skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately, these actions generally work to increase the batch size of our work

That is the key. When your batch size goes up, your iteration speed generally goes down. Longer iterations mean you can't keep current with your users, and their frustration builds up. This can feed back in the form of second-guessed partly spurious requests, which often result in bugs and/or weird changes in your models, which results in more "best practices."
Rural America not ready for broadband? Hogwash, say ISPs
No, I just live with two people who are.
Ozark Greenways Adventure Race
While this might be slightly off-topic for Hacker News, the restaurant is cool :)
While pattern matching is one of my favorite things about OCaml, I'm not sure this fits well in Python. A big part of Python is trying to keep the language from being all things to all people and accumulating esoteric cruft, especially in the syntax. If I ran the zoo, I would have probably chosen a slightly different subset of features for Python, but I have a lot of respect for Guido's intent.

Also, doing anything by overloading arithmetic operators for a semantically unrelated purpose tends to be pretty disharmonious with the rest of the language. The only exception I can think of is Lua's LPEG (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html), but that's a specific sub-language that tends to be clearly isolated to grammars; in practice, it's usually as distinct as using * within regular expression strings.
Outsouce testing of hard to find bugs
The CIO of my startup wrote to me "I think you are familiar with some startup blogs and forums", and asked if anyone has any experience outsourcing part of QA, at least for time-consuming hard-to-reproduce bugs.

We sell a data sync application, and in rare cases, it can cause data loss. It is really hard to reproduce, but is possible. It can take me 3 to 5 days to figure out the cause (usually a race condition or something like that).

We may or may not outsource this, just wondering if anyone has any experience or commentary on this situation.
Spray paint has lots of legal uses as well, but you'll still find it locked up in a cage at Home Depot.
Am I the only one that read this and was left wondering what the heck was up with the interviewer, not the candidate?

Why drill a candidate for a technical writer position on hash functions and memory needs and speed and all that?

It seems to me like whichever company this was (I'm guessing Google) that the interviewer only knows how to ask one type of question, almost as if he/she was reading from a script.
If you know something about the probability distribution of VM requests, use that knowledge!

Otherwise: When adding a new VM, just search for the maneuver that minimizes total cost (cost of moving VMs + cost of inequality). You can structure that search as a shortest-path-problem in a graph and solve it with the Dijkstra-Algorithm. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance for comparison.
We switched to Redmine from Trac and so far I'm pretty impressed. So yeah, give Redmine a try.
It's amazing how many comments to this thread are trying to rationalize FB's claims when everyone knows they are bogus.
Can you suggest a better alternative?

Currently, we use email/password for authentication, but if our user forgets their password, they can answer their security questions to reset it. To design our list of questions, we worked off of http://www.goodsecurityquestions.com/examples.htm and tried to find questions which were relatively obscure, but not so obscure that users couldn't come up with answers. I suppose we can make "write your own question" an option, but we do think that most users given that option will write too easy a question, like mother's maiden name.

Our app contains a lot of sensitive data, including medical data, and privacy of this data is incredibly important to our business. We have to be attentive to regulation and industry standards -- and you're right that industry standards probably give us some cover -- but we have both the desire and the flexibility to do the right thing.
I think it must be the case that some people derive much more pleasure from eating than others. I know some people who eat only because they must, and I know at least one person who has stated that he prefers eating to sex (not in a general way, but in a very specific, "given the choice right now" way). I'm somewhere in the middle (but you can see which way I lean from my weight, which is over 300lbs, still).

I'm not particularly interested in eating at a place like this, though, mostly because I use eating to enhance my enjoyment of other activities, like reading or watching TV, and while going to a burger place is great with friends, I hardly ever bother going out to those same places alone.
That is terribly un-Pythonic, and a poor imitation to boot. Neat proof of concept though.
Chances are you can just answer "I wrote gibberish." and the guy on the phone will accept that.
"If my religion is true, it will stand up to all my questioning; there is no need to fear." -- Unknown
> Are those not real people and real lives?

As someone else has pointed out, the average retail investor that might own some GM bonds through a mutual fund would maybe lose a few percent of their portfolio. The average GM retiree losing his pension/healthcare is looking at a near total loss of income.

That said, I definitely see the legal problem here. The two solutions that come to mind for solving it are:

1. Let the retiree VEBA go without the last $10 billion owed it, accepting whatever that means for retirees.

2. Have the government pay the $10 billion in cash rather than GM stock.

(Just as a disclosure, my dad is a GM retiree. He gets a $35k/yr pension and health insurance. His insurance used to be quite awesome, but in the last five years has become merely 'good'. Best financial decision he made was to divest his GM stock in November 2003, which at the time was 80% of his portfolio.)
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you. --Oscar Wilde
I'm the author of the blogpost and I feel I didn't write enough about how I differentiate simple and complex. Here's a good but very software-specific example that might illustrate that. Imagine you told a programmer (or team of) to create a Digg clone. How many of them would build the entire system with all the features (submissions, comments, friends, profiles, media types, categories, etc.)? I'll wager that most people will attempt to do so. As a result, they'll probably fail. That entire Digg "system" is what I would call complex. On the other hand, when given such an assignment, you should try to write something simpler which would at once also be useful. In this case, write something like Hacker News (but take out comment threading, karma and a few other things)! Once you're done building that, you can slowly add profiles, categories or whatever would benefit the community the most. That's the meaning of "start simple, use a lot and evolve"

Another thing, it's important to remember that what was complex yesterday is simple today as we move to a higher-level of abstraction.
Oh boo hoo.

You get a full ride to Harvard.

20% of everyone at Harvard comes from a family making less than $60k/year.

...and yet, because some of the other students get driven to campus in fancy cars, you feel left out.

I arrived at my Ivy League college in a station wagon and signed up for a four year commitment to the Air Force in order to help me pay for college...and, yeah, I knew kids who had gone to Phillips Exeter and "summered" places ("summered" ... never knew that was a word before college ... I "summered" at the mall, working retail for $5/hr...).

And you know what?

It wasn't a big deal.

I felt a bit excluded from some groups...just like in high school, and just like after high school.

So many people love to bitch and moan and whine.

You're born into an amazing country, at an amazing point in history, and someone gives you a full scholarship to one of the most amazing universities the world has ever known...and you whine that you feel a bit left out?

Cry me a !@#%@#-ing river.
While I don't have direct experience with either of these (I just googled for "python prolog backtracking"), you could probably do just as well in idiomatic Python using generators:

* http://codespeak.net/pypy/extradoc/paper/prolog-in-python.pdf
* http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-October/348485.html

I think Peter Norvig has written about this, too.
Smart Toilets: Doctors in Your Bathroom
I don't think any site stipulates that you answer such questions truthfully. My solution is just selecting the top secret question, but actually answering my own secret question with an answer that is as good as any password. And of course a different set of those for the actually really important sites.
Rally Dev Community version http://www.rallydev.com is pretty good. We used it with a team of 6 and it worked out great.
Obama Administration Takes Tougher Antitrust Line
Real solution to bridge socio-economic inequalities is inter-faith marriages.
Govt must give incentives to inter-faith couples.
Well, true, IE doesn't support <canvas> out of the box, but you can make it support it with something like excanvas.

http://excanvas.sourceforge.net/
This is a post about why Facebook should remove anti-semitic groups. He doesn't cover the case of a group that is not anti-semitic, but does deny the Holocaust. Since his argument is "Holocaust denial correlates strongly with anti-semitism, thus Holocaust denial must be banned," can be simplified to "Anti-semitism must be banned" with, in the worst case, no loss of accuracy, and, in the best case, a reduced rate of false positives.
Glad to hear it. This is a silly debate. Let them have their Facebook group, their twitter hashtag, their IRC channel, whatever. If you think they're idiots then simply don't click links that take you to their content.
It's also the name of the CD Audio standard.
If you do not support a person's right to express an opinion that you abhor you do not support free speech at all.

While I disagree with their decision to prohibit photographs of nipples, doing so is unfortunately quite prudent lest US politicians decide to meddle.
Hopefully he had enough self-respect to not take it.
I know people who don't spend more than half their waking hours in front of a monitor.

I know people who think lisp is a speech impediment.

I even know people who think emacs is a series of over-priced computers!

Yet I would not call any subhuman for their clearly irrational and self-destructive choices.

Except maybe the last.
That's one of the reasons I don't use AIR. It's the stuff as 20 years ago, with windows with all forms and sizes, and weird black buttons.

I know it's hard to build cross-platform stuff, and stuff that tries to look native (Java/Swing, Qt) also fails horribly, but stuff like AIR makes me cringe when I can't use command-a, or control-a/e. I think browsers are relatively good in that regard; at least in Safari I can use all my common shortcuts, even if the web page is created on windows/linux. That sounds logical, but is a huge difference with things like Java, QT, Gtk+, AIR or Silverlight.
The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages by Simon Peyton Jones [pdf]
whilst I am a daydreamer, I am not sure I could daydream when stuck in an MRI scanner
I disagree with what you say but I will defend to death your right to say it.
Agreed! The way I always viewed it is removing any of the groups is all but vindicating them: it is tantamount to saying their views might actually have some traction in the world...

Leave them to it: especially as it means wer can see who holds such opinions and ignore them :)
It's not as hard as you might think. Sure, it's loud and cramped, but it's really freakin' dull in one of those things! I daydreamed just fine. I even know someone who fell asleep during an MRI.
There is a difference between supporting free speech and supporting it on a particular platform. The First Amendment doesn't give me the right to force the NYT to say what I want. Similarly, it doesn't require FB to post stuff it disagrees with; they're completely within their rights to censor this stuff.
I thought the Red Book was Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung

But anyway... What makes this book special? The website is not so great. Got a review maybe?
You do not have the right to express any random 'opinion'. Slander is always defended as 'an opinion' and both juries and judges rightfully punish those guilty of slander.

Holocaust denial is not 'an opinion': it is a blatant lie. There is no reason why spreading lies about historical facts should be less punishable then spreading lies about a companies' products. They both do damage and the cumulative damage of the first category is much more dangerous.

The first amendment is not there to allow idiots, fearmongers, demagogues and pussies to hide behind a twisted interpretation of the word 'opinion'. Neither uninformed statements that are false nor lies are opinions and neither is protected by the first amendment.

We forgive those that utter uninformed statements, 'for they know not what they do'. When they are informed of what they do and insist on repeating the statement, it becomes a lie.
There can be identical policies that produce different results. For example, a startup telling you which intersections were best for hailing a cab could have the same TOS as one telling you the best intersections to score drugs; the latter would be more likely to assist in breaking the law.
I'm not sure if it fits the bill, but check out the Trac Project at http://trac.edgewall.org/.

It's free, opensource and web-based.
Echo that sentiment. When I hear an overly complex solution or idea, I think that person either doesn't know what they are talking about or that the solution is for a hyper-niche situation. Usually, asking a few "Heilmeier-type" questions will lead to classifying the person in the former group.

And I admit to being a member of the former group myself, too often, I'm afraid.
Porn at work = felony hacking?
facebook's usage numbers stopped being realistic once they opened up to the public. it used to be kind of hard to get more than one .edu email address. now, even i have multiple facebook accounts (for testing apps). it is unrealistic for them to expect that 1 registered user = 1 physical person.
Freedom of speech is a fundamental right of all human beings. Freedom to hate is also their right. Otherwise who decides what is right to say and what is not right - at some point in history, it would have been illegal to have a group advocating miscenegation.

Hiding the groups does not change the beliefs.
What Life Might Look Like on Jupiter's Europa: New Extreme Species Discovered
In the academic/applied research setting, I find sensor networks are the canonical example of this phenomenon. People jump off into "secure energy-efficient self-organizing" sensor network architectures, that they lose the ability to even articulate the problem they are ultimately trying to solve.
Never click on a link you don't see where it takes you. You can get goatseed.

Is it possible to show the url in the browser's status bar?
I sure hope you finish your mental masturbation before the elephant in the room sits on you.
"censor"

A private citizen or company may choose not to broadcast whatever it likes, for whatever reason. This is not "censorship" except in the broadest and most meaningless possible sense.

I agree with you, but to call it "censorship" is to cede part of the argument.
most of the QA team for my 9-5 is outsourced. what type of info are you looking for?
Could you explain why inter-faith (as opposed to inter-class) marriages make such a difference?
I disagree. This seems to suggest that no matter how stupid the interviewer is, you just need to make him feel better and you'll get hired. Which defeats the purpose of the interview. I'd walk out on that interview as the interviewee.
Looks like he's not the only guy out there who likes to bitch and moan and whine.

Edit:

Read the article, then decide.

Likeliest scenario: Harvard has a big initiative to make it even more "need blind" (already linked-to in this thread) and seems to legitimately "care" about the educational experiences of those receiving aid under this program ("care" in scare quotes b/c it's hard to precisely define what "care" means when you're talking about an institution of Harvard's size).

Program's been running for a bit, early results starting to trickle in, reporter at Boston Globe decides to see how things are going (perhaps out of legitimate interest, and also b/c in greater Boston stories about Harvard always help move product).

Reporter finds some kid who's part of the program and willing to answer some questions. Kid gets asked questions like:

- do you sometimes feel out of place? can you give me an example?

- have there been times when the aide wasn't sufficient? can you tell me more about that? what'd you do?

- what changes would you make to the program? what else could they do?

...and probably gives honest answers, as reflected in the quotes.

Now, perhaps you could fault him for not expressing more gratitude -- perhaps he would have been more couth had he been sure to follow every mention of "Harvard" with an utterance like ", whose name be praised and whose benevolence towards me I will be forever thankful for,..." -- but we're talking about a kid here, and a kid who almost certainly has no media savvy and seems to have just given honest answers.

Look what I can do to you:

- I arrived at my Ivy League college in a station wagon. I felt a bit excluded from some groups...just like in high school, and just like after high school.

- Yeah, I knew kids who had gone to Phillips Exeter and "summered" places -- [I] never knew that ["summered"] was a word before college. I "summered" at the mall, working retail for $5/hr.

- I signed up for a four year commitment to the Air Force to help me pay for college.

What a whiner, right? Where's the gratitude there?

Hence the mild tweak pre-edit: you're implicitly calling this guy's character out onto the map:

- YOU joined the airforce and felt left out and it wasn't a big deal and you're shocked at the lack of gratitude

- HE is a whiner and moaner etc.

All based on a handful of quotes in an article with an obvious agenda -- and we're not talking quotes from someone who has given any indication of seeking out media attention beyond consenting to do an interview.

It leaves a bad taste in my eyes to see a response like yours to the article I read: who knows why, really, you like to bitch and moan about other people's reactions to their circumstances, but you apparently do, and in so doing reveal something about your own character.
It was not intended to be a solution to text on the canvas for anyone but people using the Processing.js language. There are already great tools for TTF rendering for websites like Cufon.
I bow to experience... may I cheekily ask how you managed daydreaming with the other probes attached/inserted? I find even whistling difficult. ;)
This is a very tough call on Facebook's part. Their primary purpose is to serve as a facilitator, not as a moderator of people's opinions. At the same time, this is a pretty clear case of religious/racial hate speech.

Leave it to TechCrunch to ignore every nuance of the issue and make a catchy headline out of it. If anything I find TechCrunch's demagogy more offensive than Facebook's official line on this subject.
>From my reading, he appears to have avoided many traps of assumption, traps that the interviewer blundered into without even noticing.

In my experience, if the interviewer seems to be trapped by assumptions, they aren't. ;)
Same reason as iTunes for Windows and the iPod monopoly then.

On the other hand, Office for Mac likely has <5% marketshare at most, so Microsoft could legitimately justify less development resources as making financial sense, similar to how Mozilla and Google treat Windows as the primary platform for Firefox and Chrome respectively. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if the marketshare for iTunes on Windows exceeds that of iTunes users on Mac OS X, so there's really no excuse for that particular half-arsed port.
Whenever someone finds an SQL injection vulnerability, we'll know how many users are really on there.

Unless they do crazy shit with databases....
Interview != Quiz

Most interviewers are NOT aware of this.
http://www.amazon.com/review/RGXWU3TSSJ3RT/ref=cm_cr_rdp_per...

The text of the review:

This book is well-known in academic database circles as "The Red Book" (in fact, the editors maintain a useful web site at http://redbook.cs.berkeley.edu/) and is a canonical resource in those circles. It's primarily intended as a reader/textbook for a graduate course in database systems and has a heavy emphasis on implementation issues. It contains a fair number of classic papers that should be read by anybody who actually works on database engines as well as a number of more recent papers that should be read by anyone who does research in database systems. The usefulness for end-users of databases (i.e., application writers) is unclear.
The 3rd edition, in my opinion, improves upon the 2nd edition considerably. Of course, it freshens the paper selection in some areas. More importantly, it prunes the number of subject areas considerably, resulting in a more manageable collection (in more ways than one!). For example, a great deal of work was performed in the late 1980s and early 1990s in areas such as extensibility and active database management. By the late 1990s, the SQL3/SQL1999 train had already left the station - work still goes on in these areas, but at a greatly reduced rate. Conversely, data mining and decision analysis have become hugely important areas, and the new Red Book has a section on it.

If there's a place where this book "missed the boat," it would probably be in terms of applications. The editors cut the section on user interfaces and programming models and have always ignored unstructured/semistructured data models. In these days of the Web, this choice is questionable; on the other hand, a lot of the most reasonable work in these areas has in fact appeared since 1998, so it's a bit hard to criticize with any degree of fairness!
Simulating Physics with Computers - by Richard Feynman
Chart.ly acquired less than a month after founding for $10K + revenue share
Hate speech is speech. If you favor free speech, you favor free hate speech. I don't get what's such a tough call about it, aside from the business/legal implications of Facebook operating in countries which restrict speech.
Nice book. I submitted it before, too.
because of that a shortcut answer would have been to delegate the issue to the CS department as sorting words is not a task for a tech writer. Nice that he identified the question as being off-topic. Poor that he didn't dismiss it because of that.
And allow them the opportunity to play on the fears and prejudices of a great many uninformed souls, winning them for their cause? No, thank you. I'd rather have someone with a conscience step in and say: "We won't allow this here. I have the moral right at my side and I will make it as hard as possible for them to spread their lies."

If you are affraid to do the right thing, then you are enabling the wrong thing, which makes you just as guilty of the consequences.
"People assume that when the mind wanders away it just gets turned off"

Who assumed this? It seems like a pretty stupid assumption from a cognitive standpoint. Daydreaming is basically an activity where the brain has to create a whole scenario without the benefit of any outside stimulus what so ever which sounds fairly hard to me.

I was a day dreamer when I was a kid and my Mom never assumed I was stupid. The only problem with daydreaming is when you do it instead of applying yourself to the task at hand which makes this study a bit irrelevant imho.
There are no easy answers if the scenario is that someone has "forgotten" their password AND you want to authenticate them using a web form that can be submitted anonymously from an arbitrary machine.