can such a company afford to fire essentially randomly? Remote workers may be some of the best producers. Generally a reduction-in-force is done more selectively.
A college degree is essentially used by some employers as just a proxy for an IQ test.

And college (and all schooling here in the U.S.) likely does have a disparate impact, but it is not the same as jobs. Schools don't hire students. We have universal education at least for K-12, and colleges have scholarships and the like to enroll more minority and lower-income students.

"More important, not only do students enter college with unequal demonstrated abilities, but those inequalities tend to persist—or, in the case of African-American students relative to white students, increase—while they are enrolled in higher education." http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Undergraduates-Actually/125...

The problem with college is that they aren't doing a good job at actually educating students (see the above article about the book Academically Adrift). Faculty at most colleges, for example, are never even trained in how to effectively teach - they lecture. Research has shown that engineering students in traditional lecture courses are twice as likely to leave engineering and three times as likely to drop out of college compared with students taught using active learning methods. Active learning also results in twice as much learning as lecture methods. (http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ost...)

And the problems at the K-12 levels include things like no universal pre-school, which could decrease inequity, and the lack of learning and high number of dropouts in high school.

Even if conservative criticisms of 'disparate impact' are right (http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-dead-...), there is still the moral problem of inequality. Do we just accept racial/income differences as unchangeable or inherent to humans, or do we actively try to improve the situation.
Man, never noticed how the quality of front-page HN posts on a Sunday morning really bottoms out.
Here's a link to a clip of the music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8e3qaF1ocU

Doesn't do much for me, but I'm no music afficianado.
Yes, it does, and the link has been removed. At the bottom of the Google Scholar page linked in the article[0], you find the following notice:

> In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

It leads to [1], which has been filed by Bertrand Meyer, and corresponds to the "kms" file he referenced in his post.

That being said, there are five other links to his book in pdf form in the results.

[0] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=115252680840168408...

[1] http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=775089
https://www.google.com/search?q=Object-Oriented+Software+Con... gives:

"In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org."

Here's DMCA complaint:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=775089
Apple Releases Code To Remove Java Hack Malware
Our entire company works 'remotely'. There is a nominal headquarters on Castro Street in Mt View CA, but only a fraction of the developers work there. We move fast, work closely together from 5 states and 3 countries, have standup meetings, code review, all of it.
I picked up a legal copy for about < $5 in 1999 at a book store near Peking University. They do (or did) price the book for the market; it was in English (back then), and was a crappy printing, but hey...it was cheap! These days, they've translated the cheap copy into Chinese, but its still reasonably priced.

I guess my point is: books are like drugs and are priced according to local market conditions. So the rich Americans pay more (they get nicer binding, but still...) and subsidize the rest of the world.

I doubt Bertrand makes that much money on being an author (who does?), and if he wrote the book in today rather than 20 years ago, things could be very different: self published, e-copies, whatever. But he made that deal back before any of this was an option.

But thar be pirates in those waters: in countries where IP is not respected this will happen. Piracy is quite wrong and its not weird that people have a problem with it. We should respect property rights, we don't have to buy it unless we are Dr. Meyers students.

Pity: its not a bad book, but is definitely dated and is probably no longer a must read, definitely not worth $90. Cutting the cost to make it more consummate with its value would be better.
Whoops. I tend to rely on the site itself to block (recent) dupes. I guess the different title threw it, though I would have expected the identical URL to get caught.
Great slides! In one chart he shows what the level of his pre-Sifter salary was and it seems that the current app hasn't quite met that level, or am I reading it wrong? It would be great to see some actual revenue numbers here, but I can see why the OP wouldn't want to disclose that.
We have several years of experience with building websites with WordPress for clients. And indeed most of the clients seem to struggle with managing the content. Most of the problems occure with the wysiwyg editor and the media library. Mostly small stuff like disappearing new lines or the other way around. Even for me it's sometimes hard to figure out why the editor behaves unexpectedly. Try to make a decent bulleted list and then edit it. My personal rescue is the html view, but we can't expect that from the customer can we?

But give any unexperienced person a copy of Word and the struggle with the same problems. The difference is there are not that many client without experience with Word. They do that every day. They edit the website a few times a week tops. And when they try WP for the first time they expect it to be a hassle free ride. What I am trying to say is every piece of software you want to use in a good way you need to sit down for and put some effort in it. Sweat and curse just like we all did on Word and then you wil get used to it.

That being said there is always room for improvement in WP. Thanx for the post.
A site to learn English pronunciation using the Google Chrome Speech and TTS API
Oracle updates NetBeans for HTML5
A whole bunch of the comments mention that employers who are insisting on college degrees as a hiring criterion are basically attempting to use the degree requirement as a proxy for a requirement that would be more plainly illegal under current United States law. That's regrettable on two levels: degree requirements are demonstrably, by replicated research, poor criteria for hiring for almost any kind of job, and if the company is trying to find a work-around to practice illegal discrimination, the company should be just as liable for the degree requirement as for other illegal requirements. There is a research base on what hiring procedures work best (short answer: work-sample tests and general mental ability, a.k.a. IQ, tests) for finding good workers for most kinds of jobs. No hiring procedure is perfect, as all hiring procedures produce false positives (applicants who are hired even though they end up being lousy workers) and false negatives (applicants who don't get hired, even though they end up being great workers for some other employer). But if you want to be scientific about hiring and improve your odds of getting a good worker, you had better build work-sample tests into your hiring procedures.

In the United States, IQ-type tests were held by the Supreme Court to be illegal (UNLESS specifically validated for the job in question) under the federal equal employment opportunity statute in a case that found that IQ tests have a disparate impact on applicants from some "race" groups. The facts on the ground are changing (the "race" gap in IQ scores is not nearly as large as it used to be, and appears still to be closing) and that rationale, properly thought through, would apply equally well to show that other hiring criteria might be just as illegal. Possessing a college degree is a much stronger signal of family wealth than of job-applicant intelligence, really,

http://www.jkcf.org/news-knowledge/media-coverage/no-child-l...

but many companies these days insist on college degrees from applicants for jobs for which a college degree is no preparation at all. That just tends to turn many lower-tier colleges into expensive diploma mills.

See

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923

for the most recent posting of my full-length FAQ on company hiring procedures, written specially for HN discussions.
What type of coding are you comfortable with? If you can get in with a good team then you should be fine. Shoot me an email (check my profile)
> Given two equally capable candidates, the one with the degree is better.

This doesn't have to be "true" to be useful. A positive correlation is a valuable tool as well.
Are the screenshots used from Reddit, Stackoverflow and Facebook comments or do the show the actual 'product'?
A hack with some API? Plus bootstrap to make things quicker
I've built http://lstack.com to satisfy my need to store custom parameters with bookmarks, rather than tags only (eg. http://www.clojure.org/ programming language, licence:epl, lisp, clojure, platform:jvm, language:clojure, paradigm:functional). It's private and under development. You can give it a try.
This is the state of consumer-level tech:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PKG8q94D98

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1mDsgJaAwE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvCqLWq1nr4 (notice the stabilizer)
Looks like a classic case of weirdtopia [1] to me.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/