skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If one wished to pursue this project with systematic diligence, the ontological questions would necessarily begin with, "What is a programming language?" and "How do we distinguish programming languages from natural languages?" -- particularly natural languages such as Wittgenstein describes as consisting only of "slab" and similar terms.

I fear that such an investigation would not get around to closures for a really long time if at all, and that OOP and PHP as objects of study would be so far in the future as to be archaic.

The ontological (and taxonomic) problem can be illustrated with a simple hello world written in Java running in the JVM running on a 2011 Macbook Air under OSX. What language is used to write the characters to the screen? A case can be made for JVM bytecode. A case can be made for C used to write the hardware's microcode. There's only a better case for one rather than the other when we have closed over a lot of assumed values.

The general problem of programming language is semiotic, not epistemic. They consist of symbols and meanings, and while these my glob together here and there - FORTRAN in any language is still possible.
This is one of the reasons I went into math and software. In math there is only black and white, provably true and patently wrong. Still, part of the reason this is so is that to show any results everything must be laid on the table. CS and Math papers are therefore open by design and the world has benefited. I hope the rest of science will move in this direction.
Why do you think this is related to language? We don't think in words, we think in images.

Now if we were to presuppose that cultural priming has something to do with this, we might be closer to the truth (i.e. people in Western world have carrot as an archetype of vegetables, while people in e.g. Philippines might see cabbage as the representative of veggies).
Escape traffic? The Government says never!
City traffic is worth more than $1B dollars. I am surprised that BP is not buying this to shut it down the next day.

:D
An article claiming that only 11% of findings could be reproduced doesn't cite its sources, thus rendering the findings of the article unreproducible. Nice work!
Scoreoid Secures Pre Seed Investment - Adds Yanki Margalit As Chairman
When a journalism project goes terribly wrong
The worst time I ever had dealing with a candidate was one that had been referred by a friend to our medium sized organisation. Normally that firm either hired people via a recommendation from someone who worked in that field (ie "they are perfect for what you need") or via an agency. Never "they might be what you're looking for".

What was hard for me, was simply trying to say no. It took me about 1.5 hours of research and help from some of the more experienced people around me, I felt like I was writing a dear John letter. I wanted to explain why it wasn't just a no, that it was due to the fact we needed someone who had more experience in the kind of thing we were doing, as sadly we didn't have time to train within (our normal method at that place).

When going the conventional route, I can simply email something along the lines of "failed all questions, got nothing correct simple SQL, couldn't write a for loop." even tell the agency not to waste my time, or large HR firm that we need to have better screening.

If they are a small startup, it might be as simple as you didn't gel with them. A friend of mine puts the success of his team down to the fact they all meet up in person, every friday at 11am, at their favourite bar, if people are really stressed with each other about work they drink and play table football until they are friends again. He commented how he couldn't work with a mutual friend because they don't drink and refuse to go to pubs. Obviously you can't say that to the person.

So if you've got someone who is busy or who hasn't got very good reasons for saying no to you, then they might simply ignore you. Don't let it get you down, try to understand its not an easy situation for them either and try to be much more detached about applying for roles, it is as they say, just business.
The craftsman, the prop master, the boy, and the 3D printer
78,000 People Apply for One-Way Trip to Mars
This is why I love HN. This conversation went from NZ software patents to the legal status of apes in NZ in no time.
Great points. Similar to work from home memes - WFH productive or not productive? Neither...depends on each individual, team and environment.
People might be lying and also 3 people is not "many" ;)
Landsat Annual Timelapse 1984-2012
Sorry to hear about your experiences. Try not to take it personally, startups don't have HR departments like Big Companies do, and they probably just got swamped and didn't find the time to do things properly. I'm sure it's no reflection on you or your application.

Good luck out there.
I might be wrong here, but is not their reason to be strict on VISA so that they give better chance to actual Americans to try and land the jobs which would be normally be taken up by people coming in from outside US as students and staying back ?
An Efficient Way to Extract the Main Topics from a Sentence
The website didn't load initially, so I allowed it javascript and cookies, fine. Then the hilarious "skip intro" button transported me back to the 90s. Then the website finally loaded with style over substance and a hilariously tiny window in which text appears. Thank god it loads up the whole website so you can at least disable the retarded CSS and view the text of the site - better than in most cases I guess.

I don't like where the web is going, it was on the right track with CSS but it's getting ridiculous again. Now I need javascript to read text and view pictures.
My experience is that to avoid calcification, you should move between projects/companies. You won't do the same thing for too long, even on the same OS/language combination. The danger, in my [bitter] experience, is to stay in one place with lots of other people that also stay in one place.

Since you mentioned Perl -- it is an old hobby (and present job; hired/paid as a senior, feels like a junior with the new stuff), I'll use that as an example.

Perl is a totally different world now, compared to just a decade ago. Testing took over completely, about then. The testing support is really good. (See CPAN + Perl testers; please copy that in other environments.)

The use of the language ("Modern Perl") is totally different -- see e.g. (not only Moose and the language extensions but the ability to create them!) http://search.cpan.org/~flora/MooseX-Declare-0.35/lib/MooseX...

Many of the work domains (e.g. web development) are also very different.

And so on.

(AFAIK, it is similar in most other scripting languages.)
Or big-time torrentors ; )

Oh wait...
Yes, that's the standard compusci response, and that's why debates in this area are presently fruitless. I dont really care to know to what extent PHP can be written in first order logic, nor does that help anyone decide between PHP and Javascript (via Node), for example.

With any philosophical project there are assumptions that you hold fixed and work that you assume "has been done" (or could be). Either way,

I think there is substantive and helpful contributions to be made by forgetting where programming languges come from, by ignoring their syntax and by treating their standard implementations as worlds-to-be-explored.

And if you like, the above statement is my starting point, and implicit rejection of the compusci approach which is to ask all the questions im ignoring.
Do you recycle your numbers? I once got a T-Mobile prepaid phone and had drug dealers and bill collectors calling me all day.
No, the idea was that his personal fortune minus the entire cost of making this movie would still be sufficient, i.e. funding it himself and failing completely would still not bankrupt him.

So he's claimed the numbers being circulated concerning his wealth are exaggerated and I wouldn't expect him to tell us the correct ones, but one thing I would expect is that if he says he's putting "a lot" of his own money into this project, to also say how much exactly that is.
I would be highly suprised if you had consulted all your staff on such issues, generally such a thing may be discussed early on when policy is set, but it's unlikely to be reviewed after some staff churn but I'll take your word on it.

Regardless, he's aruging for something that's going against the grain, so he doesn't need to actually give a balanced approach. We already know the advantages and hopefully the disadvantages or working set hours, so we don't need to hear it, we just need a strong argument for his point of view. You don't generally route for the other side in a debate, so the complaints are misplaced.

Also it's not surprising as an employer you feel set hours are the right approach for you. I'm not making a judgment on you, but it's very common for employers to make leaving at 5 O'clock very awkward and they never seem to have a problem asking employees to do work out of hours, while generally being very quiet about policy to get that time back.

Over the short term, abusing your employees in such a way comes with no disadvantages, so the employers love it. Long term, the same employees will probably become disheartened, but we live in a society where we'd rather replace those employees and charge on ahead. If you do any of these things, you're the type of employer the article is arguing against, if not, then your morale is probably fine which is the real undertone of such articles.
CS has similar problem, specially in AI fields. Researches often claim the accuracy rate more than 95%, but in reality that is much lesser (in fact less than 10% in most of the claims).
I thought it was pretty clear that "OP" in this case referred to "Original Poster", by which s/he means the person who wrote the article. It can't really refer to groundCode, because there's no way to work out his/her age. "OP" stands for "Original Poster."

Your point is valid, but it's usually easily deduced, or the person who wrote the ambiguous comment should simply have been clearer.
Eight paragraph of this article, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02... sounds like a forerunner
Seconded. Is this cheaper than a SkypeIn number?
After hearing similar things about psychology papers, this is rather disconcerting. This is why I am a climate change skeptic, I don't know whether it is happening due to CO2 or not, but I am confident that science can't be confident when they can't do control experiments. You can't control for any variable when it comes to the climate, let alone all the reasonable ones. We have infinitely more capabilities to control variables when researching cancer than we do with the climate of something as massive and complex as the earths climate, and it turns out our confidence is cancer research may kind of suck.

one interested in the subject should check out feynman's discussion on the psychological effect on scientific research. Millikan use bad assumptions for his oil drop experiment to determine the charge of an electron, but nobody would publish results that differed too much. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment
Project Anarchy by Havok added support for Tizen OS
Some really interesting insights here, Wodlander -- I look forward to seeing more from Glipho
Google and Time launch satellite-photo Timelapse tool,changes over 25-years
We will keep cutting up time into smaller and smaller chunks until we cannot go any further.
Scientific publications have a history of having papers contradictory to each other for a long time. In medical research, findings are often based on statics results from limited samples. From that perspective, it will be a big surprise if they are more accurate than public polls.
Ask HN: What was the name of the beta app enabling easy use of LXC?
On HN a couple of weeks ago. I think it was related to Joyent or some company like that.
It's interesting that the big tech sumo-wrestlers seem content to outsource R&D and then stomp in with huge buy-out sums when something great surfaces.

Apple with its billions apparently isn't interested in exploring disparate R&D projects beyond their core interests. Microsoft apparently is and isn't having much luck. Google used to but not so much anymore, and is producing glasses. Facebook is voraciously subsuming R&D and design talent.</stereotypes>

Does seem like they mainly would prefer to pay an exorbitant fee for the gold nuggets, rather than fund all the failures in-house.
I'm 35 this year, I'm excited for my new career in 5 years!

Actually I spent most of my life as "the young guy" in the office. It's pretty sweet being the wise aged veteran and nobody questioning whether I should be there or not.
In just the same way plenty of people now don't know about what the unions then went on to create or enable. Spanish practices, crippling national strikes, the near inability to fire poorly performing staff, closed shops and intimidation of non union labour.

Many of these rights were also secured because the awful production line jobs were sent overseas (cf Bangladesh). Unions were a powerful force for good - but they also created huge problems in some countries once those rights had been one and they failed to modernise. Modern trade unions are again a powerful force for good, but those are the ones that aren't going on strike all the time and hardly anyone has a problem with them.

(From a very UK perspective)
I love the sound my own voice and i’m bad for meetings
On a conceptual level, I like the approach of building up a mini-smartphone from the bare essentials. A few years back Nokia acquired a company called Smarterphone that was doing this[1], and this updated Asha platform is apparently the first fruits of the acquisition.

The alternative is to take the "kitchen-sink" platform of Android which is actively developed for quad-core phones and full-HD displays, and try to pare it down to run on low-end hardware that's an order of magnitude slower and also has an order of magnitude less pixels to work with... While still preserving compatibility with half a million existing apps.

That's of course pretty much impossible, so instead the super-cheap Android devices are running old software from several years ago with extra limitations imposed by the low-end platform.

The difference in the two approaches is analoguous to Windows RT vs. iOS on tablets -- the other party tries to cut down the full system for cheaper devices, while the other builds up from software that's been proven on smaller devices.

--

[1] According to previous reports, the Smarterphone OS had an app platform written in Scheme!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smarterphone

...I doubt anything of that survives in the Asha platform, but it would be cool to do low-end smartphone apps in Lisp :)
I've always felt that NZ was a sensible place for startups (in theory, I've never been). A nice clean country, easy of doing business, no capital gains tax, respectable government, no drones or porno scanners, California-like in north (and amazing scenery every in general), impressive # of tech companies in relation to size. They'd be smart to do a Start-up Chile sort of program. If I were a VC and wanted an adventure, I'd set up shop in Auckland and target the promising startups who couldn't get US visas.

http://ease-doing-business.findthedata.org/
I believe all the posts on this blog are by the person mentioned in the sidebar on the right, "Mehdi Medjaoui, from Webshell.io".
We did consult all our staff, with only 25 it wasn't hard. There were differences of opinion, but a balance was found. Further, we have no churn - as I write this, no one has left in the last 11 years.

We are explicit about out-of-hours work, because sometimes we have engineers in the field working in very different time zones. In those cases the staff decide among themselves who will be providing support, and the company policies about recompense are clear. The compensation policies were agreed by all affected staff, and they seem genuinely content.

We take this seriously, not least because it would be possible to abuse our position.
I don't know if "destroy" is the right word, although that can happen. It has the ability to act extremely quickly, which is actually what we want. We want markets to respond to new market conditions quickly so that we know the information has been disseminated throughout the markets. The faster it behaves, the more efficient it is. The problems we see come from human programming errors, not from a mis-networked market. This is incredible engineering.
Wow, ancient web history.
I suspect it was already outdated when it was written...
Even without the perks, the basic idea is that you pay money to allow someone to make something that you want made, so there's still the risk that it isn't completed or differs from what you were promised.
What if a Turkish citizen says bad words (swears) to Turkish people while he is abroad? Then the penalty increases 2 times. The interesting part here is that the laws of Turkey work even if you are not in Turkey.
The comments on that article are priceless. Ripping into the author with great accuracy. No pun intended.
After two years of this list, I've just updated it to include more information.

- The code index is now named iata.

- Includes the size of the airport if known.

- Includes the type of airport, heliport, seaboat, airport.

- Now includes the continent of the airport.

- And finally includes the ISO code where the airport is located.

Hope it helps!
I agree. The speed at which markets respond to news reveals how efficient the system works. Flash-crashes and what not are either caused by human programming errors or it is simply the right reaction to new information about the environment. We want the new price to be discovered ASAP.
I'd say no. I'm pretty serious about employee rights, but this is not a consideration that I feel employees are entitled to, at least not as originally framed. Who sets the market rate? Anyway, legally you have no standing to charge for that when the going protocol is that interviews are free.

I'm not sure that I want to step away from that protocol, either. Employers have as much ground to charge sloppy candidates for wasting their time.

Employers should pay all costs (e.g. travel) and they should volunteer so it isn't socially awkward-- no one should have to ask to be reimbursed for train tickets-- but they shouldn't be expected pay for the employee's time. Search costs are shared; that's just social protocol. Besides, the absolute last thing I want as a job candidate is to compete with spam candidates taking an outside shot at getting in and collecting a day's pay. Yes, that would seriously happen if companies started paying unsuccessful interview candidates.

However, companies should be upfront about how long the process will take. Unexpected follow-ons are irritating and I usually wouldn't start running a clock, but I feel that I should have that right. What you can't do (legally, you have no standing) is retroactively decide that the clock was running because the company didn't have its house in order and missed deadlines. Also, if you try to "collect" and threaten reputation damage, there's a thin line between that and extortion. You probably won't go to jail in that particular case, but your leverage is gone.

What I do support charging for (in event of not getting the job, which hasn't happened yet) are reference checks. I haven't had to give references in a while, but here's the best way that I can come up with to do that. Send an email with the contact information of your references in it. Then, generate a PDF with the first page having phone numbers and emails of your references (the exact same information, so it looks redundant; you'd prefer that the PDF not be read). Have the second page be either blank or garbage. On the third page, put that you consider any contact regarding you between employer and any reference to be extension of a job offer and that, if they contact a reference (provided or "back channel") and pass on you, they are liable in amount of 3 months' salary, Then make sure one of your references is someone who'll tell you if they get a call from that company.

If they pass on you and you can't prove that they contacted references, you don't collect. However, if they call your references (and you can prove it) and still decline you, you usually will have legal standing to collect; since you allowed them to take a risk with your professional reputation, you have a right to appropriate consideration.
The Apple II. TRS-80 & Commodore PET were all released 36 years ago. Those three machines marked the wide availability of computing. 30 years ago you could buy a computer for $200, and millions did.

The early 80's were filled with heady optimism. It was obvious that computers were the future; that they were the next "plastics".

So while it's not surprising that there aren't lots of 55-60 year old programmers, there should be lots of 40-50 year old ones.

I think a better explanation for their lack would be the downturns experienced in the early 90s and the big internet crash of ~2002. A lot of people shifted into different fields in that time.

Even more so is just attrition. It takes a lot of effort to stay current; for many it would have been just easier to switch into management.
I don't participate in the FB ecosystem at all and do not want to use an app that forces me in - either through a mandatory requirement (..you must now have an FB account to use Waze..), or simply because I use the app and therefore FB can identify me by Waze nickname, forum account details and current location.
I would not bring up a notorious nutter like Mother Theresa in support of your Ayn Rand ideology if I were you.

And your argument that charities and government-funded welfare are mutually exclusive is just plain bizarre. In any case, let us know how Somalia works out for you.
Maybe it wasn't so eloquently stated, but it's a valid point.

The article is written by someone who is not yet 30 and started his company, a small web design company, 14 years ago. He has likely worked with young, small teams and has no other experience.

The article itself comes off as naive and doesn't even say who the advice is intended for. It's reminiscent of a bad assignment for an undergraduate management course.
A lot of those messages might not be trades, but actually update messages to resting orders.
So maybe we need rename Life Sciences to Life Arts?