skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the precedence climbing algorithm since you can easily fit it into a normal recursive descent parser and it allows you to easily add new operators just by putting them in a table. See: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2012/08/02/parsing-expressions-...
> I don't know how the CIA measures its success, but it failed to predict the end of the Cold War.

The answer is obvious -- the end of the Cold war hinged on the end of the USSR, and the end of the USSR was not a matter of intelligence, but broad historical forces and chance. If the CIA had had perfect field data, it still wouldn't have predicted the end of the Cold War, because the Russians didn't see it coming either.

This wasn't an intelligence failure, because no one had the required intelligence.
I understand the frustration of sifting through hundreds of "fake" resumes where candidates can't code a fiz-buzz, but from the other end it is a total waste of my time spending 20 minutes of my time solving these coding challenges every time I want to know more about a prospective position.

If would be nice if the recruiter agencies (who are actually getting paid to do a job), would hire people qualified to understand if a candiadate is or not up to par for the job from a quick email or phone call.
I have seen this argument (that higher interest rates will lead to lower prices), but it would be nice to see some historical (or at least anecdotal) evidence of it. I think at least one problem is that it assumes wages will remain flat. If wages start improving, home buyers will be able to spend more money on their mortgage each month which would tend to prop up prices.
cache, cache, cache... Reddit and HN do not really send a lot of traffic... It baffles me to see peoples sites go down for 20k+ unique visitors total for the day... I've seen basic Wordpress installs with a few tweaks such as caching in place handle hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a day every day for months... It's not rocket science..
Telling the truth is "rant"? I'm amazed that the international community didn't noticed we are importing slaves from Cuba.
I read it as "people from Standford aged 19-26"
(UK)

Mortgage is 36% of our combined post-tax wages (there's no tax relief on mortgage interest in the UK). Childcare is another 21%.

(Mortgage and childcare combined would be 100% of my post-tax wage!)

Seems harsh now but it's worth it, and when the childcare costs drop (next September) there will be more money for holidays, more fun and also paying off the mortgage early.

Mortgage payments, for fixed rate mortgages anyway, aren't affected by inflation unlike rent payments. In 10 years time my mortgage payment should be smaller than it is now (as I hope to overpay) but my salary should rise; we have the bonus that we'd be happy to stay in this house for at least 20 years if need be (it was one of our criteria when looking for somewhere to buy).

The above may not seem sane, but the figures are quite normal for the UK tech sector.
This code makes no sense. I think you do not understand C++ very well.
> As someone that is friend of people of Serpro.and know some of Air Force research I feel offended.

Don't be. There are pockets of excellence surrounded by fluff. The fact remains that we, as a country, do not produce a lot. We can be proud of a little thing here, a little something else there, but not much more. And it's very sad.
The fundamental problem of viral marketing is developing an efficient, repeatable process of content production that is very similar to venture companies: few pieces of content will have incredible roi,some will have ok roi and most will have negative return on investment.
While this research will help if applied correctly it doesn't solve the fundamental problem.
BTW, buzzfeed has some success using this approach.
That's exactly what will happen. The weakness of much social science is people make judgments based on no external influence. Once the influence happens, the outcomes change. This is also why market inefficiencies disappear after they've been published. In more specific terms, you might accept 4 spams from a friend, but not 20 Candy Crush invites.
Startup founders, get out of solitary confinement. Join me in the lounge now
How many game reviews are bought and paid for by the industry? (not saying this game doesn't deserve it, but it makes me wonder)
It should be post-tax, but I think a lot of people forget that their nominal salary is not all take-home pay.
> 5) Sold all his belongings, including said house, and travelled the world for a year with almost nothing... probably in 2k8 or so before such an idea became more commonplace.

Didn't Jesus do this?
Well written, though nihilistic.

Conversely - don't date a man who writes.

Find one that leads an undocumented life of events without seeking approval or record. Find a man who knows how to be.
I see not many here are commenting on the Treat your financial team as co-founders.
Bringing in water is a rescue effort, and it saves more people from suffering or dying from dehydration. No, the last thing FEMA wants is for people to see how useless and counterproductive they are.
> June 6, 2013

Given all the revelations since this was published it makes sense to add the date. In terms of the NSA disclosures timeline, two months is a long time and could be misleading if a reader isn't paying attention to the date.
Yes, but doesn't it also have the three requirements mentioned by the article: ML-style function foo, something akin to type classes, and polymorphic return types?
It seems like they're looking for a large amount groups of people who are tightly connected.
A somewhat related albeit primarily entertaining idea is that behind the Quine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)
In an exercise thread yesterday, he talked about helping rebuild his neighbor's house. :-) But in your defense, I also read the article as slightly selfish. Perhaps an explanation of how his sig other enjoys the challenges and how they are teach their kids to adapt to change would have changed the tone.
I interpreted it as saying that there's no market reason to put people on Mars first, so SpaceX as a corporation wouldn't do it.

But my understanding is that Elon Musk has a personal reason for going to Mars, and that SpaceX's commercial efforts are being used to fund that private goal.

Exploration is not Tyson suggests, solely a government-sponsored activity. Private and philanthropic societies have funded many explorations. The National Geographic Society and The Explorers Club continue to fund exploration.
There is a point made here about how Haskell's namespace handling makes monads easy, while CL's makes them ugly. I don't know enough about CL's namespaces to understand this. Can someone explain?
If It's Important, Don't Hack It
There are 26 and 37 opinion samples for the PS3 and XBox respectively. Given the small sample size and the subjectiveness of the evaluation, I would imagine that the margin of error is much higher than 1 point.
It is a lot of fun, quite addictive! Let us know what you cook up at the julia-users google group.
Re: optimization, that is indeed usually true, although I imagine the actual sudoku solve time dominates the request time. From a code design perspective I'd probably pull the validation/change-to-matrix stuff entirely and stick it in a module which would achieve the same thing.
The way I build the "pretty" table is also pretty inefficient, using an IOBuffer is probably the right way to go. Tried to go for clarity for new-comers to the language.
>he doesn't really think Windows is a bad platform for gaming

How can you know this? Right now, being a Windows desktop centric company is a huge liability as consoles and mobile are eating the gaming world. Yeah, PC gamers will always be here, but not in vast numbers.

>he just wants to try to crush a competitor

He also wants to contemporize and have his own OS. If the Steam linux-based console came out with tons of game support, it might be a no brainer for PC gamers sick of building expensive systems and dealing with Windows centric hassles (DRM, shoddy updates, OEM crapware, goofy UI decisions, etc). I'd buy it and retire my desktop. As long as the games were keyboard/mouse-centric and complex, not lazy PS3/4 transfers.
So is there a simple solution?
May I know the apps that you have published, probably with some numbers (approx is ok)?
Even as an RPG it was much worse than many competitors at that time. It is (basically) linear, your choices don't influence the ultimate ending (you get a final pick), which, at that time, some pure RPGs already provided.

But you basically reiterate my point: Deus Ex did enough great things to cover the bad things. So it's perfectly fine to give it > 90%, while you can still find strong critique in almost any part of it, without even nitpicking.
That's technically a memorization test or a trivia test, because its really easy if you remember the trick, and a total PITA if you don't remember the trick. If I recall correctly the trick is something along the lines of pouring a full 5L into a empty 3L and when the 3L is full there's 2L left in the 5L, so then you dump out the 3L then pour the 2L in the 5L into the 3L such that the 3L contains 2L of H2O, and then refill the 5L and pour the 5L into the 2/3 full 3L till its full such that about 4L remain in the 5L bottle. Ta Da, I've just proven I can memorize meaningless trivia, does that mean I am now a C++ developer or whatever they were interviewing for?

If you started life as a chemist this is kind of a lab joke as in its funny but if anyone in the lab tried something this wasteful of time and product or risky of contamination if you reuse the product, they're too stupid/lazy to work in your lab. The correct answer is supposed to be walk to the stockroom and ask for a 4L container.

Its about as useful as a practical programming test as asking who won the 1984 baseball world series, in other words a complete waste of time.

Fizzbuzz at least is an excellent test of the modulus operator (oh boy is that ever useful to me on a daily basis LOL) and a so so test of control block and conditional knowledge which is actually useful on a daily basis.
Git client Tower 30% off on MacUpdate
That's a good point. Most marketers would only want to target a segment, say "Women under 40 who have children" which would be a different seed group than "Males 18-25". BUT - I can imagine a good deal of overlap since the algorithm seems to select people with highly diverse friends.
Go's garbage collector is exclusively stop-the-world, so it seems like this is going to die in a fire pretty quickly with a non-trivial heap size (more than 1GB). HotSpot's CMS collector (which is parallel & concurrent) has a pretty rough time with heaps >16G and it's been maturing for over a decade.
That's not what I mean necessarily. You can specialize by grabbing a single purpose library.
Is cyberwar really war?
Well, that didn't make much sense.

His point stands, however, and you only have to look at the quality of many of the Steam Workshop addons produced by hobbyists. Yes, this includes plenty of high poly models and much more, easily comparable to anything produced professionally.
There is another copmany that has been doing this for years: http://codility.com/ (I am an investor there).
>DNA

Someone tell me why this wouldn't work.
Yes, at least for me on Firefox 23
I would love to see some of your background, ie. what made you competent to write such book. Some info regarding content would be also a nice to have - I know, what your book covers, but how is it structured? How many pages it has?
There was a flood of people out of Atlanta and into the surrounding counties in two waves during the late '90s and early 2000s. The flood was driven by prices going higher. After the market collapse, there are plenty of empty suburbs going to literal rent-seeking speculators at rock-bottom prices. Something similar could happen in SV if the market cools.

Source: Barrow County resident who would have preferred Gwinnett.
"Obviously, if the only criterion was that it should just work, everyone would go with the simpler system."

It's obvious to you and me, but to many people it's not obvious at all. You only have to look at the very large deadpool of companies that made these mistakes and died because of it.

People optimize prematurely, scale prematurely, make ego based decisions, care more about interesting tech than making the business grow, etc etc. That's really the whole point of the parent article - people make bad decisions because of the allure of some "cool" but complex and unnecessary tool.

Also, thanks for the note on the background - I'll fix that :)
If there was ever an article that needed a [citation needed] this would be it. There are so many statements that are either flat out wrong, but something people like to believe to things that are only right in some locations. bla, flagged
Perhaps this is the beginning of the resurgence of the "Small Data Expert"
The top for interest rates was in ~1982. Not sure how anyone can try to time macro trends that have happened on 30-year time scales.
How to be smart in a world of dumb bloggers
Building traffic by blogging isn't so much about design or traffic techniques or any other "hacks." It's about being someone worth listening to, and this post shows you how to do that.
How to effectively spread propaganda?
I outright ignore any job postings talking about "cultural fit"
I don't know the US housing market very well but I think anybody discussing the national market as a whole is talking through their hat. Different areas are massively different and are going to react differently to stimuli like rate changes.
Is there anyway to buy both a hard copy and an e-book without making 2 separate purchases?
Well, if I would want to communicate a concept, FOSS, for example, I would create lots of various packaging for that idea: stories, infographics, videos etc. to prevent saturation.
Reality is there are many Java code bases which handle resources like this. For java 6 and below this not bad code; it is how you are forced to deal with resources.

Even with the new block syntax, you have painful nesting if the operation requires several disparate resources.

Blocks are an improvement, but not the same as RAII. A block is literally converted to a try-finally by the compiler. It is the same thing with a cleaner syntax. There is no safety added to the old Java way. A programmer can forget to put his stuff in a block and leak the resource the same as he forgets to use a try-finally. The onus is on the consumer, not the library writer.

With RAII the onus is removed from the consumer. The consumer writes safe code automatically, no onus to remember any special clean up idioms.
Where I live in the US I'm at 30% post-tax. I could probably get this down to about 20%, but I'd be adding on an hour or more of commute each way, and I'm in a pretty desirable part of the city.
Little Robot Friends
I would ask why if I had 8 L of water containers why I would try to figure out how to have no more than half of that and just fill both jugs, then I'd say that's a stupid question and has nothing to do if I can code or not. I hate these stupid job interview things just be frank and lets talk about my skills and what you're looking for, not stupid brain teasers, fizzbuzz, or anything like that.
Given this algorithm. What does the Seed Group end up looking like? What do they have in common?

It seems to me that in the real world, this group would be people with the most friends, or people with very diverse friends, kind of a no-brainer.
A Brief History of Open-Source Code
Twitter often gets singled out for it's big dataness, though the latest numbers I've seen are only about 400 million tweets per day. Even allowing 1K/tweet this is a rather manageable 400GB uncompressed.

15 minutes of US tweets would fit on your phone :-)
> C++'s C heritage

Well, at this point it's more like C++'s C++ heritage.

> const correctness

It certainly exists in plenty of other languages, but in a non-broken way. C++'s const correctness model is mostly broken, by the way [1]. D's model is a bit more sane [2]. Languages like Haskell or Clojure (AFAIK) make immutability a default. This kind of functional style is a good thing for C++ developers overall, as emphasized by John Carmack [3].

[1] Once again, the C++ FQA has plenty of wisdom to share: http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/const.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Const-correctness#const_and_imm...
[3] http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programm...

> RAII didn't catch in other languages

That's because most other languages are garbage collected. (Not that RAII is a bad thing, it's just not needed.)
it must be a bug in the bubblesort!
A book is something that I usually don't like to buy without knowing what I am going to get. A great way to know that I will get good content is to know: who are you? what makes you think what you wrote is correct?(beware, I am not saying it is not, I just don't know anything about you) have you ever wrote something else? Is it possible to the even just the introduction available? I'd really like to know how you write.

Other than that... Congratulations!!!! and best of luck!
Pasting a response:

Blocks are an improvement, but not the same as RAII. A block is literally converted to a try-finally by the compiler. It is the same thing with a cleaner syntax. There is no safety added to the old Java way. A programmer can forget to put his stuff in a block and leak the resource the same as he forgets to use a try-finally. The onus is on the consumer, not the library writer.

With C++ RAII the onus is removed from the consumer. The consumer writes safe code automatically, no onus to remember any special clean up idioms.
Drupal Co-maintainer Funded at $475/wk
No my parents never smoke.

I did though.
here are a few, you can get the rest from these links. I've published some numbers on my blog. I won't give exact, but it's > 6 figures

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/debt-snowball+/id516229756?m...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/walk-tracker-gps-fitness-tra...

http://www.entrelife.com/
I couldn't disagree more with some of the statements in the article.

Hadoop is not a database! It's a parallel computing platform for MapReduce-style problems that could preserve locality. If your problem fits this, Hadoop absolutely rocks. If your problem is different then please use another tool. If your problem deals for example with high-resolution geographic or LiDAR data that can be easily processed independently (and that would easily give you a few petabytes each scan/flight so you can't stuff it into GPU), Hadoop is about the only open thing you can use to process them reliably (imagine having Earth surface data with the resolution of 1cm and the need to prepare multiple levels of detail, simplify geometry, perform object recognition, identify roads etc.). Even when your data is smaller if your problem fits in the MapReduce model well, Hadoop is a pretty convenient way to be future-proof while enjoying already mature application infrastructure. Why would you even bother working with toys that put everything into memory and then fail miserably in production (HW failure, need to reseed data after crash etc.)?

I worked in a company that routinely processed these kinds of data; usually people accepting the thinking from this article hit a wall someday in production, couldn't guarantee reliability and ended up writing endless hacks for their algorithms that didn't scale when it was needed and became frustrating bottlenecks for everyone.

Yes, I saw also some ridiculous uses of Hadoop (database that didn't have a chance ever growing over 20M records, problems not fitting MapReduce that needed custom messaging between jobs etc). Just use your reason properly, whatever has the potential for the future to handle large data do it with Hadoop or any appropriate system that supports your algorithmic model (S4, Kafka, OrientDB, Storm etc.) straight away.

Make your software future-proof now or you'll have to rewrite it from the scratch when you will be under huge pressure. Don't become complacent with what you "know" now.
Hmmm, I can understand getting bored and switching jobs as a way to stay stimulated, or to take on the "opportunity of a lifetime" that comes along every so often, but when there are other innocents whose lives are interrupted as a result, my empathy ends there.

Once we had children, before any were in school, my wife and I picked a place where we could reasonably expect to stay until they were finished with school, and we're still here.

Their lives are more important than mine (my amusement ranks far below), and in my opinion, a stable childhood provides the foundation to take some risk as an adult.
Isn't producing content that people want to watch and share the "fundamental problem of viral marketing"?

Obviously, being able to identify high value "seeds" is paramount, but it appears to be more related to cost-reduction (not having to contact more seeds than necessary).

Centrality measures, along with propagation simulation algorithms, already helped identifying seeds...but without "the proper content", I doubt that good seed classification can, alone, "solve the problem".
Probably wouldn't be a bad time to leave IBM back then.
> How can the linux kernel compile itself?

Short answer: it can't. Each software system relies for its own existence on a predecessor, usually one of smaller scope. Sort of like biology and evolution.

When I wrote Apple Writer in 1978, there were no high-level development tools available, just a primitive assembler built into the Apple II BIOS. By making direct hand entries, I used the BIOS assembler to write a better, faster assembler that supported alphabetic labels. Then I used that assembler to write a better one, and eventually I had a development tool suitable for writing applications.

Linux development has relied on a similar bootstrap process, on a larger scale.
In broad strokes, the more specialized your skill, the harder it will be to find a job that meets your salary expectations. Sometimes this will mean moving to a new city or being unemployed for over a year. Sometimes this will mean taking a pay cut, which means you'll need some cash to break a lease or otherwise see you through downsizing your lifestyle.

Also keep in mind that it's huge to have 6 months of expenses easily available while evaluating job offers. You're much more likely to settle when you have to worry about paying your mortgage next month.
Friendfinder files for bankruptcy
Excellent. I love when things like this get more visibility. Now, let me go make notes on my book of all the red flags of why I should stop talking to a company.

As a candidate, I understand the system is incredibly broken. Maybe one way out is to have recruiters who have a technical background. I have seen that happen with exactly one company where the lead recruiter had a BS from MIT. She was awesome and a genuine pleasure to talk to. Also, she had enough of a understanding of the company stack that the interview acted like a semi-filter.
I've worked on setting it up with Amazon match, but I'm honestly not sure how that works. If you can't figure it out shoot me an email - clarky07[at]gmail and i'll help you through it.
She also mentioned that it wouldn't deter her if she was already going. I agree with the author that the email itself could have been worded better, but the intention of the conference organizers seems to be sincere.
That's partialy a good news for many website as their affiliate programm (AdultFriendFinder, ...) was attracting lots of people using black hat technics to acquire trafic (fake websites, ads, Google bots manipulation, etc).
#7 is the Shadow Inventory Myth. Completely unfounded rumors were spread in 2009,2010, etc that banks had a huge backlog of foreclosures that they were keeping off of the market. Completely baseless however.
I agree that it should be post tax, but nobody uses post-tax figures when stating how much money they make so it's often not clear which "15% of income" they are referring to.
Study Shows No Clear Evidence That Google Plus Drives Ranking