skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be really great if someone could do that in a way that was trustworthy at high levels. The problem with those professional certifications is that they're targeted toward the middle of the bell-curve. Above the 95th percentile, it all comes to word of mouth and introductions. Which kills you if (a) you want to change cities or (b) you've been working 80+ hours per week on something and your networking has gone to shit.

If someone could verify programming ability above the 95th percentile, that would be a huge service.

Unfortunately, I can't just make people know how good I am by saying it. You can't either. No one can. And social proof (which is what drives most economic decisions) comes down to reputation politics rather than capability.

I think open source is the best way for a person to do this, but how often does a company actually read someone's open-source contribs? The one startup I was at where I was actually involved in recruiting, people just checked to see whether the candidate's technology choices matched their language prejudices (there was a serious tech-stack war going on at the time).
> appears in Comic Sans to me because of some web font usage
Which I was admitting: this is on my end.

It's ironic because some opinions in this thread sounded like old-school "You want .txt because of Micro$oft", exactly the Microsoft-bashing we were used to read back then when websites where in Comic Sans.
7 Reasons Why Your Titles Suck
Andreessen Horowitz just put a lot of money into OpenCoin/Ripple, I guarantee you they are going to knit the two services together. Dwolla w/ happy PR buzz, back end provided by OpenCoin.
Bret Victor: Stop Drawing Dead Fish.  A talk about art and computers
Cite it, then. I went through the slide deck. It talks about aggregating and selling "retargeting personas" based on check-in markers (e.g. "checked in once at a resort in the last year"), but nothing about selling your personal check-in data.

I think you're reading what you want into this.
It appears to be a video and I don't do those. I can read about 2 to 5 times faster than most people make a presentation, I find it annoyingly slow so I don't watch them. Can anyone summarize solely the facts of the matter and skip all the milkshake stuff?
This is a pretty fair deal. As the sole income for a family of 5 in the bay area, these kind of perks are good. Well, not that it matters for me anymore. No more kids for us!!!
How much data does a human driver gather per second?
Woman with disorder has no sense of direction, even in her own home.
What does this have to do with government programs? Gender is a protected category, and many policies (not sure about laws specifically) prohibit discrimination according to gender just as they do about race, age, etc.
Oh, I've been pretty distracted with other (probably less important) things these, uh, years. embarrassed face

My first prototype implementation, a tree-walking interpreter in OCaml I threw together in a few days, was discouragingly slow, so a lot of work may be needed to get it to run acceptably fast; and I haven't done the GUI work to realize the potential Light-Table-land advantages yet.
Just because something is a trade secret doesn't mean someone else can't think of it. That's the risk you run when you don't patent an idea.
If you're working on a large team, this becomes a more pernicious problem. I've seen rebases change histories to the point that whole branches become incompatible with master. When you have 15 people all merging branches into master, complete with binary files, conflicts are frequent and often involve files you personally didn't change. People resolve the conflicts to the best of their ability, but they have no idea why certain things conflict and bugging your co-workers every time you merge a branch is unrealistic. So we guess and whole features get wiped off the face of the repository.

My team now has a merge only policy and it's reduced the number of conflicts and borked merges.
Go is neither obscure nor that functional either.
I confess to being one of the non-programmer types that nonetheless gets a lot of value out of hacker news...

...how do you do this, or what does it mean? I'd google it myself, but I didn't catch the reference and can't.
Obama to Seek Closing Amid Hunger Strike at Guantánamo
Why do people fall in love with products?
This guy is an idiot.

Anyway, Go is obsolete since Rust is strictly better than Go.
Heh ... be careful my friend! Moving to Canada when you are ready to start a family is non-trivial if your spouse isn't Canadian :(
What do you expect from a title that says "Your language sucks, please just pay some attention to our project"?
Ah thanks, those were the pointers I was looking for =)
Having developed autonomous vehicles in a previous career, I can tell you that raw sensor data is far less useful than you think. By the time you are starting to hand over controls to the system itself you are pretty damn confident that your pipeline up to the control logic is all very solid.

Also, i'm not entirely sure what you think the costs involved in a test are? We purchased about 20 acres of land for a test track, but that was the only real expense involved in day to day development.
hUMA addresses this, too. Not only can the GPU in a hUMA system use the CPU's addresses, it can also use the CPU's demand-paged virtual memory. If the GPU tries to access an address that's written out to disk, the CPU springs into life, calling on the operating system to find and load the relevant bit of data, and load it into memory.

Is demand-paging actually relevant, or just a poorly chosen example of what would theoretically be possible? I'd think that in an application where the worry is memory transfer speed, one wouldn't ever want to be swapping to disk. Better a swift death by the OOM killer than drowning in molasses.

More generally, do swap files still have a useful role to play in high performance computing? I'd think the window between "fits in RAM so no need for a swap file" and "ever so slightly larger than RAM so we can quickly page in what we need" is thin and growing thinner.

Sharing a virtual address space, transferring directly to and from RAM, and hardware cache synchronization sound like real advantages, though.
I'm finding the locations for rides to be very confusing. I searched for "Denver, CO" and there are a number of people offering rides.

It says "Los Angeles -> Denver", which would seem to mean it starts in Los Angeles and ends in Denver? I don't think so, but that's certainly how I read it.

Also I want to just click anywhere on the item (in the map view) and have it take me to the details. I find getting to the details link itself to be kind of frusturating.

Overall I think it's really cool. Love the map interface. Seems very polished already.
He accepts that the milkshake thing was just to get people to come. "Link Bait". He is also out of his depth during the whole video. Wasted 15 minutes on it.
I had problems with Acuvue Oasys back in the day as well, but I'm sure it varies from person to person. Ask your eye doctor to order trial pairs from different brands. That's how I eventually found the ones that worked for me.
Thinking Forth was published the same year and is still very relevant.

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Forth-Leo-Brodie/dp/097645870...
What are some well-know open source projects/products that are using it?
Here in Sweden you get 16 months to split between the parents. It amazes me how crappy the benefits are in even the most "progressive" Bay Area companies, like Facebook trying to recruit with "25 vacation days", makes me laugh.
The vacuum is an infinite insulator. As the sensors get charged they have no ability to dissipate that energy. Eventually they'll get warmer and noisier, and you'll spend more time trying to clean up the images. It's been operating continuously for over 1000 days .I'm sure they have more data than they can currently process.
Let me reiterate my point: If those differences exist to companies (different amounts of time off), then companies have a reason to prefer one sex over the other.

Childbirth is not an injury. Childbirth is literally essential for society. Whatever extra profit that can be squeezed out of a new dad is meaningless next to the importance of equality and assistance to the new mother. Somehow I think our GDP will be ok.
Front-end guys (and gals) happily write their middle layer in Node on server.

They won't touch Go with a ten meter pole, so no. Go won't cause Node to dry up.
This isn't a comment on the superiority of any OS, but on misrepresentation. I don't pretend to use a mac by adding _MACOSX folders either.
I've had this enabled for about 2 months, and its been nothing short of amazing. (picked it up from an HN thread somewhere). Cannot recommend this highly enough.

Yes, there's the occasional false positive, but its surprisingly rare. I pop into my "Unsubscribes" folder every few days to make sure nothing is caught, just like my Spam folder. If there's a false positive, I make a new rule in Outlook.

Seriously, try it. You'll be surprised how nice it is, like a clean apartment.
I assume that none of your files have extensions then?
Doesn't it also know about Google Maps data?

Meaning, it can look at a lot more data than just its raw sensors, every second.

Also, why do you assume the front-facing camera is the only one?
Hey, thanks for the feedback! I'm the lead designer on this project. Gravity probably won't replace Google Reader just yet. Out goal was to create a fun experience, show off a little bit of our network, and listen to feedback – feedback that we might use to drive the design and features of potential future Disqus products.
Very cool! However, can we send a tutorial too?
Wouldn't that woman want her husband around to help her recover then?
Nothing against Jessica because her personal page says it differently, but this bio snippet on HS seems odd:

> "...runs the Boston Python Meetup,"

From http://meetup.bostonpython.com/

> "Organizers: Ned Batchelder, Deb Nicholson, Giles Hall, Jason Michalski, Jessica McKellar"

I don't know enough about the other organizers, but I know Ned does a tremendous amount of work for the meetup group.
Interesting.

So, the IRS issues everyone a unique identifier at an unknown point in time. Separately, a federation of businesses decides it needs to share records to estimate a customer's likelihood of conducting business in good faith. This federation needs a globally unique identifier that can be used to collate these records into a single profile. It decides to use the IRS's unique ID, which means a whole host of companies require you to provide this identifier in order to do business with them. The credit profile also establishes a system whereby someone else's identity can be more useful than your own when it comes to procuring services.

Most of the companies that require a credit check treat their business with a particular individual as confidential. Over time, they establish customer support call centers and require that the customer authenticate with a shared secret before providing support. Most key their records off this globally-unique ID (your social security number), and it becomes the industry norm for the second half of this ID to be the shared secret you use to verify your identity.

So, you've got a shared secret that we expect to be fairly well-protected, as someone can use it to falsely identify themselves as you and rack up bills in your name. The second half of this secret is freely shared over the phone, as its presumably useless without the other half.

Meanwhile, the authority that issues this ID is completely separate of the consumer credit system and uses it for a completely different (and less consequential) purpose. It changes the policy by which it grants this identifier, whereby the first half can now be fairly well predicted with a known piece of information (where an individual was born).

As a result, the infrastructures of many critical institutions presume that a secret they don't control is fairly well-guarded, and the inertia of their old decisions leads them to freely pass around the only part of the secret that is still hard to guess.
Would love to try this but you'd have to let me have at least 1 private project. I don't have permission to share private research data with the world.

Also, I tried to submit my email to be notified for the mac app and was told it was invalid (it was just a standard @gmail address).
CrowdCode: Central Repository for Coding Tutorials
When somebody says something is "necessary," you assume they don't do it? That hardly seems rational.
So the user must always decide what to do with a file instead of the user interface? Seems backwards to me.
Seriously? You're claiming that most people are aware that writers are choosing their topics (and ideas) because they were fed them that by PR agents?
How does your product compare with http://www.openscienceframework.org/? As a scientist, I'm inclined to trust OSF more, since it's run by other scientists, fully open source, and doesn't need to make a profit. At the moment, OSF seems more focused on tools to facilitate collaboration and less focused on replicating functionality currently available on GitHub, although it sounds like they use git as a backend and eventually plan to implement functionality similar to what Banyan (and GitHub) currently provide.
What old innovations are they trying to claw back revenue from? Wasn't the disputed object actually a fairly new innovation?
I second Chalmers' book. It's an excellent introduction to how contemporary philosophers think about these issues.
If it was anything like when my child was born, my wife's company gives a base 8 weeks of parental leave to both men and women.

The extra 8 was paid for by the company's short term disability insurance policy, for a total of 16 weeks. Childbirth was deemed sufficient to trigger short term disability.

I imagine that's what happened here.
Another similar user report from 3 months ago on Reddit, very detailed report.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/16tavj/warning_be_c...
That's my fault; I wrote Jessica's bio and will make it clear she's one of the organizers and not the organizer.

Thanks for the correction!

EDIT: Just updated the site.
Do programmers get the respect they deserve?
This is great. Too often we only get the original researchers' interpretation of the data and not much else. Good luck with it!
The day I first tried on contacts, I tried every brand my optometrist carried, most of which wouldn't stay in at all. I took samples of both varieties that would fit to try wearing for a week. Both had issues staying in and both caused serious irritation so I couldn't wear either for more than an hour.

While there might be a brand that would work for me, I have had no luck finding it.
Feed Wrangler - a modern, sustainable RSS reader
I'm a fan of Go, but this is not a very good talk. The first half is unnecessary trolling, and the second half is based on some code snippets taken from Rob Pike's "Go Concurrency Patterns", but in this case badly presented. So I prefer the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6kdp27TYZs
Welcome to the A16Z family!
The menu needs some work. I can't choose a category because the dropdown disappears as soon as I move the mouse..
Running Chrome 26
(Blow me) some bubbles
I guess for the HN crowd enough will never be enough. What if they are keeping part of their codebase closed because they want to make money off of it? And if this is so anti good-guy, then if they released it and then the project was cancelled because they weren't able to recoup their costs is this still good-guy? IE: No more development from Google on this cutting edge product could be seen as a net loss for everyone vs. a win for 100% open source demands.
It is a one word explanation to users asking why their app is slow/drains battery/doesn't feel like other apps.
Is there a program or summer institute like Hacker School but more graphics programming and interaction design oriented?
I agree, there's no easy solution. Maybe public debates like this are the best we can hope for anyway. My approach is to be extremely cautious with apps that depend on network effects to be useful or profitable.
I think that the problem entirely rests with #1. First, consider that this central third party already exists: Universities. I have a PhD, so I should be hired over someone who has only a BS and we should both be hired over someone who never went to college. Except a large number people on HN who do hiring don't agree with this ranking (and rightly so - I'm only an average programmer). Therefore, we need a new organization to do this certification.

We got that new organization. Microsoft did certifying with the MCSE. Of course, I've heard MCSE used more often as a punchline than as a job requirement, so that hasn't helped us too much, either.

Thus, we move into the tests companies actually perform while hiring. Here, we still have the problem that no one agrees on the smartness test. On the one hand, puzzles that I've considered trivial logic puzzles that have been declared obscure memorization tests by people who are certainly more qualified than I am. On the other hand, I've seen programmers who literally couldn't tell a hard drive from a network card breeze through interviews on the basis of rote memorization. Even if we could find a good rubric for grading programmers, we'd need to sell the businesses on this test.

I agree that hiring is completely broken and that outsourcing it to a company who makes it their expertise is pretty much the future of business. Honestly, the reason I've written so much here is because I've spent a lot of time thinking about this idea, too, and these are the issues I've run into. However, until problem #1 is solved, I don't see this going forward.
To my understanding, Go is meant to be a replacement for C, while Scala supposedly would be roughly in the same position on the technology stack as Ruby/ Python/ Java (and this is a broad generalization as well). I'm not sure how Go will be competing with either Node or Scala?

One of the appealing of Scala for me to start learning it is the functional aspect. Although not too pure, it's "functional enough", and is an actual useful language for working in the industry. Go doesn't even pretend it's functional (which is a good thing of not trying to half-ass stuff), and while interface is a really nice idea, it's just barely OOP as well.
Exactly. Right tool for a right task. No hype.
Apple Raises $17 Billion in Record Debt Sale
Which is convenient, because the Oath of Hippocrates has not actually stopped doctors from harming people.
It allows people to treat memory on the GPU just as they do on CPUs. You are correct, you will probably not achieve high performance if you are paging in from disk all the time. But, what if you want it done once every ten minutes? Consider the amount of programmer effort required to do that manually. This is part of sharing the virtual address space.
While the idea of an oath may be flawed, I do think it's about time some segments of the tech field showed a little less contempt towards users. I don't know how that would happen, but launching your own startup shouldn't give you carte blanche to exploit your users however you see fit.

As a programmer, I don't want a bunch of charlatans in SF to give my career an unsavoury reputation because of these antics.
> It's just an illustration of how "simple linear history" is a non-sequitur - you now have to factor in that a specific commit could very easily have been made after a commit that comes after it in the history. You're moving complexity around, not reducing it.

You are removing several sources of complexity when you rebase.

1) You have fewer logical branches to keep track of. Before you rebase, it's unclear what code in the main branch your feature branch depends on -- clearly it depends on all the things in the common ancestor, but if there were any merge conflicts, it depends on the resolution of all of those as well. Rebasing lets you easily see: "This commit depends on the commit immediately before it, dependencies on older code have already been resolved, no need to look elsewhere."

2) You remove a noisy merge commit. Merge commits, unless they are actually resolving a conflict between two branches of code that are both in use somewhere, serve no functional purpose. They only record that a particular physical operation was performed. If the merge is resolving some conflict that only one developer ever saw and only on his local machine, then why not rebase that content-less piece of information from the historical record?

3) This is the softest point, but rebasing encourages manual curation. On average, I would expect that this increases the quality of commit messages, and encourages the removal of commits that are just useless noise. The developer wrote one commit message in the middle of work, or maybe just because it was 5pm, and it reflected his thinking at the time. Later, after he knows the context the commit falls in, he looks at and evaluates it. I think of it as revising a draft -- sometimes you got it right the first time, sometimes you didn't. In any case the end product is unlikely to be worse off unless someone is throwing away EVERYTHING by squashing down to one commit and giving it a message "squashed".

In any case, the end result really isn't any more complicated. Take your example: you want to know what caused the bug at Monday at 8pm on the production server. You know that a particular commit was deployed, say "deadbeef". Is there really a meaningful difference between commits with timestamps before 8pm Monday that come after "deadbeef" on the master branch, and ones with timestamps before 8pm Monday that weren't yet merged?

If your problem is really, "I don't know what commit was on the production server at 8pm Monday, and I need a branch with linear timestamps in order to figure that out" then you have a totally different problem.
Startup Mania at New York Tech Day
Awesome! I hear from Nick that there's a mailing list starting soon so that we can coordinate housing and stuff before we arrive.
I hate presentations like this. First of all, they aren't particularly enlightening. Second of all, they make an already-weak point by using an even weaker method: anecdotal evidence. And third of all, most examples are cherry-picked out of a poisoned well.

It's hard to take anyone doing a talk like this seriously. Truth be told, (and for anyone that hasn't read my Go-related posts on here), I am a pretty harsh critic of Go (even though I contributed to the project). I used Go until 2011 when I decided to turn back to Java (which, in many ways, I think is still my go-to language -- along with an embedded Jetty -- when writing.. just about anything web-related). But my personal bias aside, it's brutally obvious that Node and Scala are at different programmatic levels when compared to Go. Go is, in many ways, the "next C" - especially with the recent architecture additions, the low-levelness of Go is starting to become painfully obvious. Comparing something like Scala (or worse: Node) to Go is, in a very literal way, like comparing apples to oranges.

So lets bust out the checklist. Language zealotry? Check. Comparing apples to oranges? Check. Anecdotal evidence? Check. Using cherry-picked examples to show how X sucks or Y is awesome? Check. Congratulations, you've got your linkbait.

Note how I don't even bother to attack any argument on a technical level; I think it would be profoundly foolish to do so. These three can simply not be compared on a technical level unless we want to do it in incredibly broad strokes (think about comparing a fighter jet with a stapler).
"I like Go. I don't know Node and am uncomfortable with Scala. "
Torchwood!
Last week we had snow on the road and I couldn't see the lines. On my way into work this morning, I noticed some truck had drop clumps of hay on the road. I am thinking that the car better be able to handle things without extra work on the road.