skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The mainstream financial headlines generally regurgitate what the Fed wants to message. While certainly 'most' were surprised, many weren't.

Tapering was dependent on econ data, which simply hasn't been there to support it. I know plenty of people who were betting that it wouldn't happen, myself included. Good overview of why from before the announcement here:

http://www.moneyweb.co.za/moneyweb-safm-market-update/r-1805
Please don't upvote this site. Adding more snark to the world on a nice Friday morning doesn't help anyone.

On the contrary, go visit SO and find a few questions you can help someone with. I'm going to after I get some coffee. Help some others out, just like people have helped us out on so many occasions.
I'm no expert, but if both Chicago and New York are synching their clocks to NIST(Gaithersburg, MD) or the Naval Observatory (Washington DC), the a message from Washington sent at the same instant, should arrive at the same instant, as measured in local time.

A more 'science' way to make the claim that Nanex is making, would be to compare the same products on other Fed meeting dates.
Not all code is server-side code that can be addressed by elastic computing. Most C++ programmers work on desktop, mobile, and embedded programs. In such a domain, it is very likely that your code will be running on more than 10,000 cores on launch day (and with little or no intercommunication between the cores).
A different kind of app
Ah, yes. Out of Boulder?

Which game's engine was in C#? Project MyWorld?
Futile?
Writing It Down
I'm sorry, but I can't outsource the computation of real time ultrasound denoising to EC2. Nor can I do the work of my LTE radio modem on EC2. Clouds and scaling out on clusters are great answer to a certain set of problems, but far from a panacea.
Saving The World, One Text At A Time
This is an absurd argument (Stop spending money on sports and rather spend it on real education)

rather, we should spend less money on things like policing the rest of the world/inflating the defense sector's wallets and channel THAT money into education/infrastructure/healthcare/many other things
Using Google to Find the Best StackOverflow Result
Google's search engine is better than SO. Here is how I search google to find the best results on SO:

#this limits the google search results just to the SO website

site:http://stackoverflow.com/

#searches for an exact match of a keyword

site:http://stackoverflow.com/ "nested forms rails"

#searches for synonymous words

site:http://stackoverflow.com/ *nested forms rails"
Isn't "cultural fit" another way to hide sexism, racism, and prejudice in the hiring process?

I'm sure that's the case in rare circumstances. The phrase 'cultural fit' is fairly common here in the UK but I agree it may be taken a bit too literally elsewhere. The cultural fit I'm referring to is attitude, work ethic, maturity, etc.

I don't need a high school coding exam and a 2 hour panel interview to see if someone is a "cultural fit".

Completely agree. I can't see how that scenario could give anyone an appropriate insight into a persons character. As explained in other comments below, a relaxed, two way conversation in a comfortable environment is one of the few ways of establishing how well a candidate would adapt to life at your company.
My top five list of the most beautiful desktop wallpaper sites
I turned it into a more portable user script: https://github.com/neeee/cloud-to-butt
So you helped them, and showed them a tool they could use to help themself in the future. That's good!

This tool on the other hand, would help you belittle and alienate them so that they are afraid of asking for help in the future.
Oh dear.

Better read the Clang team's Kickstarter update here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang/posts/60...

These people sound really, really discouraged and bitter about not having found an investor.

From what I can tell, their pitch on Kickstarter said that they were going to use that money to build their idea. But in fact they used it to look for investment, which they couldn't find... because they were not building any product but rather had a demo (which they themselves described as not very good) and were only shopping that around.

On the one hand I feel for them - meeting tons of investors and getting only a "no" is definitely discouraging - but it may be the case that they are missing something and/or doing something very wrong to have not found any investor at all.

Below are some (out-of-context) quotes which I think the team may regret having written.... they seem overly cynical. But at the same time it breaks my heart a little bit because I understand that these folks are just exhausted, and have run out of ideas after busting their asses for so long and only hearing "no".

"Kickstarter is amazing, but one of the hidden catches is that once you have taken a bunch of people's money to do a thing, you have to actually do that thing, and not some other thing that you thought up in the meantime." -- this is not strictly true - I mean, kickstarter projects aren't legally obligated to deliver anything at all - so they could certainly decide to do something else. (But still, this quotation beggars belief.)

"What can people do to help? Probably not that much, unless they happen to be qualified investors or superstar game programmers looking for an adventure."

" In the climate of anxiety that seems to pervade the industry now, however, any perceived risk factor is sufficient to torpedo a pitch, and so all such discussions end up following the template of the justly famous "Tesla pitches VCs" video."

"The potential financiers most likely to talk to us are Neal Stephenson fans. Once they have actually met Neal and gotten their books signed, it turns out that they are not really that interested in our project. But they don't want to make Neal Stephenson feel bad and so they don't give him any useful feedback; instead they just go dark."

Overall, the Clang team's kickstarter update is just too negative - which is not going to help. I guess that means that they really do believe that they have explored every avenue and that they really think that no one can help... which is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the same time, I think the backers might feel like they have been lied to since the money didn't go towards what they thought it would.

If anything, this will remind people that Kickstarter is not something that is selling you a product. It is patronage, and you might not see any result of the money you have put in. But you still might have helped someone try to achieve their dream, which is what it is really all about.
Edgertronic - The first affordable high speed video camera
Excel is super powerful, but I loathe that power. It leads to people doing a ton of amazing, great work in Excel that's super impressive... that no on else can replicate.

If you're really smart about it, Excel is one of the most remarkable tools for analysis ever devised. The problem is virtually everyone who is smart about it can use different better tools that are more suited to their purpose.
You made an excellent counterpoint. The improvements in performance were not solely due to dropping sports programs. It may be difficult to tease out the impact that each of the major changes had on performance.

I did participate extensively in high school sports. I think that the benefits far outweigh the costs. In evaluating solutions like dropping sports programs, I believe that other options for performance improvement should both jointly and individually be considered, e.g., minimum GPA for sports participation, uniforms, longer school hours, mandatory summer school, etc.
Interesting idea. It's such a difficult usability problem that it's tough to solve it for everyone. I had a job where I was responsible for getting business folk the data they needed and kept on trying to come up with a way for them to extract data from the database without having them to write queries. I got this nugget from the CTO: "To get the expressiveness of SQL you will be writing SQL"

Just need to figure out where the tradeoffs are and I think Excel made a pretty good one. I think Excel shouldn't be used for recurring jobs but for the one off it can't be beat.
> The problem isn't a lack of jobs, it's the draining of capital flow that happen when the monetary system dries up. Whether you believe that to be unfairness or just some players being so adept at the game... that doesn't matter.

> The ball needs to move or people who want to play the game will be sitting out. If the ball is kept moving, even artificially, anyone who wants to play will get to play. The only ones left out would be willingly out or mentally/physically unable to play at all.

What you're saying may be true now, but surely it won't always be true? Who's to say that every mundane task won't (relatively soon) be automated? We need to start thinking about how we should deal with this.
I can see that becoming a problem in a couple of years:

Step 1) Go to stackoverflow and search question.
Step 2) Answers only point to letmegooglethatforyou.
Step 3) Search using letmegooglethatforyou.
Step 4) Find only results pointing to letmestackoverflowthatforyou.

As a matter of fact it has already started.
As iGoogle Nears Its End, 'My Yahoo' Gets Beautiful Redesign
> That's not personal, just business.

unless you happen to be Belgian. but eh, it's such a small country, who cares right??

come on just say it, it's not about "personal" vs "business". You all care when it's China hacking into the US, even if they're not allies like the UK and Belgium.
I've always found it a lot more effective to sit down with someone and find the answer together, no matter how simple the question. If our technique works well, I've found they'll generally try it again the next time they have a question.

Unlike sending this link, figuring out things together doesn't leave teammates avoiding and dreading interactions with each other.
> I find it amusing that there isn't a single word about runtime performance in the whole essay.

It most certainly is. In fact, it's the answer to the opening question, "Why does Go, a language designed from the ground up for what what C++ is used for, not attract more C++ programmers?" You might not have noticed it because he only refers to the performance issue as a "Zero (CPU) cost" mentality.

> C++ is about having it all there at your fingertips. I found this quote on a C++11 FAQ:
>
> The range of abstractions that C++ can express elegantly, flexibly, and at zero costs compared to hand-crafted specialized code has greatly increased.
>
> That way of thinking just isn't the way Go operates. Zero cost isn't a goal, at least not zero CPU cost. Go's claim is that minimizing programmer effort is a more important consideration.
> Isn't "cultural fit" another way to hide sexism, racism, and prejudice in the hiring process?

While that may be, it doesn't mean cultural fit is only used in those cases.

There is a vast difference between someone who cares about doing their job well and someone who does their job. And 'cultural fit' will be used to describe that. Are you the type of person to put in your own time to advance your knowledge, or do you require the company to pay to keep you up to speed on the latest advances. I've seen both types of people.

And the former is more valuable than the latter. And the former generally won't want to work with the latter, either. Granted, the former will cost more than the latter, as he brings more value to the table.

You can argue the merits of 'cultural fit', but it's not just a word used to hide sexism, racism, and prejudice in the hiring process. And, personally, I think it's important because I want to enjoy the people I work with.
I'd like to note that Dash is awesome, and easily searches and displays docs, google, and stackoverflow:

http://kapeli.com/dash
Starcraft 2 is not about multitasking. Starcraft 2 is about context switching. That was a difficult thing for me to learn. You have a loop of tasks that are your "macro" tasks. Economy -> Supply-> Production -> Tech -> Repeat. When you need to respond to stimuli (Enemy units, drops), you change your loop to controlling your army during battle. Think of yourself as a thread scheduler. What you think is important is most likely not, which is one reason you may be having difficulty.

Think of your day as a programmer like a Starcraft game. You have to do each task well. You likely don't do two tasks at the same time. If you are, you are doing them poorly, so you do one at a time. Then, you context switch into the next task. Perhaps you move from coding to documentation writing. Or from coding to management meetings. You have to be able to see the next chain of tasks and switch the context in your brain.

Add in a response to changing needs (enemy units) and you have a great analogy for many things in life.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner
No, it is about priorities. See Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
I got a 0 (perfect), which surprised me. My monitor at work is not very good.
I guess you failed to read my comment.

Did I say it was the only thing? No. I said that the burden of proof shouldn't require three phone screens, a multi-hour (7 - 8+?) coding test, and then a 5 hour on-site interview. Companies are taking time out of people's lives to string them along on a hiring process that could last up to a month and a half, and still could result in absolutely no offer.

Second, I'm not merely referring to the list of things I've done. Like many people, I have public projects online that you can download and use, and in many cases, these projects have source trees that are publically available. Yet, most of the time, companies don't even care enough to do the background research of downloading the application and using it, or looking at the source of these applications to see if they are any good. I've submitted examples of work I've done and when I got to the on-site interview, the interviewer had no idea what I was talking about - hadn't used the application, hadn't seen the source, and in one case (where the application was actually quite popular) had never even heard of it, despite the fact that I'd mentioned it in at least two of my interviews.

Companies should be respectful of people's time. They shouldn't make the burden of proof so high that only the most desperate would ever agree to jump through these hoops knowing what they are in advance. I shouldn't have to complete a 10 hour programming test and then spend 5 hours proving to you on a white board that I can code. At what point do you say that my knowledge is general enough that I can pretty much approach and come to a meaningful solution for any problem that you can throw at me ? The combination of a short, in-person interview and a review of my work history and my references should be sufficient to get a grasp of my work skills and this vague concept of 'cultural fit' which seems to amount to, "Are you nice and respectful and a team player?"

Any thing beyond that is disrespectful to the candidate, especially if you are trying to recruit them away from another full-time position.
Linus Torvalds Talks Linux Development at LinuxCon
The danger I've seen with Excel is that people who start using it have a very hard time letting go. At a prior role, I tried rewriting a ton of Excel reports into SQL queries that would run much faster and would be maintained to deal with various schema changes. Unfortunately, the people who were currently putting them together in Excel did not like that loss of control.

Do you think Excel with built in version control would help in solving the problem? I remember reading about some company that was trying to do that but no idea where they are now.
I'll agree with you that choosing individual software packages can be a daunting task for someone who's just looking to set up a single laptop or desktop as an end user.

In the FreeBSD world the PC-BSD project (http://www.pcbsd.org) provides an operating system focused on the end-user experience, with a convenient "out-of-the-box" configuration. They track FreeBSD development closely and in general use exactly the same source - primarily changing configuration and tuning options.

From their website: PC-BSD is a desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. Rather than having the user build their own environment from the base operating system, PC-BSD aims to make the FreeBSD experience easy and achievable for the average "casual" computer user.
> One programmer costs ~ 300 cores. (Bay Area salary with benefits vs. AWS EC2 pricing)

That is gibberish. If I work at a company and we have 5 machines with 12 cores apiece already in place that is what I have to make do with. We don't all live in an elastic world.

Further to that the scaling of large single computations across cores is a costly and often pointless exercise.
For me it's not about the language. It's about pragmatics.

With C++ I can write code that builds natively using standard tool chains and libraries on Linux, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and dozens of other less common platforms.

With C++ I can write something once and then ship it on all those things without worrying (much) about the availability of tooling. If I write it using portable programming techniques (mostly acquired through hard experience) I will not have to do very much porting, and the #ifdef mechanism provides an acceptable way to accomplish alternate code paths on different platforms without compromising cleanliness of the build or performance.

C++ has its uglies, but it's not too bad if one knows it well and avoids various also-learned-through-experience antipatterns.

Go is in fact better than C++, but it's not better enough to justify the hassle or the impact in my ability to ship across umpteen platforms.

This is why everyone still does systems programming in C/C++. Write (a bit painfully) once, ship everywhere.

Other languages like Go, Ruby, Python, Rust, server-side JavaScript, various functional dialects, D, whatever, always achieve success in two areas: specific ecosystems/platforms (e.g. ObjC on Apple, Haskell in the world of high-speed algorithmic trading), and server-side coding. With server-side coding who cares if you can ship, cause you don't. But all the world is not a server, and sometimes you want to hit multiple user bases. For that, only C will do.

I actually think a Go (or any other language) compiler that builds to cross-platform C code with a configure script and a Windows build script would be a worthy development. I know many people hate language-to-language compilers, but this would enable one to write in nifty new language X, build intermediate code, then build that intermediate code with the native tooling of every other damn thing.

The other alternative would be for Google -- if it really wants to push Go -- to put a lot of effort behind porting it to offer good high-quality native tooling for everything and everyone's toaster oven. But Google thinks all the world's a server or a browser (and it is for Google for the most part) so that doesn't seem to be a priority for them.
It's because this doesn't involve the US and they're tired of this news cycle, so they deem it "less important".
> There's no way that the value of a dollar in your pocket will suddenly double, but the value of a bitcoin has and will again.

It might again.
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6414214
The article says he made 3-5 bitcoins.
I'm currently a C++ programmer that does not intend to change to go because I want to have exquisit control.

However, this is not because of my views or something like that but because I'm only a C++ programmer at the moment, because I need that kind of control for my current work. If I want to publish a paper or argue on specifics of algorithms and data structues, e.g., like cache efficiency, it is highly convenient to know as much as possible about what your code does in detail and to have the opportunity to force a particular behavior.

The next time I'll be asked to get a complex problem solved somewhat efficiently (I did write a lot of java code before starting to dive into C++ 3 years ago), I might look into go. But as long as the specifics of my solution are "the job", I can still focus on getting the job done but choose C++ over Go.

New C++ features are always nice, because I don't have to use them all and can cherry-pick whatever is more convenient to achieve what I want
NSA subversion of Internet security: bad for the US, good for criminals
I got a raspberry pi to see if I could replace a noisy htpc with Raspbmc. It worked a lot better than I anticipated but I found that I was sacrificing speed for the 'cool' factor of running it on a Pi so I ended up going back to a PC.

Still looking for a project to combine my Rift and Pi.
Probably because those endeavors (art, math, chess) are cheap compared to football. When looking at the budget, the most expensive items are going to get more scrutiny.
It amazes me how so many commenters here can miss an essential point about hipsters and hipster-hate. Hipster-hate is more than bullying, it can be understood if we consider that socio-economic classes are at war with each other: in this understanding, hipsters are the ones that have crossed the trench lines. They're percieved as people who mostly come from a wealthy white background, from which they want to be independent, but which gives them a certain legacy and advantage over non-white poor people. This helps them colonize/gentrify poor neighborhoods, thus pushing the prices up and paving the way for the city to push it's poor further away. Not to mention the fact that they are easy targets from the traditional upper class who percieves them as "willfully bohemian". We have the same kind of hate here in France for our "bobos". Hipster hate has a material economic basis.
I think that we can simply say "no one has been fired for traditional interview". Yes, it is broken, ineffective, interviewees mostly hate it, some egos get hurt while solving fizzbuzz on the whiteboard, etc. But for an interviewer, it's a safe choice. It's something he has done hundreds of times, something the interviewee expects. He might miss some really good potential employees but at the end of the day, everyone will be ok. Trying something totally new requires some courage and stepping out of comfort zone, probably a lot, and that explains it.

And if we are talking about major corps, it would require lots of investment in terms of internal training, would take a while, in other words - it's expensive. And they still get a lot of top quality candidates, so why bother?
An amusing problem reading this is that in my browser it currently reads:
Userscript that replaces occurrences of 'my arse' with 'my butt'

which could be problematic in the implementation depending on viewing editing etc!
Shameless plug: I just did exactly this over the weekend and wrote about how well it works here: http://blog.travisthieman.com/ec2-for-23-cents-and-your-own-...

Short version: BTSync is awesome, ownCloud makes the Pi struggle pretty hard
a modern lotus improv would be welcomed
I would call Java simplistic, but for a funny reason: with other languages, you can do things the straightforward way using basic constructs, or you can do things the expert way using a variety of more complex (sometimes user-defined) constructs. With Java, you have to do things the simple way. Sure, you have to define a class with a main method in it instead of just being able to print "Hello World", but there's one less way to do that in Java than in scripting languages.

Haskell is a lovely language and everyone should dabble in it for a while, for that very reason: because it makes you look at programming differently.
Well written code in any language will almost always outperform poorly written code in another language. Python being 50x slower than C++ doesn't matter if you are using an exponential imlpementation of a linear problem.
So run your Go programs with 1.1 and with 1.2 and tell us if there's a difference.