skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a big hackathon fan and participant and I can sympathize with the emotional high of "hey, we built something really cool" to the low of "the judges didn't just didn't understand what we've built". Most of the hackathons in which I've participated use a panel of judges from the VC or general "tech community" but whom aren't usually hackers themselves. I'd love to see an event where the judges know what it takes to produce something that works in a compressed timeframe and don't ask the inane questions like "how are you going to make money?" or "who are your competitors?"

I'm also bootstrapping my startup primarily for the same reasons. I don't particularly want or need validation from VCs, many of whom aren't hackers, to distract me from figuring out whether what I've built is of any value to my customers.
But it helps us! :P
Bla bla
I LOVE S.f. And Would never give it up for Oakland, even though I'm a Raider fan! ;)
You are misunderstanding the statistical theory. The xkcd comic was making a joke about misused priors. You have no reason to believe that this paper used a wrong prior and peer reviewers overlooked it, nor have you examined the choice of p-value.
Actually that is a case where Java really shines, as it is cross-platform
Caveat: While you might use Google Apps to host your email [1], I would be leery of using Google to register the domain name that you use for this.

A major point of this exercise is being able to use control of the domain name registration to change its email support settings (change your email host), if/when needed.

You might find exercising control of a registration initiated through Google, and/or moving such a registration to a different registrar, difficult. And if so, you face Google's [cough] "legendary" customer support.

----

[1] I believe that you can still host a single address for free; multiple addresses / users under an Apps account is now a paid-only feature.
I've seen one where it was always:

"What is 2+4?"
Wrong. The worst CAPTCHA ever is http://www.solvemedia.com/
I thought you had to read them before actually registering, not after.
Part of the reason for this is sponsorships of the hackathons by third-parties, as they are the ones who frequently award prizes because of the increased publicity behind the tech used for successful hacks.

Unfortunately, I don't think that will be changing soon.
I find that his self-deprecating tone provides a welcome contrast to his usual boundless smugness.
Blast from the Past: The No More Bzz Bzz Hun Hun (1995 or so)
A website that let you vote college professors up and down. Make sure to click on Misc. Sadly voting system or data could not be resurrected.
One of the drivers in making the purchase of qnx for RIM apparently was the integration play in the embedded space. Automotive for example.

Have seen not much fruit of that other than the QNX car project [0]. I remember seeing a Porshce at CES a year or two ago that had the system in it and it integrated with the Blackberry Playbook pretty well.

[0]: http://www.qnx.com/products/qnxcar/
-> Most of the channels were educational or news or other special interest...

There was a lot of news and special interest but throwing Educational
programming into the mix is not factually correct.

I have two list, one from 2011 and one recent. Both show an emphasis on Entertainment and Extracurricular programming.

Recent:
http://www.youtube.com/yt/advertise/original-channels.html

From 2011:
http://www.tubefilter.com/2011/10/28/youtube-original-channe...

Not too many pure educational programming plays. Certainly not the majority.

->Non-talent costs really can be dramatically reduced in a non-union world...

Producing content is like anything else you have to make, a lot of times you get what you pay. I've worked with a lot of new workers, the good ones rise
to professional level pretty fast and they won't work for equity/portfolio for too long. I think Youtube has gone as far as it can go with cheap content, which is pretty good. Now they are experimenting.
You know that you can make things happen when you talk them out, right? You know that you make things happen with other people, no one can be a lone hero a run a product, company or any other greater humanity organization just by himself, right?

I've worked 5 years in an exclusively office environment, flexible time but we weren't allowed to work from home, for the last 2 years I've worked almost exclusively from home and I from my experience I can say that some days I would be more productive if I'd met some guy for a face-to-face conversation.

I do Skype meetings all the time, or Google Hangouts, none of the tools I use for remotely talk to people make me as dynamic as I can be face-to-face. I can't grab a piece of paper and sketch something to illustrate my point, I can't gesticulate to show something better than only my words or my webcam showing something can.

I have lost HOURS on meetings + sketching things with digital tools (Skitch, diagrams, etc) that I could've explained a lot better in person.

You can hate meetings all day long, I hate them too, but I don't hate social interactions, I don't hate face-to-face conversations to clear things up. And that's what standup "meetings" are, just "gatherings" not meetings, if you think that meeting has a bad connotation. Standup meetings/gatherings just bring everyone to the same page in about 10 minutes, no e-mail, Skype or Google Hangout can do that, I'm sorry.
You mean the government contractors?
Not sure how your remarks rebut any of the arguments I made.
What litigation would they face? At least in the US, it's not illegal to discriminate against job candidates based on what they post on Facebook. As long as employers are not discriminating based on race, religion, sex, disability or other legally protected attributes, they're not breaking any laws.

I don't think it's a good idea, however, just like I don't think that running drug tests or credit reports on job candidates (both widespread practices) are good ideas.
I mean that the Haskell version is not anywhere close to being type safe. If you change almost all of the [] to () you can achieve a great deal of type safety at no extra cost. Having said that, there's still a lot of low-hanging type safety fruit remaining! (I also took the liberty of removing Lambda, which was redundant).

diff (y, x) =
atom (y) → (eq (y, x) → ONE $ ZERO) $

eq (car (y), PLUS) →
cons (PLUS, maplist (cdr (y), \z -> diff (car (z), x))) $

eq (car (y), TIMES) →
cons (PLUS, maplist (cdr (y),
\z ->
cons (TIMES,
maplist (cdr (y),
\w ->
z /= w → car (w) $
diff (car (w), x))))) $

error ("Unexpected term" ++ show y)

mctest1 = diff (List [TIMES, X, List [PLUS, X, A], Y], X)

data SExpr = ZERO | ONE | PLUS | TIMES | X | A | Y
| List [SExpr]
deriving (Eq, Show)

car (List t) = head t
car _ = error "car of non-pair"

cdr (List t) = List (tail t)
cdr _ = error "cdr of non-pair"

cons (h, List t) = List (h : t)
cons _ = error "cons with non-list" -- our lists aren't pairs

atom (List _) = False
atom _ = True

eq (x, y) = x == y

maplist (List x, f) = List (ml x)
where ml [] = []
ml x@(_:t) = f (List x) : ml t

infixl 1 →
(→) :: Bool -> a -> a -> a
(→) True x _ = x
(→) False _ y = y
I didn't like this article. Felt the author gave no thought to what work has been throughout human history: dull, physically demanding, etc.

He says work is meant to be interesting engaging and meaningful... It would be great if that were true... But that is written nowhere. Work is simply things that need to be completed that someone else is willing to pay for. Any other definition is you projecting your ideals onto what the task really is.

So to answer the question: why are so many jobs crappy? Because that is the way things have always been.

If you enjoy your work (like I do), count yourself lucky.
Meh, I'm not surprised. There's too much noise on Hacker News. Just keep your eye on the new submissions to see this.
LOL. So someone is doing automated lookups on the D&B site, they noticed, and then they put a broken captcha on the site.

Really, the only thing wrong with this picture is that they got called out on HN, so now whoever is doing the automated lookups won't be able to kill off D&B by releasing their information.
I wasn't insisting on lists, but on square brackets, to match McCarthy's syntax. This golf game has strict rules!

If we drop the brackets we may as well go the whole way and use curried functions, in which case the diff function looks like:

diff y x =
atom y → (eq y x → ONE $ ZERO) $

eq (car y) PLUS →
cons PLUS (maplist (cdr y) (\z -> diff (car z) x)) $

eq (car y) TIMES →
cons PLUS (maplist (cdr y)
(\z -> cons TIMES
(maplist (cdr y)
(\w -> z /= w → car w $
diff (car w) x)))) $
error ("Unexpected term" ++ show y)
Is it such a good idea to use "SC2" in the name of an unofficial app? I imagine that's entering a legal minefield.
AES cache-timing attacks viable on phones
>> Prove this wrong -- identify a surefire winning stock picking strategy that is immune to the announcement effect and insider trading, that reliably puts its practitioners ahead of market indices.

> Falsifying EMH does not require such a thing ...

As a matter of fact, yes, it does. The only acceptable evidence against the EMH is a performance that the EMH cannot accommodate -- a successful strategy for reading and exploiting the market in a way that performs better than market indices. And not just sometimes, but all the time, reliably.

Science requires evidence. Evidence in this case means producing results above the norms set by the market averages, and not just sometimes, but all the time. Anything else is empty philosophizing.

Performances below the norms can be explained in any number of ways, but above the norms is a different story. And by "above the norms" I don't mean 1/2 the time or 1/2 the practitioners -- that's assured by chance factors.

All this talk about the EMH being flawed, not being the whole story, falls down before the fact that no one can invent a strategy to improve on long-term market averages, and that says it all. It is the ultimate evidence in favor of the EMH.

If no one can think of a way to read the market to his advantage, better than average performance, without engaging in insider trading or reliance on the announcement effect, then the default assumption is supported.

> This is an onerous, diabolical burden of proof.

Be that as it may, it is an essential standard of proof. Nothing else matters -- no amount of philosophizing can stand in for actual results.

The expert gets up and says, "The EMH is flawed, meaningless, unscientific, wrong, etc., etc.." Someone from the audience says "All right -- prove it. Produce a strategy that beats the market norms." The expert is naturally taken aback -- "Are you serious? What about the EMH? What about the fact that every single strategy that has ever been tried, has failed in the long term?"

This is like people in a bar talking about sailing. Any number of ideas about sailing are aired over intoxicating beverages, and it's all very interesting, but since no one goes out on the water, it's completely meaningless.
> attributed to some tiny company that promptly goes bust, leaving taxpayers paying for the cleanup

If there was ever a reason to disallow the boundaries of incorporation, that's it.
I could imagine that that is for keyboard layouts where | is prohibitively difficult to type.
Many jobs are crappy because companies want guarantees. They would rather have peace of mind that things are moving at a known rate compared to any risk of uncertainty.

The jobs are not necessarily crappy because companies are interested in keeping wages down. Companies are more interested in boosting profits compared to keeping wages down.

The humorous part is so many jobs continue to remain crappy even when you make a boss look good by generating orders of magnitude more value than he bargained for when hiring you.

Even if you explained to the boss how you could generate such value at the time of hire, they still wouldn't be able to assimilate it's possible. They don't see how one can generate such much value, even when you present plans on how it can be done.

It's as if the boss is trying hard not to let you generate more value than expected.
The author (a former classmate of mine) is a professor of physics and philosophy, not a trader.
That may have to do with it having been hacked before: http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/05/google-recaptcha-bro...
What I don't get so much is the push to take the result of a hackathon and turn it into a company. Several occasions I have seen investors promise to invest in winners, but most of the time it is just a group of people together for the weekend with already their startup or a dayjob. Lauch, Angelhack have this actually built in. Result: more focus on business and already existing teams (companies?) that come in together to use the event as a launching platform. Which is not the goal for me for a hackathon: trying out technologies, meeting new people, have fun. I already have my startup, don't need another.
And to be more specific, Turing completeness refers to what is computable with an unbounded amount of memory and time. This is why we have complexity theory layered on top of computability theory. Some things are theoretically computable but practically infeasible. Compiler optimizations can help greatly in some of those cases.
Isn't that the whole reason of why jobs need to be done?

Someone has a problem and they want to get it solved (but don't want to do it themselves) so they pay someone else to do it for them.

That's the reason work is called work – it's work.
"BigCo. didn't engage in discrimination: your resume was rejected without a human seeing it at all."

I don't think that argument would stand up in court. If the software you contracted to use explicitly applied screening criteria based on protected classes such as race or sex, then you would be found to be discriminating illegally.
I don't really understand this approach. Won't the false positive rate be close to 100%? Humans are going to get the captcha right every time. If it's supposed to be a honeypot system, the input should be hidden from human users to avoid that problem.
> Having nothing to report is fine.

In a meeting where you're supposed to say what you've been working on, at a job where you're paid to be working on it, in what way is it fine to have nothing to report?
Jupiter's Moon Europa May Have "Spikes of Ice"
It's funny to hear Samsung and Intel described as "hobby" developers. Intel and Nokia achieved a shipping platform with the N9 and I think some other partners may have shipped a Meego product before it was killed by Microsoft cash/Elop.

Samsung shipped successful BadaOS phones under the Wave line. People on HN should be uniquely qualified to know what it means to actually ship a product and not dismiss it so out of hand.

Bada was an extensive userland sitting on top of either Linux or proprietary BSD-ish kernels and was the culmination of probably a decade of effort. I never saw anything other than prototypes running on top of Linux kernels though. The shipping product was entirely proprietary and achieved some decent share in a few markets (Brazil and Europe I think) for the total lack of marketing.
The M-Expression in the post is rather limited in what it can do; if anyone is looking for a system for use in practical mathematical modelling, during my PhD research I created a system for expressing ODE / DAE models in Haskell, and a solver which uses symbolic/numeric techniques (including symbolic differentiation) to solve them.

My RealExpression definition (I also define BoolExpression) is here https://github.com/A1kmm/modml-core/blob/master/ModML/Core/B...

Code to symbolically differentiate a RealExpression is here https://github.com/A1kmm/modml-solver/blob/master/ModML/Solv...

Documented here: Chapters 9 & 10 of https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/2292/8... [3.3 MB PDF]
"persistent homology simply cannot decide whether something is noise or not"

Isn't that general, when one does not know anything of the data? You need assumptions (for example the simple one of linear separability) to detect noise, and even then, it is conditional in the sense that 'this is the smallest set of noisy items that makes the rest of the data satisfy the assumptions'
> your ad hominem at the end ...

What ad hominem was that? I correctly identified my correspondent as a salesman, not a scientist. It's a simple statement of fact. He thinks one data point counts as evidence, which means he isn't a scientist, and he is objectively in the business of talking people into investing in his fund -- therefore he is a salesman.

Simple straight-up facts. And it really is pointless trying to discuss these issues with someone whose livelihood depends on the myth that the market can be tweaked in any way we please.
Some interesting material on Aubrey de Grey, the former Computer Scientist, now Biogerontologist behind SENS

[1] TED 2007 - A Roadmap to end aging

[2] TedMed 2009

[3] Documentary: Would you like to live forever

[4] Book: Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime

I also wonder if he is on calorie restriction [5], i think it's quite possible

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYpxRXlboQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgLRhxvRlKg

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YNTMrarUBE

[4] http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough...

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction
Ah, great list.

I would consider a lot of the science/food/tech/automotive stuff as "educational entertainment" to the extent that the Hitler Channel and other cable tv programming is educational. But there is not a single thing there I'd personally watch.

(The only YouTube content I love, personally, is Hickok45, MrColionNoir, etc., and cat videos. I'd love curated high quality cat videos. I'll probably get some cats and a 4K RED or Canon just to have an excuse to produce this.)
Hell yes it does! Reason, logic, and observation all the way baby!
Pssst. I don't think that was seriously a post from a D&B developer.
Microsoft reportedly bringing WebGL support to Internet Explorer 11
I guess I will have to introduce random spelling errors into my messages then.
[Show HN] Android hack for sweeping panorama
Why must it be an either/or decision? Delve into Django while learning JS. That gives you practical abilities on both the client and server side, but there's a bigger benefit: these languages do a lot of things in very different ways, and the ability to approach problems from different angles will ultimately make you a better programmer, not just in these languages, but in others you come across.

And there ARE others, but you're just in your first semester, and these things take time. Python and JavaScript aren't bad places to start. Once you get your feet under you, there's time to do more.
You're disregarding specialization. Someone has a problem and they want to get it solved - but they can't do it themselves, so they pay someone else to do it for them.

Things get outsourced for this as much as "I don't want to do it myself". And therein lies the space for interesting work.
What is up with this commentary? In one section the author writes that it's going to be awkward for the future dates of the woman's son. I can see why she would think this, but in reality, the mom's comments probably will not affect her son at all.

I think the part where she says senior girls only have 1 class to choose from is at least partially true. Being on campus I've noticed that college girls want to date older guys. This also means that they dislike dating younger men. I'm not saying it's true for every girl, nor am I saying that women can only date older men. It's just a preference they have. Why is she getting all offended? Does she really think senior girls would want to date a freshman? Come on now.

Also she's making a lot of statements that she (and many other people) have observed in life. Like the idea that men marry pretty but stupid girls (it does happen... all the time). I'm not saying that it's great, but it's what happens.

Just seems like a feminist who can't get a grip on the reality of things.
You bringing up things being different in New York City made me remember that if you compare the proportion of women and men of New York City and Los Angeles, you will notice that there are more women than men in New York and the opposite in Los Angeles. Now this fact alone may not be enough to conclude that based on these ratios that it is the cause of such a change in quality of women. But from another perspective it makes sense. In Los Angeles and in California, there are less women. This means that women have a much larger pool of men that they can choose, so they can afford to be picky. This means that the proportion of good looking, successful men using online dating increases since there aren't enough women in the local area to date. Now New York on the other hand, the advantage is for men as there are more women and they can be picky. This means that even attractive and interesting women now have to make themselves publicly available via online dating.

Of course this is just a hypothesis so of course this may not be the case.
I created some screenshots [1] showing some things, menu based tab completion, global aliases, included vcs prompt support for git, svn, hg, bzr, cvs etc.

There are plenty more features like for example hashed directories, e.g. shortcuts to a directory:

hash -d log=/var/log
cd ~log # PWD is /var/log

and plenty more.

[1] http://imgur.com/a/gqpsF
Damn you, Poe! :(
WebGL in Internet Explorer 11
Standups, when well done on a healthy team, aren't poisonous. But I've found that they're rather pointless as well. If you have enough unforced communication in your team, you don't need the standup.
You don't figure out how you are going to get things done in a 10 minute meeting.

Sure you do, at a very high level. "Milo is doing the SYNAPSE adapters, Stinky is working on the compression drivers, Lisa is doing the UI stuff and Teddy is fixing the build system."

That can be covered in 10 minutes, and then the individuals involved can (and should) go off and hold whatever independent meetings - if any - are required for their specific tasks.
I'm not sure I understand your logic. Let's say 100 men and 100 women move to the Big Apple for their careers. Now let's say 50 of the men and 50 of the women hook up, get married, and move to Scarsdale. Let's say all of the women who have moved to Scarsdale buy a minivan and give up their jobs. Now, during the day, we have 100 men in the city and 50 women, giving a 2:1 ratio of men to women, but there are still 50 single men and 50 single women, giving a 1:1 ratio of single men to single women. And at night there are 50 men, all of whom are single, and 50 women, all of whom are single. Again, a 1:1 ratio.

So where does the demographic skew come from in your model?

Personally, I'm not so convinced that women move to the Big Apple merely search of successful men, though. There's all sorts of stuff going on in NYC that would appeal to women!
I got a message on okcupid once from a woman saying only "you're so attractive, why does your age filter include me?"

One of my current partners is about the same age as her.

The 'man should ideally be at least slightly older' norm is counterproductive and I hope one day it goes away.

(I'm not saying there aren't underlying reasons why that norm often works ... just that I wish people would consider those underlying reasons and give up on age as a hard filter rather than a probability contributor)
Sign me up for a shot of Einstein astrocytes.