skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a lot of value in the comments on this article, but I am afraid that the idea that you can usefully hire someone based on the answer to one question is a bit oversimplified. In any project that I have done that spans any length of time, often the first code I wrote doesn't look up to snuff with what I wrote most recently. The later code looks better by virtue of a better feel for the environment and the tools and some obscure abbreviation-finder that seems to be at work in the background.

One concern that I would have if you think the worst code that you have seen is stuff you wrote, perhaps you are not reading enough of other people's code. I bet there is a lot of that amongst us all.

In the vein of simple questions that help in an interview, particularly for someone who purports to be an expert, is "Tell me five ways that it won't work". An expert ought to have some scars, and have learned from them, no?
There's that old joke that God tipped America on its side and all the loose screws slid to California. And then God tipped California on its side and all the loose screws slid to Marin County. And then God tipped Marin County on its side and all the loose screws slid to Bolinas. My kind of town.

Anyway, I wonder if there is a similar thing going on here with Cuil attracting clueless executives. Not to be mean piling on criticism after criticism on Cuil, but really, asking people to do anything that touches their social network is something you have to slowly work up to, with a process of building trust. It's not a switch you can just turn on overnight.

Or maybe they don't care about users. Maybe they just think the social buzzword will attract some needed investors.
One of the big arguments for TC releasing the documents (or parts thereof) was that it would happen anyway.

Are there any documented instances of that ?

Is it ok to do something because otherwise somebody else would do it instead ?

Mentioning something exists is not the same as getting tons of mileage out of stolen property.

Btw, the malware writers will have a field day with the search terms 'erin andrews video'.
I am large, I contain multitudes. - Walt Whitman
Julian Beever - Art Hacker
I'd love to upgrade from D5 to D6, but I can't because I had to install a dozen modules and make a few changes to the core code to fix the litany of UI problems in D5 so it could be used by consumers. These modules aren't all supported in D6. Short of dropping 3-5k to hire someone to come in and do it for you or devoting a solid month to mapping it out and carefully upgrading, I don't see how it's possible to ever upgrade a substantial (50+ modules) Drupal site.

That said, nothing else out there compares to Drupal + Views + CCK. I just wish it performed better.
Therefore, only the ignorant can be happy. (QED)

I have a kind of philosophical revulsion to this. I feel like if knowing how it works doesn't make it more magical, then something is wrong.

That said, I do know what you mean. Is there a way to fix this?
I'm not really sure what you mean about best at solving problems in this domain. This was a brute force problem, so the only real skill was in making it as fast as possible. I don't think it was any secret techniques, but rather that they happened to be a group sitting on the right tools at the right time and with a little bit of luck.

You can't infer after the fact that it was their genius and domain knowledge that gave them the win, for I'm sure there were many other groups with geniuses and domain knowledge that didn't win, as well as some without the domain knowledge that just didn't get as lucky.
that's been happening for a long time in the US

What you were agreeing with is the proposition that people might starve, by implicitly claiming that some people in the United States already do starve. Where? Has anyone in the United States, and I mean anyone, actually died of a cause attributable to undernutrition caused by anything other than mental illness in the lifetime of anyone posting here? Who? There are people in the United States who cannot buy food out of their own family budgets, and there are children who are not well fed by their neglectful parents, but I don't think there is any adult who actually lacks enough food to live. Where is the example?
Yep, though you can change the image used like this:
http://overtar.appspot.com/pete_not@mailana.com/default/http...

You can also force a 404 response instead by passing the special value '404' as the default image:
http://overtar.appspot.com/pete_not@mailana.com/default/404
Easier said than done no? Outside of school, where do you find people willing to work with someone worse than them?
I'm sorry, but whenever I hear Cuil, i cannot get the cuil theory http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory out of my head.

Additionally, when i hear the word 'leverage', I release the safety on my Browining.
Only when you hold the position of governor. jk.

If you ever want to be hired again and your current boss is going to be on your resume and gets called for a reference it might hurt you.

Personally, I think that unless the situation is absolutely untenable that two weeks notice is a very reasonable thing to do, especially since in most companies they'll wave your obligation to work and will just pay you the two weeks on the spot.

That way you've done the right thing and your employer doesn't have to worry about having somebody walking around that they know is going to leave anyway.
Awesome!

Fake Steve just gets better and better. ;)
I agree completely. I have worked a fair amount with Drupal, and anyone who says the codebase is crappy is just plain narrowminded. The power and flexibility of the codebase is incredible for the high level of abstraction it's working at.

Granted, almost any of the architecture choices can be questioned or even ridiculed, but that's inevitable when you are trying to be all things to all people. It's all too easy for someone random programmer to come in and pick on one thing and decide the code is crap, but yet the same programmer's ideal solution would only work for maybe 5% of Drupal's userbase.

Also, FWIW, I'm not a Drupal fanboy. I can't stand Drupal and will never work with it again. I think building a career on Drupal will severely limit your skillset, and I think time estimation and client relationship management is made much more difficult for a web developer due to the byzantine constraints it imposes. All that said, Drupal does what it does brilliantly and in much sharper form than any of the other PHP CMSs.
No lie, this was probably one of my favorite articles posted this year, definitely saving for later...
The website is down - Sales guy vs. Web Dude
My experience has been that after a year or so using Ubuntu I am on a learning curve, which was a bit frustrating at first.

My legacy Windows XP install makes me want to bang my head on the wall.
Why so much focus on calculus? I found algebra much more entertaining, abstract and challenging.
It'd be totally awesome if you could cross post. You can copy/paste the whole text, just the link, w/e. And then that way you have a chance to get paid. I'm just saying.

If I'm handing out free money why not hold out your hand? :)
I think you'd be surprised how easily you can put Drupal on a resume without putting PHP.

I know a few web design firms where the "Drupal programmers" really are just the ones who just know enough about Drupal to get the things working the way the graphic designers want them. They just install the right modules and know how to configure things and where to change files to get things to display properly. They really don't know much about PHP at all.
Drupal is much more developer oriented than Wordpress and Joomla. The module system is robust and impressive (if not overwrought). An expert Drupal developer can do amazing amazing things, but I would never want to spend the time to develop such a narrow skillset.
Point taken, then let me rephrase that.

Threads we can fire and forget. Threads we can start "inside" our script and let them work while we do other stuff.

myfunnyfunc = function(){/* do long funny stuff */}
mycallback = function(){/* do something when done */}

mythread = new Thread(myfunnyfunc,mycallback);

Asynchronous like xmlhttprequest, just a way to replace the "settimeout" hack.
Go to a karaoke bar and sing in front of a bunch of people you don't know.
Exactly what I was asking for. Thanks!
Your comment is great. Can you expand on your 3rd paragraph? Why will you never work with it again and what byzantine constraints did you find? I'm wondering if there's some aspect of Drupal that I'm missing and if I'm not doing myself (and my clients) a long term disservice when I recommend Drupal. Have you found other, non-PHP CMS's better?
I'd say that the instances where the article discusses the negatives of drug prohibition policy far outweigh the instances where the article discusses the negatives effects of drug use. In fact, the anti-drug discussion seems to go no further than an anecdote about cocaine usage, as opposed to many paragraphs spent retelling the pro-drug opinions of a Huffington Post writer that once worked for the Marijuana Policy Project.

I'm not strongly against the opinions put forth in this article, but I think that we should be clear that it is pro-drug.
'Calculus brought a change in focus from "details and things" to "arguments and proofs",'

If your class has "arguments and proofs" in it, then you were not in the type of calculus course this essay is about; you were in the type the author was advocating. I assume this is different than the calculus you got in high school, or you'd have mentioned; that is the type of calculus class he was talking about.

You're not disagreeing. You're agreeing.
Known and unknown unknowns in software
Assuming VCs received the $6.5M before proceeds and let's say the VCs owned 50% and each of the 2 founders 10%, that comes out to $1.35M per founder. Not bad for 2 years work (plus learning, reputation, etc.).
In principle I'm sympathetic to this idea, but attempts to make this work in the past have been worse than useless:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math

Stillwell is wrong, or at least not doing his homework, when he says "Everyone concedes that [ideas of number and space] are fundamental, but they have been scandalously neglected..." Back in the early sixties, when Bourbakism was hip and new (as mathematical ideas go at least), everyone agreed that set theory and mathematical logic were fundamental, whence the debactacular attempt to begin teaching first-order logic to seventh graders.

The uncomfortable truth is that math is like a language in that it requires a student to put together a large and messy collection of terms and concepts to express any kind of thought at all. The fact that all of the thousands of entries in this vocabulary can be derived in principle from maybe a dozen axioms is what gives math its power, but nobody learns it that way, proving this or that fact as needed. Real skill comes from practice, which starts out as imitation and then generalizes into problem-solving and proof.

All the emphasis on The Fundamentals of math is really just evidence that most mathematicians are bad at teaching -- it's an attempt to impose mathematical order and rigor on the fundamentally messy and organic process of human learning.
Srsly? I built a CMS for a client that needed photo management, video management and 1-1 mapping of the pages on the site to admin pages that represent the editable fields plain to see in about 30 hours using Django, django-photologue and Grappelli.

Just what about Drupal is so good for CMS that isn't also trivial in RoR or Django?
MIT creates genetic parts super warehouse
This discussion is useless unless you get more specific than 'fat cat'.
Yep, that's my experience too...

The funny thing is that I don't understand why they don't get it together more. A bit more direction and less of a 'let's code fest' would help a lot.

Bugs that I've fixed (sent in patches to the relevant maintainers) are still in the templates more than a year later.

It's really weird because they could go sky high.
No. What's the connection? Hi-tech? Someone dying?

Antitrust is about a company developing and selling a product that is stolen from somewhere else. I don't remember anyone dying because someone wanted to see a Mr Blurry-Cam shot of the new iPhone on Engadget.
Thanks.

Just sent you an email.
Build Your Next Web Application with Erlang (pdf)
Cuil should do less PR and more coding.

They have good ideas but a service that simply doesn't compare to even the smallest competitors in the same space.

For one heck of a hack check out http://gigablast.com , one guy and a couple of years of work.
Not even having a Mac saves you from the crapware hardware makers bundle with their crap. You have no idea how annoying it was for me to have to remove shitty Kodak photo management software from my parents' Mac (which had a perfectly good version of iPhoto) or the horrific, kernel-panic-causing HP All-In-One software. Or even the shitty Verison DSL setup CD I was supposed to use to set up my DSL modem.
This explains more about the relational vs xxx debate within corporations than any of the white papers, conferences or debates I have ever read. Forget relational theory, toss your CAP theorems, no one cares about paxos; This is the real reason relational is king.
A conversation with Chris Anderson about Free and Freemium
The ABCs of interviews (and the DEFs)
So one of the cool things about Narwhal is it was created with the goal of supporting multiple interpreters. Where possible, code is written in JavaScript to facilitate sharing between interpreters. For example, the "binary" module is currently about 700 lines of JavaScript, plus about 100 lines of C/C++ or JavaScript per platform.

While Rhino is currently the most complete Narwhal platform (mostly due to the ease of prototyping in it) We've also started working on V8 (github.com/tlrobinson/narwhal-v8/) and JavaScriptCore (github.com/tlrobinson/narwhal-jsc) support. They're still very incomplete but it's a start.
The economics of Botnets
That's a CMS, so long as you limit your definition of "content" to photos and video.

Also, I find it poor form to expose the Django admin interface to your users in place of developing your own templates and view logic. Seems like a "srsly" bad idea.
Wow, spot on! Likely not news to anyone here, but I really wonder how many people out there are smart enough to realize how amazingly cheap the stuff we buy is, and really think of where it comes from.
Typical user behavior is to get productive, never worry about backups, and whine endlessly when their hard drive crashes. Backup software should definitely be bundled. It's a classic opt-in vs opt-out problem--users who have to opt in to install backup software, won't opt in.
When I first decided to give Cuil a go, I did a broad search for my home city (Perth) who's population is about 1.65 million people (roughly).

I finally found a result on the 3rd page of Cuil (towards the end), with the first 2 pages being dominated by some Perth in Scotland who's population is several orders of magnitude smaller (and is officially classified as a "town")

In fact, it's population is so much smaller, our stadiums contain more people in them during average sporting events.

Does not compute.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea that they want to create a new search engine. I even like the idea that they want to take on Google but come on guys. When your highly publicised search engine gets its ass kicked by a stock installation of Lucene, you're doing it wrong.
Police Using Paintballs to Tag Iranian Protestors
The first math competition I entered was an interesting experience. There were so many completely foreign concepts like sigma notation that precluded me from even trying to answer the 'tricky part' of the questions. Luckily, the proofs came out on a later competition, after some good math competition coaching by the quizmaster.
Stillwell is wrong, or at least not doing his homework,

Have you read his book Numbers and Geometry, or any of Stillwell's other books?

I actually think he takes the approach you advocate, but you haven't given me quite enough examples of the approach you think best for me to be entirely sure.
Digitize Your Own Books: The Book Ripper Project
Not at all.

I mean, we love technology (aren't we hackers?), but probably we feel (albeit indirectly and just partly) responsible for such things: a man has died for a lost phone/gadget. One of those we buy, use and work with.

So my question is: how can we change this? Is it still possible?
This is something I've been looking for.

I wonder how many users he is following to create the trend and also what kind of users he's following.
Are you talking about the school algebra that for most students precedes differential and integral calculus, or are you talking about the abstract algebra that in most curricula follows calculus as an upper-division undergraduate course?
Ask HN: Best way to find breaking articles on a particular topic?
I've used Google News Alerts before but it's quite dated and doesn't pick up 90% of what's out there.

There has been a lot of Chrome OS posts on the site lately and I've started a site to kind of aggregate Chrome OS news... so I crave it.

But I can see that it's slowing down and I'd like to find more.

What's the best method that everyone uses to find news about a particular search term in real time? Ie. as soon as someone posts an article about Chrome OS (blogs, etc) I'd like to know about it within the next, say, 4 hours.

Any ideas?

PS. If you are interested in forwarding me links to any Chrome OS articles you run into in the forseeable future, plesae do so: johng@forumfoundry.com
Learning to use your debugger
I'm tracking your two projects on github and have also been watching ry's node project. I'm really interested in how SS-JS will develop. For one it necessarily removes the DOM model people are familiar with and it also has evolved in an environment that has fostered the growth of many interpreters without one being totally dominant. V8 and Rhino are both very manageable, it will be interesting to see how compatible they all remain and if one assumes the position as the de-facto standard.
Trip Report: Exit Concepts, Final ISO C++ Draft in ~18 Months
Reading this, I just realized that my earliest code does in fact predate my earliest memories, a peculiar thought. I remember not being able to tie my shoes, not knowing left from right and having to jump to turn on a light, but I don't remember not being able to program.
"I think it's important to look at costs as investments in the business. And if that investment will not yield a good return, why make it?"

Can't agree more. This was my point.

Look at those costs as investments and not just something you can get rid of to save money. More than likely, it's there for a reason, so please evaluate this expense as something that is likely producing revenue in some form or another.

In other words, you should expect your revenue to fall if you're getting rid of some expense unless you are able to successfully reinvest that expense into something with a higher return.
I would have to try Vista/Windows 7 to weigh in. I don't have pleasant Windows experiences at all, but I can't say right now that they haven't become a lot better.
Try parental controls in system preferences.
I don't how you read the article and understood that he recommends to "keep things the way they are" as you say.

Godin stated the exact thing that you say: "Instead of squandering it in a long, slow, death spiral, do something else. Buy a new platform. Move...."

What I understand Godin says is that if you cut costs you shouldn't do that just to keep the company afloat but to invest the money you "saved" in something new.
http://www.happn.in/

Has an API, too.
(Disclaimer - I am most likely biased since I suffered through twelve years of US public school math, often racking up low grades from boredom even while distinguishing myself in math competitions)

I agree that the US system teaches mathematics in too formulaic and granular a way. The way I see it, a good way to divide math students into two categories is to look at those who will use math in their future careers as scientists, engineers, etc, and those who will not and are only studying math to "see the world from another angle".

In either case, a spitting-back-of-formulas approach is counterproductive: Scientists and engineers need to (or at least would do very well to) understand how the mathematics they use works. On the other hand, those who will not use math in the future have no real need to pack their brains full of formulaic tidbits; they will get the most value through pursuing a problem-solving approach that generalizes well to other areas of life.

In short, no matter what the class's level, mathematics definitely needs to be taught from a more problem-solving, integrated perspective. "Pre-med math" that consists mainly of memorization and regurgitation does nobody any good.

The main problem, I imagine, would be recruiting teachers that can actually teach mathematics in this way. That raises a whole different question, though - why do we have "teachers" and not mathematicians teaching math; why do we have "teachers" and not historians teaching history? It seems that much of what education school teaches is how to keep order and run a classroom of bored and antsy students, but wouldn't it be more effective to simply teach interesting material and keep the kids engaged?
Which is referenced in the F&L; they were both writers for Rolling Stone. F&L is certainly considered a reference, at least by Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...
Perhaps they could rejig some of the algorithms used for Cuil ranking as a defensive measure, just in case robots ever decide to rise up against us.

Think of it, just like Tic Tac Toe was used to confuse WOPR in Wargames, a simple search on Cuil for anything could be used to confuse any Skynet wannabes.

We make fun of these guys now, but they could be unrealised geniuses.

I salute you Cuil, in the fight against future robot overlords.
They're all smart but the government or any one for that matter doesn't give a shit when you're poor. And like he says, people don't worry being exploited as long as it makes their life a little better, just a little better. I hope some awakening happens there but the government won't it let happen.
You know what's even more popular?
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=sharepoint%2C+drupal&l...
One of the best classes I took in college was Abstract Algebra, and I only took it because my math-major roommate kept telling me that I needed to "learn more math." My favorite part was coming to the realization that linear algebra was not just a set of tools for solving particular problems, but rather an instance of a much more general mathematical structure with a beauty and simplicity of its own.
The overconfidence paradox
Who Buys Virtual Goods?  It's Not Who You Think
Debunking Moon Advertising
Very fascinating article. I fell into the Calculus trap myself, and I admit that it definitely would have been more interesting to have avoided it.

As it was I got an A in Calculus, breezed through the course as an early college course student.

How much better it would have been to have enjoyed the alternate possibility presented:

"Going from ‘top student in my algebra class’ to ‘average student in my city’s math club’ is a huge step forward in your educational prospects. The student in the math club is going to grow by great leaps, led and encouraged by other students."
chrome 3.0.19 (dev track) loaded fine for me. But Quicktime and realplayer? Come on PBS...although at least the QT didn't take me to a blank page with a postage stamp in the middle.