skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wipro? Kind of a biased party. My group at MegaCorp has hired an army of testers from Wipro. (they're generally competent within their job description, which is about all you can ask of any consulting company) Anyway, the point is that Wipro is in the business of providing cheap bodies to large companies. That's what they do. (one of the many things they do, actually) Of course they don't like visa restrictions.

Interesting point about my group's work with Wipro: even if we wanted to hire such a number of people from the US, we probably couldn't. It would be too expensive and they would be hard to find. BUT, hiring an army of testers was a terrible idea in the first place. It was a bad solution to the problem. 2 clever people with the license to act couldn't solved the same problem for a fraction of the cost, with better results.

So I wonder if this kind of labor acquisition is needed only by dysfunctional companies? Hard to generalize from a single sample, but interesting to consider.
I think a patch would be looked at, but he'd have to admit it was a bug to accept it.

My complaint isn't that he won't fix the bug for free, it's that he won't acknowledge it's a bug, and thus won't fix it even in a year's time.

Also, I'd pay for the bug to be fixed, by hours, but I saw it costs from $1500 to $75,000 for special service. So I had to fix the bug myself.

The .quit bug, I found already mentioned on the Internet, but unsolved. I fixed that one myself with a simple hack [.quit = exit(0) ] and recompiled SQLite.
I looked it up and I'm wrong. Copying an array is implemented with native memmove() but comparing two arrays really is done one element at a time.
The Mind is Not the Brain
I've used linux exclusively for the last 6 months.

I think for consumer-use (not coding), it's clear that Windows wins: hardware drivers work, all software is available, games etc. Specifically: my expensive old laser printer doesn't work properly on linux (even after wasting a lot of time trying to fix the drivers.) I couldn't run Flash 10 without upgrading glib6 which would upset the rest of the OS. Google Chrome isn't available for linux. Most games aren't available (though Wine does a surprisingly good job for older games).

I much prefer bash and the unix command line tools to Windows. Windows batch files etc do have a subset of the unix functionality, but even with adding DOS versions of the unix utilities, it's not quite there.
The question about what you've actually learnt from linux is telling: I've mainly learnt about configuring terminals and package dependencies. But these things are not intrinsically worth learning - they're just detail.
The actual work I'm doing is at the programming level, and is independent of the OS (though I really do prefer bash).

I think if you want to hack OSs, then of course linux is a great place to start. If you want to hack something else, just using the OS as a tool, I'd still say that linux is superior (but it's close). However, if you just want to use the OS to do consumer things: print things, watch things, write documents, use the web - then Windows is much better.
Can you expand a bit on the inner join issue, how you fixed it, and when and how the author refused to accept that it was a bug?
"Take a look at famous "J prototype" source"

thanks!
Anyone know where I can find "An Implementation of J" from which the source fragment is extracted?
I have found "The Pragmatic Bookstore" handling of the beta review process for Stuart Halloway's book on "Programming Clojure" simply excellent. Of the listed points in this article:

1. People are absolutely willing to buy beta books.

[Clojure's beta book was near completion content-wise, and very readable and usable in everyday learning of clojure.]

4. ... do not lay out the beta version beautifully in InDesign ...

[They were clearly typesetting in LaTeX.]

5. Have an update plan in advance.

[The update plan was announced from the beginning and worked really well via email notifications.

6. It's never a good idea to publicly promise to ship on X date ...

[They never had a final date. They even waited for Clojure to stabilize to 1.0.]

7. The types of folks who buy beta books are very involved, and will send you all kinds of helpful emails about typos, errors, or suggestions...

[My impression is that Stuart got even overwhelmed.]

And to top it, beta reviewers not only got the ebook; they were promised a free printed book. Hats off.
"
About the inner joins - SQLite can be small because it doesn't have the tremendous amount of query optimization that e.g. Postgresql does. That's like complaining that a bicycle makes a lousy tow truck; significantly improving its query optimizer would require changing it into a completely different kind of tool, and a big part of its utility comes from being small enough for embedded use.
"

What I realised is that some free libraries are worth the effort of having to cope with odd bugs. For instance, I'd rather spend 5 hours writing a 'cascading filter' which does its own inner joining but on top of SQLite, than 6 months writing an SQL database engine!

Also, I didn't change a line of SQLite code, it's all in my queries.
there were several ignorant comments in the OP, i have a burning need to address 4 of them:

* There is lack of service with open source tools, where on the other hand Microsoft guarantees if you purchase a licensed copy.

i've never had a good experience with just about anyone's tech support. MS has been one of the worst.

* Ok let us assume windows is not secure, but what have you achieved by your OS being secure? Security isn’t an issue unless you are deploying a server based OS! Are you aware of the efforts gone in developing a virus? Do you know it’s all the hackers who started linux revolution?

Ah, ok. I'll let everyone know that all those supposedly nasty things that can be done with a hacked PC aren't actually important ( http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/05/the_scr... ).
And I simply love the 'its the crooks who started linux' vibe to the last sentence.

* You any ways will not be able to survive without windows, and you will be having a copy of windows with you – how much did you pay to obtain that copy?

that is a matter of market share. many people can survive without windows. if i wasnt doing wed dev where i needed to test in windows, i would have almost an entire lifetime of productive, windows free computing under my belt. alas, i do do web dev so every now and then i need to fire up a windows install that has ie7 or one that has ie8 and test.

* If Microsoft’s that bad company, why haven’t any of the stalwarts able to bring them to their heels? Why is still the best talent in the world getting to that company? Why was the open source company Sun Microsystems not able to sustain the market if the open source community is so strong!

i think a number of people would take issue with calling Sun an 'open source company'. It hasn't exactly been embraced by the larger open source community. And when did he setup the open source community as strong? Is this a might makes right argument? MS Windows is strong with the force, using something else is wrong. You must use that which is strong? He who is week today can be strong tomorrow. The history of India's independence movement demonstrates that nicely.
A few people (including me :-) ) wrote SQL parsers in ANTLR. I'm quite satisfied with the result and never heard anyone to complain ANTLR wasn't suitable for the task...
Ask HN: Is Free Dead?
I was reading this article from FT titled: Media's want to break free. There are a couple of interesting things from my perspective. Firstly file sharing has been stagnating for the past 5 years, while legal downloading has been growing. This appears to suggest that the "visitors" or from now on "customers" have moved away from seeing the internet as a free for all to finding it acceptable to pay for say music.

I'd like to keep the question very general however, not narrowed to either music, newspapers or anything, but information online. Is it no longer viable or does it no longer make business sense to provide the information for free and rely on adverts, rather than charge the visitor?

Besides the business side, taking a "philosophical" perspective, would the internet stop being a force for good, if each person was asked to pay. Would this not create a great barrier to the freedom of information which has been such a strong force for progress and lifting of, at least many than otherwise, from poverty and as such, should any attempt to school the visitors to pay for content be resisted and make available any content for which payment is asked for free.

Personally, I view this from both a business and individual perspective. I, as I believe many here are, am very curious to learn about a variety of things from design to rhetorics. Being a student, and the many people here being in a start up, and the many people generally in the world being unable to afford to pay for the many content that they would like to read on the internet, is such a move just business greed which should be resisted?

Or should it instead be embraced as afterall many of the content providers do work rather hard and to see their work rewarded may be a generally good thing in itself and directly or indirectly contribute more greatly to progression of human kind as a whole by increasing the quality of information?

So, is free dead and should it be dead if it is not?
I'm sorry; No. I'm not demanding he fix it; I'm asking he do something more constructive than nothing. Python isn't "my" software - it's "our" software. Zed's smart enough to contribute and help fix things - I hold him to a higher standard than someone just walking in off the street.

Python-core does not ignore bug reports, especially ones which really fix things, and come with a patch. Asking him to help isn't out of bounds.
Designing and executing experiments is a skill that goes beyond science and beyond entrepreneurship. It will serve you well in everything you do.

The big take-away is when you learn to only make conclusions your experiment set out to find. Said another way, don't answer questions you didn't ask.
Basically, I can't go into it properly because the project is confidential, and I can't think of a similiar table example.

In SQLite:

2 inner joins took about 10 seconds.
3 inner joins in one query were taking 10 minutes.

I was using inner joins to filter - ie shrink the table - when a row had multiple fields in one column (eg, a house has 1 front door but 3 bathrooms).

What should happen in SQLite is that each progressive inner join should make the search table smaller, not bigger. So a 3-join query should be quicker than a 2-join query.

The solution was to create some temp tables, do 1 inner join at a time, and shrink the temp tables down myself.

Now a query with 4 inner joins takes 8 seconds, without changing a line of SQLite. You can't tell me that's not a bug! :-)
Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension
Scheeeeme!
No more Digg shouts: Rationalizations to Why Digg Needs a Better R&D Department
I’m not a power-digger, and never cared much to be one. But, after reading a couple of articles about Digg putting an end to the “shouts” feature, it got me thinking: What the hell are they doing?
technically illegal though I'm positive many people get away with it because I knew someone who was in a community of sorts who did this.

what differentiates it in the eyes of the law are zoning and housing standards.
I love moonbase films! Not that there ever has been one...

And there's a bit of Dark Star in there!
Can you just snag one of those parsers? It depends on just how "sub" your "subset" is, but for something like this, there's nothing like a snatch-and-grab if you can get away with it. (I don't recall SQLite's licence, but PostgreSQL's is very unlikely to be a problem for you.)

Even if it gives you something a bit too elaborate, it can be easier to filter your way back down to what you are looking for than to rewrite something up from the bottom. (One easy strategy is to just scream "SYNTAX ERROR!" when you see something that the grammar knows, but you don't understand. Since you'll be attaching your own object model/structs to the parser anyhow, this is virtually trivial.)
Not to mention, real-time "social shopping" and "leading other people around the web" apps/services already exist and have for ages.

I don't see a differentiator, just a bad attitude.
I would second antlr. Get the book, too, if only for the educational value.

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/tpantlr/the-definitive-antlr-...
This goes both ways. If your thing is actually good, those numbers will quickly climb to respectable levels.

Start a new Twiddla meeting today and you'll get a six-digit room ID. That's a piece of information I don't mind people finding out. It shows we've been around a while and that tons of people have been using it. Consider it a subtle form of marketing to those who speak AUTOINCREMENT.

That being said, I have in the past started with >1000 seeds for other services where I knew we wouldn't be getting the same sort of traction immediately.
Django is not a "type" of jazz you moron. It's the name of Django Reinhardt, who was a great jazz guitarist.
I'm not sure what to mark because I don't cheat on my own material but other students pay me to help them cheat.
... as long as nobody ever has to type them in.

Sometimes, short and typeable is a bonus, and integers win there every time.
"It would be like an engineer taking the finer points of concrete and steel and making something weaker than wood."

That's a bit antisocial to bring that metaphor up around programmers... that's uncomfortably close to what we do all the time.

Just this week I was examining a project built on Java and Struts and a couple of other rock solid Java technologies, and the end result... well, you name the problem and it had it, inconsistency, no conceptual integrity, bad performance, terrible code... 'twas horrible what they did to Java. I don't like Java, but it doesn't actually have to be this bad...

(I found myself making this metaphor: It was like the team was situated in front of a bulging dam, armed with a firehose that sprays Java code. Every time a crack appears, they shoot the hose at it and spray out a few more hundred gallons of code. Eventually you're left with nothing but a mess.)
This question exposes the flaws of quantitative economic analysis. How can you price future assets in todays dollars with unstable economic growth? inflation could be 3% a year or 30% a year depending on what the government does.
> Until we developers have books that better elucidate the pitfalls of implementation, or better libraries that avoid the pitfalls on our behalf, we'll be stuck "building crypto", somewhat blindly.

There are a lot of really good books about cryptography now.

This book is the best one that I've seen for coverage of the pitfalls of implementation.

http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Cryptography-Practice-Hewlett-P...

> I've seen you recommend GPGME previously.

I missed the context in which tptacek was recommending GPGME, but if your problem is something other than authenticating downloaded packages or signing and encrypting email, designing with GPG as a 'primitive' is probably not such a great idea. I have seen some attempts to repurpose GPG into new applications and every time these protocols have been badly flawed because the authors don't even realize that they are inventing a brand new protocol.
You can get around this by simply having a 2nd way to reference that single integer ID.

I've built systems in the past where we simply gave out base26Encode(ID+20000) whenever an ID was desplayed on the URL, which gives a nice typeable 4-digit string like "6cw8". Pulling up a record, you'd simply check whether you were looking at an integer and if not, (base26Decode(key)-20000) and you're in business.

It doesn't need to be rocket science crypto stuff. After all, it's just obfuscation to confuse the casual observer.
I cheated once (Data Structures II), and I feel no guilt about it.

The homework: implement various data structures in C++. The professor then gave us a printed copy of a correct stack/vector/etc implementation. So the homework could properly be rephrased "type what you see on the page into the computer, then run gcc to catch typing errors."

He then threatened that he would catch us if one person transcribed the printouts and multiple people submitted the same transcription.

I split the typing work with some friends, and wrote a perl obfuscator. Suffice it to say, I learned more about programming writing the obfuscator than I did in the rest of the class.
"The same holds for the contract you have with a school."

You can not have a "contract" with the school. The student is being coerced, to a degree not dissimilar to a prisoner. (I am not saying that a student is exactly the same as a prisoner, because I can think of many relevant differences, I'm just saying the coercion level is similar; it is unilateral, the scope is huge, and there is no way out for most of it.) The concept of "contract" is not relevant.

If you think cheating is bad only because it is a violation of contract, then cheating is not bad. (You may not agree with the word "only"; I am making a logical statement here. If you think it's bad for other reasons, as I do, then that does not falsify that logical statement.)
Hardware is Expensive, Programmers are Cheap
thats how competing in global economies
work, if someone can do your work for cheaper,
thats what its worth.

I agree with that...until you do that in YOUR country. From your definition, you would be ok with moving all of India to US and working at lower costs leaving zero jobs for the people here. That is ridiculous.

I have defended outsourcing OUT of the US ruthlessly. ie. if an American IN America is doing something for 80,000 and his job can be done for $10,000 in India, it is 100% fine to send that job to India. But it is not fine to bring that guy INTO America BECAUSE he is cheaper. Neither is that the purpose of H1B.

I thought the salary difference was mostly to cover moving and visa expenses anyway?

Untrue. Read around.
In many countries, math has long been recognized as a tough subject that can be mastered through hard work, said Tom Loveless, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who analyzes international math test results and cultural differences. Efforts to make math more fun or dress up textbooks are not the answer, he said.

OK, yes, but the state of American textbooks is TERRIBLE. They don't need shiny graphics or examples using social cliques. They don't need personality quizzies. (Ex-Winnie Cooper, I am pissed at you.)

In the lower grades, some schools are subsidizing textbooks by purchasing ones from companies that use brand names in the problems. E.g. "If Tommy has 3 Oreos..." That is not the kind of dressing up they need, no.

But if you compare your basic Silver Burdett piece of shit to a book like "Mathematics: A Human Endeavor" or Geometry by the same author (Harold Jacobs), you'll see the difference.

I have the Geometry book. It uses Escher, Alice in Wonderland, and other great and useful devices for explaining math. (Hofstadter uses the same devices - not a coincidence, I am sure.) It uncovers math in everyday life and unexpected places. It reveals. It pulls back the curtain. That is the magic of learning.

It does not pander, which is what all the other textbooks do. And, in fact, the entire school system does.
Well, when I wrote that it reminds me of Chandler Bing, I got lots of negative karma!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630656

:)
Plinky
Just check the amount of IT jobs moved out of US in the last 6 months.

That is 100% fine. Move the job out! But don't move the job INTO the U.S, underpay the H1Bs, and bring the rest of America's salary down. If H1Bs want to compete with Americans, they should do it in their own home...not by coming to America.

FYI the goal of H1Bs was to help America with skilled labor not available here. The goal was NOT to replace Americans at work with Indians. (I have no problem with American jobs being replaced with Indians so long as they stay in India)
Blackberry Storm 9500-Touch the World
Blackberry is a massive company in the smartphone market with more than one phone in this list which is reflection on the inexperience of the other companies in this market. At first glance, the Blackberry Storm 9500 looks very appealing sleek black, with some stylish silver highlights,a solid first revolutionary touchscreen smartphone, a modern PDA and based on a new technique called SurePress, which turns the entire screen into a large button with a unique touch screen and cutting-edge multimedia capabilities, the Storm 9500 smartphone makes the great impression as you travel across town or to almost any corner of the world. Being the first in a line Blackberry Storm 9500 runs the Blackberry 4.7.0 operating system, platform 4.0.0.98 for business tool with wide range of messaging capabilities as well as the HSDPA connectivity, make the device especially great.I got this best deal of BlackBerry Storm 9500 at unlockcell.com.
Personally, I would have been okie if Microsoft installed an extension in Firefox to support .NET related applications [ClickOnce for instance.].

But it is completely unacceptable that it disables the Uninstall button! Who is thinking of these ideas at Microsoft? Also, why does Firefox let an extension decide whether it is uninstallable or not?
Fa cup final 2009 kick off time
Is google adsense dead?
How is inflation relevant to this calculation? Both career paths will presumably be paid with the same currency.
I just bought an Acer Aspire One and Firefox comes installed with the Google Toolbar. The uninstall button is also disabled so it's not just Microsoft doing it. Almighty, do-no-evil Google is at it too.
Certain offices will police this if they are worried about building code inspectors.

I know at least one warehouse in Hoboken demands to see your apartment lease before they let you rent a room.

Incidentally, "living" differs from "accidentally falling asleep" if you also keep your clothes and personal items in the office. And if you don't rent an apartment elsewhere.
I've been teaching a couple of teenagers programming using Python and Pygame, and surprisingly, I found myself yearning for QBasic. Because...

- Already installed on the Windows 3.1 machines.

- Whitespace isn't significant. It's obvious to me how a program should be indented, but it's not to a beginner. Missing ENDFOR is much clearer than Incorrect Indentation.

- No modules. Anything I have to explain as "it's magic" is a potential source of problem.

- LINE (30,40)-(100,50), BF to draw a rectangle. The Pygame equivalent is somewhat longer, mostly due to having to setup a window.

- The IDE was better. The help facility, in particular, was positively wonderful compared to what you get with help(...)

Once these hurdles are overcome, Python does provide better capabilities, but it's not quite the perfect beginner language that I expected it to be.
there is a fundamental difference between software for sale and software as a service when it comes to this debate. the economic efficiency math is much different for licensed software because more than one company is using it.
My point about the title still applies. I wish to raise awareness of linkbait tactics. Perhaps then good articles won't have to resort to that.
Personally I think people download content, or use a service, because it's convenient not because they don't want to pay for it.

Slowly, but finally - paid for content is getting better... it's catching up.
Photo deletion on social network CDNs (or lack thereof)
This started happening well over a year ago and has been covered extensively before.

http://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+Microsoft+.NET+Framew...