skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These two searches seem to work:
Factor programming language
R programming language

So instead of writing "Factor tutorial" (for which btw Google asks you if you mean the language), write "Factor programming language tutorial". Being more specific about what you're looking for helps.
If someone can't grasp concepts as simple as those without "friendly metaphors", they're going to struggle with programming.
To be honest, I don't usually read the names of those commenting (and notice that they are less prominent, being in grey, than the comment itself) - at least until after thinking "Good point, well made."

But perhaps others are more fan-worshipping.
I used to do competitive programming in high school and early university, but I stopped doing it mainly for lack of time.

Most of what you learn from programming competitions is not transferrable to business programming, but possibly some is. Maybe you'll see a case at work where dynamic programming might be super-awesome. Maybe you won't, but either way it's not going to hurt. There are be opportunity costs of course (i.e, because you're not spending your time elsewhere), but only you can judge that.

My motto, if I had one, would be that learning is not a zero-sum game. Programming competitions are a form of deliberate practice not unlike cross-training for athletes.
There seems to be a bit of a trend for "$groupOfPeople are stupid" posts - presumably it's just an attempt to be inflammatory to get links and visibility.

People who post "$gOP are stupid" posts are stupid. Read about it on my blog ...
Um, why? Because we don't know what clothes to wear unless we're given a season? What purpose do seasons have other than a very rough approximation of weather trends anyhow? If you're living in a particular climate then the month is surely enough to establish the approximate weather - or you know there's something called a window and you can look out of it and see what the weather is like on the other side.

I really don't get it.
eg of what I think of a badly named language.* I think * clojure is a sorry name for the fascinating language it is.

In the words of Rich Hickey - It's a ploy on closures and is supposed to be pronounced as cloSSure (and the domain was available; fulfilled his requirements of combining c for clr, j for java). Many have been spelling it as cloJure, even stuart halloway(author of the only book available on clojure) has couple of podcasts with cloJure pronounced with the emphasis on J.

my little rant aside, the name(in context to the article) is instant seo juice. input just one word and google spits everything clojure, no distractions from random links.

I have taken a mid way to pronounce clojure - clozure.
[Meta-note - I find it a bit sad that a post gets 100 points of upvote for reposting part of the article with nothing but "Ok, this is just golden." at the top.]
I recommend Project Euler as a complement (or replacement) to the competitions. PE is not timed, therefore you can concurrently solve the elegant challenges while working on other projects. Furthermore, there are no "levels of access": all problems are available at the start.
wait - you still can't send more than attachment from iPhone's mail.app?
If Cricket Is a Religion, Sachin Is God
Interactive Unicode Table
Practicing in online competitions does help . At least to master the different problem solving techniques , but doing it full time would be a mere waste of time . As pointed out the way we need to code in the industry and the thought process that has to go through is way different . Yes we do face challenging problems and knowledge of different techniques / approaches will surely come handy, but i am sure it will be more worth to develop a software or contribute to open source . By this way you give yourself a chance to learn the entire SDLC and hence u will be more valued in the Industry .Ofcourse the complexity of the problems you have solved while building the software will be the criteria based on which ur skills will be judged

Google code jam is just a competition where u can tell Google you are there and you can do good programming and yes probably get hired by them !!
I didnt really mean it as a side project. I understand it won't work that way. Just keep it on the side till you are able to raise more funds, or organize from other sources (job,consulting etc.) to give you a decent runway.
Indeed it makes the term ambiguous, but luckily in this case its easier to fix. When it matters, then just specify:
If you are saying "Jews believe that..." you are referring to people who practice Judaism.
If you are saying "Jewish genes are such that..." you are referring to someone of Jewish ancestry.

I suppose it could be more confusing with people of mixed ancestry, but we can probably generally find a usable definition by context.
What ambiguity? It isn't illegal to hack your phone. It is illegal to modify and distribute someone else's copyrighted software to do so, though, and that is the only thing that Apple has taken any legal action against.
Thanks.
I had tried PE some time ago as a time-pass activity. Loved it. Also loved pythonchallenges. currently I was doing SPOJ (python and C) and it seriously needs lot of time and focus. I was wondering whether it's worth it. It do improve timed programming though, as you can code faster. Plus it never gives a sense of fulfillment.
I'm so sick of hearing how apps and websites were built overnight. I'm a programmer and I know just how much work goes into building a site and all its little details.

There's a great Mixergy interview about how Digg wasn't built in a day either. Owen Byrne, the guy who built the original Digg site, talks about how much work it really took.

http://mixergy.com/pr-lies-destroy-your-understanding-of-how...
To practise and participate in programming competition needs loads of time. Somehow I felt, giving that much time would not be worth it. However it do improves speed and accuracy and helps getting campus-recruitment. This was the dilemma here. Go for it ( yes/no ) ?
How Google Serves Data from Multiple Datacenters
Would someone with more knowledge than me on this shed light on whether this is essentially what the Google chaps have done for their Wave protocols?
"Unless 'racing' someone will spur you to work harder."

You don't think this is the case? When I was on cross country I usually just tried to pass the person in front of me... having other people to compete with is a huge part of what drives athletes, especially in sports that are directly competitive like basketball as opposed to sports that are about the clock (such as running).
I have no idea how they even pull that off.

It's easy, if you're happy to have the kind of capricious review decisions which have been getting Apple into so much trouble.
Compojure's not really ready for prime-time yet. Try writing an app in it, you'll see what I mean ... once in a while, a baby tooth just falls out.
You can also add Bulgarian, Ukrainian and Russian to the list..
Really? What do they use?

Do you think I could find when you're on holiday, then call the bank [apparently] from your phone number and with the account details and say "my brother has been killed interrupting a robbery, could you halt the account" ... would that make a difference?

I wonder if they'd need anything more than a [forged] death certificate to cash out the account?

You carry plenty of cash on holiday don't you, so that when your accounts stopped you can get home quickly?

a little info + social engineering >= lots of hassle
>I doubt I'll ever see a woman make up the 0.9 seconds to overtake the fastest man in the 100m, but I also doubt I'll ever see a man make up the 5 hours to overtake the fastest woman in the decaironman.

In general men's times are significantly better than women's for ultra-ironman races, including the deca. The one woman who did set a bunch of records, Astrid Benöhr, is a verified cheater.

http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/ultramentor/results/mexi...
>Marco Flores reports: "During the Deca, Astrid Benöhr was disqualified due to taking shortcuts during the running trial. This was done in the middle of the night and was observed by athletes, maintenance people and support crews. Nobody reported this to the organizers until, finally, one of the members of Guy Rossi's support crew was surprised by the disappearance of the athlete on the course and reappearing very soon after Guy's arrival. This was reported. The times were checked and this gave way to suspicion, on behalf of the organizers, who stationed inspectors all night. They confirmed the occurrence and a video was taken of this athlete taking a significant shortcut of the running course, which is run in a loop. Subsequently the athlete was disqualified."

http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/ultramentor/records.html...

This link is a bit dated, but it does show records as of 1997 for ironman, double ironman, triple, quadruple, penta and deca events. Men are ahead in all of them.

In 1999, Astrid Benöhr set records in the quintuple and the deca. If her victories were legitimate, a possible factor may be that she limited herself to only about 8.5 hours of sleep for the entire 187 hours of her race. It reminds me somewhat of how a 61 year-old farmer, Cliff Young, won a grueling 875 km race from Sydney to Melbourne, despite the fact that the competition included professional athletes. He absolutely crushed the field and set a course record. Was it because old men have a biological advantage? No.
It was because he was the only runner who chose not to sleep.

http://www.elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff-young-the-61-ye...
It does now because we've never split things up this way, but it might not be so weird once we get use to it.

On the other hand, I see a bigger problem. If we are using this technique for the 100 m dash (for example) then we're going to basically split people up into "best category", "second best category", etc... and we'll end up comparing between categories anyway since there is an objective measure to use (the clock).
"Lobsters" was amazing. Accelerando dragged a bit and could have used some more aggressive editing toward the end.
The Real Truth about Apple and Google and Arrington
Tiago2204
The chance that not being "verifiably" part of either group results in a competitive advantage over both groups is essentially zero.
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At least concerning R there's http://www.rseek.org
I do think his estimate of 30/40 LOC is low - though perhaps he means an average over the "life" of a project.

But in an hours coding I'd hope to push 100 LOC.
You're right, but apart from health and safety related cases quality is an economic issue, and QA has to be balanced against other economic factors.
That bigger problem is exactly the one I was talking about. Competition sorts people by performance already. Adding another new layer of sorting based on computer analysis of last year's performance doesn't really gain you much.

Virtually all sports rely on some level of arbitrary meta-organization. While you could write essays about why that is, it boils down to one: It's interesting that way. It's not just gender, either. Playing fields across most sports are divided by geography, age, affiliation or nationality, or simply arbitrary divisions like in the MLB. So long as the boundaries are recognized by everyone there isn't a problem.
The Snorkel gene: Key to Increasing World-Wide Rice Production?
What about Ruby? Python? Java? Those are pretty "normal" terms. The only reason search engines can come up with nice results for those languages is that there are thousands of pages out there which mention the word "python" or "ruby" or "java" in context of programming.

I agree that J and R are (and will be) very hard to search for, but not Factor. If/when the language becomes popular, a Google search for "factor" will be dominated by results that relate to the programming language.
http://codegolf.com/

Not that frequently updated, but some really cool stuff there
I downmodded this post because claiming that competition sports are "good for two things only" is absolutely ridiculous. Competitive sports are good for:

Physical well-being
Mental well-being
Self-esteem, self-worth, self-satisfaction.
Pure fun
Personal motivation and accomplishment
Social interaction
Entertainment
Proxy for real violence

... To list a few things off the top of my head.

Most athletes are not paid exorbitant salaries because most competition does not result in media spectacle. Yet sports remain an important part of life for people in nearly every culture on the planet, as they have for thousands of years.
Those problems are certainly interesting to learn a language and to learn algorithms, but almost all contests I tried have one MAJOR MAJOR problem, which is why I stopped solving those interesting problems: It is like trying to fix a complicated robot which should work perfectly by my confidence in total darkness, wearing oven mitts without tools.

Yes, once you submit, you get back WRONG. You question your algorithm, you question your understanding of the problem, you question yourself, you question the forum, but there is no error. Great. So you can just stop trying to solve the problem and do something else and probably assume that either the problem description is wrong or the input/output is wrong. This is certainly not fun at all.
You relate these skills with human worthiness because of your own innately competitive impulses. It's because of your own rationality. It's because of your own drive to achieve. It's because of your own drive to impress your peers (especially women if you are a man). It's not the media's fault.
Thanks for posting this. This is one of my favorite series. The guy who does the presentation is the quintessential engineer. This is great geek stuff.
Nice! I had something similar on a website some years back. Suggest use code 2001 for default fonts and now you can serve it!
I highly doubt that the stack is executable. I'll write some code today to test this.

User databases are really not accessible from sandboxed applications. They are simply not in the sandbox filesystem space. What frameworks like the AddressBook do is open the database before the app is launched and then pass the app a file descriptor or Mach port to communicate with the database or 'service wrapper' around it.
I just burst into raucous laughter, mostly from my own shock at realizing that that the idea is potentially practical.

I've always thought of government assistance on a large scale as the kind of thing that will seriously damage a country if allowed to continue indefinitely -- by creating economic incentives not to work. [See: Sweden]

I'm not sure it has to work that way. Between food technology and plateaus in first-world population growth, sustenance and covering could probably become as cheap as we are motivated to make them, for some definition of "sustenance" and "covering."

I think it's obvious that society is better off if people work. But society is also better off if the people who work work harder, and only Ayn Rand fans walk around the office glaring at the dullards dragging society down. ;)

In a way, those who really don't want to work are holding a gun to their head and demanding money. If we don't give it to them, then we'll have to get the blood out of our carpet, which will cost more than the few dollars they are asking for. If there were no risk of this, there would be no blood to clean up and thus no reason for social programs to exist. (Those who can't work are already bleeding, and the assistance is intended to keep their situation from worsening expensively).

The people that don't want to work are doing something that I would find morally wrong. But I'm doing something that others doubtless would be troubled by: I work three months out of the year, saving my money, and then live off of that money for the rest of the year in a third-world country. I've had people angry at me for not spending all of my money in the US; others feel it's short-changing society to minimize the amount of work you do for money. Nonetheless, I'm at least paying with my own money, and society is net richer.

From the standpoint of a person, I think that being a parasite is morally questionable.

From the standpoint of society, however, maybe it makes sense to subsidize some level of determined laziness. I can vaguely imagine that under certain circumstances and with sufficient disincentives, such a thing could be a net win for a society.

It seems societally risky, though. ;) Better to "officially" not support such a policy, so you can jettison it if its effects get out of hand.
Right now they need a legit spinner or they will lose the Ashes real soon.
This is a brilliant tv show for geeks!
I up-modded but I actually use a fat felt-tip pen (aka fibre-tip). Pencil allows you to add lots of detail if you want to, you can't do that with a big fat pen as you just end up shading the thing in. Interactive white board might be good (you can build one using a wiimote in a famous internet howto).
The Ashes Season - does that work?
You sound surprised but this is extremely common in smaller deals IME.
Shouldn't the "index start value" just be a compilation directive?
I sorta agree, but he/she took what was a wordy story and got it down to the punchline quite well.
That's exactly what managers do if they have the foresight to pad a schedule.
TWiSTRecap - Mixergy, Darrin Clement of Maponics
I think the estimate is good. When I write 100 LOC, it probably won't be correct the first time. So I go back, fix, test and fix again. While having another look at it I notice that some things can be condensed or replaced with existing code. When I'm done I end up with half the code I started with. So: did I just spend an hour on 100 LOC or 50 LOC?
Sounds like more of a threat to wetlands and other frequently-flooded areas that are not being used for agriculture right now. Every advance that brings formerly marginal areas into production means another ecosystem under pressure.
He also failed to address fractional reserve banking. Many of the big banks, which are shareholders of the Federal Reserve, are able to loan out money they really don't have due to fractional reserve banking.

Also, the Federal Reserve is neither a federal agency nor does it have any reserves. It is owned and operated by the banks, which are able to game the system and this gives them an advantage over you and I.
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Dear Paul, when I say its syntax is its best friend, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

Now, say I fork lisp and change one little thing:

(defun foo (n) (lambda (i) (incf n i)))

to this:

[defun foo [n] [lambda [i] [incf n i]]]

or even this:

{defun foo {n} {lambda {i} {incf n i}}}

or how about this?

<defun foo <n> <lambda <i> <incf n i>>>

Hmm, trees are powerful, no matter how they are expressed huh?

What if we can represent the same trees using colons and commas as delimiters?

:defun foo:n, :lambda:i, :incf n i.

Maybe spice it up a bit using periods as recursive closing delimiter.

See? still powerful trees!

Between common lisp and colon lisp, I still use the latter.

Love is blindness.
I don't understand this point which someone tried to make above. If GV actually came pre-installed you may have a point, but the fact is that the users seeking to use GV will not be confused, annoyed, or furious at all. We understand exactly what GV is and what we want out of it. Apple's point is completely bullshit about confusing users because only users specifically seeking this functionality will have it.
Tragically, it works way too well for Australia...
Yes, that is correct, individual banks do not loan out money they do not have, but the collective system does.

And I gathered that he wants to be separate from that system and therefore not take part in fractional reserve banking.

If he were to explain in detail how he would have 2-3x more reserves than the banks and not take part in the fractional reserve banking system, he would clear up some of the confusion.
It gives me a chance to use a favourite new word I discovered recently...petrichor, which is the scent of rain on dry earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrichor
This is a very interesting topic, but I feel he really doesn't understand banking for a number of reasons and this is one of them.

The banks mine tons of data and use it to make profit off of you and I in more ways than you could imagine.

I find finance and technology fascinating, but the idea of a good citizen bank is very wishful thinking.
The best essay on writing I've ever read (by a NYT bestselling author)

"Some Thoughts on Writing"

http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/writing.htm

"Magazines, editors, agents - they all employ young people making $22,000 a year whose job is to read lots of manuscripts and send back letters telling you that you aren't good enough yet: LET THEM DO IT. It's their job. Don't pre-reject yourself." -Elizabeth Gilbert
If you were going around selling a business model of a new bank, as soon as you mentioned a 2.99 iphone app you would be shown the door.
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look at this user interface: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eurofighter_Typhoon_cockpi...

I can't imagine trying to use that when in the high stress situation of combat.
What usually happens is that the programmers think about the project long before starting to work on it. I have 3 ideas that at some point I'll start implementing, and right now I'm gathering bits and pieces of information for all three.

And when it comes the time to do it, the core functionality can be done really fast if you have good tools, since you are prepared for it.

What separates the good projects from the bad ones though are final touches and the features that are expected by the users - those weird business logic additions that aren't properly defined. These take an incredibly long time to do. Not to mention deployment and scaling which is always a fun ride.

And of course, there's always that intern/junior that has to work on something, and he's given the task of helping you, leaving a mess in any module he touches ... and then you have to clean-up the code, just to keep your sanity.
I've been writing a series of experimental prototypes recently; and I've noticed that as I try to add things to an existing prototype (instead of starting something new), it becomes incredibly painful. I actually end up spending almost all the effort on trying to make it fit with the code I've already written.

Reusing code seemed like a sensible thing to try to do (you should reuse code!), and the existing code itself was actually pretty clean - just not designed for what I wanted to do next.

Therefore, I've decided in future to try out making prototypes that are strictly prototypes. If I want to try something new, I'll make an entirely new prototype. And see how that goes. At the very least, it will probably be more fun. :-)

I mention this here, because of the article's description of "honeymoon code" vs. "maintainable code".
It seems low at first, but if you factor in debugging and documentation it is actually pretty good. I wished I could claim that as an average. I've pulled all nighters in a familiar environment starting from a 'blank' page where you get this amazing amount of output but that usually slows down quite a bit by the time the week is up.
I really hope it can add some UniHan reference

http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=%E...

btw, I really the code point navigation slide bar, it's very intuitive and easy to use.
you are aware that PHP uses -> rather than . to access an object method? ;)
YouTube - Project Natal: Meet Milo.
The Love Car Volkswagen Beetle will be coming soon to India in the mid of 2010
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