skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) I think a lot of start-ups want to hire "smart" people.

What does it really mean to be smart? Lately I cannot stop thinking about it. I have always been considered a 'smart person'. I am a self-taught freelance developer now - it used to be my hobby and somehow (mostly because I needed location-independent work quickly) it became my profession. I get by because everybody thinks I am smart but I feel like an impostor because the more I think about myself the more I realize that intelligence is not some general ability to solve problems - it's more just a set of very different skills that corelate to much lesser extent than people usually think and you can be really good at something that people use to judge your abilities and at the same time really bad at something else that is actually required to get the job done.

I studied sociology and I shortly worked as a data analyst. It seems to me that this kind of work requires... ehm... a different intelligence than programming. You need to be good at connecting the dots, noticing things, seeing patterns. This is my kind of thinking and I have always been good at this - doubting everything, seeing pure assumptions where other people saw 'truths', permanently creating hypotheses and alternative theories, trying to spot logical fallacies in prevailing theories... basically trying to spot things.

Programing is very different (at least it seems to me - so different tat it's even difficult do describe it). I guess it's about creating stuff, not just observing stuff. You need to build very complex and abstract mental models, keep them in your head and be able to operate with them - and this is the part of intelligence that I seem to be lacking. It just does not feel natural. I try to solve some problem and I am thinking... if this condition and that condition but at the same time not that condition... and bang!, suddenly I am lost and I don't even remember what I am doing. I cannot keep it in my head. I totally get what OP was saying about passing anonymous functions in JavaScript - I had the same experience. The first time I encountered something so simple as JavaScript closures it took me two hours to get it. And the day after that I had to repeat the whole mental process to get there again because I somehow lost it over night. This is simply not how my brain works and I think I am really bad at this. Yet people pay me for this... which is just depressing (and you understand why I write this under throwaway).

I remember our 'statistical analysis 101' professor always telling us 'remember, you are not really testing hypotheses, you are only testing indicators!' - if HR department picks wrong indicators for the skills that they actually need both company and employee are going to be unhappy - and I think this is very common because our understanding of the indicators for different kinds of 'being smart' is still poor.
Every time I hear or read some absolute statement about something related to perception (mostly visual), I think about "The blue boy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Boy).

Never use blue as a foreground colour...

There goes another principle.
Try telling that to the guys who designed Windows Phone.
It's not but if you configure Ghostery's filters strictly, it blocks a lot of third party elements that are widespread on the web and as such can be used to track you. Ghostery in general doesn't target ads in particular. That's what AdBlock is for.
Hell, even those can exclude a good candidate, especially at larger companies. Candidate not a good fit for the team? Probably won't do as well as one who is.
Could you go into a little more detail?

Is this if I log into backblaze.com there may be files it says it has which it does not, or if the UI on my Mac says it's backed up it may not be? (Or both?)
Nice quote at the end. One could argue: "I am my data. My data is me, but it is not mine".
Ask HN: Should I apply today, or "apply late with a working product?
I am about 3 days away from a working app. I feel I could explain things way better
I kind of gave up on it when I realized how complicated it is to sort a list. Hopefully they'll improve that in future versions.

Still could see myself using it for specific use cases.

But for the future I'd wish for something cooler to win :-)

Edit: check out the sort module and decide for yourself http://golang.org/pkg/sort/

It has some interesting, if confusing, properties. But why not just let me write

list.sort(function(a,b){ return 1, 0 or -1...}) like JavaScript does?

While the examples in the sort module are perhaps more generic than necessary (hence the interesting but confusing properties), any sort still requires the definition of 3 functions, and they can't be defined inline (on the fly) either, afaik.
The Python equivalent of two communicating goroutines is a bidirectional generator (PEP 342), not a for-loop. I try to use the language construct with the least power.

Basically what I wanted this for is that I have a user-defined type that is basically a list of some other user-defined type, plus some extra stuff. In Python it's trivially easy to implement __iter__ and delegate, and then I could manipulate these objects the way I thought of them, as containers for other objects. In Go...I wonder if I could've used type embedding (making the first member of A be []B), but I don't think the built-in language constructs respect embedding when figuring out what's a legal expression. I ended up biting the bullet and explicitly looping over the slice member, but the point of prototyping is being able to think of your code in the terms of your problem domain.
Im pretty confident that Go will be around for at least as long as C/C++, python, and java remain relevant.
Looks cool, but what about being device agnostic?
Game Devs Abuse Copyright to Censor Negative YouTube Review
You can recover the "perfect J" by phrasing the problem as "find the path that results in the monster having been waiting for you at the shore for the least time, or if he's too slow, that results in the maximum distance from the monster when you exit the lake". The best path is always the best path.

What really bothers me about the solution presented is that the (optimum) angle of escape is clearly exactly pi / 2, computed as the arcsine of 1. That's going to be exactly 1, but it's computed here as 4.603339 cos 1.351817, which is only approximate. There must be a solution that gives you the exact value; that's the one I want to see.
Not sure if this will really help improve the adoption rates for Pascal.
"Surveillance data will always be used for other purposes, even if this is prohibited."

This stood out for me in the article. And I think this applies to all forms of data.
Thank you for your comment.

Are you saying that a government focused on protecting individual rights cannot exist, because people sometimes disagree?

If so, that's too big a leap for me -- I don't see how one necessarily follows from the other.
I agree that for quickly writing code Python is quicker, but I'm not sure it's necessarily to do with dynamic typing. I've been using Go for about a year and a half and Python for about double that (and other things before that like C#). I'm still trying to pin down the usability differences, and what causes them.

List comprehensions are one of the most obvious things. LINQ and Haskell and co have shown that this is absolutely doable with a static type system.

The lack of genericity is one of those things that will be argued about for the lifetime of Go, I think. Python doesn't need it because of the dynamic typing but the same problems are solved to some extent by the compile-time-duck-typing enabled by its interface system.

I'm not sure I agree re productivity. One on project I reached 30,000 lines of Python, collaborating with 3 other people remotely. Some things would have been a lot easier with static typing. I think.
Hanging bullets/numerals have nothing to do with markdown, they're a typographic choice and in my opinion look better than the indented style that you normally get by default.

In fact, the author of the post has previously written a hugely popular series about typography that specifically mentions this choice: http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/five-simple-steps-to-be...
Whats surprising is that PayPal didnt close his account as soon as such a sum arrived
This is a tremendous resource, but may I suggest you rather point here: https://www.fpcomplete.com/school/haskell-fast-hard.

It's the same course/series, but with interactivity, so Haskell can coded/evaluated from the browser. In fact, one "dir" up, you will find a bunch of similar tutorials here : https://www.fpcomplete.com/school.
Great article, thanks for sharing rosser!
I think this is relevant: it's a sketch from the show "Mitchell and Webb about identity theft.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
Looks like a fair solution, but the problem remains with the OP - I'm from Italy, if I see "Western Europe excl. Uk" I tick it, but then I would also need to tick "Southern Europe" ;)
Was using Samuru from July - half September this year. While I applaud the way it just searches for what I ask for, no more no less, there was just one major issue that made me turn to DDG: loads too slow. The way I use it is as default search engine in Opera. So to search, I do Ctrl-T, start typing query, hit Enter. After the Enter it sometimes took more than 5 seconds to show the results. I don't know why that is but it's just too long in comparision with others, sorry. It seems better now, but it's still slower than the competition.
U.S. intercepts French phone calls on a 'massive scale'
It is already growing exponentially. Did you mean Ackermann function growth?
can be outperformed by newer algorithms

I'm interested to hear more about this. There's CAR... what else?

As an aside, ZFS's ARC algorithm differs a fair bit from IBM's -- a case of theory which then met reality. I don't recall the details though, alas.
You badly misunderstand something. The Streisand effect is an unintended consequence whereby trying to minimise attention actually increases it. "Banksy" has known all along that maintaining the mystique of secrecy would create attention where otherwise there would be none. So the exact opposite of the Streisand effect. His secrecy is to create attention, not avoid it.
They could learn a lot from how UK.gov (http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/) operates these days. It's a true agile shop, that's been ridiculously productive and forward-thinking for at least the last 5 years.
I'm not claiming this to be a priori knowledge; that's how causality works, I don't know that Barack Obama was elected because I chose not to eat a cheeseburger in 1999. RMS laid the foundations for the free software movement, growing the open culture and creating a good licence. I think it's hard to debate that what RMS has done hasn't improved the free software landscape today.
No. In 10 years time it will sadly be forgotten like many of Google's experiments.

The low-risk, conservative, sensible and boring choice exists today. It's Java.

And as enterprises adopt functional programming via Scala/Clojure it will only cement those characteristics.
Central Europe = "Other" I guess :-/

Edit: Actually, for the purposes of this poll Czech Republic is "Eastern Europe", just don't tell that to a Czech person ;)
If you want to learn Haskell slow and easy, this is brilliant: http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters
Yeah, the Morris Worm was the first big strike against such openness. A lot more stuff got locked down after that.

I remember a lot of universities allowed you to telnet in and log in as 'guest' with no password back then. IIRC, I could telnet into Berkeley XCF and UIUC.
99 Bottles of beer song
What usually happens in these instances? A warrant for one of those computers at any of those 185,000 IPs needs to be examined, monitored, and then the proxy-snail-turtle-chain needs to be traced, which could be long, onioned (like Tor) and well -- obfuscated with lots of extra superfluous traffic. Are botnets just considered collateral in a highly vulnerable computersphere? When does anything get done, I really have disdain for the kind of people who run botnets. Every single one I've met, years ago, when I was more in the scene was a power-hungry tool out for petty cash through bribery and destruction.
Hypothetically, if you made all parts of android rely on "Google Data center services" would moves to close it off be justified?

This is what Play Services are moving towards.
a) you're alive in my world (or maybe we're both hellbanned and it's hidden from us)
b,c) combination of both. Internet is chaotic, I submitted nice links that had <10 votes and no comments, while a trivial one about a cute css button got 500+ ...
I used this as a basis (but had to shuffle around Northern countries to achieve a clean Scandinavia break):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_geoscheme_for_Eu...
What I learned this week
damn. at least i found http://www.w3.org/TR/webrtc/#peer-to-peer-data-api which looks like its a standard to allow for peer to peer data transfer.
OP would still blow you away by using the Nested set model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_set_model

Although if you've been doing this interview for a while, you're bound to have come across someone who mentioned it, so I'm sure you're familiar.
>Incapsula was able to mitigate the attack.

I wonder how considering the packets would not necessarily be similar.
I guess I'm just a little sceptical that that is the reason. Seems a little too handwavy. Especially when so many other languages/frameworks had decent tooling, too. Consider, Rails would setup tests for you, as well. I fully grant that testing most websites is a good deal more involved than testing most utilities. But, if anything, I would suspect that is the true gem in go. Seems it is mostly used for utilities with well defined inputs and outputs.
Making 128mb SIMMs from 64s
You really think so? I think that implies that it remains unsuccessful, which (given its current trajectory) seems unlikely.

I think it's more likely that in 10 years, Go will be the new Java. Big companies (besides Google) will use it, Hacker News will hate it, consultants will write books about it, and language geeks will be trying to replace it. Recall that Java also had a no-nonsense "do more with less" approach. The problem is that once a language gets popular, it's inevitably pushed into more and more domains where it's unsuitable, folks need to learn it to earn a living, and all the folks who define themselves by what languages they know will move on to greener pastures.

The only way a language can remain cool for decades at a time is to "avoid success at all costs", which was actually one of Simon Peyton-Jones's goals for Haskell (which has remained remarkably true to that ideal). Otherwise Stroustrop's Law kicks in: "There are two kinds of languages: the ones nobody likes, and the ones nobody uses."
Here's the test I've used in the past:

Before the interview, I ask them to write some code to access an HTTP endpoint that contains exchange rate data (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY etc.) in XML and to parse and load said data into a relational database. Then to build a very simple HTML form based front-end that lets you input a currency and convert it into another currency.

I ask them to send me either a link to a repository (Git, SVN etc.) or a zipball/tarball. If the job specifies a particular language, then I obviously expect it to be in that language. If not, so long as it isn't in something crazy like Brainfuck, they have free range.

If the code works and is basically sane, that goes a long way to get them shortlisted.

During the interview, I'll pull the code they sent up on a projector and ask them to self-review it. If they can figure out things that need improving in their code, that weighs heavily in their favour. Usually this is things like comments/documentation, tests, improving the structure or reusability. If it's really good, I'll throw a hypothetical idea for refactoring at them and see how they think.

The reason this works is that, despite Hacker News/Paul Graham dogma to the contrary, "smartness" isn't the only thing that matters in programmers. It's actually fairly low down the list. When hiring programmers, I want people who are actually able to do the daily practical job of writing code, modest and self-critical enough to spot their own mistakes, and socially capable to actually communicate their decisions and mistakes to the people they work with.

I interviewed a guy who was intellectually very smart and understood a lot about CS theory. I asked him why the PHP code he sent me didn't have any comments. "I don't believe in comments because they slow the PHP interpreter down." Sorry, he can be smarter than Einstein but I ain't letting him near production code.
No, I currently just manually keep the site in sync with the repository. Not exactly the most professional system but it got the job done. I'm going to look into that(not sure exactly how it works, but I do need to keep a node.js server running as well for webrtc negotiation) , as well as potentially just installing git on the server and have it sync up to the repository.
Interesting, I searched for "engine oil" and I don't get anything about fish oil in 5 first pages of results. First two hits are the most relevant as well - wikipedia entries.
Type in "women need to" and the resulting suggested search terms may shock you
we generally consider this a worthwhile tradeoff

Yes, generally we do, and I'd agree for graffiti done in canvas or similar mediums, but I think street art is an obvious exception, since the canvas is the whole street. You could only preserve the artwork by preserving at least the whole building, and possibly more than that.
It's easier to evaluate the language than to predict human behaviour.

The language is very good and has excellent support and libraries.

People, though, are somewhat mysterious...
Keywords Not Provided: What Remains, Keyword Data Options, The Future
I'm not sure how you arrived at this perspective. Certainly as a matter of political expediency in the last presidential election, the Republican ticket had to emphasize again and again that their Medicare reforms would have no effect on benefits for current and near-seniors. But that's an allergic reaction to what happened the last time a Republican tried to reform old-age entitlements. That was all of 10 years ago, when George W. Bush came out of the re-election gate with a plan to allow young people to redirect a portion of their Social Security taxation into personal accounts. It was, of course, demogogued into oblivion by the then-"Party of No".
Cork, Ireland.
Ireland is not in the UK.
OR, those people are wealthy because they have a high IQ, and are likely to give birth to children with a high IQ.

I would bet that's far more likely.
Show HN: LeWeb Speakers Slot Machine is my project to win a ticket to LeWeb
The syntax is much closer to Lisp than C, really. The main differences from Lisp are lack of macros (so slightly more actual syntax) and function application (in particular infix functions). Most things you see are functions.
I think I agree with you about the UK. Most people do seem ok with it. Of course, we'll never know if that might have been different had the reporting not been quashed by D notices.

I have to admit, I find surveillance extremely creepy, but then I translate it into my head into an Iain Banks novel. The great orbital in Look to Windward, is essentially governed by the AI Mind at its heart, which lets them all go freely about their business, yet saves them from peril. I like that world, and if I knew the ones who save me would never abuse it, I'd be happy.

Given the fact it's probably impossible to stop surveillance, I think the real question is how we make sure it's used for good. As it stands, the people in charge appear to believe public knowledge and debate is a bad thing.

So my question is less: "how much surveillance can democracy withstand?" and more, "how little oversight can a democracy withstand?"
Nice guide - very simple and to the point.

One minor issue. For "git commit -a -m “this is my commit message" you don't explain what the "-a" flag does in your description which could lead some to dismiss it, whereas it does actually perform extra actions beyond simply committing. A developer might not always want to add unstaged modifications, so they should be aware of this.
The most thorough libraries of personal data ever built have been built by us.
The first comment has a link to this article: http://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-two...

Wow.
This is sadly common in a community keen on logic, evidence, and avoiding fallacies in thinking. Worse than puzzles are pointless faux psychological screening questions like "Tell me about something painful that has happened to you and how you dealt with it."

I would (and have) asked if the interviewer or organization has any evidence to show that interview puzzle performance (or shit like Myers-Brigg) predicts job performance. No? Not surprising. Google did look into it and found no relationship. (http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-2013-6)

Programmer interviews are so crazy and sometimes sadistic that I catalogued some of the more common interview patterns:

http://typicalprogrammer.com/thirteen-patterns-of-programmer...
Golang: Is there opposite of 'go get' in the tool chain?
Do you know any other functional language? If not, it's a problem not with syntax (Haskell syntax perfectly fits its semantics), but with what is actually going on in the program. Without firm grasp of FP concepts (recursion, currying, partial application, abstract data types, etc) almost any Haskell code seems to be alien.

I find a lot of people complaining about Haskell syntax without understanding how deeply different this language is from "usual" languages.
Are people going to enjoy looking at it less if the building changes (assuming the painted part doesn't)? My guess is that the overwhelming majority of the enjoyment will be preserved.
your⁎
Many of us who aren't quite as old-school as RMS still treat electronic communications in this way.

Yes, there's communications we'll make which are more privileged, but we understand that fundamentally the system is open to observation and snooping. If we've got something to say we don't want others to know, we say it in person, using crypto, or through code (formal or informal) which will be difficult for others to understand, if at all.

And there's still good old mail. First class will often reach someone faster than they'll dig through their mail spool these days (and a letter indicates an investment in communication), even next-day mail is pretty cheap (much less expensive than FedEx).
The letter Q was never illegal in Turkey. It was just not allowed to be used in names of people/companies etc. due to the fact that it is not in Turkish alphabet.

It is like letters ç,ğ,ü being illegal in US.
Previous discussion of this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6316536.

A longer thread about Nimrod: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6272600.
There's work in progress on type inference and static typing for Python, and Python 3 supports type annotations (PEP 3107). Whether they'll get anywhere remains to be seen - it's a challenging problem, not the least because several of the language built-ins have strange typing rules. (What's the type of multiplication?)

type(3 * 5) => int
type(3.0 * 5) => float
type(3 * 'foo') => string
type(3.0 * 'foo') => TypeError
I don't think this is entirely true. I'm a native that have worked in Stockholm for almost 7 years (digital agencies, production companies). At every place I've been we've had at least one person that did not know swedish at all.
Picking up the Right Circle
Ilya Grigorika, the presentation author, has also written a book called High Performance Browser Network that I highly recommend if you are interested on the subject.

There is a free online version available at http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000545/index.ht...