skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Match the person with the job

Absolutely.

>or train them if they aren't a 100% match.

If they're close, sure. If they're not, then odds are unfortunately good that they aren't trainable, at least with respect to certain categories of advanced programming.

I could probably train anyone with decent technical aptitude to do web page work, or simple CRUD backend server work. There are probably still people who couldn't learn it; I think there needs to be an aptitude regardless.

But core game programming (engine work, graphics work, but not simple scripting) and certain kinds of embedded development (especially if video is involved) are realms that I'm familiar with that have a higher barrier to entry, and where "training" is probably going to fail more times than not. As in fail 90% of the time or more.

I think the cutoff is when you go beyond the point where a topic can be completely "taught" at all, and instead the task itself requires the developer to have exceptional learning and analytical skills. If a developer is good enough at figuring things out to actually get the work done, then any training would be unnecessary, because you would be able to learn what you need to know to get started on the job. Then what a new developer needs isn't "training" but just "orientation" to the tools and methods used in the domain in question.
isn't that rapid? it sounds awesome (and congratulations), but i would perhaps check w a doctor or something that you're not losing weight too fast?

[edit: not to ask why you're losing weight so fast (because you're not eating, duh), but whether that rate is healthy.]
Top level methods in Ruby • has_many :codes
He got fired because, as an executive manager, he was in a position to make hiring and firing decisions based on those opinions, which is illegal (and thus a liability to his employer) in addition to being immoral.
After attending hundreds of weight watchers meetings, and being involved with hundreds and hundreds of people losing a ton of weight, I still genuinely believe too many people make weight loss too complicated, which leads them to give up. Keep it simple (as the article did)

If you burn more calories (energy) than you eat, you will lose weight.

Obviously, you have choices. You can cut down on all the really high calorie stuff. You can increase your exercise to burn more. You can (ideally) do a bit of both.

Of the hundreds of people I've known that have lost life-changing amounts of weight, I would estimate less than 1% of them had any idea how calorie dense the foods they were eating (and drinking) every day really are.

For the majority of people that are severely overweight, all they have to do is cut out high calorie snacks like chips, soda and anything deep fried and they'll lose significant weight, without even getting off the couch.
>If they think that (Emphasis mine)

Details people. Unless of course you'd like to tell me why this comment is misogynistic anyway. (Thinly veiled statement of his own opinion perhaps?)
My self imposed no news until Friday embargo means I hadn't heard of the titstare debacle either.

Glad to hear this guy got fired, not glad that he still has a job. I voted the article up, but man are geeks a drama laden bunch of apes.
Thank you! This is why i like this community!
Follow your interests.

It's not perfect and you do need to stay on top of things; I'm a heavy user of lists and persistent search tags. But you could also use a service like http://getlittlebird.com to find people in a specific field.
I know this is true but find it implausible that those donations are really cannibalizing donations to worthy charities. I think it's more likely that they're donations that wouldn't have been made otherwise.

Let's also be clear that in this case, with Watsi, there's no cannibalization to refer to. Watsi is in many cases working with Partners in Health, which is pretty close to being an unimpeachable charity.
Wait. They access google directly... without depend on routing your traffic and tramp your SSL to get a lot of compressed js and ajax traffic.

So... maybe this was only needed or relevant before have direct access ?
> British Scientists Collect Evidence of Alien Life from Stratosphere

Wow, great! Let's read some more ...

> Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe ...

Oh, S * * t. I remember that name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Wickramasinghe

Quote: "More recently, Wickramasinghe has hypothesized that elementary living organisms like the lichen-forming alga spores present in the red rain in Kerala are of extraterrestrial origin, and that pathogens as the SARS virus also arrived on Earth from deep space carried in asteroids and comets. However, these speculations lack support from the scientific community ..."

The article's title is extremely misleading. In point of fact, British scientists did not "collect evidence of alien life from the stratosphere". They collected a biological sample that could have had a terrestrial origin. And if the sample cells have DNA, that probability becomes a near-certainty.

Reading on: "However, certain people claim that bacteria-like life forms could have passed into the higher atmosphere from Earth and not from space."

Those "certain people" are called "scientific skeptics", a class on which science depends -- people who assume the null hypothesis, the precept that a claim is false until reliable evidence forces us to a different conclusion.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" -- Carl Sagan
"if the opinions he rudely expressed were more in line with the mainstream"

This makes it sound like his opinions were harmless exotic ideas like The Secret or Wycca, or saying that Citizen Kane was a terrible film.

The man posted an incoherent pile of racist and sexist ranting. Racism and sexism are not acceptable professional positions. This man was in a hiring position. There are laws against being racist and sexist when hiring. Laws that exist for good reason.
When you buy a new Android phone, during the first setup it asks you if you'd like to enable this feature. I've always click "no".

Not sure why the author assumes most Android users would enable this feature... unless he didn't realize it was an option on the initial setup.
thank you!.
I've no evidence for it existing as a concept in reality, but I've been thinking of something I'd term 'defensive PR' - ensuring that when your business is mentioned in the press, all of the known attacks that would typically come up over a brief lunch/dinner conversation have associated defences, which would also likely then appear in the same conversation.

I know very little about Watsi, so I don't feel comfortable commenting on it in particular, but there are so many new businesses cropping up, and people are so prone to being critical in the startup world, that it would seem to make sense to try to get your defences out along with your initial publicity.
While it's always great to hear success stories, I think the broader point of this post (and others like it) is that there's no "great secret" to weight loss. There's no silver bullet and certainly no short cut. The simple truth is: people in the western world eat crap and don't exercise.

The success stories all boil down to a few simple points: eat real food, cut down on alcohol, and do some exercise that you find enjoyable enough to do it every day.
Protect and License Mobile Device Apps with Cloud License
They had tons of them at JFK T4 last time I was there in February. None of them were connected to power.
> But I'm a bit surprised by all the people celebrating and supporting this and criticizing Dickinson, and I rather doubt we'd see the same reaction if the opinions he rudely expressed were more in line with the mainstream.

Being outside the mainstream causes people in the mainstream to ostracize you: news at 11.
As I understand it, it was a technicality they got him under: don't use software not officially sanctioned on official machines.

Go forth and use wget on your own machines!
Somewhat off topic, but I wish there was a credible site out there that reviewed these type of general libraries. There are hundreds of them out there and when I need to find one it usually comes with hours of research trying to decide on the right one to use. It would be great if there was a place to look up the general strengths and weaknesses of each without doing all the necessary leg work.
I've used prefix trees to represent matching rules for network-routing rulesets. They're also handy when you need to compute intersections because you can perform a parallel depth-first search over two prefix trees and prune from the search any nodes that don't have a corresponding node in the other tree.

For a fun example of this last application, there was a recent Google Code Jam problem called "Alien Languages" [1]. My solution [2] basically counts the leaf nodes in the intersection of two prefix trees. (Note that we can compute the count on the fly during the search and need not actually construct the intersection.)

[1] http://code.google.com/codejam/contest/90101/dashboard#s=p0

[2] https://github.com/tmoertel/practice/blob/master/google-code...
How much do they cost? They're sold out now so they don't list the price. Does anybody know how much they run? Seems like a really good idea to me, there are lots of known USB hacks for phones and somebody smart could probably find away to get the trojan back up on to the person's primary computer.
I'm 31. A recent physical revealed that I have both high blood pressure and high cholesterol. They've put me on meds for the bp (which is now under control rather well) but they wanted me to try a lifestyle change before putting me on cholesterol meds. I was ~ 10 lbs overweight, nothing major - and while I wouldn't say I am fit by any means I wasn't out of shape either. But they wanted me to lose the 10 lbs and so they told me to stay under 2500mg of sodium per day, and less than 150g of carbs per day - no more than 50g per meal. And no red meat - all I can have meat wise basically is chicken, turkey and fish. Occasional lean pork.

I am two months into it - and have already lost 15 lbs, without any additional exercise. The carbs were rather easy to give up really - less sugar in my coffee, no pasta, few potatoes. Sodas were a little harder, but at 40g of sugar for a single Dr. Pepper, the choice between that or a whole sandwich is an easy one to make. The sodium is quite hard if not impossible though, unless you make every meal at home and only use fresh ingredients. If it is in a box, bag or can you can forget it. There is hardly anything at any restaurant you can get that is low sodium though. Even salads are absolutely loaded with sodium.

I will say I feel a little better, and not just from losing a couple inches around my waist. Water all day certainly helps. I don't think my cholesterol numbers are going anywhere really, I think my genetics are to blame, but I hope not.

Just a short anecdote, but if you sit behind a desk all day and have put on a few lbs, its fairly easy to give up the fast food and watch your carbs. It sure didn't seem like it at first though.
Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?
As experts on technology, business and startups, I'm very curious what wil happen (technology AND business wise) if the pentration of ad blockers is 100%.
I thought the only reason there's a predicted shortage is that stockpiles are being aggressively sold off, lowering the price below the point where it would be profitable to produce helium on the market. Granted, once the stockpiles run out, there could be a rough period, but the price (i.e. what buyers are willing to pay) would probably quickly return to levels which would make production profitable.
This. In a recent post a commenter discussed how Bruce uses a machine not connected to any network ever for highly sensitive material. The problem with that is we really have no adequate indication of exactly what in all of this is really compromised. The conspiracy theorist in me suggests the whole of the internet in all its layers have been nurtured by our government. Exactly what part of that the NSA was involved in seems irrelevant. I have to wonder which operating systems, which network devices or any other devices that can run code and listen in.

The only advice if any of it were true would be to scrap it all and start over. Scrap multiple decades of work by really smart people due to a few "bad seeds" being planted during the harvest? Unfortunately that's the only true remedy unless someone can really unwind the rootkit in our lives that is the NSA. It's an analogy of a computer being infected with a virus. Do we try to go back to a backup we hope isn't compromised or do we reformat and start over? We're all trying the former because I don't think anyone really has a grasp on or even wants to think about the latter (I certainly don't).
Intro secondo semestre
If you start rapidly losing (or gaining) weight with no obvious explanation that is a cause for concern. If you start eating much less, and exercising much more, you probably don't need to ask a doctor why you're losing weight.
The word for this is "cynicism". I'm a cynic, too, but I recognize that my cynicism is usually unproductive.
I have thought about this long and hard. Advertising seems like a necessary evil. Free services help to democratize the internet to some extent. Imagine if you had to pay for Google searches! Today, a kid in India can use the same search engine as a kid in the US. However, to address your question, advertising will not be able to support all the businesses of the future.

The reason for the reliance on advertising for revenues is because of the shift of ad dollars to the internet from old media such as radio, print etc. Advertising seems like this massive source of revenue waiting to be tapped. It is really a temporary illusion of growth. Overall ad spending is not increasing dramatically, it's only being reallocated. Once the shift to digital is complete, digital advertising will track GDP growth (similar to offline advertising today). But complete allocation will take several decades more.

A second reason for this reliance is lack of competition. Only a few companies have the scale needed to be attractive to advertisers. Hence, all ad dollars go to these companies. The success of these companies creates a lot of me-toos. Once there are a few more companies with the scale of Google/FB fighting for the same dollars, advertising will cease to be as attractive.
I guess I mis-read the post because it sounded like the most important document of my life, not for product management. I will agree that it's important when you're a business and you want to keep tabs on your customers and their use of the product but I still doubt the point that it's the most important document (except for product management or customer development or customer research).
Who funds our lawmakers and elected officials? Who bribes their way into regulatory agencies so that these agencies promote business interests over interests of the people and country at large? Who's got the revolving door between private enterprise and public office?

Large business, owned by very rich people. Without campaign contribution limitations and regulation, the voice of people is drowned out by the flow of money. We're about the least regulated in that respect in about a century.
New system for weight loss
This is a great weight loss guide and new system that really works!
Can someone explain to me how everybody knows that Pax Dickinson hates women?
This article doesn't belong on hacker news. It literally starts out by calling somebody a dick in the first sentence. If there was an article starting out by calling some woman a cunt it wouldn't belong here, and this doesn't belong here either.
Some companies really do have a policy that if you quit (especially if you're leaving to work at a competitor, say for example you're quitting Microsoft to go work at Google) they will call security on the spot and escort you out.
Like I said, I hate them. I'll still do them, though. I don't mind jumping through the hoop and if the company really wants to hear the reasons I left, so be it, I will tell them bluntly and honestly. If they ask me personal questions I don't wish to answer, I will refuse to answer them. But I'll do the interview if they really want to do it (assuming, of course, I'm still living on their dime).
Scumbag Puking Monkey: puts wireless tracking/identification device on his car; surprised when he is wirelessly tracked/identified.
“It's not an accident that, in those same communities, the thriving of women and minorities is fewer and further between.”

I don't know about women, but since I'm a minority, let me put this directly:

I'd rather have someone crack a mildly racist joke at my expense and laugh with them about it (or possibly quarrel, if they are being really crude) rather than have everyone be the uptight sort of humourless corporatese-speaking drones that these people seem to be trying the fill the tech industry with.

Also, I might be missing something, but “Tech managers spend as much time worrying about how to hire talented female developers as they do worrying about how to hire a unicorn.” is a reflection on the current state of the industry. What is it being spun as Pax's own opinion here?
Tech managers spend as much time worrying about how to hire talented female developers as they do worrying about how to hire a unicorn.

I would think more time would be put into worrying about how to hire talented developers regardless of gender. I don't see why any break down between genders is required there.
> OK so in the case of a "normal" lost password then how is it that it's safe on Apple's servers?

In a word, it isn't. The new password is no more nor less safe than the old one. Or are you asking about the data, not the password? Pretty much the same answer.
I just wanted to say that you shouldn't necessarily see his cynicism as a bad thing (he's probably just confused good journalistic skepticism with the cynicism that mediocre journalists think will make them "hard-hitting"). IMO, he comes across as so cynical that he actually loses the reader, which just builds a more sympathetic case for Watsi. If you were hoping to win over idealists with this interview, that I'd say you might even be better off with this article rather than one that is overly fawning.
Southwest Airlines begins enforcing no-show policy
Why didn't he have a raft?
Oddly enough I just received an email from SunPass(Florida tolls) encouraging me to trade in my old battery operated transmitter that beeps when it's read for one that doesn't. They're even offering to foot the bill. Weird... maybe I'm just being a conspiracy theorist :)
Hey, HHVM alum here.

The outright language gaps to 5.4 are few and fairly obscure these days, in my opinion. Most practical problems are due to missing or slightly misbehaving extension functions, rather than the core language. You can write programs that produce different output from php.net if, e.g., they depend on the order that destructors are called when killing lots of objects at once, but you can also write programs that differ across minor revisions of php.net. In the absence of a standard, much like pre-standardization C, "PHP" is anything that runs useful PHP programs. We think HHVM qualifies.

HHVM lets you do eval(), and we try to do a decent job of running it fast. We do actually jit eval'ed code, though if you're running in whole-program optimization mode the presence of eval() will prevent lots of compile-time class hierarchy analysis based optimizations from working. Yes, yes, we should be optimistic and deoptimize when we're wrong, it's just easier said than done :).

Facebook disallows eval() in production code for reasons you can probably imagine.
Thalmic (YC W13) is hiring a PM
When a firing occurs, it happens because the employer does not want to, or can't, employ the employee any longer.
Interesting. A few months ago I was really ill one day. The night before I had drank heavily, but I think in this case I also got food poisoning from something. Anyway, I vowed to stop drinking that day, and have. What I realized is how much alcohol was affecting me. Even two days after drinking, I feel tired, less enthusiastic and more depressed. What I have found is that now I can exercise routinely (for several months now), where as before I would give up after a few days or weeks of trying. I think it's important for everyone to evaluate what in their lives may be holding them back, even if they don't realize it. Also, want to point out that I am not advocating everyone stop drinking, just that it seems alcohol affects me more so than others.
The real difficulty comes when you want to use multiple scala libraries in a project which are compiled against different scala runtime versions.

I live in scala land, but I prefer java libraries for this reason.
Liquid OS X
Yes, but non-technical project members may not. This is pretty useful to pretty-print this information so it's readable in design docs, etc (it doesn't replace the json raw data, just explains it a bit better)
Wow, that guy is something else. It's hard to believe that he was in such position. Shame.
The "scribble" may have been given meaning by becoming this person's name, but if it's not in any character set, it probably doesn't already have meaning as a character in any known written language.
Agreed, this story is as much about self-motivation and determination as it is about weight loss techniques. They both go hand in hand. I saw myself at 192 and didn't like that number, so I got myself down to 174 after a year and maintain that weight. It's not a huge difference in size, but I feel better because of it. I also learned the value of staying away from bad habits, like junk food and sedentary activities.
I believe that the healthy rate is around 1 lbs per week with 2 lbs pushing it.
There is a lot of room in-between.
Introducing the new Yahoo Answers
Based on your interpretation, nobody can be in a position to hire or fire, because everybody has opinions. Where do you think he indicated that he would discriminate in hiring people based on their race, sex, religion, etc.?
The problem with your analysis is that you're thinking of Wall Street and the federal government as distinct entities, which would be nice, but isn't the case.
What I don't understand is what there is to enjoy. Nobody ever communicates this effectively.

PHP is a greasy pig at the best of times. You can kit it out all you want and it still isn't a first-class scripting language, it's only a web-site scripting system, and the way it's designed it will only ever be a web-site scripting system.

The only advantage to PHP has been, in historical terms, its ubiquity. Most if not all hosts support it. However, this is a blessing in disguise. Most of these hosts only support PHP 5.2 or maybe PHP 5.3, usually trailing two or three releases behind what's current.

For those who write WordPress-like "download, install on server" packages, sure, PHP is an effective delivery platform, but I'd hardly call it a great programming language.

Maybe I'm missing something, though, but I've never seen anything about PHP that's made me go "Yeah, I wish I had that in X language", but it's often the case in reverse.

I've done a lot of Python, Ruby, Perl, C++, Objective-C, and JavaScript and each of these has something interesting about them, a style that meshes well with their design philosophy.

What does PHP bring to the table that means choosing PHP is a good idea as opposed to just doing PHP by default?