skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't get this. I live in London, on the edge of zone 1-2; renting a room. Expenses: 510 pounds / month for rent including utilities; 300 pound for food (granted, I haven't really upgraded my lifestyle ever since college -I simply don't feel the need.).

So this comes to 800 pounds + occasional funtime = 1K -still below what they've calculated for most places. Are they really that bad at negotiation?
It's been posted already. Here's the original source:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528511
Yes, and he'd have to hold the job for exactly one year, then quit. A better title would have been "Five lines of code cost me a job interview", which is so unremarkable as to not be worth reading.

The most surprising thing in the article, really, is that he managed to have thirty interviews without having an experience like this.
"How we operate:
- Startup type environment with a geographically diversed team (UK, Australia, Argentina, Brazil...)
- Company is committed to building a trusted site and pristine user experience
- Projects are bite-sized (1-3 weeks to complete)
- Small team. Your work will make a big impact on the site.
- No bureaucracy. Decisions are made quickly
- We use data extensively to make decisions "

They seem to have better practices than most businesses.
Have you seen http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015 and PG's article? I found it helpful, YMMV.
it wasn't just about submitting it anywhere. Hacker News is really the only site of this nature I frequent and thought this crowd would enjoy the humor.

Yet many things get flagged for weak reasons. (ie. just because person x didn't like the article).
Everybody's acting like it's strange. Is it possible everyone is being sarcastic? Everyone on the internet?
I'm waiting for the analyst report to come out saying they are losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Maybe. Since the developers are getting overzealous, my guess is that they might try to block tab use altogether, a la how the Gnome developers operate.

All software projects that are successful seem to go through an open, inclusive, customizable period, then a user-hostile, closed non-customizable one. Gnome, Windows, etc., have all done this.

No reason to suspect Firefox won't, either.
Animated loading gifs generator
Human beings are rarely simple, one dimensional creatures. What's wrong with acknowledging some positive aspects of otherwise reprehensible people?

We don't have to admire or revere someone to be able to learn from them. It's not their thuggery that's being elevated here, but their institution of democracy among the crew members.
The conclusion is a pretty good summary, if you don't want to read the whole lot.

A big thing that's missing from Parallel DBMSs is fault tolerance, which the paper cops to (but also diminishes):

"MR is able to recover from faults in the middle of query execution in a way most parallel database systems cannot. ... If a MR system needs 1,000 nodes to match the performance of a 100 node parallel database system, it is ten times more likely that a node will fail while a query is executing. That said, better tolerance to failures is a capability that any database user would appreciate."

Also: "Although we were not surprised by the relative performance advantages provided by the two parallel database systems, we were impressed by how easy Hadoop was to set up and use in comparison to the databases."
Maybe. His figures for South Africa is fairly high.

Although rent differs from place to place, 680 pounds/month is on the tad expensive side (I pay 200 pounds per month for a 50 sq meter flat). Although he lived in cape town which makes it more expensive.

What is expensive however is renting a car (especially in season). The problem is that public transport is virtually non existent.

He left another thing out: medical aid. It is essential that you have a medical aid so that you get taken to a private hospital. This can be 140 pounds per month.
The original poster also said one word that rang some big alarm bells in my head: architect. So, he's written a small pile of OSS from the ground up, which while certainly not worthless, isn't anywhere near as impressive as somebody who fixes bugs and contributes valuable patches to existing projects.

Anybody can write a program from scratch to do X. It takes programming skill, to be sure, but it's much easier to start with a clean slate. Adding functionality to an existing codebase is much, much harder, and requires exactly the sort of skills required to be a truly excellent programmer. Not only do you need to understand the complexities of the existing system, but you need to work with other people, and write code that doesn't stomp all over other parts of the system.
Yeah, I am not particularly happy with the layout and spacing either. Moving the search on the upper right corner save some space, but I think it makes the search a second class feature. However, I like the idea of making the search across the site (problems, tests, etc…), which will DRY my code quite a bit.

This is the second comment about solving a problem without registration; I guess I have to open the gate ;-).

I didn’t get your last question.
When crime prevention strategies are effectively crime promotion
What a terrible idea. It is one that is appealing to developers for the simple reason that we get paid to write this stuff. From the point of businesses, it makes less than no sense and makes planning just about impossible.

From a slightly similar system (undersea fiber optic cables):

Like many other telephony-related technologies, traffic forecasting was developed to a fine art a long time ago and rarely screwed up. Usually the telcos knew when the capacity of their systems was going to be stretched past acceptable limits. Then they went shopping for bandwidth. Cables got built.

That is all past history. "The telecoms aren't forecasting now," Mercogliano says. "They're reacting."

This is a big problem for a few different reasons. One is that cables take a few years to build, and, once built, last for a quarter of a century. It's not a nimble industry in that way. A PTT thinking about investing in a club cable is making a 25-year commitment to a piece of equipment that will almost certainly be obsolete long before it reaches the end of its working life. Not only are they risking lots of money, but they are putting it into an exceptionally long-term investment. Long-term investments are great if you have reliable long-term forecasts, but when your entire forecasting system gets blown out of the water by something like the Internet, the situation gets awfully complicated.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

When the business ecosystem gets chaotic/fractal, investments stop, because they can't make the 25-year plans to pay off their investments. And they can't make 1-year plans to pay off investments, so those investments stop getting made as well.
Not 100% irony, but I did enjoy the hilarity. :D
Class-D amps aren't a common project for the electronic enthusiast: although the theory of the Class-D amp is beautiful and simple, there are a lot of details in the construction that are hard to master. Using an evaluation board, as the author does, is a good answer to the problem.
Nice! You're on stumbleupon now, too.
The most important part to me :

That’s particularly true of girls and math, apparently because some girls assume that they are genetically disadvantaged at numbers; deprived of an excuse for failure, they excel.

Our conditionment plays a very important role in limiting or improving our abilities. Doing maths is solving problems. During this process, having empowering believes about oneself is crucial.

I remember when I learned how to dance. The first thing I had to fight was my own belief that as a geek, I was good at maths but supposed to be akward at dancing. Not giving up is much difficult in this condition, but the reward is of a greater kind when you fight this particular demon. Believing in yourself is first and foremost refusing to let the outside world determine your idendity. Reality is complex and we are too multi dimensional to be fit in one category or another.

Instead of focusing on abilities, I prefer to focus on the center of interests of someone. Passion is the master, ability is the servant. While it's true we don't have the same potential in every area, we never know what we are capable of until we try it. And trying is precisely to challenge our inner beliefs, daring to face the unknown.
If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers
Nope it wasn't me but I did restate in a comment below that it's mostly a personal belief. I definitely appreciate the engineering required to scale YouPorn/RedTube services.

My background is in design, which in this regard is a little different than what goes on behind the scenes to deliver [insert ambiguous video content here]. Porn is graphic, and masking around man's lower thunder is not something most people want to do unless they have to. That was the point of my desperation comment from a straight-male's perspective.
I have to say I was a bit disappointed to find that the author "built" the amp by assembling evaluation boards in a case with a power supply.

$500+ is allot of money to pay to "do-it-yourself" when amps like the T-Amp produce similar power output and are available for 1/10th the cost.
SuperMac War Story 7: Rabbits Out of the Hat - Product Line Extensions
Alan Turing was wrong.

Correction: Alan Turing was right, but if we redefine "universal computer" in sufficiently weird ways, Turing's results no longer apply.

In particular, while Turing was concerned with machines computing functions, Akl is looking at machines interacting with a changing environment.
I would say fish :-) Joking aside, of course he can eat anything he wants, as he can perhaps bike to the grocery store nearest to the shore. I guess living in a boat is like living in a water-front property that has better view than other water-front properties.

There is something really cool about torrenting recent Johnny Depp movies using a Swedish website while you are sailing.
I think they're looking at the costs for 2 people, and also they've clearly pointed out that they're living fairly comfortably.
Yes that's a better way of putting it :) Thanks.
This appears to me to be a little (or in fact a lot) crackpotish.

A universal machine with capable of n operations per time unit can be simulate a universal machine capable of n+m operations per time unit. It's just a bit slower.

His argument seems to be that this will make it so slow that that it won't be able to keep up. Which is just stupid.

The Church-Turing thesis says that a universal machine can simulate any other computing machine given infinite memory. It doesn't say anything about how fast it will be :p

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this guy and he's not saying something so completely and utterly stupid. Anyone who wants to correct me please do...
Most do, otherwise you can just get a 3G phone, coverage is OK even when you're at anchor a mile or so off the coast.
Navy takes next step towards laser weapons
The Emperor says to the Pirate: "How dare you think you can molest the seas!"

The pirate replies: "I am but a man with a small boat, so you call me a pirate. Yet you have a vast navy, and they call you an Emperor? How dare you think you can molest the world!"

-- Noam Chomsky: Pirates & Emperors

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=676452061991429040
I doubt they're losing money. Porn affiliate links make big bucks. Don't ask me how (who pays for anything on the internet?) but they do.

I used to regularly speak with some people at a financial company that processes most of the payments from porn sites to their affiliates. After Neteller (the massive processor of financial transactions to/from gambling sites) withdrew from the US market due to the UIGEA, the company I knew took a good chunk of their business and was probably the industry's largest third party payment processor, easily handling 10-20% of all transactions. But when the lawsuits started flying at other gaming companies, they dropped that line of business instantly because they didn't want to lose their US porn affiliate processing business. It was considerably larger.

Much of the reason is that porn sites have high retention, high prices ($35-$40/mo is not uncommon) and pay their affiliates ridiculous rev share like 80% for the large ones. So an affiliate who refers a successful customer could easily make $20-$30/mo for a year or two off him. That's just a tremendous amount of cash.

Until I was told that, I believed gambling would rule the internet.
If you know how to do it, you should know how to do it on a whiteboard.
Half of French believe it is acceptable for workers facing layoffs to lock up their bosses
How does one go about showing that there is no way to solve such a problem?

What about the argument that perhaps the author was not clever enough to devise an algorithm which solves the problem he stated?

Perhaps when I read the papers I will be enlightened?
A large corporation lying?

No, not possible!

Of course, this is just to maximize profit at all costs.

It may be anathema here, but I believe corporations -- especially those granted a government monopoly -- should have more than a duty to increase shareholder value, because in the process of increasing shareholder value they may make the entire world vastly worse for everyone else.

No, I don't have any good answers on how to square that circle, but it seems a pretty obvious point if you ignore the knee-jerkers.
The actual posts (http://informationarchitects.jp/designing-firefox-32/ and http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/firefoxnext-tabs-on-the-side...) are much more insightful than this blogspam. The prjor suggests that the iTunes-style design could be more of a "default landing page" than an actual tab replacement and a way of uniting the sidebars together. I could live with that.
Brilliant, great re-use of existing, tested and proven technology.

I'd love to see how it scales, I'm guessing well?
His argument is deeper than that; he's basically saying that there's no such thing as a universal machine if the function being simulated meets any of the 5 criteria he lists, since the function can't be simulated (that is, you can't compute it with any less steps than running the whole thing through, and it could require up to infinite variables). I don't know if this makes it non-crackpot-ish, though; I don't have the background in formal theory tell; but it doesn't seem something like a "it'll take arbitrarily long" argument.
How does one go about showing that there is no way to solve such a problem?

With great difficulty. Usually the approach is to suppose that you have an algorithm and show that either (a) this algorithm allows you to do something impossible (e.g., solve a different impossible problem, or reach a contradiction); or (b) there are two different problems with different answers which the specified algorithm cannot distinguish between (this is generally only possible where you're proving that it's impossible to compute something in less than some number of steps).

The first approach is used for things like showing that the halting problem is impossible; the second approach is used for things like showing that it's impossible to have a comparison sort which runs in less than O(N log N) time.
He clearly didn't reject every offer, since he worked at Princeton, Google, a law firm, and more.

I guess they were all/most for summer and part-time jobs. He also may have already interviewed a few times for other jobs to take after graduating.
So true. I tried getting into Zope a few years ago and it was like being dropped in the middle of a forest without a map. I even came to the (incorrect) conclusion that one had to run this entire, huge Zope stack just to use parts of it.
"Any knucklehead with a computer and half a brain can write anything he or she wants on the internet."

[citation needed]
Agreed. The revenue share in gambling and porn sites is just phenomenal.

I used to send some traffic to a Bingo website, and I think you got £25 per signup, but then 50% of all future losses for the lifetime of that player. After only a couple of months that revenue share (%loss) was making up hundreds of £/month for doing nothing. I'm sure it's pretty similar for paid porn sites.

They'd have to be doing something seriously wrong to be losing money in that sector.
Are the good times really over?
Framework groupie disclaimer.

Catalyst is so great. With Catalyst 5.8 I get Moosey controllers, which means my Perl 5 doesn't have to suck anymore because I can use Moose objects. Someone finally took a look at the framework developments in Ruby and Python and brought sanity to web development in Perl.

If it weren't for Catalyst, I'd have bailed from Perl a long time ago. It lets you build web apps that don't suck. Catalyst is 'unopinionated', it just gives you a minimal framework for building MVC web apps, with plugins to accomplish common tasks. Catalyst doesn't care what view or model you use. It is totally view/model agnostic. There are several good options for ORMs to databases, but its trivial to write a model wrapper around whatever you want. I wrote one for SimpleDB very easily.

While there are better options for doing Simple CRUD, Catalyst is quite good at building more complex web apps, and it lets me leverage the CPAN, the world's largest module repository, to get things done faster.

I love Catalyst. I won't bother trying to convince anyone that its the BEST web app framework, but I will say that its good enough to make Perl an option for new projects again.
I wouldn't hire this guy, what good is a coder that has to have 3 RedBulls and can't do anything productive until the afternoon?

If you can't represent your abilities away from a computer on a whiteboard or in a conversation to a reasonable extent, you are not as good as you would like to think you are, and the guy who can do it is better than you.

He didn't miss the job because he couldn't answer the questions, he missed the job because someone else could.

[edit: Okay, I might be a bit grumpy, but I think the gist of my comment is spot-on]
Look at it this way: imagine you have a server that's totally maxed out (CPU-bound), 24 hours a day. If you add just one more connection to its load, it won't be able to handle it. No matter how long you give it, it'll just fall further and further behind. The requested pages are uncomputable! A faster computer, on the other hand, will keep up just fine, and finish all the computations.

This isn't how computations have been traditionally defined, so that's why it seems so unintuitive. But, he's right nonetheless.
Commit logs can give you at least some idea of this stuff, surely, and they tend to be available for a lot of open source projects.
He's saying though that those two can't be separated -- the functions the machines are computing are themselves changing with time.
It doesn't seem terribly crackpotish to me. He's absolutely correct in pointing out that it's very sloppy to define "computability" as "What the Universal Turing Machine Can Do." It's also not unreasonable at all to talk about variables that change with time, and he's absolutely correct that this is a gap in complexity theory. One which should excite new grad students, because eventually it will net someone a lot of academic fame and one hell of a PhD thesis.

Personally, I'm very interested in this and I'm going to keep an eye on it.
Turing machines are constructed in a closed, static universe. This guy says that if you need to deal with a source of changing data, turing results don't apply. This is both obvious and important to state, although not with as much verbiage.
Suppose that my "computing device" were a machine designed to build and program more copies of itself. This device would "compute" a function across n variables in time log n by building n-1 copies of itself, and then parallelizing the computation across them. With sufficient resources, this machine could could compute the function for any n in finite time.

All the author has done is posit an ever-increasing volume of data, such that the rate at which the volume increases causes it to outpace the speed of the computation. It seems that positing an ever-increasing computational capacity is a reasonable solution to this problem.
This article is basically just speculation on his part but I disagree with his premise. He’s looking at the next generation iPhone like Microsoft looks at products which is to stuff as many features in as possible. Even if they don’t work all that well.

But Apple tends to be the opposite. They’ll go so far as to leave out features that other competitors have if they think the technology isn’t there yet. Which is why I don’t expect to see things like office document editing in the next iPhone.

The whole post reminds me of this video...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0&feature=playe...
But even more to the point: the objection is that no particular 'computer' (like some physical device or at least a performance spec) could be a universal computer in his terms, b/c past a point it can't keep up.

The same idea rules out the possibility of a universal computer (barring magic), too, except in the heads of theoreticians: any particular real-world computer is just a finite state machine, and a turing machine with eg 32 gb of space on the tape isn't actually universal, either (or even a turing machine).
This doesn't really apply in the western world, but interestingly enough, one of the cheapest ways to raise an society's IQ is by introducing the use of iodized salt:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/health/16iodine.html
the functions the machines are computing are changing with time.

Sure. But that's not what Turing was talking about. Give a UTM a computable function, and the UTM will compute it. Specify an infinite class of functions F(t), and of course a UTM will have trouble.

There's no contradiction here, just a really weird way of defining "function".
How(3) I(1) need(4) a(1) drink(5), alcoholic(9) of(2) course(6), after(5) the(3) heavy(5) lectures(8) involving(9) quantum(7) mechanics(9).
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