skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure how that would work, because the very nature of the beast is exceedingly personal. As I mentioned in the example I added to my original comment, it is about small things that, cumulatively, add up to big things.

I think the kinds of things that would show up on a rosettacode-type site are most likely already exposed in terms of plugins of some sort (however the editor defines "plugin"). It is the murky area between keyboard macros and plugins that the programmable editor makes its mark, and those things are highly individualized.

It would be fun to have something like seewhatididinmyeditor.com, that just let you post snippets of these kinds of things in your editor's native tongue.

Here's another example: I was converting some javascript to coffeescript. Coffeeescript's conventions are snake_case, and I wanted to follow those conventions, so I added this little thing:

(defun my-uncamelize (s &optional sep start)
"Convert CamelCase string S to lower case with word separator SEP.
Default for SEP is an underscore \"_\".
If third argument START is non-nil, convert words after that
index in STRING."
(let ((case-fold-search nil))
(while (string-match "[A-Z]" s (or start 1))
(setq s (replace-match (concat (or sep "_")
(downcase (match-string 0 s)))
t nil s)))
(downcase s)))

Now, I didn't write it; I grabbed it as a snippet somebody else had written and shared. Now, with a bound key, I had a single key-stroke that would snake-case an identifier.

Again, not a big deal, but it made the workflow for converting those js files just that much easier.
Maybe another way to think of it is, "Do Elite Colleges Discriminate Against The Kinds of Things Asian Tiger Moms Think Will Get Their Kids Into Their School?"

At risk of sounds discriminator and stereotyping, the number of Chinese and Korean kids applying for college with 4.0 GPAs, perfect SATs with awards for Math and who play either expert level piano or violin is just simply not interesting anymore.
Make a 40 Hour Work Week an initiative, for yourself, for your team, or for your organization. Start small. Lead by example. Start with yourself, then help other people. Focus on finding more effective ways to do things, focusing on the vital few things that matter the most, playing to your strengths, and improving your energy. Know what counts and be able to put your finger on it.
> In my experience there are few college kids with Node/Go/Haskell/Clojure on their resume

> Your average brand new college CS graduate knows Java.

Maybe we are reaching different conclusions because we are looking at different anecdotal evidence. What you are saying in these two lines does not jive with what I have observed at all.

Colleges are not teaching that trendy stuff, but CS programs in American universities don't teach any technology anyway (aside perhaps from an OS course or two that focuses on the Linux kernel a bit too much, and the obligatory first freshman quarter with Java/C++). The tech college students come out of school with, from what I have seen, is the stuff they taught themselves outside of their coursework. That stuff is almost invariably the trendy shit. At the very least, the trendier parts of Java.

> they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts.

Either way, it is either about the ability to do the work for those salaries, or the willingness to to do the work for those salaries. Even if I'm off-base and it is entirely the second, it makes sense that companies are going to start looking for some more of the same sort of cheap but effective talent.
Tips to Surviving Sequestration when traveling with  kids
You can estimate the likelihood that a particular sentence is spam by calculating the log sum of n-gram probabilities of sub-sequences in a sentence. These probabilities are obtained from a sufficiently general training set, such as Google's n-gram viewer[1]. You can estimate the probability of a particular sequence of words by summing the log probabilities of each n-gram within that sequence. Using a trigram language model (n = 3), you could estimate the likelihood as follows:

Sentence = "This sentence is semantically and syntactically valid."

P(Sentence) = log(p(START,START,This)) + log(p(START,This,sentence)) + log(p(This,sentence,is)) + log(p(sentence,is,semantically)) + log(p(is,semantically,and)) + log(p(semantically,and,syntactically)) + log(p(and,syntactically,valid)) + log(p(syntactically,valid,.)) + log(p(valid,.,STOP)) + log(p(.,STOP,STOP))

where START and STOP are special symbols that aid in determining the proximity of a word to the beginning and end of a sentence.

If your training set fails to sufficiently generalize, you could use Bayesian inference to estimate the likelihood that the sentence is spam. Under this framework, you'd be calculating the posterior probability of the sentence being spam given the observed sequence of n-grams, which combines (i) the inherent likelihood that any sequence of words is spam and (ii) the compatibility of an observed sequence with (i), which is proportional to the impact it has on (i).

[1] http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2....
Learning from the marketing shenanigans of dot-com era startups that still exist today is a textbook case of survivor bias.
Yes, in the sense that an EE degree from MIT is a heuristic of sorts. It's got some differing qualities, but at the end of the day that heuristic will make a difference for two otherwise comparable job applicants, say.

Konstantin Guericke, one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, now offers coaching and mentoring to students and would-be entrepreneurs. But because he's deluged with requests, he tends to give preference to students from his alma mater, Stanford's engineering school.

"I don't feel a Stanford student is better than another one," he said. But "since there are so many, I use that as a filter."

http://www.cnbc.com/id/49465579
Here’s an example of powerful customization. I recently wrote a macro in Vim that, when run in a particular Visual Basic file, would search for a certain part of the file with an SQL string, delete everything in the file but the SQL string (just temporarily), and reformat the SQL string for easy viewing. I needed a macro because that Visual Basic file was compiled from another source, so it kept getting rebuilt to the full version but with different SQL, and I had to keep on using my macro to view the new SQL.

The main reason this was easier in Vim than it would be in Sublime Text is that I could edit the macro after the fact – the macro was just text. All macros are stored in a register, and registers are basically like multiple clipboards, so to edit the macro, I just had to paste the contents, change the text, and copy it back to the same register. Because of that, I could develop the macro bit by bit. At first, I just made the macro delete the parts of the file other than the string with SQL. Then, when I realized that I was going to be viewing the SQL in this file many more times, I edited the macro’s register. I was able to develop the macro bit by bit. And I could even save the macro in a text file for me to load later. Basically, I used Vim macros as a substitute for a scripting language – Vim has convenient text-manipulation functions built-in, and text manipulation and viewing were my goals.

Another way Vim made writing the macro easier is that it has more powerful macro primitives. It is easier to, for instance, select all the text in the next quoted string on this line, because Vim’s text-manipulation primitives are more granular. I think Sublime Text can select the cursor’s current “block”, but not a double-quoted string specifically.

Here’s the final macro (^M carriage return characters were turned into actual newlines, and ^[ and ^V characters are invisible):

/History Section goes here

f"vi":s/\( \+\)\(	\+\)/\r\2/g
gv--dgg/\.replace(
hhi
--
dG:setf sql
gg/"Select
a
-V-I--

.
Yes, those weren't a surprise.
That makes their site suspect IMO. I probably would have done the same but I am willing to bet my last dollar that they'll be nicer to start-ups funded by their funders. And yes, I've read the declarations of impartiality.
Responding here since I can't respond to the grandchild comment of yours.

You're right as far as experience of new graduates vs. those with 10 years experience (that basically, all either knows is Java), at least as far I experienced when I hired people when I worked for a university. However, the key difference between the younger set and the older set was that the fresh grads were open to and eager to learn new technologies whereas the older set basically gave me responses of: "Drupal, why would you use that?"
"PHP, that's horrible."
"That's not JSR-168 compliant"

And on... Now, you might say they were right to be skeptical. However, experience showed they were not. We did such a good job of replacing the old Java/Websphere/Oracle based systems for various university functions that we put a number of the Java engineers out of jobs without need to replace them (don't worry they were union so they just got transferred).
Excellent point. A truly open source movie (like the Blender Foundation flims) would release all the unedited source materials for other people to use themselves. Creative Commons is just the first (minimum) step towards an open project.
As far as public schools go, the article only excludes the UCs because they can't consider race. In fact, it uses Berkeley as a peer for the elite private schools. There's no other public school that has a reputation across all disciplines similar to the elite private schools, so I don't think the article made any real oversight. There are many programs within public schools that are considered peers, though.
I see. I almost thought about applying to transfer to CU, but didn't since I didn't know how their financial situation would work out. Non traditional students don't really get a lot of help with these things, and it's uncertain enough as a transfer already. Hopefully you were treated ok as a transfer at NYU!

It's really sad to see CU's free tuition gone. It was one of the few places that smart but poor people with no access to easy credit still had a fighting chance of attending. :(
Race cars sound quite exciting.
I think the OP was asking how requiring a degree is relevant to the number of men in those professions. When compared to women, men generally have equal or better access to higher education, so it would seem that the dearth of men in nursing and teaching wouldn't be related to those professions requiring a degree.
I'd have been a radical then and I'm apparently a radical now. Sigh.
How to create a great ‘about’ page
Here’s one thing that never made sense to me: people make websites so others can find out more about them, but most “About Us” pages absolutely suck. They’re either really long and boring or really short and mysterious. Not many people understand the best way to go about these pages.
It doesn't seem like this is a new theory explaining why it was built as much as a theory explaining why there were people in the area to begin with.
"Ignoring the housing bubble"...great talking point, but sadly, inaccurate. The most significant obstacle that blocked attempts by the Bush administration to combat the runaway housing/financial sector bubble was a Democratic House that strongly believed in the "affordable housing mission", and obstructed reform and investigation via their stranglehold on the House Financial Services Committee.

http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/200...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?nomobile=1&v=NQXbT5ZMYaY
That professor sounds like a jerk. There's about 1001 ways he could have said to that student, "Sampling classes in that way is disruptive," without being pompous and condescending.
There are tens of thousands of bright young kids under 20 reading the internet and getting big ideas. Maybe 10,000 read this website.
hmmm..thats a very good point. also, i didnt notice that about RoR. altho, they do mention it once, ure right that they dont make a big deal out of it.
so, we can change our homepage copy to be more focused on the clients and problems/solutions. the hairylemon site is a great example, it has very good flow and nice clean simple text. is this your company?
thanks for the great advice robocat!
An API for typesetting LaTeX onboard your iOS device
21 hours
I'm not sure I'd get a lot of utility out of 10,000 hours of "butt calls". Maybe if there was some memory that I was looking to rekindle by listening to it, but I'm not sure if the actual audio would ever beat my "memory" of it.
Just pay yourself the money you were going to pay a college.
Brilliant idea! Best thing I read on HN today.
Thanks for the feedback. My initial target is small/medium web app developers and not so much the big guys (yet). At this stage, some A/B & design saavy is required and not fully eliminated. There's a lot of demo possibilities (one that comes up very often - eat your own dogfood much?) which I think will improve conversions.
Oh I see what you're saying. Bottom line, there needs to be at least 1 copy of each piece available to pull. It also definitely lacks a lot of the features that Dropbox provides on top of file syncing.
We Had No Idea What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like. Until Now
product is in development and testing at this time so,no. But, that's going to be a persuasive argument - we eat our own dog food.
Great post, thanks! I've also been working with Flask and have found it extremely flexible.

Does SendHub use Flask in any sort of production environment? It's always been touted as a great small framework, but rarely (if ever) do we hear about sites using it in some sort of large-scale effort.
> Your systems are all Node/Go/Ruby/Whatever ... Or do you hire the guy with 15 years of experience on his resume who only has "C/C++/Perl" on his resume

I tend to prefer the guy with 15 years of experience with "C/C++/Perl" on his resume.

Our software is a mix of Python, Scala, Java, CoffeeScript and Obj-C (different components). Scala is the driving force right now for the backend and the code that we've built in it is heavy on concurrency and functional programming. We've also standardized our workstations on Ubuntu (not Windows, not OS X).

From my experience, the language or the technologies themselves are NOT THE PROBLEM. The problem is finding people that are able to build software, people that when faced with a problem, they solve it, even if the problem is new to them.

Our backends also need to handle massive traffic and we don't have the resources to throw hundreds of servers in the mix for scale. To build efficient backends you need an incredibly difficult to achieve mix of knowledge that I won't even bother to enumerate.

We also have to analyse terabytes of logs daily. So besides setting up clusters for map/reduce, those scripts have to infer knowledge from those logs, going into the territory of statistics / machine learning and natural language processing.

So you're a hipster that knows Go/Node/Ruby/Whatever. Great, but what can I use you for?
Yes, conflate healthcare policy (that in many ways is fundamentally different) with Homeland Security. I apologize for my sarcasm, but this just seems like knee jerk partisanship.

In addition, we are not a democracy (per se), but a constitutional republic, and as such, our elected representatives decide public policy. In the case of Obamacare, Democrats had been overwhelmingly elected the prior year (and Obama ran with healthcare reform as a campaign pledge). So, I don't quite see how it is "undemocratic" either.
One of my old Physics teachers was an expert on Stone Henge. Did a lot of original research in the 1980s. From what I recall Stone Henge is actually multiple sites on top of each other, so when someone says "this is what Stone Henge was for" I am skeptical because we're talking an enormous span of time and several re-buildings with no guarantee that all were for the same reason.

This article title is slightly misleading. The migration route of Aurochs theory certainly gives an explanation as to why ancient people gathered in this location. But it doesn't give reason for why the specific structures at Stone Henge were built, as people might assume from the title.

What I recall from my old teacher, and his work, was that you can pretty clearly demonstrate that the structures were there for observing the sun cycles, as was typical of many megalithic monuments - sun & moon cycles. Most of the other claimed observations can be explained away as statistical artifacts. Given the evidence of burial and the fact such observations would have had religious significance I haven't seen much to challenge the existing understanding of the site.

As an aside, I have visited many megalithic sites in the British Isles (many years go). I find them fascinating. One thing that people often remark on is how they're often in the middle of nowhere, but when they were built they were often in clearings in dense forests, but over time as we domesticated animals that would feed on the bark, killing the trees, then eat the new shoots, over many centuries - millennia - we deforested, for example the moors, and the megalithic sites became elegant monuments to a forgotten age, standing proud against a bleak landscape.
Above, in response to me, you say:

> The goal is really to remove obstacles that unfairly exclude some people from the field. I don't think that will happen all by itself. If if could, it would.

Doesn't your use of the phrase "unfairly exclude" imply a narrowing of the scope down from "all people who want tech jobs" to "all qualified people who want tech jobs", since excluding unqualified people is fair? I don't understand why now you are arguing that you didn't understand the OP's implied assumption. This statement implies that you did.

Am I missing something?
Yes you can intentionally take different photos of the same thing by varying lightning. You may even learn what type of lightning invokes what emotions in your viewers. I'm just saying thats not how photography is usually done. You set up the set, the lightning and the camera to the best of your knowledge but you don't take one picture. You take loads of them varying your setup slightly and then you pick the right ones. Of course photography is very varied field and there are guys who get their highs from taking one picture with shoebox but they are not that common among photographers.
I suppose I can show the emails:

> Hi Dmitri,
>
> Thanks for applying to Counsyl back in August. At the time we didn't
> have any openings in engineering but now we do.
>
> We'd like to schedule you for an initial phone interview with Rishi
> Kacker, VP of Engineering, to learn more about your interests and how
> you may fit in at Counsyl.
>
> Please book an appointment here: http://bit.ly/Rishi_appointments
>
> Enter in your full name in the "What" section and the best number to
> reach you in the "Where" section of the appointment slot.
>
> Email me once you've finished booking your appointment so that I can
> confirm that it went through.

I responded saying -- hey this is spamming me and is kind of disrespectful/underhanded approach to recruiting and they said:

Hi Dmitri,

This is definitely an error on our part. I'm sorry for the annoyance.

It looks like your name was pulled up as an exceptional candidate back
in August (likely from a HackerNews thread). You should have only
been contacted to check for interest, but unfortunately, you were sent
a stock email (as if you had previously applied).

See the attached linkedin profile PDF from August.

I'm sorry again for this clerical error. I'll look further into the
root cause and hopefully we can prevent this type of error in the
future. I'd be happy to take a call if you have further concerns.

EDIT: On the linkedin profile they mentioned and sent via screen shot, it explicitly says no recruiters.
I wondered what everyone was talking about here, then realized that since I have noscript installed, I was looking at the site with no javascript - and it was perfectly readable. Once I activated javascript I saw what the fuss was about. So much clearer without javascript.
I've been looking for something like this, but I'm curious - how does it transfer the data?
any pointers how you implemented hearbeat with nginx?

thank you
The problem is that because you can be rightfully extorted by original author you have little incentive to keep and acknowledge attribution. It's better to pretend that given image came from the cloud.

That's how copyright enforcers again make it worse for all creative people.
which is very much NOT the same as someone else paying you money and certainly not available to the majority of people who pay for college on huge subsidize loans
Based on my reading, there definitely are challenge/response protocols, but they also seem quite dependent on the specific merchant/POS (and issuer) as to whether or not they are enforced or effective (for example, there could be an offline-purchase system that reconciles latter in the day instead of with every transaction, or the issuer might use a static/clonable challenge). I'm still learning...

Interestingly, CBC had an article a few years ago anticipating today's: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2010/05/31/f-rfid-cr...

It outlines a few interesting hacks (ex, anticipatory challenge/response gathering). Mostly, it just seems very easy to get the card number and expiry - and apparently that's not a secret, or anything to be concerned about, as far as the credit card company is concerned.
How is HFT materially different than actual front running by a broker? You might not have individual orders from your own customers in front of you, but clearly your only interest in an equity is to find activity and sponge off a few cents by holding shares for a fraction of a second.

HFT is just a legal way to pull almost the same scam.
>However, the key difference between the younger set and the older set was that the fresh grads were open to and eager to learn new technologies whereas the older set basically gave me responses of: "Drupal, why would you use that?" "PHP, that's horrible." "That's not JSR-168 compliant"

That's partially because the younger kids didn't know enough to know what's wrong with PHP, but mostly because fresh college grads are so happy to actually have a job that they'll do anything to please.

This isn't a case of the old guys not wanting to learn something new (PHP and java are almost exactly the same age). It's a case of old guys knowing enough about PHP to know that it has problems.

Put it this way, if you want to hire someone to hit himself with a whip all day long, you find someone who doesn't know enough to know it hurts (or is a masochist).
I recommend reading the full letter from Prentiss as opposed to the summarized version on B-insider. The full-version presents a very clear cautionary tale about business strategy and management. Prentiss articulates himself well and gives you an inside look at what it's like to watch a start up fail.
I know that one thing you can’t do is have custom tabstops for text. The plugin https://github.com/SublimeText/ElasticTabstops is unable to completely implement elastic tabstops, and its README says that “Limitations in Sublime Text's API make it virtually impossible to use elastic tabstops with spaces.”

Though neither Vim nor Emacs currently provide all the APIs necessary for elastic tabstops plugins, either. They only have the possible advantage that since they’re open source, such support is a little more likely to be added.