skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Extremely detailed microtasking. Like this: http://taskulus.com/taskulus17.png or http://taskulus.com/taskulus16.png

Each of these is a very small tasks that 1-20 minutes but it's important that I can devote my complete concentration and focus to it, without the need to load everything else in my brain.

That of course requires a lot of what SICP calls "deferred decisions" and so units of my code are forced to be much more independent.
If I were in your position, I would start by building a portfolio that you can share. Either some throwaway app that people can download if you're trying to do client-server work, or a simple webapp you can show people.

After that, I'd start checking Craigslist for people looking for small jobs that they need to get done. If you're in an area that has enough work, I think there's an advantage to being local (until you've built up a body of work that stands on its own).

I hope that helps!
I looked into this previously and was interested most by XMPP. You can use open source servers like Openfire (Java, http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/index.jsp) or eJabberd (Erlang, http://www.ejabberd.im/). It's more instant messaging than chatting, though (although it does support multi user chat)
One of, if not the, scariest moment of my life was waking up at home on the couch and not knowing where I was or who I was. It lasted for maybe 5 minutes and then things started fading back as I wandered about the house. Frightened the life out of me.
They didn't say that the code from candidates that weren't accepted was used, just the code from the one that was. I suppose you prefer that interview coding tasks be arbitrary and wasted effort rather than put to good use?
MySite from touchideas.com is a MVC framework with an ORM.
It has all the features of other big products (check the site for a feature comparison).

Like: MVC, Web services (JSON, XML), ORM, database access / connection pooling, caching (memory, disk, distributed), session data with automatic serialization, internationalization / localization, view template engine, custom memory allocator (no delete needed), and many others.
I don't know much about Portugal, but I know it's a small country. I didn't claim that Portugal can take on the huge surplus of doctors from Eastern Europe, but they seem to be taking steps in the right direction, just like they did on drug decriminalization. Other countries could and should follow Portugal's steps.

Not all of healthcare consists of curing cancer and performing open heart surgery. A lot of medical practice is terribly dull and vanilla. It would be hard to go against the doctors' lobby, but perhaps a compromise could be reached. Doctors want to keep their salaries high. People want affordable healthcare. There are a lot of people who simply can't afford healthcare anyway, so they are not even in the market. Re-training foreign doctors could be a step towards a more-affordable healthcare system.

Worst-case scenario, ask Bill Gates for a couple of billion USD. Hire foreign doctors, retrain them and place in Vancouver. Then allow American citizens to cross the border to have access to healthcare. The colluding doctors of the U.S. could not fight it.
search and rescue dogs (and bomb/drug sniffing dogs) have to have a lot of training, and i'm sure they are quite pricey to hire out.

also, since a lost pet is probably roaming around quite a bit vs. a missing person that is lying in a ditch, they are probably quite hard for another dog to track reliably.
A Look Behind The Curtain At Facebook’s Optimization Efforts
I've been reading about the American inventor Elmer Gates.

http://www.elmergates.com/egamu/egamu_link_page.htm

I think his three tips would be:

(1) quiescence
(2) periodicity
(3) dirigation

Which in modern language means (1) remove or zone out all distractions, (2) work at the same time each day, (3) pay deliberate attention to each aspect of the problem in turn in your imagination. (4) Repeat.

Step (3) helps to build the relevant mental structures. Visiting them habitually will strengthen them.

'Each aspect' will include mental images (visual, aural, kinaesthetic), concepts, ideas (including all the relevant constraints and conditions that must be met). Generating mental images is important as the mind works best with things that are translated into sensory terms.

Eventually a conjectured solution will pop into your conscious mind, possibly at a time outside the working hour. You may know it is coming before it arrives.

He might also add that thinking draws from one's personal store of vitality. So it may be necessary to adjust sleep, diet, exercise and any addictions you have in order to conserve this.

Being unstressed is vital. Partly this means only working on important problems and working with the intention to do good. It also means switching to a different problem if you get bored of the first one. (You can go back to it another day).
> WP isn't a primary source.

That's sounding more and more like an obsolete policy.
Here we are in a fairly lively field with technical skills and a million ideas but (generally) not all that much life experience. The demographic that this article talks about are older, more experienced, but either weary or lost due to unexpected circumstances. What if we built a marketplace for startups (and founders-to-be) and young engineers to connect with older unemployed folks? Kinda like an age-reversed mentorship program, maybe. Or a "young hackers teaching older folks how to hack" program?

--

I was a bit surprised to find this article on HN, but since we're discussing it: Anyone else have ideas on how we, as a fairly narrowly-defined demographic, could help "generation B?" I personally feel like we have a responsibility to do so, if we can figure out how.
Unless he was somehow drugged or injured, this state is called "Dissociative Fugue":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_Fugue
A reference/link to focus training would be much appreciated.

As for your experiments with getting less sleep vs better focus, I think that stuffing more hours in the day is only more effective for tedious work, where you don't have to think much to get it done. In my experience, when the quality of your ideas and code matters more than just getting it done, you definitely should be well rested.

In most cases, the self-inflicted pain from getting less sleep is just a psychological substitute for real productivity
Fed Chairman Falls Victim to Identify Theft
Cloning tech creates ape with 2 mothers - potential gene therapy
Are you looking to write something, or use something like mibbit?

(In other words, would mibbit do what you needed?)
Windows Notepad Log
The real question is: how did they survive working at their present company for 2 years if they can't code?
I think you're reading too much into it. John has posted to Fake Steve articles he enjoys in the past. Gruber receives and dishes out this kind of stuff all the time. I bet if you'd ask him, he just thought the article about him was funny, wanted to link to it and decided to play along a bit.
For example, Steve Yegge's Five essential phone screen questions:

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-scre...
Wolverine-like frog breaks bones to produce claws
Also note the ridiculously loaded questions.
Uh...why?

I mean the idea is interesting and all (in theory - I didn't download the framework), but I gotta ask why you'd want to do this? C++ is appropriate and excellent for many problem domains...what is it about web development that should cause it to be added to that list?

Put another way: a lot of smart people have been making very good web apps for a while without using C++. Why is it that you're the first one to see that this domain is somewhere C++ will excel in, and what is it that you see that others don't that lead you to believe this?

I'm not saying that you're automatically wrong (great innovations tend to come from people who buck the existing mentality), but when you introduce something as distinctive and thought-provoking/dogma-challenging as this, you gotta provide more of a sales pitch than one table which says you're as good as Hibernate.
Every Millisecond Counts
Sharp PC-71, This Netbook Thing Is Tiny
You have a bug in your matrix library. The entire universe has collapsed to (0,0,0).

If God is a programmer, I wonder if he's hit on that kind of bug before. "Whoops, destroyed all of existence! Better start over..."
There's also the open-source OKWS http://www.okws.org/doku.php?id=okws
Please fix the title. It's "Design in Open Source".

For some background, this particular situation was kicked off by a comment at http://twitter.com/markboulton/status/3576335793 which led to a response at http://angrydonuts.com/an-observation-about-designers-versus...
Upmodded for coital conglomeration.
Don't take action against the story—more will come in its place. Take action instead against the submitter. jrp has submitted three stories. Two were HN-type stories. This, the third, is descending into irrelevance. Tell him that "we do not want this here, and if this is what you have to offer, we do not want you here (or, at least, we do not want you submitting.)"

Although we think of HN as a community, we still tend to deal with it in terms of the shared domain objects we create here—links, comments, and votes. We ignore that there are people sitting around this table and playing with the shared collection of LEGO we call a site. If someone keeps building things no one likes, look up from the table and tell the person; don't just take apart the blocks. If we actually want a community, then people should feel social, not just technical consequences for doing things that negatively affect that community.

HN doesn't actually have a good method of going about this, though. Perhaps there should be a user-flagging mechanism (let's call it "intervention") that gives people a chance to air their complaints, in private, to the person, and prevents the person from posting publically again until they've replied to the greviances? There's nothing technical standing in their way of just replying "asdfghjkl;'" and going back to posting, but the social guilt of doing so might make HN feel "real" enough to discourage it. Plus, we could stick a "review user" link beside those replies, so people that felt they hadn't been given adequate response could submit the person to the mods for a possible ban.
I agree. This is a little over-dramatic, and made me roll my eyes:

"Mr. Blattman cannot walk by a street person now without wondering if this could be him."
I think that might be it. I found it a bit hard to visual what was actually happening with these commands since they are all pretty simple.
That was my thought as well. In that situation, you need to look at all angles.
Ask HN: Question about default location sharing popup for iPhon App
An iPhone is being developed on my behalf and there is an issue regarding the default location sharing popup that I was hoping someone here could answer.

My application accesses a users location and displays it on a map. Does apple's terms require the default popup to come up EVERY time the app (or the location sharing) is initialized?

For example, if i activate the app right now, it comes up. Lets say i exit out of it, and then come back in immediately, should we display the popup?

I am sifting through the guidelines and cant get a direct answer. Your assistance is greatly appreciated.

If you have any questions let me know.

leo
There are currently some big developments happening in the Scheme community. Definition of the new Scheme standard is currently underway and there is a lot of motivation to produce something that will bring the community together. Check out recent activity on c.l.s and on the r6rs-discuss ML.
So that's good .. but all the other products have those features too.

So what does yours do that the others don't do? If it's C++, maybe its faster?
Yep, exactly what I meant. Thanks for explaining it better.
Much of what I am doing these days takes a couple of hours to spin up, so I don't have any ideas for you here. Maybe find a way talking with your friend about your need for long stretches of uninterrupted time. Already mentioned here is Paul's very relevant essay http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html.
Is json-rpc considered RESTful? At first glance it seems like no, since it encodes the method within the request body instead of using HTTP methods.
For non-subscribers:

Page 1 - http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/3...

Page 2 - http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/3...
Actually, I found vim quite discoverable, you can pretty much type :help <topic> on anything and you'll see ton of stuff around that are interesting.
Ummm... your own IRC server? Seems pretty realtime to me, and quite configurable. Of course, IRC is geared towards group chat, not user-user.

Perhaps include some more details about what your restrictions/requirements are - will the users be web-based? How many concurrent users will you expect online at any given time?

If you're looking for advice from others, it's best to provide as much info as you can.
Random question, which isn't clear from the spec: can arguments be arbitrarily "deep" JSON objects (i.e. arrays and objects) or are they limited to primitives (strings, numbers, booleans, null)?

(obviously you could just pass a JSON serialized string, but that's not what I'm asking)
As someone who as explored both "creative" pursuits such as art and the technical pursuit of coding, i explain to my techie but creatively challenged friends that pursuing art is like hacking your brain's kernel while it is running. A bad line of code can bring down the entire OS. It might be why traditional creatives have the reputation of being unstable. You can't really take your brain offline and debug if something goes wrong with refactoring your aesthetic assumptions. If a creative is hacking their visual identity, they can get to look pretty weird through the major releases and might require several dot releases to look "right."

But then we encounter the creative coder. Those people are freakiest of all and for that we are all better off.
Coding Scheme Live, to Music
Thanks caffeine and frig.

I now understand what you is being suggested.

Yes it's true, that is not how QueryCell currently works.

I will have a think about this idea. My first impression is that it would be quite complicated to implement and get right but very powerful if done well.

Thanks Guys.
Bionic burger (really disgusting)
Instantiating Classes with Internal Constructors (C#)
http://www.bionicburger.com/forreal.html
Why can't we downvote submissions in HN?
Even for CS topics I find it great as it gives me direct pdf access (I dont have ACM/IEEE account)
AFAIK the new law applies mainly to robotic sales calls. Businesses like this shouldn't be affected, but I'm not a lawyer or that well versed in the law.
block level checksumming. http://storagemojo.com/2007/09/19/cerns-data-corruption-rese...

If you have never lost a file system, I'm guessing you haven't had very many.

Also, ZFS gracefully handles cheap disk. RAID cards don't handle the case where you are using consumer grade disk and it retries for hours rather than failing. (I recently tested this on a rather nice 3ware 9550SX. It handled the problem no better than linux md. Performance was worse on the 3ware, too. I'm sending it back.)

I am personally switching to 'enterprise' (read, 20% more cost for 30% less capacity) sata just so I get drives that actually fail rather than retrying when they are failed.

And this is ignoring the 'silent corruption' issue the CERN guys were on about. Block level checksumming fixes that too.

Also, cheap snapshots are awesome. LVM snapshots work, and they can save your ass in a pinch, but they are expensive performance-wise. In my case, where I'm pushing my disk to it's performance limits already, LVM snapshots are nearly unusable. ZFS snapshots, I understand, have almost zero performance overhead. (space is cheap. Performance, not so much.)
TechCocktail DC (8/27) Recap
Do you want to look for a job? I mean to say do you seriously need a job? I would suggest spending sometime looking into open source world and improve your skills and online profile. This would automatically get you a good job couple of years down the line.
While the submitter of the story plays a part in bringing the content to the community, the main reason the story makes it to the front page is due to many readers upvoting the story. Taking action against the submitter to me is wrong, because the story would get pushed back if the community hadn't upvoted it in the first place.
Nope, it's true, I don't actively need a job.

You're probably right - putting a lot of effort into some open source software would generate equivalent experience, and would help later on.
Why? What encyclopedia is a primary source?
The setup I've found works best is to have two computers with browsers pointed to an Etherpad document, to allow pseudocode, and use problem domains that don't require the use of references.

That allows face-to-face communication, and avoids the uncomfortable violation of personal space induced by over-the-shoulder glancing.

Incidentally, this technique scales very effectively for phone interviews.
If you need to beef up your hacker cred, this is the way to go. But as Martin Fowler said: "It's been a long time since I used C++. But it hasn't been long enough."
Skype for Linux 2.1 Beta
_Only with the permission of the rights holders._

I don't have knowledge of the specifics of the case but I believe Google only have the permission of an organisation representing authors, not the authors themselves.
Let me get this right:

Your position is that it is impossible to change this industry no matter what because of a deeply flawed political process unique to the US.
My first question is... why? There are so many well proven, excellent web frameworks in modern languages. Why would anyone choose this over Django, Spring, ASP.NET MVC, etc. etc.
Exactly, the same happens for me "n" is for Hacker News in my Firefox vunderbar.
It's an outgrowth of the perception that the government, even in the "free world" of democratically elected governments, is somehow separate and greater than the citizens who provide the governments mandate and charter to exist. I agree that it would be great if the government recognized that it should act in the best interests of the people, not in the best interests of its own continued existence, especially as the latter assumes that the continued existence of the government as it is RIGHT NOW is somehow in the best interest of the people.
“No-else-after-return” considered harmful
I am morally opposed to immigration restrictions in general. But I agree with dbc. An increased supply in engineers lowers price (wages). If all immigrants left SF tomorrow, the companies left short would bid up the price of an engineer. That is basic economics.

The words you have put in quotes are the moral judgements you believe are attached to those events. dbc gave no indication of such a position. He is just talking abut the dynamics of the market. An engineering shortage would have encouraged more engineering training. The number of white engineers is not static.

*The other things that would happen if immigrant left is that it would become more rational to hire engineers outside of SF ultimately damaging the prosperity of the city. SF engineers should not want to lose the immigrants.
A well-written piece, but I would not call it news.
Could genetic algorithms help prevent future housing crises?
Intention s irrelevant in the long rung. The only reason European politicians talk about it is because you can blame someone for intention.
Anything that includes the three letters "RPC" is not inherently not RESTful.

This is because you are making Calls to Remote Procedures rather than Transferring States of REpresentations [of resources].

I, of course, rearranged the acronyms RPC and REST for the sake of English.
One thing that slowed down WP was the suddenly perceived need for adding references ... unrequired for years. So a lot of effort got turned into improving the quality and reliability of millions of already-existing articles.

A lot of people didn't have the know-how or time to do that. Locating reliable and authoritative references can be very time-consuming. (Google Books has helped a lot!)

Despite that, and despite many articles being combined with others , millions of articles have been added in the meantime. I don't understand any concern about this process: it's all healthy. For the subjects I dig into, it's reliable 90% of the time when I check it out.
It's almost funny that someone from Canada would need a visa to work in the US and vice versa. For long stretches of time when I'm in Canada, I forget that I'm in a different country
So--is there an acutal way to do start a company without a US citizen as your co-founder?

Just graduated from a US college on a regular foreign-student visa...
Would you happen to know if these non-Americans were mostly students using their post-graduation time for work (<= 29 months), and also working for US co-founders on paper? That seems like the only way it could be.
> You're standing in front of a black wall.

That was the best one.
I recently did a project with naive bayesian classification, and it was a blast. If you haven't gotten your feet wet with artificial intelligence yet, I recommend document classification as a starting point.

O'Reilly's "Collective Intelligence" has a great chapter on this, with at least one improvement over the stuff I culled from the rest of the web. Paul Graham has a post somewhere about spam filters that shows how the big kids build it.

For the kids in the front row, try changing your old classifiers to 4-step markov chains. If you're asking "why would I do that?", you're in the wrong classroom :)
It's really cool that you've poured so much of your time, research, and development into building out this framework. Congratulations on bringing it so far - I can't imagine this being an easy feat.

I have to say, though - I really couldn't see myself using a closed-source framework for any web application, especially one which is quite new. The potential for running into bugs which it's impossible for me to fix is too great, and I can't afford the time and tension involved in waiting for a vendor to offer an update.

As the founder (and at present, sole developer) of a small ISV, it can be difficult balancing requests from customers, the vision of the company, and maintaining existing code alone. This problem would be far more pronounced for someone attempting to build out, maintain, and develop a community around an entire framework. Aside from perhaps Werkzeug (especially when it was first released), I can't think of a web framework that would have been able to thrive without either a growing community of developers and maintainers contributing, or heavy corporate sponsorship.

I know I'm just some guy on the web tapping out a comment, but I think you'd save quite a bit of sanity and find much better adoption by opening up the source, encouraging others to contribute, and empowering more developers to build applications rather than finding themselves frustrated by a bug in a closed framework which they cannot fix. If revenue is a concern for you, perhaps it's worth considering that things tend to work out well for those who succeed in defining new ways of building and deploying web applications (cf. 37Signals, the Django team, JRuby's core team, etc). You might be surprised.

Thanks for sharing the screencasts - good luck!

Scott
20 people upvoting it is not "many" people nor does it reflect poorly on the community as a whole. Those 20 people can't make up more than 5% of the total number of active users on HN.

No matter how hard we try, we're never going to be able to control the community's whims without literal rules. No matter how much we'd like it to be so, the Reddit/TechCrunch/Gizmodo/etc commentors are not going to "unfind" HN. All we can do is flag crappy submissions like this and hope they eventually get the point.