skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is very funny for someone who lives in Minnesota. My wife grew up in Taiwan, and didn't see snow for the first time until she was twenty-one years old. When we moved to Minnesota a year after we were married over in Taiwan, she then got BIG TIME acquainted with snow, as we moved in February (about twenty-eight years ago today, now that I think of it).

Our four children all pile outside in Minnesota winter weather with very minimal clothing on--indoor wear even when there is snow on the ground, and light jackets even when the temperature is well below freezing. My wife spent years being horrified at seeing her half-Taiwanese children going out lightly dressed in temperatures that were unimaginable to her when she was growing up, while I just smiled and said, "Our children are just reflecting their Norwegian ancestry." Today we've all learned to deal with the cold.

My wife and I had a very enjoyable walk to the public library (one mile out, one mile back) yesterday, and I reflected that she has proved her adaptability by living so much of her life in weather that she never experienced at all in childhood. Personally, my second stay in Taiwan (1998-2001) seems to have permanently reset my body's thermostat, so much so that I NEVER feel hot anywhere in the United States, but now feel cold from time to time during winter in Minnesota. I'm probably more adapted to Taipei's semitropical climate now. But whatever the weather trade-offs, it's a delight to be outdoors, and I encourage our children and myself to get out of the house every day, in all seasons, wherever we live. When we do that, we have the children WITH us, because we want them to experience the different sights and sounds as we are on the move. I have not tried what the interesting submitted article specifically mentions, leaving a baby carriage (pram) outdoors while the baby is immobile. That sounds a bit radical to me, but apparently it works in its cultural context.
My $0.02: there are a lot of reasons to want to move to the US that are completely unrelated to job opportunities.
How can this even happen? I mean, isn't it obvious in the first week or two, month tops? If not how can they hide their cluelessness for months until they are laid off?
LOL, my song is the saddest song I've ever heard. It sounds like the score to a point a play where the protagonist loses everything.
At my current job, we used FizzBuzz when we were interviewing potential senior devs. One of the candidates who looked good enough on paper to talk to could not complete FizzBuzz, and in fact spent 20 minutes struggling with it before I decided to end the screening.

It's certainly possible that some of the people who completed FizzBuzz are not good programmers, but it seems pretty clear that the one person who failed it cannot possibly be a good programmer.

Having people go through FizzBuzz (which generally took 5-10 minutes per person) saved us the trouble of a longer interview with more people for at least one clearly unacceptable candidate.
What about tablets like the Lenovo thinkpad tablet 2? Atom powered, gets 7h+ battery life, weight and power comparable to arm tabletsa, and can run x86 code.
Trinity University, San Antonio.

http://cs.trinity.edu/

(Yes, their website is ancient)
While JavaScript drags the scars of its hasty standardization around with it, Go was designed very thoughtfully from the beginning, and as a result I find that it’s a pleasure to write.

This is very true. Go is a pleasure to write. In fact, it's such a pleasure then when you hit something that wasn't really well designed it's horrid.
The fact that Node.js is being used in this equation says a lot about how much impact and penetration it has achieved in a rather short while.

Personally I hope that Go does just as well, if not a lot better. I am a bit of a fan of both.
There is something more than that. There are many beautiful things, but flowers in particular seem to stand out as something that is recognized for their beauty regardless of culture, time or place. In the same way that people the world over, independent of one another, come up with the same conclusions about geometry and mathematics...
Please also note UInvest as a crowdfunding platform:

https://uinvest.com.ua/?amigosid=32511

It's primarily oriented towards established local businesses as opposed to new startups.

But nonetheless it's a good example of crowdfunding in action.
Yes, but putting it in the parent preempts a lot of similar sibling replies from people who don't read all of the comments.
> because of a custody agreement needs to stay in North Texas

Wow, pretty bad case to blame immigrants.

As a father I can sympathize with the guy, it should be hard having to choose between a decent job offer and the ability to see your children every day. But mobility is one important factor in the job market, you don't always get to choose where to live while advancing your career (unless maybe if you're a rock star and telecommuting is viable), especially in STEM areas that have most jobs in large metros or startup/high-tech hubs.
He says on twitter. To gain more publicity from HN. Just because he hates that there's some people here who call him on his bullshit, or even if he hated HN for real, that wouldn't mean he doesn't use it for marketing.
It isn't that people are insecure about their programming skill and intelligence. It's that they are irritated by tests which don't measure what they're supposed to. If any insecurity is involved, it's about ability to ace unrepresentative tests ranging from trivial nonsense to outright hazing.

You advise readers to "just get better at [the tests]". That's practical. But it goes right back to the problem, that many of the tests mostly index whether you prepared for that test.

Everyone talks about how many applicants are terrible at programming, or how many employees are mediocre. But at least offline, we rarely mention the complementary problem, that many companies are terrible at interviewing and hiring.

We talk as if being on the other side of that desk, in a position of power, means you are automatically good at interviewing. It isn't so. When a company treats candidates abusively - or takes bad hires who are extra slick, cheap, submissive, or similar to themselves - that isn't because of bad applicants. It's a failure of that company.

We can recognize that a defensive and condescending attitude is toxic in a programmer. But the same attitude in an interviewer is completely accepted. They're on top, applicants are on bottom.
For UK, I have used: http://www.gaussnewton.com/convert-word-to-latex-tex
Yes, but at what point does go transition from obscurity to PG's "python paradox"?

http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

It sure seems Scala's in this "python paradox" land now. My guess is that you need some startups make it big using Go to evangelize it. Google using it is interesting, but I'm not sure it makes it "cool".

Though, I'm not sure Java was ever a language you could use as a skillset filter. Hm.
Apple rejects gay humour app
I've been using Go a lot recently as well, and it's rapidly become my go-to language (no pun intended) for a lot of problems, even when concurrency is not involved.

The biggest thing Go gives me is that it's really easy to manage code bases that grow organically - refactoring a project that grows from 50 LOC to 5000 LOC is almost painless in Go - no other language that I've seen has dealt with this aspect of code development so well.
While it is true that hairs can sense small electrostatic forces better, I would not rule out the attractive force on the whole bee, whose mass is quite small. People are not generally aware that electrostatic force is 10^36 times stronger than gravity.
Horizontal Stripe Popcorn Towel - Handkerchief
I played around with a go server to do some simple scaling numbers - looking at possibly using go to implement a large-number-of-idle-connections notification server.

I found the (good) result that I could spawn a new goroutine for each incoming connection with minimal (~4k) overhead. This is pretty much what you'd expect since a goro just needs a page for it's stack if it's doing no real work. I had something like 4 VMs each making ~30k conns (from one process) to the central go server with something like 120k conns.

I found one worrying oddity however. Resource usage would spike up on the server when I shut down my client connections (e.g. ctrl-C of a client proc with ~30k conns).

Reasoning about things a bit, I think this is due to the go runtime allocating an OS thread for each goro as it goes through the socket close() blocking call. I think it has to do this to maintain concurrency. So I end up with hundreds of OS threads (each only lives long enough to close(), but I'm doing a lot at the same time).

Can anyone comment:

- is this guess as to the problem likely to be correct?

- is this "thundering herd" a problem in practice?

- are there ways to avoid this? (Other than not using a goro-per-connection, which I think it the only idiomatic way to do it?)

My situation was artificial, but I could well imagine a case that losing, say a reverse proxy, could cause a large number of connections to suddenly want to close() and it would be a shame if that overwhelmed the server.
The sun drops roughly a kilowatt/square meter of energy onto the earth. A toaster uses roughly a kilowatt.

The sun delivers a huge quantity of energy compared with that used by humans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earths_energy_budget
Wait a second, wouldn't it be more accurate to say the complexity had been pushed into the browser, affecting the browser developers perhaps. The reader might just have to pay in terms of waiting longer to read. Or do you mean "reader" is the browser software. The thread of the discussion started with (I thought) the difficulty for the non-technical user to install and use a static site generator?

I do think the concept of "conservation of complexity" has some analytical value in the design of software systems.
There was a guy in the Pinboard Prosperity Cloud who was working on best-in-class secure VMs. I haven't seen a follow-up but it's only been several weeks.

http://static.pinboard.in/prosperity_cloud.htm
Is there an IP block lists for Servers ? I see a lot of traffic from ip addresses that seem to probe my measly AWS EC2 instance and I wish there was a list I could feed to my NGINX or IPtables so they would just drop those packets .
I wish I could find a quote to pull out right now, but one of the other people on Bloomberg West has explained the distinction between business reporting and investment shows.

Much of the financial journalism on CNBC, or PBS's terrible NBR, purport to give you information sufficient to draw conclusions and make stock picking decisions.

One, you cannot do sufficient analysis to beat other investors from information provided in a two-minute report, and if it were reliably and predictably valuable analysis then by being reported to a large audience it will already be priced into the market before viewers can take advantage. Furthermore, the interviews with CEOs and investment managers who have fiduciary responsibilities to people that do not include the audience are counterproductive if they are ever assumed to be the final word.

However, insight and analysis are different things, and the narratives behind different businesses or the narratives that are guiding analyst's thoughts on a particular industry are a good starting point (and more interesting than arbitrary stock picks). Where Bloomberg West gets it right is leaving few viewers with the mistaken impression that wouldn't need to do their own research if they want to make investment decisions.

From this interview alone, they, or at least Paul Graham, talked about how most investors should probably avoid choosing stocks and stick to index funds. I doubt that would be a very popular thing to say on CNBC.
Everyone here would like the documentary "the botany of desire"
>What non-technical hobby or interest do you have?

That seems like a poor choice. Are you trying to eliminate people who don't have non-technical hobbies for some reason?
Sudoku's kind of a fun one, because brute force works just fine. More elegant solutions use the same strategies humans use, but recursive brute force gets the job done just fine.
it does wait for a timeout, so "route" was poorly chosen. it just wont get anywhere on most configurations because they respect the 192.0.2.x is examples only convention.
> By that logic, every contractor hired mainly by government would have to behave like a public organization.

You say that like it's a bad thing. In fact, on major criticism of outsourcing and privatisation is that it becomes way to shelter dubious activities from Freedom-Of-Information requests that would apply if the work was done by a public organization.
"Say, you want to design a protocol with reliable delivery and/or loss detection. You will then have ACKs, send window and retransmissions."

Maybe I'm missing something (likely) but it seems to me any potential replacement for UDP specifically doesn't care about packet loss, acks, etc. The whole point of UDP is speed over reliability, yes?
That kind of statistical hand waving is irritating. First, it's 40 abductions where parents are characterized as being paranoid about their child being kidnapped. The statistic says nothing about how leaving your kid on a sidewalk might affect the chances of abduction. Your chances of getting hit by lightning aren't as slim if you're a golfer.

Also, 700x more likely to get into Harvard as an applicant or just a US born child? Does that include post-graduate Harvard institutions? How is 'getting into Harvard' a useful benchmark for acceptable risk?
Startups Share Why St. Louis Is A Great Location
I was raised for the first three years of my life in a mountainous region. I have been put to sleep outside on the balcony every day. My mother told me that once my grandmother visited she was panicked to find out I was MIA, to which Mother calmly replied "the snow has made a drift out of the stroller again". What is left from all that is the habit to sleep every night on wide open window (winters usually I am single ... may have some correlation) and the inability to catch cold or flu for more than a day. Getting out of the warm bed on -17 C in the room is unique and highly recommended experience.

So it is perfectly normal in lots of places in the world.
Pretty much anything Google does is cool. Probably same could be said about Amazon, Facebook et al.

Depends a lot on your interpretation of "Cool" though.
Exactly. I commute to work by bike, and though it doesn't get too cold here, it does rain a lot, so a large fraction of my rides are in the low 40s/high 30s and rain. Most people do everything they can to avoid going out it the rain, but if you wear the proper gear it's great.
I should add that I'm not claiming 'shit-hot coder' status as mentioned in my original post there. I like to think I'm pretty good, but blowing ones own trumpet is more than a little gauche :)
I would be surprised if many people knew hashing algorithms at all.
Normal stuff in Finland, I have been sleeping outside when I was baby, so was my wife and our children sleep.
Why should programming contest problems be tests of practical sysadmin skills? That makes no sense at all.
The internet in UK (London, Virginmedia) is terrible; whenever I need to download and especially upload something (some video, hires pictures, system backups) there is serious swearing involved.
In comparison, _eight_ years ago in Bucharest I had 100/100 Mbps, just like anyone else.

At least Virgin realised they suck at it and sold the Broadband division to UPC/Chello, but that's not much reason to be optimistic.
> there's no base for outrage here

IMHO the basis for outrage (if you want to to call it that) is that the privatisation is shown to be somewhere between problematic and "not in the public interest". It's a relevant topic considering the current UK government's goals, and the extent to which they are connected to people who stand to benefit from privatisation.
It really isn't useful to base discussions on the nonsensical graphs in this series, which seem to be an artifact of how and when people are being surveyed.
Data Visualizations: How Songs Go Viral on Turntable.fm
I run node/express for most of my web servers and each takes up about 10-15mb RAM. They're very basic no fluff. Anyone know what comparable mem footprint in Go?
You can interpret the response more broadly, though. In this case, it was probably pretty apparent that the person hadn't worked through the problem before, so it is indicative of problem-solving and attitude. If he'd recited the answer from memory that usually comes across and then you have to pick something from a different area. If, as an interviewer, you literally can't find a problem that the interviewee hasn't already thought about, (i.e., he or she knows about computational biology, astrophysics, information theory, etc and none of this was obvious from their resume and previous positions) that can also be a good sign.
We used to take our kid out in the cold when he a had a cough (Alberta). The cold air definitely helps with breathing.

BTW, quick English tip: you should use "clothes" instead of "cloths" for 'vêtements'.
Longform.com looks like a placeholder to me.
Where the Journal News Went Wrong in Mapping Gun Owners
Everyone from McKinsey to Accenture makes the same mistake.
text input is important because today's computers are dumb and we have to type a lot of text to get basic stuff done.

What if the computer was much more intelligent so you could express yourself more concisely.

Also, what about contexts where your hands are not free? In a car for example?
Interactive touch laptop experiments
Claims 3 and 6 lack a true understanding of Ocaml. The compiler's error messages are exceptionally good in most cases.

Syntax errors without detail are a product of the parsing technology: its a minor irritant and worst.

The most difficult problem (IMHO) comes from type inference when a type inferred from context is not the one intended, but a conflict is not discovered until code with the intended typing is found: the error reflects the second location which is confusing because there is no error at that point. Of course this doesn't occur if you actually provide type annotations, so it is merely a cost of being able to omit them.

The excess exception handling is a reasonable comment, however it is easy to wrap the exception throwing code in a variant to enforce local error checking, and in any case this style is a property of the library, not the core language.

The type polymorphism in Ocaml is anything but clunky: for basic stuff you don't even need any type annotations. The thing is that Set us NOT type polymorphism. Its module polymorphic, and that requires explicit binding of an instance. There is a simple enough reason: module functors take non-type arguments, particularly function closures, which are values, which do not have unique signatures, so implicit instantiation is not possible.

Ocaml does have some other serious disadvantages. One is that because of the way the optimiser uses information from compiles on which it depends, there are annoying constraints on build order. In addition, recursion cannot span compilation boundaries which is pretty lame for a functional programming language: even C has no problem with that.

Finally, the political situation is probably the biggest problem. The development team is excellent but limited and their focus is on the type system, rather than libraries. Because the community is modest compared to say C++, many attempts to make extended libraries have failed to gain acceptance, because no one wants to depend on an unresourced third party library and the core INRIA team doesn't have the resources or interest to extend the standard distribution.

Despite these difficulties .. I would never want to go back to writing C++ (OMG .. the pain!). As a language .. Ocaml is light years ahead.
They obviously can't prevent other people from submitting links to their blog, but I don't see them submitting their own content either.

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=37s...
The entire point is "is this person capable of the most basic fundamentals of programming (conditionals, looping). That's it. We don't filter out obsessive people with it, they demonstrate that they understand conditionals and looping, what's the problem?
Leaving kids to nap outside a coffee shop in winter...I'd love to see the horror on people's faces in the US. Makes perfect sense to me, and I do this outside my house from time to time (secluded backyard of course), but I'm pretty sure child protective services would be hauling me off before I finished my latte.
As for why many of them don't become permanent residents: it is quite hard to jump from H1B to permanent residency. I'm facing this problem myself at the moment and there's no easy solution. Living in such uncertainty about your future is hard and many people are just like 'screw this' and leave after some period of time. It's not like they want to leave and take their work with them.
The article that can't give any details or make any sense.
Build an engaged platform for hackers in different domains of CS
Goal:
Build a platform for hackers to solve interesting Computer Science challenges in a wide variety of domains.

Hypothesis:
Every problem solver has one type of challenge in a particular domain that he/she loves to solve. It could be AI, Machine Learning, Security, Databases, Algorithmic trading, etc. We're building a large collection of problems with progressively increasing difficulty from beginner to real-world problems/data sets.

How big can you get?
A room full of hackers is possibly the most valuable one ever. We're building this online.

Why should you work with us?

>Build a product that's intellectually gratifying and stay sharp forever

>Foundation brick in building a company

>Be amongst fighters. That's the best way to describe the team. I might be biased but it's one of the most inspiring workplaces I've seen. You should meet us to believe.

apart from the fact that we pay well, provide equity options and funded by YC, Khosla Ventures, Jawed Karim, etc.

What'd you be working on?

Your focus would be on two important metrics - Engagement (time spent and interaction) and retention. We obsess over users a lot (https://twitter.com/ksetyadi/status/303807178114990082) and been doing a bunch of experiments on our site which has made thousands of users happy.

Imagine if you grew this number by 100x? Your role is to build (or kill) components on the site that'll grow both the metrics.

>Analyzing engagement and retention metrics, feedback from users and base product decisions on them

>Running experiments/coding some components of the product to grow the two data points.

>Detailed product specifications that'll help designers and hackers to execute more ideas and make it live

What are we looking for?

>You have coded extensively in the past and continue to build stuff for fun

>You understand the way hackers think and what they enjoy, and you are able to translate ideas into how it should reflect on the website

>Explicit mention of some of the earlier products you've worked on - what changes you made and how they affected the business value

>Experience working in user growth teams in the past is a huge plus

>You are very numbers obsessed and the first thing you wake up to is an analytics dashboard

Interested? Mail me (vivek [at] hackerrank)
I think bhousel meant http://longform.org/

There's also:

http://longreads.com/

http://www.aldaily.com/

http://www.edge.org/
Just a decade away from commercial applications? Hmmm, isn't "the next big breakthrough" always a decade away?

A good rule of thumb: unless the technology has been proven to work and they are just working on commercializing it, "a decade" always means, "we have no idea when we will have anything, if ever."
> Most H1-Bs return back to India within a year and a new person will be sent to fill in the same position next year.

That sounds wrong. The period of the H1-B visa stay is three years.