skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you speak to people who were involved in Occupy Sandy -- a real grass-roots effort to relieve the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy -- they can tell you what dealing with the Red Cross is really like. [typo edit]
For the same reason are used in others DBs.

Some things are better expressed in the DB native language. Help to abstract and share implementation of DBs that are used by different languages.
No, there is a large amount of factors that have been linked to being able to cause schizophrenia. There is no final answer to the debate at the moment.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_schizophrenia
Vitamins and painkillers. I see a ton of small businesses around Seattle using Square, and purchase food with a small literally hole-in-the-wall restaurant with it about once a week. Square solves a very serious pain point.

This seems to be more on the vitamin end of the spectrum. It doesn't solve a pressing issue I have when I walk into a bar. On a related note, this idea also seems to suffer from almost a marketplace-style issue: both the seller and purchaser need to use the app, which just makes things even harder.

If you do decide to tackle a marketplace idea again in the future, I recommend adopting a multiple phase approach where the first part doesn't require buyers and sellers. Build a product that will benefit one side or the other (I recommend the sellers), and then pivot into a marketplace strategy once you have sufficient traction.

Edit: in reading over the article in more detail, I have one thought. I personally would've tried positioning the software as an easier means to order room service in hotels. Ordering room service sucks, and I'd much rather use the equivalent of Eat24 or GrubHub than picking up the phone.
I wish I shared your enthusiasm. But I think the truth is that the majority of the world's population can not possess the means to afford any digital device, internet or no. The internet is huge, but it still is merely a fraction of the total population that has even gone online. I know that I myself am the only person on my street (somewhere in the American bible belt) who owns any home computer system, and the only portable device I own is this laptop.

Also, consider that the longer the internet is around, the more that various businesses are trying desperately to monetize from it. Even the largest online businesses such as facebook or google, much of what they deal in is still considered "theoretical dollars" and not hard currencies.

As far as Bitcoin, keep in mind that bankers have had no qualms with launching massive wars in the past, so if push comes to shove they will take no issue with deafening any perceived competition as maliciously as possible.
It's so baffling that even the news about said competition are baffling.
Would a more modern version be the pedal assist bikes? ( http://www.amazon.com/Alation-Step-through-36v11Ah-Samsung-B... )

I've been thinking of getting one of these because they bridge some rules about motorized vehicles: since you are still peddling you can take them on bike trails, but since the assist kicks in there is almost no resistance allowing you to maintain higher speeds...
I have been doing this a long time, and I have never met someone who knows computer science who has had any difficulty picking up a web development framework. This stuff isn't rocket science.
No, it's just that Daniel can't be bothered to deal with LinkedIn. I did just go and change the headline, though. Or tried to—they don't make it easy!

Vladimir worked with me on an early incarnation of the program but left before we incorporated the company or applied to YC. He's very good.
Ars republishes good SE articles from time to time. It is not about link spam, but rather about promoting SE on Ars, and vice versa. I think this approach is quite reasonable.

I don't think they give a f*ck that someone on hackernews happens to notice it on Ars rather than SE.
I think algorithmic interviews are fine if the interviewee has mentioned the algorithms on the C.V..
In general, I only talk about topics the interviewee has mentioned on the C.V. or are super important for the org/project/position.
I'm not Chris, but in his shoes, I would have stuffed the extra money into recruitment.
The manager in this case seems like a flake; using a stupid metric to justify a pre-determined review score (stackrank scores are usually based on perception, not reality) rather than coming up with some better fiction.
I've looked at the page, I do find the content offensive. The project itself (stripped of the bullshit) is somewhat interesting. Whether the project is worth any mention or platform is to the individual. I personally wouldn't have posted it for the fact that it is offensive.

My issue is that it wasn't him that posted this. The reason he's 'unwanted' is so he doesn't receive the platform. [ETA: sillysaurus says it much better than I.] The core of my issue is that it wasn't him that posted this. He's been dragged into the spotlight by a third party and then attacked.

And I agree that medical conditions are not a reasonable bye in most cases. In this case, it's an attempt to put forth some ground of understanding.
You could enforce it like that - i.e. require all cards to have titles.

But I don't think you NEED to.

I would assume that the way you know the order of the cards, is that you have some unique ID on the flow of the cards, no?

E.g. You know that A is first, then A.1, then A.2, then B.

So all you do is when you are exporting to PDF, you put the sections/cards in that order.

I think that should suffice, or am I missing something?
I wish we were more actively working towards such a world. Instead, we keep getting caught up in political discussions about how people who don't work are lazy.
It really is pretty much spam. It's pageview-bait at its finest. (And that's one of the main reasons I've filtered Ars's non-forum stuff, I've been a subscriber there for years but I'm not giving them pageviews for bad articles anymore.)
Nice counterpoint, but you are making a some assertions here that don't seem to follow -

So you say there are developers who are good at putting lego bricks together to solve business problems, but introduce bad, unmaintainable code because they are bad as engineers.

You say algorithms questions are a good way to identify them.

To me, algorithms questions show that you studied CS in an academic setting, and listened in class.

People who introduce bad code do so because:

* They 'don't have time to do it right', the root of this being that they lack the confidence or judgment to say a task will take longer.

* They lack experience maintaining code, or haven't learned the skills to write maintainable code. This happens wen people have mostly worked alone, and can be rectified by working closely and under someone good who reviews their output for a while. CS school does not teach this.

* They 'have not heard of' things that 'should be' common knowledge, e.g. unit testing. Fresh graduates often lack 'common knowledge', as do people who worked a long time in a role that just used some specific, older stack.

With all these problems, the way to fix them is to properly monitor and understand people on a team, but also they must have the humility to take advice. I'm guilty of identifying too much with my code sometimes, but we've all seen people who get very very defensive.

Look, I'm all for discriminating against people who didn't study CS. It keeps my wages up right. But if you are trying to solve this problem you describe, surely identifying the actual cause of what is bad about these candidates is a better idea?
They could fire the third party who is sending erroneous legal threats to people who couldn't possibly fight them.
Show HN: Messaging For Teams
Ars writers have been very honest about their use of pagination. Sometimes, I guess it is to get more hits, often its just a way of breaking up the story and to reduce page load time. If you are a subscriber, don't you get access to PDF or something like that?

I find Ars to be one of the better web publications out there. Until theverge came along, I would say they were bar none the best.
I used to work for a map company when the Macarthur Maze fire hit, and we were able to push out a change at about that rapidity. The data files for the maps aren't terribly complicated to parse, so pushing a change isn't difficult at all.
> what object system to use, what libraries to use, etc.

But this is easily solved by just having a standard library with preferred versions of these things. Many Lisps in the past, and especially Scheme, officially defined very little besides the core language. This is changing, I hear that the next, 7th revision of Scheme standard is going to have two parts, one for the core, and another for the batteries which should be included.

But! Racket comes with it's own selection of libraries in stdlib, which is richer than any other Scheme implementation. So it's not that different from Clojure in this regard.

Racket has reader macros, but it is necessary for it to have them, considering that part of it's focus is to be able to build new languages easily. I haven't seen them used outside of defining these new languages, so I doubt it is a common problem for new users.

There are few things where Clojure and Racket differ. One is the runtime system used - Racket has it's own virtual machine implementation with the JIT while Clojure uses those from Java. This means that a) Clojure devs don't have to spend time on a VM and can focus on the language and b) interop with Java is very strong point of Clojure. Racket on the other hand has a very nice FFI story for C, which makes writing bindings to C libraries very easy.

Clojure is being developed with concurrency in mind and every aspect of a language reflects this. Racket includes support for concurrency as one of many features and so the defaults are not always suited for it and there are things Racket doesn't have. The reason for this is that the Racket developers don't have enough time to bring native threads to VM and rewrite some of the language and library and maintain normal development at the same time. (But there is racket2 planned, which may be a language with most of the Clojure features in it)

And of course Clojure is being much better marketed. Clojure has a few simple selling points and they are being advertised everywhere; Racket is really very complex thing with many man-decades of research behind it and even where it is being advertised, it looks like a typical "academic" thing.

So these are the reasons I think made Clojure more popular than Racket. But I really believe that, in the long run, Clojure's popularity will help Racket, too - it's much smaller jump for people to make from Clojure to Racket than from almost any language to Racket directly. So I really believe that Racket will become successful some time in the future.

Meanwhile, the only thing I can do, is to comment on every Lisp article with reference to Racket and continue hacking in it happily :)
It's not about promoting SE on Ars, it's about free content that pulls from social sites.

Social sites including HN matter so much to these sites that many of them (not Ars) including media giants have been caught spamming them many, many, many, many times to pull the traffic, the SEO link juice and the viral spread of their shitty rewrites, rewordings, and repostings.
Should be added to many text books too.
He's hellbanned because that is the only reasonable course of action for this case.

Is it the only reasonable course of action or is it the only course of action the site or its policies allow? Does anyone get banned outright? Has that even been tried in his case?
They should put this on Github and start using Git.

I would love to browse through the code easily - as I am sure many others would.

I think that would likely increase the likelihood that people participate.
But THERE ARE trade barriers for other professions.
How many H1B CEOs are in the US? How many lawyers or doctors are on H1B visas here (or their work outsourced off-shore?)

Software development appears to be the one the most exposed to cheap competition.
Just to say you were probably in the best areas for pubic transit than most of the other parts of California, there are several bus and rail services along the bay area. Learning which ones to pick can help improve your experience (which may not be the obvious ones).

A lot of the "helpful" apps and sites don't compare against taking a few minutes with a paper route map and a few timetable pamphlets...

I just had a thought: maybe having a point to point travel guide where people are able to submit various methods to achieve that route and then let folk vote/rate/review the methods (ala Amazon review, stars and comments). So, say you enter SJC to SFO and since that is somewhat popular route you might see a few different ways posted to get here, along with reviews of how those went following those ratings and comments on the methods; you see the good, bad, and from what is written you might have some clue of what's actually better.
at first i thought they had written an actual tech spec of the weapon BFG!
A few months ago we were got legal threats by patent troll. It sucks that intellectual property is being abused to the point where startups need more lawyers than engineers.
Hellban: "We don't want your stuff here and hope it takes you ages to figure out that we don't read it, before you create another account to write the same things"

"I assure you this post would be dead or buried if the mods didn't explicitly approve"? Really? You claim to know that?
I call BS. You defend both project (meh!) and author (understandable, in parts) throughout this thread.

Now you're claiming that this post is 'signed off' somehow? With that brand-spanking-new account? Are you hiding some information? Do you sit in PG's office? Are you 'sillysaurus', the old/respectable account? And if that's the case, what leads you to this crusade with a '2' suffix?
"People who introduce bad code do so because....they 'don't have time to do it right'....they lack experience maintaining code, or haven't learned the skills to write maintainable code....they 'have not heard of' things that 'should be' common knowledge"

Those are all things that happen. But you're missing the most dangerous one of all: programmers who just don't understand how computers work. It's a surprisingly common problem, and it's a problem that algorithmic questions are especially good at identifying quickly.

Hire these people at your peril, because while they are fine for simple tasks, they generally have no idea why their code is fast or slow, have no idea why their programs eat memory like a hog, and no idea how to begin to break down a difficult problem in a way that a computer might be able to handle efficiently. Give them a hard problem, and you might get something good....or you might get total garbage. It's programmer roulette.

Programmers who don't understand computers are terrifyingly bad hires, because they can do the most damage before you catch them.
Interesting... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_schizophrenia#Urbanic...

"A particularly stable and replicable finding has been the association between living in an urban environment and the development of schizophrenia, even after factors such as drug use, ethnic group and size of social group have been controlled for.[142] A recent study of 4.4 million men and women in Sweden found a 68%–77% increased risk of diagnosed psychosis for people living in the most urbanized environments, a significant proportion of which is likely to be described as schizophrenia.

The effect does not appear to be due to a higher incidence of obstetric complications in urban environments.[144] The risk increases with the number of years and degree of urban living in childhood and adolescence, suggesting that constant, cumulative, or repeated exposures during upbringing occurring more frequently in urbanized areas are responsible for the association.

Various possible explanations for the effect have been judged unlikely based on the nature of the findings, including infectious causes or a generic stress effect. It is thought to interact with genetic dispositions and, since there appears to be nonrandom variation even across different neighborhoods, and an independent association with social isolation, it has been proposed that the degree of "social capital" (e.g. degree of mutual trust, bonding and safety in neighborhoods) can exert a developmental impact on children growing up in these environments."

So it does seem that it's inflictable, though we don't quite know by what. I can see that brainwashing may trigger it if someone was genetically predisposed to it. One theory may be that living in an urban environment is more of a trigger for those who are genetically predisposed to it. It seems like genetics is a requirement, though, suggesting it's not inflictable at will.
I think I would actually be happy with a ~/etc. Dotfiles in the home directory needs to stop being a thing.
Doc: Don't you see? The bridge will exist in 1985. It's safe and still in use. Therefore, as long as we get the DeLorean up to 88 miles per hour before we hit the edge of the ravine, we'll instantaneously arrive at a point in time where the bridge is completed. We'll have track under us and coast safely across the ravine!
StartPage's Servers are temporarly overloaded
The polygraph is a stress interview tactic, full stop. It's the bad cop in the room.

That's why the very first part of the polygraph if where they are 'calibrating', and inevitably announce that the polygraph machine is working, but only sometimes offer to show you 'proof' that it works.

An skeptic would do well to announce as much, announce that she is a 23-ton hippopotamus named Wilfred, consumed a gallon of paint-thinner before coming to the interview, and ask to see the output after that extraordinary claim by the interviewer.
I think the truth is that the majority of the world's population can not possess the means to afford any digital device, internet or no.

I find that very hard to believe, consider for example:

Fifty-seven percent of the adult population -- or more than an
estimated 151 million people -- have mobile phones across the 17
countries Gallup surveyed in sub-Saharan Africa in 2010.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/149519/mobile-phone-access-varies...

The speed and scale of the world's love affair with mobile phones
was revealed yesterday in a UN report that showed more than half the
global population now pay to use one.

The survey, by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an
agency of the UN, also found that nearly a quarter of the world's 6.7
billion people use the internet.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/mar/03/mobile-pho...

Of course, there are many people who can't afford one, but I don't think it's the majority anymore, and it's dropping steadily.

And while most only have limited devices (dumbphones), these have already been shown to be enough to enable very important functions, such as Kenya's mobile-based alternative to banking.
Why don't the moderators of this forum at least write a notification of the changed title and link? Some of the comments here don't make sense as a result.
I've worked with really good, skilled and really not so skilled people that held Microsoft certs. The folks that were not worth a shit on the job all seemed to list MS certs in their email sigs.

Right or wrong, I take those mc* email sigs as a negative signal every time I see them.
We're not too far apart.

He didn't post it. No need to attack the person behind the project.

But the project (you saw the page) offers quite some opportunities for criticism already. I agree that we shouldn't bash the guy for his .. background.
I still think that the "Oh, but this is so amazing" and even more, "Don't criticize the guy, he has a medical condition you insensitive clod" is useless, crap and no better than the "That guy is a nutjob" insults.

Judging the project on its own, looking at nothing but the link, I'd say that this in inappropriate. That's my position, nothing else - and I don't mean that guy any harm.
Precarious position to be in when you have to clean up after others, and these 'others' are not pro-actively helping you out, or have no incentive to do so.

Every software company - or so it looks from my anecdotal experience - has one of more of these positions. It seems to be more rampant in larger companies or companies carrying a lot of legacy code.

Nonetheless, I've seen this pattern consistently in QA and Rel-Eng groups where the impossible expectation of delivering quality out of incomplete and poorly designed products.

It's also funny that usually the ones building new things - vs fixing / delivering things - are the ones getting the highest compensations.
Yeah. We do sort of know why, it's just not exactly something that is easily proven or explicitly demonstrable through scientific method.

However, anyone who has gone through a bad breakup and gone a bit wacky has felt what emotional stress can do to the mind, you see it all the time seeing couples arguing and yelling psychotic things into the phone and slamming it, etc. It jams up the conscious process! Too much of this does cause schizophrenic states, and left unresolved can cause significant damage.
I agree that he's quite probably not racist. He appears to have a fascination with computerised randomisation as a means of divining words from God. This would explain some of his (otherwise unintrospectable) comments. And it also leads me to believe that his frequent mention of the CIA and the n-word has some special, possibly even internally consistent, meaning to him, of which we are simply unaware. I am at least able to pick up on some of the religious allusions he makes elsewhere. That doesn't make him sane. But it might perhaps excuse what would otherwise be unacceptable.
Exactly, its damage control. If they wanted to reveal more information about requests for user data, they could leak it anonymously.
To enlarge on your (really good) point..

We also have the capacity in english to substantially reduce the overhead of thought density. We do this by using symbols or signifiers (words or phrases) which refer to oft repeated concepts, allowing us to build more complex meanings without having to consciously process every part. This idea of density of thought can be expressed more specifically as both uniqueness and complexity of thought.

Conceptually, programming is communication, and all communication is essentially semantic. Though not being a programmer, I reckon the broader conceptual difficulties with programming are in the need for context, and with the necessity for specificity. Which, by the way, english is not that brilliant at either (just more flexible). It is instructive in the context of this discussion to remember that semantics rely as much on the experience and understanding of the listener, as on the speaker / writer.
"I assure you this post would be dead or buried if the mods didn't explicitly approve"? Really? You claim to know that? I call BS.

You don't need to take my word for it. The thread was sitting at #3 at 01:05 UTC. It was then manually adjusted by a moderator, or automatically adjusted due to flagging, or automatically adjusted due to the flamewar detector, to #26 at 01:10 UTC. http://hnrankings.info/6308017/ Also, mods are typically quick to bury stuff that they feel wouldn't be good for HN, especially during primetime hours. This post was #1-#3 for several hours, so this leads me to suspect this thread was either automatically adjusted by the flamewar detector or penalized due to flagging, and that a moderator had already seen this and decided not buried it. Also, for the stuff they truly do not want on HN, they bury the story by adjusting its gravity to be infinite, e.g. it's not merely moved to page 2 or page 3 but to >page 10. And this story wasn't buried.

Yes, I was sillysaurus. I was hellbanned for posting controversial comments and then deleting them. Now I make controversial comments and don't delete them.