skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree the analogy is not right. Firstly I disagree that the Art of Software Engineering has disappeared or gone down or lost. Yes it is continually morphing and yes it has its own problems. I have been involved in both 'construction' worlds for over 20 years and the analogy is misplaced.

'We need an AutoCAD like tool for designing software blueprints.'

No you don't. Autocad replaced manual drafting and took some of the drudgery of detailing out, but has made construction more 'inefficient'. The ease of change has actually slowed down construction. Project after project in fast growing areas such as the Middle East has been slowed down by 'design' problems. One hi-rise in Doha has actually tilted by over 300 mm and if a solution is not found it will be demolished (50 storey building). Most Construction Projects use Primavera for planning, one such Project that I am involved with has 22,000 activities. No-one is using it, due to its sheer volume and the actual plan itself is behind the reality on Site!

What Software Engineering and Construction need are better tools to manage teams (not tweet!), tools to manage complexity (not just to-do lists) and tools to manage re-usability and generation of some of the code. You can use Autocad to 'draw' out a building floor, produce a blue-print for an aircraft engine or draw out a cartoon. For me a computer language is my 'Software Engineering Tool'. The 'design methodology and other tools' reside in the computer that lives in my head!
The Science behind Surrogates
That's the kind of person that will never work for our company. If you're applying to hundreds of jobs and just sending your resume to everyone our process will definitely filter you out. When we advertise online for a job we're usually looking for one or two key skills and we're very careful to spell out exactly what we want (e.g. a relevant university degree and at least X experience with Y technology) and still we get HUNDREDS of applications from people with no degree and no experience with the technology we're after.

More recently we've begun to filter applications like this, and now instead of 200 applications in the first 48 hours we probably get 6 or 8 - but all of those match our requirements. Sure we could be missing out on some awesome person but it's not worth my time looking through 200 applications to find him.
The M&M test is very specific. If you see brown M&Ms, it means they didn't read the contract carefully or take the details seriously. That in turn means something important and potentially dangerous is likely to be seriously wrong. The snopes article states that experience confirms this prediction.

The "how many gas stations in the US" question is nothing like the brown M&Ms test. It is not testing anything nearly so specific, nor is it as easily confirmed by experience. At best you're taking a subjective interpretation of a creative answer and comparing it to subjective performance down the road. And even if you don't consider the inherent subjectivity, it's hard to document a reasonable number of positive and negative test cases; and even then controlling for other variables is essentially impossible.

Van Halen used the test to predict performance conditions for a specific date and venue. The gas stations answer is used to predict the behavior of a person for a significant period of time.
"It's time the UK broke into civil war, or at least blew some shit up, and put an end to the corrupt government's stronghold on their rights."

...because nothing makes a government go from totalitarianism to greater personal rights faster than a little terrorism?
He is a well-known hacker, but this isn't news.
I first saw this about a week ago, so it has been happening for some time now.
The spam points to a site that says it was "As seen on MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CNBC, and As Seen on TV"... With such credentials, how could it not be legit? Plus it only costs $1.95 to get started!

/sarcasm
It is attributed. Double-check the bottom of the blog post.
Nokia knows quite well that its biggest challenge is adapting and reacting quickly. But they're shipping something like million units a day from an organization that probably numbers 100,000 people. That's 10x the volume of iPods rolling off the line, nevermind iPhones. Good luck steering a ship that big! It's a fucking miracle to do this at all, and they do it with a 3.5% dividend on their share price and great margins.

You can see steps they've taken to address most of the problems listed in the article going back over a year, but they've just done a shitty executing them at every step of the way. Unlike some of their competition. It's going to take losing 15-20% of their market share to get back on track, if they're not slain completely by Apple, Rim, Google, SE, LG, etc...
This would only protect you against password guessing, but not against any remotely exploitable security holes in the SSH (or any other) daemon.
So the type of people who will jump ship first are the really good ones who can easily get jobs elsewhere leaving behind those who couldn't find replacement jobs. Sounds like a sure fire win plan.
I look forward to how one can mechanically handle "disorderly conduct".

Note that many of the things that are typically considered DO are legal in circumstances that do not have an explicit "DO doesn't apply here". Even worse, in many of those circumstances, the identity of the actor determines whether the act is DO and the "exemption" is usually for only some DO acts.
It's a library. I generally prefer LGPL or a BSD-like for those cases. It insures the largest number of people can use the code without having another license imposed on them. GPL is too restrictive for library usage, IMHO.

You could, of course, dual (or triple or quadruple) license the code if you like. You are, after all, the copyright holder.

For what it's worth, I prefer GPL for full-blown applications that are more likely to be added to rather than used for one piece of functionality in a larger application.
... or at least blew some shit up

Does this count?
http://www.speedcam.co.uk/gatso2.htm
When I was poking around to figure out what redbox's deal is, I found this link (http://www.paylessforfood.com/tag/redbox-videos/) which suggests that almost the majority of grocery store purchases are impulse buys. I'm not suggesting that while you're returning your video that you'll buy bread, milk, eggs, &c. surplus to your normal weekly shopping, but you might remember "Oh, I wanted to get some bananas" or the like. And while you get those, you spot the yogurt-covered pretzels that look tasty, so you grab those too. Voila, more sales.
Thanks!

I agree with you. Even though I'm also a flash developer, I'm looking forward to the day when I can get that level of performance out of javascript, and abandon proprietary plugins entirely.
Thanks Josh! =)
I don't know much about econmics, but here's an explaination on the Internet for last year's similar news:

'province' is political region, and you can't simply 'add up' those provice GDP figures because many of Chinese companies are inter-provincial. Each provincial officials will try their best to make the figure look large, but the central government has to eliminate duplicate ones.

The real question is why the gap 15,376bn-13,986bn=1390bn is so huge?
And what if we don't have a github account? It's like disqualifying a candidate because they like the wrong sports team, or make a vodka rather than gin martini. Pure idiocy.

Not to mention just because they haven't written open source in the past doesn't preclude quality work. I'd hire someone who does DO-178B over an average open source developer any day.
Correlation Clustering: I don't like you, but I like them...
I don't think I have any ethical responsibility to help make sites I go to profitable. I also don't like looking at ads.

In the case of Gmail, Google can easily absorb the cost of my not seeing ads. If they don't want to do that, they shouldn't provide free webmail.
I disagree. I see part of my job (software developer) as creative writing because I get to manipulate abstractions and generate something tangible. I feel the iterative process of making something from a blank editor screen is one of the most fulfilling parts of my job. Yes, there is frustration and sometimes I lose myself in focus and become irritable (to interrupting coworkers) but when it flows, it flows like running the rack in pool.
The idea is to hire someone that's best for the job, not someone who is best at getting the job.

Granted, not reading the posting thoroughly is not a good indicator, but it really is an extremely minor one. If the candidate is poor there will be plenty of other reasons to disqualify, and if it's an otherwise good candidate it's really not worth getting too worked up over.
The Default Starting Point: Brainstorming Ideas
The anxiety of one-off offset mistakes (e.g. filling in the Scantron incorrectly) aside, I think computer based testing makes it harder to do random access of questions during a test.
Bodega: an App Store for the Mac Desktop
As we sometimes like to say: "It's not a bug if a requirement is required to fix it"
Neat idea but the user experience is terrible. I want a whatever.app that just opens and does its thing when double clicked, not something that shows a dialog box telling me that a dozen things need to be downloaded.

Is there a way around this?
If an open source developer is defined as "one who is committed to a particular OSS project and is a regular code/review contributor" there are only two scenarios that I see where my company should hire him

1. My company stands to benefit from the evolution of said project (think red hat)

2. He is ready to move on and not contribute to the project any more. I would need his full attention to be on the project I am hiring him for.

I don't agree with the article that any random company should go and start hiring open source developers.
Thanks Joe. Btw I use webmin and virtualmin almost everyday on my joyent box. It's great software.
Ask HN: What is your favorite board game and why?
I like Reversi (a.k.a. Othello). I think because it is so simple, yet so complicated. It's counter-intuitive. It's a metaphor for life.

Which board game do you like best and why?
What It Means to Be an Early Adopter
Non-obvious keyboard support is still almost worthless.
Here's a question I've had for a while now. It may sound naive, but I'll ask it anyway:
Given the way Twitter is set up to track current trends, shouldn't it be really easy for them to identify when one identical tweet gets repeated hundreds or thousands of times at once? Obviously sometimes such tweets are legit (especially in the case of retweets) but it seems like this should be fairly easy to flag and delete quickly.
I would also beware of friending really cute girls that friend you first. And here I thought they were actually interested in my mind...
I was wondering whether output is statically or dynamically linked to the Mono runtime, since last I checked, Mono runtime is LGPL. I found this info:

http://www.mono-project.com/MonoTouch_Beta

Caveats

We consider MonoTouch feature complete, but there will be bugs lurking in this beta release. We will be issuing new builds every few days to correct bugs that developers will be running into, so please report these issues to the monotouch@lists.ximian.com mailing list.

The beta does not come with a license to redistribute the code beyond testing. For that you will need to wait for the official release in the first two weeks of September to buy the real product version.
Rehab staff 'killed web addict'
I tested other fancy option button like this in a very simple webapp and the users doesn't seem to understand that they can change it.

for now on, I'll stick with the default, unless the web app is build to run on the iPhone.
Ack, please don't. Neither space nor tab work (at least in Chromium), and not owning an iPhone, those things don't intuit "toggle" to me.
As to why the number are odd, its anyone's guess. I'm sure there are competing interests at various gov levels that would over or under-report. Just as likely is the various accounting systems for determining the numbers are flawed. Possibly not intentionally flawed, but these number are hard to assess. So its not surprising to see when you aggregate them and pull from different sources (different methods of reporting and guessing at the numbers) you may see wild discrepancies.
I doubt that numbers over the last 8 years were correct either. The difference is no one cared to question them.

As to the view that its a landmark for the Chinese press to openly suspect the numbers, I don't think its such a landmark. I read the Shanghai and China Daily papers (English) every day while in Shanghai. I've been reading them for years. There is always info on gov corruption, fund misuse, crime, etc in the papers. I find the reporting style much better than most mass media U.S. papers. There are certain hot button issues that are suppressed, but that takes an active effort on each issue. Lots of negative information gets printed.

Let me put it another way. What is the current debt obligations of all investments banks on Wall Street? The numbers I've read (from different seemingly credible sources) are wildly different.

I would guess that most locals in China when reading something like "average urban wages in China rose 13 per cent" take it as laughable. Not just because they don't feel it in their own pocket, but they know its almost impossible to know such a number.
It is painfully obvious that there is demand for a service here. People who bring their own tea bag and use the free wifi the entire day are never going to be profitable, but what about laptop users who aren't quite that cheap?

I did the working-from-a-cafe thing for a while, and it can be quite enjoyable. Working from home can lead to self-discipline problems. Renting an office can be expensive. Shared workspaces are more affordable, but the atmosphere isn't necessarily great. Working in coffee shops isn't for everyone, but it clearly works for some people.

So what's the business model that can make this work for everyone? There has to be one.
Twitter Sued For Patent Infringement by TechRadium Messaging company.
Go. Another very simple game that takes forever to master, and yet the rules can be tought in under a minute. It's also so complicated that the Go players of today are far better then the Go masters of 1000 or even 500 years ago because of all the strategy in the game that has been discovered and passed on. You can tell a lot about a person based on how they play Go... are they timid, aggressive, unwilling to make mistakes, willing to move without all the information? It comes out in a single game of Go.
I've played both a little Reversi/Othello and Go. If you haven't tried Go I'd give it a shot. It is good to start by playing a little against a computer (and don't feel bad about using a handicap) until you the basics click. Then find other humans I guess...

[I always had trouble with chess, my "ADD" always got in my way. I'd end up making a mistake I had previously ruled out, because I had forgotten where I was at, felt rushed, and eventually just made a move.]
Entrepreneurship During a Slump
I like www.kdice.com. It's a distillation of the best elements of Risk down to the most minimal essentials. You'd have to be crazy to try playing it on an actual board though. I believe it is the largest public installation of Google Web Toolkit. I'm kevin143 there if you want to play sometime. It is not an easy game, but I believe it is close to perfect.

Otherwise, Diplomacy.
It's obviously not a good article, it's obviously highly biased against Apple, which means it's either pro MS or pro Open Source, and it certainly didn't appear to be promoting the open source movement from how much I could tolerate of the article.
Love this, makes more sense in small areas.
I don't think has any merit, the first patent abstract says there should be response from receiving device back to the database. TCP ACK can't be considered this kind of response.
Wow, one would have hoped that TechRadium would have tried to upsell their clients on the security of their services over Twitter. This reminds me of the company suing Google because they are offering maps for free. Twitter is a start up and this will eat up some of their much needed capital... TechRadium is trying to bully them into shutting down instead of trying to have a better product. Another example of our patent system gone awry.
I wish I could tell all you guys working 70-80 hours the stories I've heard from 45-year-old guys who did that when they were your age. Short version: cut that out.
I'm sure we'll add a focus highlight or something soon!
In Go, all but the very best players in the world play with a handicap depending on who they are playing. It balances the game so that players who are not as adept have an equal chance at winning a particular game. This is an advantage that Go has over Chess, where removing pieces would just be silly.
My dad gave a test like that to people when he was in the Marine Corps. I'm not sure when he did it or in what unit but he says it was a test of their ability to follow directions. Since my dad had a lot of commands over maintenance, support, and engineer units it makes sense.
I've got the paper back. I read it back in highschool, and I'll recommend it.

One passage that stuck with me, was when he spoke about how he taught himself to write. The process was basically to read a page out of a "good book" several times, then close the book and try to reproduce their style... imitate, and iterate as necessary.

I tried to do this myself with Ralph "Where's Waldo" Emerson (I was a transcendentalist nut for a while); soon I found my sentences littered with semi-non-semi: colons everywhere. (The scattered use of parens came later.)

Also I liked his anecdote about beer delivery services while working in printing presses in Europe.
I was under the impression that all the major social APIs (facebook connect, twitter, etc...) terms of service prevent 3rd party services from storing any data for more than 24h?
In Canada many of our cafes have 20 min max signs. I've only ever seen it actually enforced once, when someone had stayed for nearly 5 hours without buying more than a simple coffee.
Well the mere fact that they spend so much time, and make money to artificially lower taxes is what's disturbing. Every pound that they make isn't being given to them through a government budget, essentially turning them into a semi-private organisation as they no longer have public safety in mind, they have profit in mind.

That's been evident for a long time in the UK. I grew up in a small town, and even there you could rely on seeing a few cops that were always helpful, but that's since gone. I haven't seen an officer on the street for over 5 years yet the number of speed cameras in the area has gone through the roof. I don't really see how this is making me as a civilian safer, because cops who watched the side walks have been replaced with cameras that watch the roads.
Even China faces meltdown
Sometimes people have habits, like following their own expectations and assumptions rather than paying attention to detail and accurately comprehending clear, simple, literal instructions. These are good habits to test for, and good habits to break, in many instances. Not everything in the world neatly maps onto people's assumptions and intuitions.
grellas, keep 'em good posts coming. It's good to have a lawyer amongst us and you have been dropping gems around here (I've been forwarding a few of your posts as well.)
"The most likely form of meltdown to occur is that of a banking system collapse, as the gigantic volume of recent loans goes bad and liquidity in the economy finally dries up. That would drain the huge Chinese savings pool and cause steep output contraction, particularly in the overleveraged and inefficient state-owned sector.
The excess money in the system, with M2 money supply up 28.5% in the year to June, also suggests that a price explosion cannot be far away. Although official inflation is currently negative, the People's Bank of China has already warned of a possible inflation resurgence.

"It must also be remembered that the social structure of China is now quite Latin American in nature, with a Gini (inequality) coefficient rising rapidly, already at 47 by 2007, well above its Asian neighbors and not far below Mexico (48) and Argentina (49). Thus an economic collapse is unlikely to be survived quietly, as was the case in South Korea and Thailand. "

The article has some interesting comparisons between China and other countries in the region. It's examination of the example of Japan was interesting to me.
A slightly more indepth article is http://www.macworld.com/article/142129/2009/08/twitter.html

The technology they are attempting to protect is described here http://www.techradium.com/about/irisBrief.cfm
I have a long commute to work :(

Alas! This has lead to many an audiobook listening.

You may like the audio book as well:

http://librivox.org/the-autobigraphy-of-benjamin-franklin-ed...

Librivox is kind of like Gutenburg except for audiobooks. In fact it has received help from Gutenberg in the past.
I've played it once or twice against a friend who also didn't know how to play. Seems like an interesting game, very deep.
No problem, apology accepted.
Though an individual may be "committed to a particular OSS project," it's hard to work on OSS in a vacuum. An open source developer is much more likely to have a broader awareness of the software landscape, especially when it comes to the F/OSS ecosystem. That knowledge can be invaluable when large tasks with tight deadlines pop up.

So as to your first point, I'd argue that the added domain knowledge would benefit your company, even if the specific project does not.

As to your second point, it seems like that policy would only allow you to hire individuals that do not practice their craft off-hours. I'm not sure how that would improve the quality of your team or its products.

All else being equal, I do believe that random companies should hire open source developers preferentially. If nothing else, the first and third bullets are quite useful: You can see real, working code before making a decision, and the commitment to a F/OSS project is a commitment to honing the developer's professional craft.
ReiserFS fading into obscurity as maker leads cops to corpse
It's funny that this article is on WSJ, owned by NewsCorp, which just said it is going to start charging for access to its online content.
Awesome. Glad to hear our stuff is useful to you.

As another data point or two, Webmin and Usermin are under a BSD-like license, and the Open Source version of Virtualmin is GPL. Even though Webmin is a full-blown application in its own right, we wanted it to be useful as a platform for as many folks as possible. I'm still unsure if that was the best license choice (hundreds of companies have built products on Webmin, and very few have contributed back in any notable way), but it definitely has led to widespread usage of the code.
It would be nice to add a yellow/someothercolor border or change the colors to a darker blue...
Probably just (another) cross-site scripting exploit
Hacker Dojo / coworking spaces. Charge a monthly or daily rate for a place to sit alone or with peers in a facility that has a restroom, tables, and power outlets.
How about public libraries start selling coffee!
Man arrested for modifying Xboxes
This story is more than an year old now.
We could automate all these steps using scripts. A very good example is the scripts by RightScale - http://github.com/rightscale/right_link/tree/master
It would be pretty difficult to find another global company that's been around for more than 100 years. I think if you look at local companies that have been around for that long, you'll find that their logos have been pretty stable - after this many years, keeping the old logo is the marketing move to make.
Rules of Front End Coding
10 things to remember and practice on each web development project.