skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is an insightful distinction, and as you've said before such incremental work could lead to a major shift.

But you can't claim Victor for your cause, he is explicitly concerned with reinventing programming, and not incremental improvement.

For example he says his "Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction" essay is his personal manifesto, and that "it's not about programming. It's about a way of thinking".
http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/note.ht...

He says in that same note that he was goaded into writing his "learnable programming" essay by people relating his work with live coding. It seems that for him, discussing improving programming tools was a diversion from his long term aims of uncovering a new way of thinking with computers. His disassociation from live coding seems to be a direct criticism of Khan Academy's approach but maybe he has a more general criticism of live coding... In any case, I wouldn't claim him for my cause either.
Prove that Android is not open.
Go To Statement Considered Harmful (1968)
Indeed. Also, there's a lot of different approaches to polymorphism in Clojure, all of which are valid in context. Protocols are fast but quite limited.

Personally, I find it better to start with the freedom of multimethods for several reasons: 1) Protocols push you down OO roads 2) It could be a premature optimization 3) Multimethods are brilliant for discovering the most elegant design.

The last point bears expanding on: multimethods don't bundle methods together, allow hierarchies not based on Java's inheritance, can dispatch on arbitrary strategies. Going protocol too early tends to lead to too many concrete types and not enough straight-forward data manipulation.

Which is not to say that protocols aren't brilliant. It's just that it looks like the first tool you should reach for and it's probably the last. Note the article is from 2010, when protocols were the new shiny.
I think most people who have never worked for a very fast-growing company grossly underestimate the number of rewrites that it will require anyway. You are not committing to a solution that makes it difficult to use more than one machine; you are trying to get to the point where you need to replace that architecture. Pretty much all your other architectural choices will be bad ones at that point anyways.
> What makes Go so special other than the lack of deep class hierarchies?

Google sponsored language with HN rockstars in their team.
We started up new development a couple of weeks ago, With it was the choice of language, runtime and so on.

Python3 ended up being the target for server-side bits. Thanks to the fact that Pyramid now is Python3 capable.

We are still finding Python3 issues. Deploying Python3 on RHEL was a bit of a pain, most solved by RH Software Collections providing a python3.3 build, and the functioning state of virtualenv+pip.

Not being able to use mod_wsgi with python3 was a bit of a pain, ( fastcgi wrapper, to the rescue ) but solved.
Should read more like "Google has an Iron grip on Google Apps (Gapps)" - Not Android. Android is the OS, not the Google service based apps.
I agree. Identity theft is just a particular method of fraud with a name that mitigates the responsibility of the institutions that enabled the fraudsters.

I don't know if it is one one of those terms that was invented by one of those PR agencies that invented terms like "climate change" to mitigate the visceral impact of "global warming."[1] But it certainly has ended up as a term that obfuscates the responsibility of banks to stop treating public information like passwords.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz
Do the search again. We have two indexes, a shallow one for things we have never seen and a deep one for things people have searched for. The results have changed likely since your first search. This would not be an issue if we had only 15% new searches.
I'm convinced that those 'errors' on reports are actually phishing.

When I ordered my reports I paid with postal orders, so as not to leak any financial information back to the agencies. I'm glad I did so, as the details ( other than my mortgage ) were laughably incorrect.

I was on the verge of writing to correct them and then caught myself - that's exactly what they want, isn't it? So hopefully by now they've diverged even further from the truth.
Interesting 'study'. I wonder if it's particularly repeatable though. Football fans are incredibly tribal - they actively want to be part of a group, and following someone on Twitter is a very lost cost way of participating. As far as engagement goes, sports fans are low-hanging fruit.

Doing the same thing for a new coffee shop for example, would probably be a great deal harder.
Management consulting firms and Wall Street banks have employed somewhat strict GPA and SAT/GMAT cutoffs for quite some time, but even they can't resist the allure of brainteasers during the interview process.

Google, on the other hand, appears to have done away with them, and now prefers to evaluate potential hires without giving too much weight to GPA or test scores:
http://qz.com/96206/google-admits-those-infamous-brainteaser...
> If you've previously done a lot of statically typed work, it's much more meh.

Specially when being old enough to remember when all your peers used Modula-2 and Turbo Pascal.
Wait... what company originally wrote the code? I'd like to know.

And I'm assuming said company billed by the hour? And of course, there's no way for the government to claw back the money?
does google really care?
Hello World from Cairo - Egypt . anyone?
I will only buy / recommend nexus phones. Knowing that the phone will be updated quickly and for a long time is worth a premium, rather than being a cash in strat for Google.
Monopoly is not antitrust. Abusing control of a market is. A monopoly (which is usually considered to be dominance if a market place) is not itself unlawful.
He obviously had - his campaign was praised about the high quality of IT personal and solutions that were developed.

But after all getting reelected is more important than making sure your signature piece of legislation is actually working at launch.
I suspect he doesn't have to rely on closures to do pagination: they're a programming convenience that means you don't have to do things like think about what state persists between pages.

Anything you can do with SQL you can do with in-memory data structures. If you're interested, I'll be happy to take any SQL query and convert it to some Python list comprehensions on arrays of dicts.
It is a good strategy, if the company is interviewing freshers as programming is teachable and the assumption is that new inductee will take few months to become productive. If you can't wait, the best strategy is to give a live coding problem and test the person's proficiency in the required language/technology. I invariably do the latter as my requirements are always very specific. Most start ups I suppose, are themselves undecided on product/market/technology choice and thus the former strategy.
What do you think of this idea: developing billing plans as functional code (sets of functions), managing them in Git (changes, versions, effective dates) as any source code, treating stored account data as immutable results of transactions (making account data available for any given moment)?
defer is no different than using(C#), try-resources(Java), scope(D), with(Python).
CyberGhost Launches New, Faster & Simplified Windows Client
You would be testing them on the ability to learn a new language. You could test the same abilities using just a custom library. This is a test I used to use on intern candidates. I didn't even provide documentation, just examples of API usages, and was testing their ability to learn from example.
I'm fine with only hiring people who have done some work outside their workplace. If they're really great at programming, they have the drive to try new things outside work. Indeed, a couple good personal projects is probably the best predictor of skill you could find.

(Skill and interest tend to be highly correlated.)
I live in two countries. Hmmm
Living United States Presidents
Bangkok, Thailand :)
I could chisel down Michelangelo's David statue into a skeletal structure of David. I'm sure you could appreciate that both as art and an act of vandalism.
I meant that mostly rhetorically in that I think that was a poor decision, or at least applied poorly. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you can show a high IQ is necessary for the job, isn't an IQ test acceptable?)

Still, asking for SAT scores is still legal and they correlate decently with intelligence.
People have personal preferences, I suppose. But the approach to kill the magic seems weird - I'd expect things to become more magical the more I learn about them.
I think that you hear whatever you want to hear, but the truth is very different: Google's apps and APIs are just cloud endpoints and weaving them into AOSP doesn't make sense and just delays updates, as the same author previously scribbled: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/balky-carriers-and-sl...

As for "strong-arm tactics", what is referred to is explained in this post: http://officialandroid.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-benefits-imp...

As Andy Rubin puts it, Google will not encourage non compatible forks, it is in their interest to have Android developed apps run on all Android devices. Anyone can still have a go but Google won't encourage it.

It's a very flawed and overwritten attack piece, seemingly coming out of nowhere.
How to do good talks at conferences
C is anything but simple, given the amount of undefined behavior it has.
> Spoiler alert: to solve this problem, you need to know how to enumerate the rationals.

This problem was addressed nicely in this functional pearl by Jeremy Gibbons, et al.: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/jeremy.gibbons/publications/rationals... . As interesting as the result is, however, it's a pretty well-made point that research-level ideas from the programming languages community are not really software engineering interview material in the vast majority of cases.

This is yet another example of "rockstar developer"-itis, wherein startups are given to believe that they need the best of the best when in fact they do not. This particular example is entirely egregious because they asked her about something that requires enumerating the rationals when what they really wanted was an iOS code monkey. Then they fired her, based on their own shoddy interview.
I also think that there might be a mismatch between hiring process and expectations. When you say "But if I have a couple of weeks more" then you obviously underestimate the time it takes to learn if we are actually talking about somebody without much programming experience. Try "if I have a couple of years more".
If it's any consolation my bank pays off my credit card every 30 days. When I signed up the credit card would get payed on the 1st of the month. Over the years that date has drifted to now be the 20th. So even the big players haven't solved this recurring payment problem.
Maybe even Turbo Basic would do the trick! :)
Secret giant worm behind mystery of vanishing aquarium fish
Oh no, you are wrong. Machine learning algorithms that are used by Google learn by observing behaviours of users and the results of this learning is essentially a black box of parameters and weights for the target function.
Certainly they analyze the data and add some parameters manually, for example, manual review process but most of the work is done in the opaque black box.
So your statement that "Google absolutely chooses which pages rank highly and which do not according to their own subjective human judgement" is not accurate.
Checking VirtualDub
That, or just Google it and see if Robin Gunningham flew into the country recently.
Various techniques to implement internal DSLs in Java
I haven't done any statistical surveys, in my undergrad years, I find math students are much smarter than the cs majors.
Poll: Where are you currently living in the US?
Drilling down from the poll on current location to current location for the US. Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583772
SF Bay area
Seattle/Redmond area
Other California
Other west coast
Boston/Cambridge
Other East Coast
Michigan / Ohio / Pittsburgh
Other noncoastal
IMHO, the post is more about the interviewers not understanding what is important for success in the job they are interviewing for than about anything else. If you need a person that will have to switch technologies, languages and paradigms, you have to test for that, make sure a candidate has done it before or is capable of doing it in expected time with expected depth.

If one is good and quick in problem solving or has high GMA, that does indicate that he has the capacity to handle new and difficult things in general, but says nothing about the speed with which he can handle a particular new thing. Author's example with JavaScript is very good illustration how difficult can it be to learn a new paradigm for the first/second time.
Um, not really. There's a working group that is gathering data, exploring options, and intends to present a plan early next year.

Right now what we have is very minimal. The current tools let you manage versions your own way. If we built something more complex we would be stuck with it forever. We're being conservative because getting it wrong would be worse than not providing it at all.
Added a new poll for you - if you're interested, go there to vote or comment if you want the categories adjusted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583918
They are anonymizing queries after 18 months, not deleting them.
I never really understood why teachers and preschool teachers make so little money (and recognition/work environments etc. aren't great). As a society I'd expect we'd put a higher premium on educating our children.

It's an interesting double whammy because in many countries there's mandatory school attendance until a certain age. So basically you "force" kids to attend school and then don't even try to create the best learning environment possible.

From my very limited samplesize of being an exchange student in the US back in high school I have also noticed that the situation in the US is actually worse. There's quite a different level of respect for teachers. In Germany being a HS teacher is a fairly respectable job socially (they also get lifelong tenure which may or may not be a good thing, I'm leaning the concept is flawed because I'd rather be able to fire people).
Airbnb user account “hacked” for one week
Thanks cylo for the post. Sadly we can't seem to trust the credit agencies or Government agencies with data protection. We need a politician who will champion some sort of legal offence (Federal?) for digital data protection breaches whatever the industry/company (above anything that already exists) that will scare companies enough that they start taking digital identity seriously. Maybe that's a pipe dream but I get the sense after reading this article that regulators just don't carry a big enough stick or have too light a touch when punishing serious infractions.
Here's a serious question: what exactly is a "content person" when they clearly don't create content? According to the article, they push data from A to B.

Surely that is the problem? Wouldn't the truly disruptive question be "How do I automate those who push content from point A to point B"?
If you're wondering, the "two stacks queue" is an easy way to write a simple immutable queue for a functional programming language. You use one functional stack for enqueueing and one for dequeueing. When the dequeue stack is exhausted the enqueue stack is "flipped" into the dequeue. Amortized runtime is O(1) per operation.
Asking math questions might exclude some good candidates. I know more than a couple very productive programmers that did not go through a formal CS education. Asking math questions to those candidates could even scare them for no reason. I hired people who had no idea about Lagrange Multipliers but were able to ship code in various languages and even learn new paradigms when necessary.

There are not only smart people and persons referencing reference manuals. Being a programmer often means solving bugs in messed-up codebases, build web apps using the technology du jour, or making data go from one place to another, and asking math questions does not help a lot to find people able to do this. This blog post resonates with some people I met.

I have been programming for a while, and went through a CS education, but my experience with hiring made me realize that being good with maths and being a productive programmer are not necessarily two things that always come together.
The fact that I can download and build Android is what makes it meaningfully open.
They way they have defined Western Europe it amounts basically to France/Germany/Benelux/Switzerland.
> I can't imagine ever building something that relies on a <any company name> service at this point.

Seriously, if you don't build it or own it, you can't rely on it. SaaS is convenient, but it's a flawed business model if you depend on any startup/product lasting forever. If you want to last forever, you have to innovate for yourself or buy the people you will depend on.
I was actually looking for that update and thought that the RT customer base is once again neglected, after being unable to install most apps / programs...
How to Build a Secret Facebook
This video does a great job explaining how Bitcoin works. Here's the accompanying blog post:

http://www.imponderablethings.com/2013/07/how-bitcoin-works-...
As a last note (and as a last chance for the pathetic down voters that lack better ways of arguing :-) ):

I Googled. There really is some guy that wrote a book and claims that the embarrassing Wikileaked internal US data is a conspiracy! :-)

He had an article up at one of the usual left extremist sites (alternet? zmag?). Sorry, should have written this when I read it.

He also ignored the obvious reality check from IBC and why the needed conspiracies to hide them isn't visible in the Wikileaks documents.

(E.g. where the Hell are all the dead buried?! How could they get most every doctor to keep quiet -- if the Lancet report is correct, any larger hospital morgue in Bagdad should see almost as many dead as the whole country's official statistics!? Why weren't death certificates given out (important in Iraq)? Where are the hundreds of thousands maimed -- and who made their prostheses?! Etc)

Also, I doubt there is discussion of why the Wikileaks lacked information of the conspiracies to influence the other measurements with larger data sets than Lancet. And the conspiracies needed to keep hiding e.g. data about all the maimed, predicted by the Lancet report, after US left. And so on, ad nauseam.

I doubt he covers the serious academic criticism.

And probably no discussion of the simple solution -- idealists lie... Hell, lots of researchers fake results just to get published.

I still predict you will like the book... :-)

What I learned from this discussion: The US extreme left/right are equally crazy.

I still chuckle when I think about your claim that all are in denial, except left extremists... Thanks for that.
> Google literally pushed the company out of business by strong-arming manufacturers to stop using Skyhook services.

This is what Skyhook claimed, but the reality was much different. Skyhook were intentionally or unintentionally polluting the Google AP database. They refused to change and so failed the compatability test.

Look into this more.
Hm, maybe if I ever have to hire somebody I'll challenge them to a Corewar duel :-)

Before the internet my friends and I sometimes used to get to together, everybody got some time to write a Corewar warrior on paper, and then we'd watch the tournament together. It was great fun.
See, there's so much more that you need to learn when you start on a project in a company. There's the framework they use, their libraries, the requirements for the project, the problem domain, the people you work with, the process they use, ... just to list the few that come to the top my head. Especially learning the problem domain can be very hard and challenging to programmers with little or no knowledge of the field. It can easily take a couple of month, if not years to become reasonably proficient.

So yes, "a couple of weeks" is certainly not enough to transform a graduate into a project lead for bespoke iOS project, but it could easily be enough to transform a decent java programmer with solid project lead experience. Transforming a crack Objective C Programmer with no lead experience can take easily as much time, if not more.

My gist is that programming knowledge will only get you so far and depending on what position you're hiring for other experience combined with the ability and willingness to learn may be much more interesting. And whatever I do, I tend to hire for that trait since that allows people to pick up other abilities when required.
Which did you choose? All of us here in Taiwan should at least represent consistently ;-)
I'm pretty skeptical of your claim that the point of marriage historically was to force women to stay in the marriage. Evolutionary sociobiology holds the opposite: that marriage evolved to get men to stick around. A woman already has an evolutionary incentive to provide for her offspring: she's invested far more in them (having provided the egg and nurtured them inside her for 9 months) than her partner has. A man's evolutionary incentive is to spread his seed across more women, because he can have many children while his wife can only have one per year. But since society benefits from not having all the violence and uncertainty that results from men porking each others' wives and being unsure whether the children they were raising were actually their own children, marriage evolved.

If your "70% of no-fault divorces were started by women" statistic holds true, it could be because the greater economic power wielded by men made them pretty shitty husbands, and so when the opportunity arose, their wives divorced them.
Look at any time period, any medium, and the most creative work is always going against the grain.

You are indulging in a circular definition in which most creative stands in for best or most worthy art, which of course depends on the premise which you set up in the first place, and which is a peculiarly 20C view of art. Only with the break down of the patron system and in quest of a new definition of art and a new place in the world did artists turn to the idea of being a creative force challenging the status quo (economic and artistic).

I don't think Michelangelo for example would have recognised your definition of his art as only meaningful in as much as it breaks the rules. His art was almost all in service of the church, which was the dominant political and economic force of the time. You can try to rewrite the history of art as a history of innovation and rebellion, but why bother? Why not understand it in its totality, which is certainly not as an instrument of rebellion, or even as a force for change - for much of the history of art change was gradual and consensual over decades and centuries, and nothing to do with challenging authority, quite the reverse, it was usually in the service of authority, used as propaganda, teaching materials and social proof. Art was a useful craft for most of its history.

Great art can include rebellion, but it is not confined to it, and frankly I think you're defending a pithy but inaccurate slogan which falls far short of capturing the full role of art in our society.
>> Cheaper, faster, better. All three.
> [citation needed]

Lookup the history of laser eye surgery over the last, say, ten years.

Free markets work. That's irrefutable. The problem is we've never had a free market system when it comes to medicine.