skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree about the importance of gathering as much domain knowledge as possible.

One thing that I have always had issues with when gathering requirements around something for an unfamiliar industry is that people who are in that industry will often neglect to mention things that are both important and non-obvious/counter-intuitive to someone unfamiliar with the industry.

This is probably because they are so familiar with the quirks of the way that the particular industry works that such things seem so obvious as to not need mentioning (and they probably don't see how it could possibly be any other way).
Basically similar to how we are often amazed by assumptions some people have about the way that computers/software works.

The paradox of this though is that to deliver truly good software for a particular industry one must really know that industry as well as somebody who has years of experience in that area. At which point you start to feel that you could do their job too.

Another alternative is to have a very tight feedback loop with someone who has tons of domain knowledge and is the target user. Basically sit next to them as you develop the software and have them review every single change you make.
So most of the things goverment forced me to have?

Maybe that is true in some cases but infrastructure does not siappear, it may be sold of because the owner went out of buissness. In a market for education a new school would open, in a goverment system the school would not go out of buissness because the goverment is not out of money.

Maybe you pension is gone, well you should not invest in a pention fund that makes bad investments. We can not protect everybody all the time, the hole point of having a social system is that some people sometimes run out of money.
"They keep talking about John Carter as a failure. I saw it. It wasn't great. And the reason wasn't bad acting or bad special effects, it was that it had a mediocre script. So yeah, try hiring some better writers next time. They apparently cost less than special effects anyway. "

I saw it too, and thought it was decent. It failed because of the title. Even the most hardcore sci-fi fans don't know what John Carter is.

If the title had "Mars" in it it probably would have at least broken even.
Go as an alternative to Node.js for Very Fast Servers
I used to give interview candidates a little background lecture on our problem domain then ask them for input on whatever I was working on that week. E.g. If you were trying to parallelize this code, how would you structure it? I never asked fizzbuzz style coding questions, because I think they're stupid and I probably couldn't code a linked list on a white board (I rarely code on whiteboards you see).
I was asked that question during an interview for a technical role at Microsoft. Granted, it was 13 years ago at this point, but they did really ask stuff like that, and probably still do.
It's more like flowers are external memory, and bees use them to send signals to each other. Just like ants do with pheromones.
Employers can be held legally responsible for the actions of their employees in certain circumstances, and hiring a ex-felon (when you knew, or could have known) doesn't look good to a jury.

I think this sucks. Since graduation I've never been asked if I'm a felon or been arrested, so it wouldn't matter to me, but for lots of the working class, "no felons" is a common screening technique for employers, and it makes it really hard for people who have done their time to society to re-integrate.
Yes, it didn't start out evil at all, it started out awesome, Gamespy was how you found servers to play on for games 10 years ago before games had their own match making. It became awful when it tried to be both.

It just morphed over time.
I have way too much trouble finding good developers to hire for there not to be a shortage. I wonder whose anecdotes are correct.
IANAL as well. However http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise20.html says that copies made in a transient form - for instance into RAM so you can run software - are not covered under copyright law.

The performance right you refer to is not a right to limit performance, it is the right to limit public performance. But what constitutes a public performance of software? I don't know, but I would be shocked if a private, personal viewing qualifies. But perhaps a website does. It is a murky area. And one that had not been thought of when the OSD was written.

However if you tried to use the public performance right to make people pay money, I would argue that you're implicitly failing OSD #6, no discrimination against fields of endeavor. Because if my field of endeavor requires public performance then I'm treated very differently than if it doesn't.
And then when the title is changed, we give admins hell for changing titles. But you're right.
I completely agree and that's why that part of the interview shouldn't be the only one. As someone said earlier, it should be a negative filter of incredibly unsuitable candidates.

In a perfect setting the interviewer wouldn't evaluate the candidate's ability to solve the problem, but his/her ability to approach it, explore it, ask questions and take steps in the appropriate direction.
I can see the siloed approach working to a point, but there are two big drawbacks:

- no exposure to new skills and techniques. This particular employee is pretty fond of cut-and-paste, and we've been refactoring to fix a lot of that. As we refactor, the ground is sort of shrinking beneath his feet, because he isn't willing to work on other people's code. If you aren't willing to learn new techniques and read other people's code, your portion of the codebase is going to accumulate technical debt while the rest moves forward.

- no big-picture perspective. I love to stick my nose into every architectural discussion, and I think it's beneficial for us to plan big decisions as a team, to try and find the best solution. From experience, a siloed employee won't be interested in getting involved in these large-scale discussions, because they haven't kept up with the rest of the codebase, and they don't have an interest in it.

Essentially, having all your team hived off from each other, doing their own thing:

- gives you a very low bus factor. If one guy moves on, dies, whatever, suddenly you've got a dark area of your codebase with built up debt and no knowledge.

- reduces the cohesiveness of your design. At the best, the high level plan will be dictated by management or a single architecture, and each employee builds their part according to spec. This seems to reduce autonomy and job satisfaction, and it presumes none of the coders have any good ideas about architecture (wrong).

If you have techniques or suggestions for getting around these issues, I'd be glad to hear them. It is a big problem that some very good technical people aren't necessarily very social.
I'm not agreeing / disagreeing on both the issues at hand here (US CEOs get paid too much, US corporations don't pay enough in taxes), but it's important to take these statistics with a huge grain of salt. In any given year, a corporation's tax paid can vary widely. It's not common to see very little tax paid for perfectly legitimate reasons such as operating loss, acquisition of companies with net operating loss, tax shields from major capital investments, etc. It's a significantly more meaningful to look at these statistics over time and with the context of the individual businesses.
What's ironic is that these body shops are mostly non-American companies (usually Indian ones that hire Indians).
Sound byte: Being Joe Entrepreneur from founder of 8bit.io
You are wrong. Olacabs is India's Uber.
http://pandodaily.com/2012/10/31/assholes-shrug/
Different bureaucracies are fighting over that form, and you are the ping pong ball caught between them.
So, name it "hexagonal.coffee" instead.
The important part to me is '“Users want to own their data” is an ideology not a use-case'

The last section of this post is in poor taste considering that at least one real person has committed suicide while building such a social network.
Yes, that's called co-generation (or combined heat/power plants). I can't comment on fusion reactors, but this isn't really feasible with fission reactors, since the coolant becomes radioactive. Sure you could run it through several loops to bring it down to a safe level, but then you're losing efficiency at each sub-stage.

I'd also like to point out you can only achieve those high efficiency numbers when you're actually using the heat.
Brogrammers, man. They are not a myth.
This is something to think about.

The interview process is so badly gamed that these days its kind of a ceremony. In a recent interview, I gave a candidate a practical problem. He was allowed to use the sed man page, and then I gave him a file and search/replace problem. Nothing much! The candidate fails! Instead he asks me if there is going to be a algorithm/data structure interview. I told him, I don't know but as far as I was concerned I was only going to test him on practical everyday problems.

It was almost like I had committed a sin. He was like, every company has those standard one's so why was I doing like a practical test. These days all candidates do is go through most common puzzles/algorithms/data structure stuff. Its actually quite easy to get access to those. Just spend some time on interview forums and you can practically game any interview, in any company any where around the world today.

My approach is straight simple. Throw a manual/documentation at the person. Give him a problem common enough to test a practical everyday situation. Check if he can pass the the test of reading the documentation and figuring out the solution to the problem. Or give him/her their favorite IDE/text editor + documentation + problem and let them solve it.

If they can do it, or even get the approach right they pass the test.

Else if all they are going to do is vomit some mathematical theory from college text books, which isn't even remotely relevant to our everyday work- I'm hardly interested in hiring such candidates.
MRI image analysis
Why Bitcoin is Great: The Spreading of Anonymous Ideas
A great employee is more than a great programmer.
Yeah. I work with several very talented indians, and hear on a regular basis about their visa woes. People who've paid taxes in this country for 10 years, raising kids here, the only reason they're not citizens is because the process takes too damn long. They're on H-1Bs and deserve to be citizens, so it touches a nerve when I hear H-1B described as some 'dey tuk ur jawbs' system.

If you're being outcompeted by the incompetent body shop employees, you need to step up your game rather than try to restrict the labor market.
I assure you, that if you were paid in goats[1], the IRS would find a way to tax you. Taxing your pay based on bitcoins will not be a problem.

1) http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html
At what price point? If you are looking for good developers at or near the "market" you will probably not find them. Anyone who has been in the industry for awhile and is very competent will know they are generally worth more.
Even if this is a troll post, it is probably true that the distributed social networks are having a really really hard time gaining ground.

The biggest problem I see is the network effect of current networks (FB, G+) and the choice of the many decentralized networks that currently exist. Which one to pick? Which one is also convenient to use for my non-geek friends?
But a commercial fusion reactor in ten years seems very unrealistic with the current regulation and standards set by current government regulatory bodies.

I think it would be too much of a competitive disadvantage for a country to not use fusion if it became practical.
You make absolutely no sense and its patently obvious you haven't read the article.
The full, non-mobile, nicely formatted version is here -

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-01/piracy-and-fraud-pr...
The non-formal english rules for time are absurdly crazy (At least to me), so I went with normal rules that all other countries use...

Maybe one day I will take my time to figure how US people speak the time.
I wonder if some day researchers were to conduct a longitudinal study on Internet users, what they would find about how a person's quality of online discussion changes over a decade (or two)? If that user started with USENET and BBS, did they shun Twitter and Facebook, or did they embrace those shorter-form, less deliberative discussions while continuing to engage in substantial discussions in other forums? How frequently do users whose first Internet conversations began on AIM/Twitter/Facebook migrate over to actual discussion boards?

I hope the findings would show growth, but I'm not optimistic.
There will be enforceable rules against any type of aggression. Coercion of private property would be considered immoral and an act of violence.

So social programs would be voluntary. ala non-profit organizations such as Kiva that utilize technology, the internet and volunteerism (instead of highly bureaucratic systems with no quality control) to affect social change.

Of course this is all an extremely radical thought experiment. But it seems to be the coming side-effect of technology.
On that note, Alan Turing's SEP entry is also worth a mention: it's a nice intro to his profoundly influential (CS + cognitive sciences + philosophy of mind) ideas as well as a (very interesting) short bio on him.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/
If you're running a web server locally on port 80, the webserver will handle the request. If no service is listening on port 80 your networking stack will not be able to open a tcp connection and it will be actively refused, unless you're using some kind of terrible software firewall.
There are a great amount of powers that do not want cheap electricity for the world.

"Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." - Paul Ehrlich.

Or Amory Lovins, who was advisor to many U.S. presidents who said "If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it."

I completely disagree with the above sentiment, but you can be sure that energy companies will always try to limit supply so that demand can be set at the right price for them to make the profit they want. We're seeing it right now with natural gas cornering the american market. NG's prices are notoriously volatile because it's easy for the companies delivering it to change the supply until demand is where they want it.
Intro to purely functional games, basic Mario in ~30 lines with elm
No need to read. The author of this post has clearly missed the point.
On driving prices down, yes, on the market collapsing, you have clearly never interacted with an addict.

Selling drugs to an addict is in no way creating value for society. None. You're taking money that was hustled/stolen in order to leave someone worse off than if they got clean. It might be that legalization is better than the black market but what I'm contending here is that "just because you made money, does not mean you were serving society".
FYI, the actual story (kind of hidden because it's linked to the single word "investigate"), is here:

http://www.wbur.org/2013/02/20/carmen-ortiz-investigation

Not a full transcript, but a long form article on Ortiz's history.

edit: A key passage that will interest some here, particularly the ones who believe that assistant DA Stephen Heynmann is the one to blame:

> A former federal prosecutor who worked alongside Ortiz for several years and did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal said Miner’s assessment is spot on.

“She is totally hands off and defers to her staffers more than any other U.S. attorney I have seen,” the lawyer said of Ortiz. “There are some [AUSAs] who have been in the office for a long time who have developed these little fiefdoms and are basically able to push her around. That’s just wrong for a whole host of reasons.”

One of those reasons, according to Miner, is that line prosecutors have an incentive to return indictments to keep their numbers up and often lack perspective when assessing the strengths and weaknesses of their own cases. It is the job of the U.S. attorney and her hand-picked supervisors to question the decisions of the AUSAs and to set the tone for the office.
I see entries to statcounter.com in there. I love that site!
See also one of my favorites, Feynman's "Ode on a Flower": https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...

It only adds... I don't understand how it subtracts.
What does it say about programmers that HN is half swamped with complaints about recruiters and half with complaints about putative oversupply of labor?
Governments don't know enough about the internet to know what a hosts file is and I don't think we want them to.
Democrify - A "democratic" Spotify queue handler (OS X only)
I'm a self-taught programmer. These stories about programming puzzles in interviews always make me nervous to look for a job.

My first job wasn't a programming job, but I did a lot of programming because the need arose and I was the only one capable of doing it.

I always felt too inexperienced to look for a real programming job. A friend pushed me to interview for the position I'm in right now (full time web developer). They didn't make me do any whiteboarding or puzzles. What I did do is give them a code sample and we discussed how what I could have done better and why.

I got the job and I'm doing quite well, despite my lack of a CS background.

Since I don't have a formal CS background, and most of my development experience is web development, I have basically no experience dealing with complex algorithms, but I've found I can solve a hard problem with enough effort (Google, co-workers, etc).

For web developers, wouldn't more appropriate questions relate to "please design a database for a website that needs to track the following", or "What would your process be for designing and implementing a REST API that would...". These would allow the developer to show you their thought process of working through a large problem without there being a necessarily right or wrong answer.
Ironically, this is precisely the attitude that prevents companies from improving their product. Such a shame.
Think twice before using someone else's hosts file, unless you can actually review every entry. Not that I really think anything funny is happening here, but it is a huge security risk to use non-authoritative DNS like this by taking someone else on their word that their hosts file is legit.
That's the best answer I've had so far, but it seems like it's just talking about matrix operations. There doesn't really seem to be any "proper" Linear Algebra in here. Nothing about bases, change of bases, null spaces, proofs that all bases have the same size, eigen-values and eigen-vectors, none of the juicy stuff. Just matrix multiplication.

So I was wondering if the more advanced stuff is used, or if it really is just the dabbling in the shallows.

Thanks.
But in how many coding jobs is pressure a real and common occurrence?

Even working in front office banking roles, there's only 1 or 2 times per year where you really have to keep your nerve and perform under genuine pressure on timescales of seconds or minutes.

The kind of pressure where 'we need to get this feature out of the door by the end of the week' is a completely different thing altogether.
New jQuery Plugin Registry
There's more money to be made in their home country.
The salaries people receive with H1-B on those companies are $60k to $70k/Year. And they are billed at $100k/year to the client.

I would say the pay is same as Americans working along with them.

The reason many companies are off-shoring to India is that there are more people with mix of domain and technical knowledge in India.
Americans don't really vote, they just choose between two dictators every four years.
Senator Lists the Death Toll From U.S. Drones at 4,700 People
There are a couple journals dedicated to computational materials science. Two active fields are phase field models and molecular dynamics.

Phase field models are mesoscale continuum (PDE) models based on the Cahn-Hilliard and Allen-Cahn equations, and are useful for things like predicting crystal grain growth and reorganization under strain, as well as fracture and many other uses. In phase-field modeling, the interesting physics is a consequence of the free energy functional, which is phenomenological and different for each material, so software should make it as easy as possible to turn specification of the free energy into an accurate and efficient massively parallel simulation. One such approach is outlined in this paper [1] from some colleagues. The resulting discrete systems are stiff and have positivity properties that must be preserved, so scalable implicit solvers (like multigrid) as well as methods for variational inequalities are necessary.

In molecular dynamics, there are many parallel scalability and expressivity challenges. Fast algorithms for long-range interactions (such as the fast multipole method) lead to less regular computational, but huge asymptotic (O(n) versus O(n^2)). Since better algorithms become more important as our hardware allows us to keep scaling up the problem sizes, Fast methods need to be applied in more places.

There is also a lot of activity in multiscale modeling and numerical homogenization, where explicit microscale models (often kinetic) are used to provide missing components of meso/macro-scale continuum models.

[1] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.commatsci.2011.07.028
It's usually basic stuff you can find in the documentation of whatever project. I know open-source software documentation isn't always the greatest or easiest to understand, it just shocks me!
Go on then...
Big-O notation is hardly "math geek" stuff. I'd not call this comment ridiculous, because I might have misunderstood it, but catch me in my cups and ask me for my true opinion and maybe I'd say that.

Big-O notation is pretty basic, and very useful. Combined with a memorized table of powers of two (you don't need all of them - I know up to 2^20, and this has proven sufficient - just enough so you can guess log N for a given value) you have a good chance at being able to make quick calculations about time and space requirements for things. Which, since we don't have infinitely fast computers with infinite amounts of memory, often comes in handy.
This would depend on your network setup - it seems unlikely that the OS would automatically refuse to route a request to there. On OS X:

$ curl --connect-timeout 5 -v 192.0.2.1
* About to connect() to 192.0.2.1 port 80 (#0)
* Trying 192.0.2.1...
* Connection timed out after 5011 milliseconds
* Closing connection 0
curl: (28) Connection timed out after 5011 milliseconds

So your browser will likely end up trying the connection and timing out after a while.
people forget that ATOC exists to protect and further the interests of their members: the privately owned Train Operating Companies -- they don't owe random developers anything.

Network Rail on the other had are (basically) state owned, and their extremely comprehensive feeds are now completely open: http://www.networkrail.co.uk/data-feeds/

these feeds even include the raw signalling data (you even get events when trains activate level crossings) -- there's nothing stopping you building your own NRE API.

I've been slowly building up a database of signal locations/berths to lat/longs by matching up my physical position (while riding on the train) to the NR feed events, with the idea of being able to produce a much better map of where the trains are in realtime.
Sadly that's true.
Under that definition there is no such thing as a shortage.
Jesus. Way to thread a needle with a sledgehammer.
For windows use http://www.abelhadigital.com/hostsman (free, but closed source). It also has a list of popular 3rd party supplied host files to block unwanted sites, with options to update them