skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a soon-to-be college graduate (as of this June), I am especially curious about this. I majored in Psychology, and did a lot of stuff with abstract math, but have limited formal CS training - yet it seems that's exactly what companies want. I don't get it. I've been coding for fun for over 12 years (e.g., BASIC, C++, perl, PHP), one of my projects even successfully scaled and got acquired, but it's hard to find employment. And besides doing my own start-up, I really would love to code for a living!

Should I go get a Master's in CS? Spend time this summer working through SICP, and then an algorithms book (I took Discrete for fun, as an elective), and then something else?

Any advice would be much, much appreciated.
That's a fair point. I still think that Facebook is in a much better long-term position than Twitter.
I would suggest taking a closer look at those links. They bring up another point in that you'll only find current, usable, robust support for SIMD in C++:

The first link is just a paper; the second is a 1.0 release that is seven years old, it only supports SSE, and it's all in French; the third is only for Mono, it only supports SSE and its SSE support is old and incomplete.

On the other hand, if you try to use SIMD types and intrinsics in C++ you'll find current and comprehensive support from the major compilers on all SIMD platforms.

(I'd love to use a current and comprehensive version of Haskell SIMD, but its just not ready for prime time.)
I signed up with GlassDoor.com to see what the Java interview questions were like. I only found three (nationwide) and they are not exactly illuminating:

"Create a small table driven site to display items from a database table."

"What do you think of Jakarta software?"

"How many people use the websites you've worked on?"
Dumb question, but doesn't Google Trends cover searches, not traffic on the actual domain? Are we just assuming that the ratio of searches:traffic is pretty much the same for both sites?
I think this is a terrible idea as I can't possibly see how they would stop a crafty student from modifying his own computer and putting in a radio link that can reach well outside the exam room in a frequency they aren't detecting (my university sniff cell phones) from getting external help.

I don't however agree that exams should be written on paper but that you should be given the option of using a computer to write on if you choose too. Incremental backups to a computer that can print could easily save any sudden local crashes but honestly all I personally am asking for is a text editor and absolutely nothing else, I don't expect that to die short of hardware failure. Even if the computers failed all the time and all data was lost it should be up to the student to take that risk, they've got no one but themselves to blame if such a system had a high failure rate (which I don't think it would).

I hate doing exams that are generally scheduled for 4-6 hours as I virtually never write anything by hand and haven't done so for years, so after about 30 minutes (probably less) I get terrible cramp. The whole experience is just terribly painful which doesn't exactly improve my willingness to sit and refine what I've written once I'm done.

My university doesn't even let us do programming exams on a computer.
Here is a hypothesis:

Our universe is like a splattered egg, expanded in the first seconds after the big bang, but won't expand forever and won't contract either.

Now walk away from the egg a hundred yards, then splat another egg.

Yes, there can be many universes as we know then, they are just way apart, in the same dimension.

No need for strings, black holes or ten dimensions.
This is the Dow 36k he's referring to in the end: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99sep/9909dow.htm ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_36,000 )
Best according to PR people. Not quite the same as best according to HN people.
AFAIK, if you want to work with BLAS, LAPACK and friends you have to structure your matrices like this (as a big block of data) rather than pointers to pointers to pointers (ie a[i][j][k]). So even if there is some inefficiency in filling the data structure, presumably the actual matrix multiply or SVD or what-have-you, is actually quite fast.
I think they're just cheap enough to run that niche shorteners can easily be done without a monetization strategy.
Yeah, you need something like http://opensource.plurk.com/LightCloud/ to make it actually distributed. It does support replication though.
Ashutosh Mehra’s Knuth Reward Checks & Certificates Gallery
Sometimes memory can cost speed as well.

I find with java essentially you are amortising gains which are payed back with GC at a later date (in many cases I guess it is worth it).

Its not one size fits all !
Obama says, "No." He says Obama will weaken.
Apple Sweeps Consumer Reports' Laptop Recommendations
Note, how the most recent checks say "hexadecimal" dollars.
>With a computer savvy group like Photoshop users I suspect you could introduce a format that addresses all the criticism with minimal disruption.

You've clearly never worked with the bottom 80% of the talent pool :) Many professional designers come from a print background which, by its nature, is not very technically demanding.
"Though I haven’t acquired anything yet (I have my eye on a few), the return on those funds will be much higher with a software product or SaaS website"

so he's basically assuming 'digital' is better because your experience with 'physical' didn't sell enough? What about thousands of purely digital sites out there that don't sell anything? Would that disprove the comparison in any way?

imho, the assumption that the margin is higher on digital ignores one simple fact: most 'digital products' on the web are free anyway...
A coherent response, but I think Wilkinson is missing the powerful a-moral reason to desire seasteading: lowering the barrier to entry in the governing industry should increase quality. That isn't a libertarian reason for seasteading, it's a positive, non-political reason.
Cost Should Be No Barrier: Evaluation of Harvard's Financial Aid [pdf]
It's pretty easy for an HR person to weed you out because of your degree. Talk to actual engineers you know in the industry. If they think you can cut it, I'm sure they'll be happy to pass your credentials and a recommendation on to a hiring manager.

The masters in CS can't hurt either; you just need to decide how you want to spend your time.
Numbers 1,3,4,7 and 8 are some of the things over time I have also learnt. Sometimes you wonder whether your just over thinking things and that is why its good to once in a while validate it against other peoples who have actually written about their own thoughts that may in some cases be in line with yours.
ODF conformance, but not interoperability, in MS Office 2007SP2
Yes, but its replication is similar to BDB's, a kind-of add-on/feature. It's not a full-blown replicated KV store like Google's Chubby with strong consistency, automatic failover, etc. Of course, not everybody needs that, I'm just saying...
Tattoos
Includes designs like tribal, Celtic and Chinese signs, Dragon, butterfly and others.
I like the idea of a url shortener indicating the content. My real pet peeve is tinyurls to PDF files though. isPDF.com appears to be available, any takers? :)
SMSGupShup (India’s “Twitter”) Grows To 20 million Users, $150,000/month Revenue
The researchers noted, too, that nearly 40 percent of the credentials stolen by Torpig were from browser password managers, and not actual login sessions, and that the Torpig controllers may have exploited these credentials for between $83,000 and $8.3 million during that time period.

I am surprised that browser password managers are so insecure. This seems like a place that browsers could improve.
I was always thought the game developers designed the whole city in 3D.

Nice article.

Why is the city's nighttime generated based on lights?
Very eye opening and very touching.
Your best bet is to go after companies where developers do the hiring.

To a recruiter who isn't a developer, your resume doesn't conform to the parameters they know to look for. They're not in a position to judge whether your non-academic experience qualifies you for the positions they're responsible for fulling.

To a developer who's tired of putting up with halfhearted graduates, and/or those who need a lot of hand-holding, your resume will likely jump off the page.

Where are you most likely to find companies where developers do the hiring? The smaller the company, generally, the better the odds.
> And as a hacker, I really appreciate a binary rule to evaluate something so complex. Thank you!

This tripped my sarcasm detector...
Ask HN: Feedback on my book proposal
I'm putting together a book proposal and some sample content and wanted to do a quick test with this group since many of you would fall into my target market. Please comment if the description and concept are interesting enough that you would pick up the book or be interested in knowing more about the project.

Working Title: The Failing Point

Subtitle: Hard earned business lessons about what not to do

Description
A business book for entrepreneurs and business leaders filled with lessons learned over a career working for some of the greatest companies and leaders, and companies and leaders of whom you’ve never heard. There are many books which attempt to lay out the steps the author thinks you should take to make you a millionaire or an overnight success. This is not that book. This is a set of essays on topics related to getting started, creating a product, building a team, starting a business, raising money, driving revenue, and operating the business. They say you learn the most from your mistakes. If that is true, this book is a trove of learning for the reader. Hopefully the reader can avoid failure and some of the common mistakes I, and many I have known, have made along the way.
I agree. After you get your first job and get some experience you'll be good. It's just finding a way to get past HR. They just look at credentials and may ignore your unconventional interest in programming. Don't worry though, after that first job you are good. Recent experience and your reputation in the industry will outweigh your undergrad degree.

The CS degree won't hurt but I would only do it if you already had research in mind that you wanted to pursue. That seems to be the key to enjoying grad school - chasing your passion and interests.
Regarding the discussion of "real" arrays in Fortran vs. "pointer arrays" in c, it seems in the real world often we need resizable arrays, which means the only way to do that is to have pointer arrays. A Fortran array cannot be resized. What if I want to read in a tab delimted file that has ints, and read that into a 2-D matrix, where the matrix rows correspond to the file rows, and the matrix columns correspond to the tab delimited columns in the file. And I have say no idea how big the file is. So the only way I can do this is to have a resizable array. I can "guess" that say my rows/columns won't be more than some arbitrarily large number, but then I likely end up wasting a lot of space. So out of curiousity how would I even do that with "real arrays"? Seems like if I ever need to resize an array, even in just as simple an example as reading in a file, then I need a pointer array, since "real" (fortran-like) arrays will not resize. Am I missing something here?
I don't know how widespread this is, but my uni teaches Python to the physics (and AFAIK most science) undergrads. Some also do C, but no Fortran.
My initial reaction: they called the four-door model the Wardenclyffe?
Namespacing properties in JavaScript
#8 is a variant of the Buddhist notion of keeping a "beginner mind". Perhaps another approach is savoring your humility.

Oddly, its the only idea where the more seriously you take it the less you believe it. Or something...
One suggestion that no one else has mentioned is take a job at below average pay. I mean so little that you know for sure you're a good deal.

I got my first real programming job back in '04 (with no degree) asking for about half what everyone else was making (I didn't have any idea what I should ask for). Within a year and a half I was at a jr. level pay and was able to move on to a much better salary.
It doesn't make sense to use mapreduce as an example of Java making parallelism easier, given that the original Google MapReduce is a C++ framework.
I used to just replace the protocol with nsfw:// so that clicking the link would go nowhere, and that recipients would have to replace nsfw:// with http://. I was thanked on many occasions for this convention.

This is a nice automated rendition of that.
If I were to say "Ruby is a terrible language to write a first-person shooter in!", you would naturally say, "Of course. That's not really its sweet spot." Then I could say

> There was no discernible refutation.
It's a rebuttal to "A sane format would pick one.". This is an explanation of why PSD is not insane. The primary point is that the use cases and expected users are not what our ranting developer might have liked.

It also rebuts the idea that Adobe makes people "sign[] in blood" for specs.

On both counts, whether you consider it adequate is up to you. Personally, I've been involved in enough stuff that the format makes some sense to me (reverse compatibility in a binary format means you make crazy choices by any other standard), but I'm somewhat unconvinced by the second one. If all it takes to get the specs is a fax, you might as well at least turn that into an email, or just put them up on the web... but that's just my opinion.
How about a bookmarklet to drag into my bookmarks bar? I know it doesn't seem like much, but constantly copying and pasting URLs into shortening services is an inconvenience (and is seriously low-hanging fruit).
Artist snags YouTube videos, makes them into (good) music
Maintenance costs do not always dominate. If you are working on code that will run on many thousands of machines, then hardware and running-the-cluster costs dominate. Performance improvements that are small in terms of % can still be worth many programmer-months of effort, and it becomes optimal to use C or C++.
Ex-Porn Star, changes name and writes a blog, quite intersting read.
F.T.C. Looks Into Ties Between Apple and Google Boards
You can't decouple the cost of malloc() from the cost of free(); if malloc has to do any more work than simply bumping a pointer (or, in the general case, grabbing a mutex and then bumping a pointer), it's a concession to free() (or to defragmentation, a side effect of free).
My recommendation is not to worry too much about the psychology major per se. Just make sure to list computer classes that you've taken and achievements that you've made in your resume (I always included an Achievements section in my resume).

I have a psychology major from UCLA and it never stopped me from getting an interview or a job. Although every single interview, I had to explain about my computer experience.

Once it was clear that I was technical, the psychology major became a nonissue.

Independent of all this, I would encourage you to get a masters in computer science. The more deeply you understand CS, algorithms, etc., the better you'll do as a candidate.
I agree these are "cool" but IMO they don't rise to the level of "brilliant". I suppose reasonable people could disagree. But I think everyone would agree that these ideas, whether they are "brilliant" or merely "cool" are not the source of Microsoft's success.
Fox got its start as a UHF station.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UHF#Television
Are you going to submit yourself to the adult filters to be blocked? Seems like it is standard to do that and then mention that at the bottom of the page
I was expecting a list with techcrunch on top was just surprised they didnt make it.
That interview mostly went awry. Nate Silver is a brilliant statistician, not a politician. He's no more able to guess the mindset of Appalachian racists 3 years from now than anyone else.
Well that kind of proves once again that there's not money in this thing. $2m a year in revenue off 20m users. Not to mention the SMS fees which likely mean they are losing cash hand over fist.
Of course you will, cause I totally bombed it. ;)
If possible, get into a PhD program rather than a master's and quit after two years. Then you get your master's for free.

Also, right now the job market is particularly bad. Around 3/4 of companies have a hiring freeze. So don't necessarily blame your own resume when you are wondering why it's tough to get a job.
http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/55207
Why your PHP App Needs a Circuit Breaker
We did have a deal with Engine Yard. We were one of their first partnerships. It was initial a verbal agreement for exchange of services, which meant free hosting! Eventually when they got big and wanted to formalize the agreement to a cash exchange, they had less use for us and so while getting a major discount, we still started losing money.

Ultimately it was time that was the reason I decided to wind down. I barely had time to keep it running, let alone all the cool stuff I wanted to do with it. If I had the time to switch hosting providers, I would have.
The First Rule for Software Development
I modified the css in the screen.css file to fix this. It seems to work ok until it's time to upgrade.
So what is wrong with

{
object* p=NULL;
p = new object();
p->foo()
delete p;
}

Do they just mean the missing semicolon? If so that's a pretty lame interview question.
I feel like this is an excellent example of what happens when you include the right abstractions in your software from the get go. Very very very cool how just a few simple ideas avoid a whole bunch of usability issues that mainstream OSes are only now starting to address.
Firefox stores your passwords in plaintext unless you specify a master password (that has to be entered each time you open Firefox) to encrypt them.
The Dark Matter of a Startup
In the collectors I mentioned, deallocation is a matter of moving the live objects to the other semispace, and considering the "current" semispace to be garbage.

If you're allocating a lot of short-lived objects, then explicitly keeping the live objects is much more efficient than explicitly culling the dead objects.
Tell HN: Chicago HN meetup Thursday, May 7 @Hopleaf
There was talk last week of a Chicago Hacker News meetup this Thursday at Hopleaf. Vote up the time that works best for you.
6pm.
>> Girls like nice colors etc from the earliest ages - before any culture can play any part.

Are you basing that on research or personal experience? From what I gather we like to give babies that are female different stuff than males, so pretty much right of the away babies are being influenced culturally. Or has there been a controlled test done that I'm unaware of?

>> Is being gay a 'cultural difference'?

Is it with any certainty possible to answer that question, as far as I know, we have no idea. Or have I missed something?

I'm sorry if it seems like I'm nitpicking, I'm genuinely curious.
Yeah, I thought I could make more of a premium product to compete with the more commodity hosted project solutions ... but then you start competing with larger companies with more time in the market, existing product(s), and more resources.

I think we did okay for what was ultimately a one-man show. But I'd much rather put the kind of investment required for running a business into something more innovative.
You omitted a line.

{
object* p=NULL;
p = new object();
p->foo()
delete p;
}
// ?? Whats wrong with above

1) Missing a semi-colon. 2) The developer knowingly checked in broken code as evidenced by the comment. 3) In English the question mark comes at the end of the sentence.
Does XHR lead to better testing/abstraction?
Problem is that a simple keylogger could get that too...
In the case of a minor collection, you don't do a full mark-sweep. You only look at a small fraction of the live objects. Generally you only need to trace objects in the youngest generation which are reachable from GC roots. Since you expect most young generation objects to be eligible for collection, this is extremely fast.

It is unusual for a lot of references to exist from older generations to the youngest generation, but when this occurs there are data structures for detecting and resolving these references very efficiently.
It doesn't make sense to compare mapreduce to databases. You might as well compare C++ with a 5 iron.

Mapreduce is for batch processing; databases are for live queries. You often use mapreduce with a database; the mapreduce can fill a database with data or take all the data out of a database and produce something of a different format. You don't write 100,000 line SQL statements but mapreduce is designed to run arbitrary code in the inner loop. You can't write a mapreduce-backed website that kicks off a mapreduce with each request, but that's a great use of SQL. Etc etc.
"Please comment if the description and concept are interesting enough that you would pick up the book..."

Sure they are, but that doesn't matter. What matters to me is who tells their story. I'd rather hear about the failures of someone who eventually succeeded that someone who's still struggling.

Make it like "Founders at Work" or "How to Get Rich" and you'll do well.
Our Favourite Drugs (USA, by region)
Neat stuff. Jef Raskin explores a number of these ideas (ZUIs, command-lines-everywhere, etc.) in his book The Humane Interface. Some really cool ideas about UI design.
An important point is that this is not a visualization of drug use; it's the result of polling law enforcement officials about the drugs doing the most damage in each region.
Don't forget protocol-droid, SuperHappyDevHouse, Hacker Dojo, TIGdb, working at NASA, etc etc

I'm actually very surprised at the number of people happy with DevjaVu as a service since after the first year or so I spent very little time working on it. Except when something went wrong and then I spent a lot of time to plug the hole (and not properly fix the problem like I should have--that would require even more time).
No, digital is better because you own the IP, the distribution and take home almost 100% of the gross. Returns are not a factor because there's no physical product to worry about. He is sharing the bulk of the revenue (40%) with the dropshippers, and if he didn't do that, he'd tie up a lot of capital in inventory and warehousing, plus have to pack and ship orders. None of these are problems with a digital business.
Citation needed.

It makes me sad that a post that portrays every employee of a company negatively without citing any sources gets modded up here. "Haha, Twitter has a fail whale, they all suck!!11" sounds like Digg, not HN.
Women 2.0
Women 2.0 is committed to increasing the number of women entrepreneurs starting high growth ventures by providing the resources, network, and knowledge for the launch and growth of their company.

Anyway, wow~
My problem with this article is he mentions that to avoid being a commodity, you need to build your own product, then ignores the rest of that path.

There is obviously lots of money to be made that way, even by 1-man shops. I do it (sell custom/semi-custom electronics) and my fulfillment and inventory costs are minimal.

Sure, reselling most products is relatively low margin (but profit is profit!), but it's not like the only choice is "digital" vs. "resale."