skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great news. Hopefully once they iron out the powertrain and battery engineering (making it more cost effective), they can start manufacturing small inexpensive cars that at least middle america can afford. I really think this is the future for tesla. They could have an entire line of cars, one for every class of citizen.

Tesla Pico - 2 seater smart-car-esque communter car. With 100 mi range and 45 minute recharge time. Price ~$15,000

Tesla Executive - Economy 5 seater sedan, 200 mi range with 1.5 hr recharge time. Basically a cheaper Tesla Model S, without the fancy entertainment system, and a more toned down interior/exterior. Would be comparable to a BMW 3 series in size, a good bit smaller than the Model S. Also would be less powerful and have less pricey wheels, speakers etc. Price ~$35,000

Then of course we have the Model S and Roadster 1/2. These are just my ideas on where they should go from here.
As noted, there are numerous expert programmers who couldn't do an SQL join in a live interview.

Besides PG, RTM, and TLB, most or all of the Linux kernel programmers, including Linus; Pete Norvig; embedded systems programmers; and on and on.

You could find a lot of people who can handle the SQL you need while screening out brilliant people who are FAR more capable, but just happen not to know item X.
No. it began as a subject catalog - Art, building, cooking, dining... In fact when it first launched it was literally just one page of links, then it became a page of links to pages of links, and so forth. http://www.dmoz.org/ (open directory) is the closest thing to what Yahoo used to be like and probably helped to inspire Wikipedia too.

back then search was possible but excruciatingly slow - you could use other net services like WAIS or Archie but it was the sort of thing you'd leave running the background. Plus those services were terminal based so navigation was tedious if you were on dial-up. Having all that stuff classified and aggregated on one website was a godsend. The amazing part is that in its early incarnation it was so simple anyone could have done it. Literally, just links and descriptors. I've often wondered if attitudes of and towards Jerry Yang have something to do with the extreme simplicity of how Yahoo started out, and the 'right place right time' versus any definable innovation.

I never, ever thought of Yahoo as a search engine - if I did a search there, I assumed I was searching their internal catalog rather than the whole internet. Lycos and Altavista were the search engines of choice, while Yahoo was the homepage where I went for aggregated content. Then one day I tried Google and never went back.
How so?

You seem to be suggesting that if the US went to the same model as the rest of the world, we would all collectively implode? You need to explain that position a little deeper.
Desktop isn't the problem. It's the browser that's the issue.
It's released under the MIT license. Sounds like an opportunity to me :)
Crockford doesn't work on YUI - but he does work at Yahoo. I will fully concede that he may know more about ECMAScript than me - but I will happily challenge him on JavaScript + DOM any day :-)

Quite seriously though, since jQuery and YUI came out at nearly the same time back in early 2006 - I feel that it has to do with the simplicity of the jQuery API and the active community that's grown around jQuery. YUI has always had better documentation (even though jQuery's has been good), so that can't be it.

A couple points:

- You can always do more complicated work with simple APIs but it's fundamentally harder to do simple work with more complex APIs.

- YUI didn't promote external plugins or development communities. For example the ExtJS library that grew up based upon YUI was left to stagnate and grow on its own rather than become part of YUI itself. If the YUI team worked to bring Jack Slocum on board YUI would be in a much more dominant position than what it is now.

- YUI has been closed to outside contributions for most of its life. No bug tracker, no outside patches, etc. It's only recently that they've truly Open Sourced both the code and the process surrounding the library.

I do find it to be odd, as well - YUI really should be more popular than it is. It's well written, well documented, and is well maintained. Even after all of that its market share is shrinking.

http://google.com/trends?q=jquery+javascript%2C+yui+javascri...
Belief ? As in that it wasn't real all along ?

I don't think there is any belief in it. Mostly just people that have made up their mind after inspecting the evidence, and the evidence is pretty good.

Think of it as 'the best we've got'. And that is of course until something better comes along. Scientists are notoriously hard to convince of stuff if you don't show the evidence. Since this evidence - assuming for the moment it is solid - would have to be inserted in the puzzle somewhere it will probably lead to adjustment of some of the pieces of the puzzle around it. But I highly doubt that it would upset evolution in a major way, there is such a vast amount of supporting evidence for that that it would take a very large chunk of counterevidence indeed for it to be changed in a fundamental way. Minor adjustments are to be expected though.

That something is 'pre-history' means that we do not have any accounts about that period. For all we know we've been 'visited' in the past by something like this and our genetical heritage still carries a bit of information about that.

Another analogue to this is that some west Europeans are much harder to infect with HIV because they had an ancestor that survived the plague times, was infected but made it through somehow.

I have a bit of an ethical problem with the wording of the article by the way, it suggests lots but there is actually very little substance that this gene will in fact prevent people from contracting HIV and / or cure them of it once they are sero positive. As to 'curing aids' that's a wholly different kettle of fish.
I disagree, I think most people who comment here would do it regardless. And you're not driving anyone away because lurking is still easy and free.

I still wouldn't do it though, if only because I don't see anything to suggest that this place is any worse than it was last year when I started reading it.
Unfortunately the debate usually isn't as black and white all the time given that there are a number of metrics like survival rates following heart attacks or cancer detection/treatment where the US is very much ahead of other first world nations.

Absolute cost is far from a strawman in this issue given that the basic argument for reform (as they've proposed - since I think a lot of people are for reform including Dean Kamen), is that the US healthcare system as it is now is too expensive and ergo a significant barrier to access. Others like Kamen make the point that by restricting absolute costs, innovation will drop because the incentives for innovating drop.
Sexy Light Box, Best lighbox tool for your blog & website.
There's always http://mailabrick.com
http://www.metabrew.com/article/anti-rdbms-a-list-of-distrib...

http://themindstorms.blogspot.com/2009/05/quick-reference-to...

The comparisons in those posts are probably outdated soon with so many new nosql data stores.
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian, and I shouldn't be wading into this debate...

You do realize though that the rest of the modern world looks at the US in this one issue the same way we looked at you when you had legalized segregation?

The rest of us can't even understand why this is a debate. How is it that someone can argue in favour of people not having the ability to access a doctor? Would you also argue that people shouldn't have access to fire-fighters unless they pay the fire-fighter's tax? Police? The protection of an Army?

Our socialized systems aren't a panacea, but the trade-offs of having someone wait for knee surgery so that another can get cancer treatment seem pretty fair to me. Sometimes, I simply don't understand the American perspective.
So your basic point is that no one wants to die and anyone who claims that they do is "obviously" suffering from some mental illness regardless of how cogent and intellectually sound their reasoning may be? Talk about circular reasoning.
The pre-print PDF seems to have encryption/defense against copy/paste, so I can't post further extracts here.

Use a better, non-restricted PDF reader? :S
"Best: What's a debugger?"

Run for your life.

Glad to see that the examples touched on the fact the being a good programmer has as much to do with interacting with people as it does code. Whether you're chained to a desk in the basement or working one on one with clients (or both?), I think the key is the programmer's flexibility.

The ability to think quickly and adapt smartly to sudden bugs/conflicts/requests can really help sort out the code monkeys from the wizards.

The 'Best' category kind of irks me; programming is an ongoing learning process. Always try to be a better programmer, never try to 'the best'.
No, that wasn't quite my point, but you're relatively close.
You could add this to your ~/.vimrc so that you don't skip wrapped lines:

" Don't skip a wrapped line
nnoremap j gj
nnoremap k gk
vnoremap j gj
vnoremap k gk
Thank you. I will. I've been whining for a while about how the web browser isn't Unixy enough.
>> "due to the well publicized problems"

Err. Which well publicized problems?
Bad usability as well. Links are indistinguishable from normal text (except for the obnoxious and irrelevant ad links).
Well, compare this: http://www.weddingbee.com/2009/07/16/craziest-vendor-respons...

Apparently some people don't like talking to users.
Terminal illness as in I can't move, I can't live I can't die and 100% I will not recover from this. I wake up in pain...but not from sleep, I live in pain around the clock.
They can't move, they have to be taken to Switzerland, they can't leave the country by themselves etc. They need help to die...that's what makes the family accomplice and there is the debate because commons sense is gone. The letter of law is taken literally and that's why so many idiots can sue for any dumb reason because the action is taken into account not the motive or the scope.
> Hmm you seem to be laboring under a concept that to know how to join two tables you need to be an RDBMS "expert"

You're misreading. You kept bringing up the point of "expert" knowledge (e.g. in C and for-loops), or knowledge of RDBMSes, and saying you couldn't know X without also knowing Y.

As the question was about SQL, NOT RDBMSes or "expert"-level knowledge of SQL or RDBMSes, I pointed that out.

> On the contrary, if you can't join two tables with SQL, you don't have any "working knowledge of SQL".

Depends on what "can't" you're talking about. I can look it up and then do it. A lot of people don't remember the syntax. Obviously anyone with working knowledge CAN do a join; the question was whether they could tell you how to do it off the top of their head.

Even things you've used a lot, if you haven't used them recently, you'd likely slip up in an interview.

> Every answer you make exposes the hollowness of your supposed "working knowledge"!

Not really. I can make things work (hence "working knowledge") and look up what I don't know and use it right away.

I've been using in-memory databases and of course the equivalent of a JOIN is a basic function but it's not an SQL JOIN.
I've heard it before, and I'm sure I'll hear it again, but this, to me, is absolutely the sort of thing I need drilled in my head over and over and over again.

The current project I'm working on is simple. The idea is simple in general, the layout is simple, and while some of the technical glitches and implementation details may not be (they never are anyway) -- I keep overcomplicating things in my head.

I've gotten about 3 weeks worth of spare time thrown at it, which isn't much, but in that time, I've already wasted a ton of effort. I redesigned the layout yesterday. True, I made it simpler, and I think easier to use, and ultimately, it's a MUCH better layout for the product, but it was completely wasted effort to determine whether or not my product is even worth building, because I honestly don't know the answer.

I guess the main difference for me is that after a number of false starts (that later ended up as actual products, and profitable ones at that,) I have committed myself to finishing this thing, if only to say that I can build a project to completion without external motivators. That almost gives me an excuse to waste time because if it's rejected early, I'll assume it's due to a poor layout, or lack of features, etc.

So yeah, I needed to read that, and get back to square 1, and friggin stay there for a bit.
Well, I was responding to lincolnq's comment, not Riak itself:

"I'm sort of excited about this project. I still want a non-relational distributed database that can do fast range queries over arbitrary properties"

I thought neo4j's ranged queries and lucene indexer might be of interest, or at least discussion. It's certainly ideal for those requirements.
FoxIt Reader beats the crap out of Acrobat: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/
There's a 'foundation' type, they don't have a profit motive.

I assume you're asking this from a USA perspectie, the wikipedia page on foundations has this to say:

"In the United States, many philanthropic and charitable organizations are considered to be foundations. However, the Internal Revenue Code distinguishes between private foundations (usually funded by an individual, family, or corporation) and public charities (community foundations or other nonprofit groups that raise money from the general public). Private foundations have more restrictions and fewer tax benefits than public charities."
To be fair though, both of those companies are extreme outliers. If you start off with a stack of funding (and lots of great advice from smart and well-connected people) then you can hop right into the big picture stuff. However, if you're a small bootstrapping company you absolutely have to get profitable as soon as possible.
If you're set on foreign markets, and have enough local expertise, it seems like you guys may have better chances of commercial success by partnering with existing telco's or established firms in your target countries. They probably don't have the in-house technical capability to stay competitive with market behemoths like Google and are looking for cost-effective ways to get their feet into a new area. (you were vague about what your product actually is so it's hard to know if any of this is true.)

I'm saying this based on a few assumptions about your business...
1. There's a cultural disconnect between you and your customers and there are various barriers to import
2. You have no idea how to price this
3. There is political/legislative concerns (working in telecom myself, I know there are plenty of legal barriers)
4. You need the local skills, resources, and distribution of existing firms.
You have no idea, I recently got into a car accident (look at my history for the story of that). And for all of our "socialist policies" in the US that republicans owuld want you to believe, we're grossly libertarian.

Long story short: Accident happened, cop came out and wrote me a ticket based on the fact that he had to come out, and pretty much told me that. Then today I got a bill from the fire department/EMS for them having to come out. In total these bills/tickets are about 1K in cost. So you'd think there isn't a fire-fighters tax but there is....
My thoughts exactly. Pain doesn't have to last forever, especially not mental illnesses with cures. They should no doubt be an exception in any potential law.

It's not "will they suffer for years", it's the same reason they banned capital punishment in the UK: The mistakes they might make which can't be fixed.
Thanks for the reference. I should have known that!
I guess I implied that that was true, but also not necessary.
Yes, yes, all of the above plus I really like
the email client, simple and clean;
note taking-thats truely great when doing research;
speeddial;
the configurability
lot of thinking gone it usability - it shows

And all of this without a single plugin that would be drawing the performance down.

I have to admit though that it does have some downsides as well. Silverlight sometimes works sometimes doesn't (it's actually the only thing that can crash Opera and Im forced to develop in it). There are some sites using activex that doesn't work and especially when using the email client (10k emails) it gets a bit slow to start and shutdown.

But overall great browser (using it since 3.60)
I was under the impression that lack of regulation is what caused many of these mega banks to collapse. Mostly because the regulations preventing banks from merging with investment firms and such were lifted in the 80's or 90's. I'm not necessarily saying that regulation is a good thing, though. Just that there is a balance to be struck.
Realize the person inside the frame has limits on their joint motion and a certain gait, if the motors do not correctly follow the prescribed gait you could seriously injure the person wearing it.

That's a very good point. Muscle stiffness or spasms are a persistent problem for people with paralyzing injuries.
If anyone involved is reading this, it would be nice to have an option for the Netherlands. You know, where Python was _invented_ ;-)
Nice. New to me.
Also, when the conversation gets pretty contentious, the pull quote they choose is "Bjarne Stroustrup: You may be right...". I'm not a fan of this interviewer.
Most of the good programmers dont think about bad programmers, but if your hiring one, it's something you want to think about.
"Helium balloon. The balloon was attached to a weight. The address was written on the balloon with magic marker; no postage was affixed. Our operative argued strongly that he should be charged a negative postage and refunded the postal fees, because the transport airplane would actually be lighter as a result of our postal item. This line of reasoning merely received a laugh from the clerk. The balloon was refused; reasons given: transportation of helium, not wrapped."
AT&T is a pretty well-publicized problem.
<blink>. Missed that. The form has been updated.
In my opinion, the procedure he describes sounds great to measure the skills of the candidate(s), but that's too early to called the 'Best' resource of the bunch. It will not be until he or she is actually working there that you will be able to measure the real quality (both on the technical and the human perspective ) of him/her.
"I don't see this as an either-or situation; don't we have both right now? Especially if you look at legs instead of arms."

We don't have this right now, that's the point. Yes, there are super-high-end prosthetics available to the uber-rich, and there is the regular stuff. But even the "regular stuff" is out of reach of most Americans, especially the millions that are uninsured (or underinsured by the employer) and thus SOL.

The USA currently has the full range of medical technology commensurate with how much you can afford - but the problem is that much of the really critical care (surgeries, etc) is completely out of reach of the average individual. It truly is a system where the rich receive the absolute best and the poor (or even middle class) can just crawl into a corner and die.

"Besides, http://web.mit.edu/first/segway/ is one of many <$1000, DIY Segway projects, so this tech is getting cheaper and more accessible."

This only proves my point. DIY geek projects aside, there is no low-cost Segway competitor on the market, likely due to patent issues (I have not looked into this myself, so correct me if I'm wrong). This is the same situation for pharmaceuticals - there is no incentive to reduce drug costs when your patients must buy from you and only you, due to patent law. So yeah, there are a bunch of DIY solutions, but still no competition on the open market, and thus prices stay up.
blogspam.

probably cut & paste source:

http://guidesigner.net/collection-of-development/sexy-light-...
In the comments for the editorial linked at the top, some of the committee members take him to task: http://www.devx.com/cplus/Article/42365/0/page/2
I can send you a picture ;-)
Ask HN: HN for science?
I think this has been asked before, but can't find any references. Is there an HN-style place specifically for science news?
I wish there were good companies in India using Python. Most companies claiming to do so just tack on Python to a long list of languages they use and don't really use it significantly. I know great programmers who would kill for a decent paying job in Django/Python.

The "do crap work outsourced to India" idea is what the Indian software industry is built around. Lots of java/dotnet.Some Ruby on Rails, thanks to the marketing of RoR. Very little python. :(
Then it is the public and corporate pension funds, endowments, fund-of-funds, etc., that should face scrutiny, not the venture capital firms. Figuring out their expected return from their venture capital investments shouldn't be very difficult because of how long the industry has been around, not to mention that venture capital investments on average are only 1-3% of their portfolios (due to venture capital's lack of liquidity), so the amount of money at risk is insignificant compared to the size of the portfolio. If losing 1-3% will collapse an investors fund, then they were over-leveraged to begin with, just like Lehman Brothers.

If the Treasury Department is worried about how much people are putting into venture capital, then they should make a ceiling of 1-3% of the fund's portfolio being able to be invested in venture capital. No regulations are needed on venture capital firms.
GameStreamer, now rivaling Steam, D2D and GoG
GameStreamer has created a new technology to allow developers to submit games on the fly. The games are then reviewed by GameStreamer staff. Once approved the game is immediately distributed to all the business partners of GameStreamer.

Gamers also benefit from this. The ability to see all the newest games right when they are completed. The most competitive pricing straight from the developers themselves. Gamers get to have a game library without a bunch of useless CDs that get scratched up and lost.
how do we know it is by the python software foundation?
I did a similar experiment with good results in college--mailed an individually wrapped slice of American cheese to a buddy.
I burst out laughing when I read that in the article.

This is good too: "Never-opened small bottle of spring water. We observed the street corner box surreptitiously the following day upon mail collection. After puzzling briefly over this item, the postal carrier removed the mailing label and drank the contents of the bottle over the course of a few blocks as he worked his route. "