skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, you've hit the nail on the head as to why I ended up at Big Bank B wearing "business casual" in the first place: I got caught up in one of the mass casualties of the Credit Crunch, and I needed to support my family, and they were hiring. It's totally understandable. Still a stupid policy on the part of the employer though.
How do the locals feel about the middle finger phenomenon?

http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/finger.html

I confess perplexion.
What are the advantages? They don't cite any, but I can see two:

1. Hobbyist implementors can implement "small scheme," so "large scheme" can be expanded with more difficult-to-implement features without ruining the classic educational experience of implementing Scheme.

2. Technical purists who want to use only their favorite module system, exception system, etc. can build their systems on top of "small scheme," so they won't hold the development of "large scheme" hostage or try to fragment the "large scheme" community.

Any others?
No, I actually think most programmers don't want the old-skool Microsoft approach of not emerging from their private offices more than once a week. I honestly believe that most programmers are social creatures just like any other human being, which explains why we're so active in online discussions of all forms.

I think you're right in that soft skills are massively important to working in any large organization, and for any organization where you're developing software for in-house users (like big banks). Communication, conflict resolution, good working habits (like good body hygiene), these are all critical parts of being effective in your job not just as a programmer, but as a member of a software development organization.

I just don't see "what clothes you're wearing" as factoring into that equation.
For the confused, check out the #songsincode trend on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23songsincode
Love it! Will start using this snippet more often.
That's down in Tuscany. Here in Padova, at the main cathedral (Sant'Antonio), they have the tongue of the saint on display.
Ah, I guess I used "artsy fartsy" in a wrong way. No native english speaker here.

Gheorghe Dan is artistic director and researcher for 0f0003, a phylotically entwined polymorphic web of covalent potentialities, a multi-cultural/scientific laboratory, promulgating generative storytelling, evolutionary design, autopoetic systems and hybrid reality multiverses.

That just sounded so very "I am an artist and use mysterious words because I am so much ~better than you".
I agree, the "Group Three" people would be the best for us. Now it's just a matter of finding one. One thing that I had never thought about was sales people leaving and taking customers with them. That thought had just never entered my mind before. Great article, thanks for the link.
It's not that difficult:

Gal ee lay ee
Power. In a company where the programmers are not making the product, I wouldn't want to go to a meeting with the guy giving the specs underdressed. It marginalizes you even more. The guys in the suits view the programmers as support, them showing up in professional attire and you dressed like their 16 year old son won't help the matter.

I would say slacks and a button down shit, with no tie is fine. I think wearing a tie to work is silly at this point, but t-shirts/shorts/flip flops at a place where others are dressed up makes you seems lower on the totem pole.

That said, I work at a startup where everyone wears t-shirts and flip flops, so what do I know?
How Do Afghan Drug Lords Spend All That Loot?
Right, but there's also the government skimming from all kinds of productive business activities, to subside farming in the US. Thus making, corn, beef, etc, much cheaper then they would be without this market interference.
It's important to note that even jobs without dress codes usually wind up having some sort of unofficial dress code. I personally would love to show up to work every day in a suit, but I can't really do that because my boss and all my coworkers are showing up in t-shirts (I work in academia).

Incidentally, the temptation of being able to wear a suit every day is one of the things that nearly drove me from physics into quant finance.
>Yes, it would be a tautology if I had defined it in terms of progress.

And you did -- how else could you exclude developments in logic from the history of philosophy?

> But progress is the result of the methods and intention of the endeavors of science; falsifiability being one of them.

No-one has really thought that falsifiability is a contentful constraint on scientific theory formation for some time now (even Karl Popper basically abandoned the view in all but name).
I dig the multicat feature in HTML 5. I'll have to use that one.
ok I get it now. Sorry for the misunderstanding!
I didn't say it was difficult. I said that, for whatever phonetic reason, I don't like to pronounce it, and I can't exactly articulate why. That's the root of the research on word aversions.
Office.com Goes Live
Another thing to keep in mind if you are working at, or considering working at, a bank or other financial institution is that the business basically hates their IT department. Not personally of course, but rather it seems to be viewed as very peripheral to their core business (of what, scamming people out of their savings and cashing large checks from their respective national governments?). Even as algorithmic trading becomes more important to their bottom line, tech seems to be a pain in the ass and something to think about as little as possible for a lot of people. Software developers seem lower on the totem pole than most, as well, though that might be bias on my part.

I have only worked for Japanese banks, so YMMV, but this seems to be the case even for the foreign guys pulled from overseas institutions, of whom we've got a lot.
If you work in an environment that views programmers purely as a cost of business, and doesn't value their input, you've found a bad environment.

The best firms that make massive use of software view their programmers as a key member of the team, because they know that they can't do their jobs without them. And some would argue that getting respect DESPITE your attire is the bigger indicator of power.

That being said, "I have to wear a suit because I have to meet with customers; therefore everybody else has to suffer" isn't a particularly compelling argument.
That's so very nice of them!

Has google released their linux kernel patches already ?
The tricky thing here is that some artists do deliberately use big words because they think they're better, but some honestly don't realize how pretentious it sounds to use language like that. I've got a friend who sounds like an old Russian author when she speaks/writes, because those are the words she grew up with. Not everybody spends time learning how to be easily digestible.
Although most of the verb-forms follow relatively simple patterns. Except, of course, for the irregular ones, which are totally off.

Then you get into the various constructions of verbs + other or nouns + other, and it gets even more complicated
I completely agree with you.

I would easily spend 5 or 10 cents to read an interesting article, multiple times per day, especially a well written article from the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.
For my MSc thesis I'm programming some stuff for the Cell B.E. processor. It provides AltiVec vector instructions which allow quick parallel computation. It's great for getting nice speed ups, but it requires a lot of thought and bit twiddling from time to time.

It has two C "intrinsics" called vec_mule() and vec_mulo(). These take in two vectors of integer datatypes (char, short) for multiplication and produces one vector with items that are twice as big. char becomes short, short becomes long. To make room for these larger datatypes it only multiplies the even (vec_mule) or the odd (vec_mulo) items.

It's a nice construction, until you start to wonder which elements are even. Is "element 0" even, or is the "first element" odd? Should I really have to wonder about that?

I have never questioned the utter coolness of starting at index 0, until I encountered this. I do not know why we start at 0 if the rest of the world starts at 1, but it seems silly and without reason.
Really? If you decide to move to London or New York, I have a number of very tech friendly financial institutions I could introduce you to. And anybody attempting to do algo trading without A-list technical talent will soon find that they can't keep up.
I'd say it's more of a comfort thing than a cultural thing, like the same reason I don't wear a suit to bed, but I agree it's not worth sacrificing financial stability. Incidentally, the last financial services company I worked at was pretty casual about their "business casual" dress code. As long as you weren't in a client-facing position you could pretty much wear what you wanted.
Sears forces reddit to remove post regarding Sears URL hacking
SackerNews - News about the sacked ones
Ah, I see... weird, but I guess it's a matter of taste. There are a few words in Italian that really are tricky. Not many, but I took a while to get this one right:

ammortizzatore

it really twists your mouth around if you're saying it right.
WHO official predicts swine flu ‘explosion’
Is that text attributed to Gheorghe Dan ? Or was it by someone writing about him ?
It combines the right amount of clean code and tongue-in-cheek sass. Perfect so far.
Thank you for expanding the volume of posts displayed. Previously, you only displayed about 200, which meant that the user would probably miss some postings unless he or she consulted the site twice a day or so. By displaying many more "historic" posts, the user would have the assurance of not missing posts if he or she did not consult the site for a couple of days. Thanks again.
5 Ways to Improve the Financial State of Your Business
If it were spelled "Galilay" it would be nearly the right sound, but wouldn't be so strange to English speakers. (Having sung a lot in Italian, I'm very used to the "ei" dipthong, but it just doesn't occur like that in English with that spelling.)
You'd wonder if they bought Roche shares at the rate with which they keep pushing this.

According to this article: (in dutch, sorry)

http://www.ntvg.nl/content/geen-bewijs-voor-minder-griepcomp...

There is hardly any evidence that that stuff is even effective.
Ask HN: Getting in Y Combinator?
I was looking at the YCombinator graduates and realized that in order to get accepted you had to have went to a very good college. I'm currently 16, have already tried to get into YCombinator yet am going to have to wait for high school to finish.

Now, has anyone managed to apply to YCombinator at the age of 16,17,18,19? Did you get in?

I'm asking this question mostly cause I think YCombinator is the best kind of "startup university" that an entrepreneur could attend.

Comments would be greatly appreciated. :-)
wait? i got voted down? why? i asked a serious question, i don't understand why it 'should' happen. the op seems to postulate its a given, why is it a given?
This strikes me as a false dichotomy, especially since I believe the hemophilia treatments fall into the first of two additional categories:

3. Treatments you will pay as much as possible for. This category may not be distinct from category 2 for a single adult with no family.

4. Treatments which have a high enough out-of-pocket cost, that it is a factor in the consumption decision.

A personal example falls into category 4. Two migraine aborting treatments work for me, rizatriptan in tablet form and sumatriptan in injection form. The first requires about 3 hours for full effect, whereas the second takes under an hour. The differences in cost between insurance an no insuranceare around $25 and $100, respectively.

In the context of missing a full day of work, even the $100 falls into category 2. However, during unemployment, on a weekend or an evening, even $25 is enough that it's not "free," but even the $100 isn't so much that I wouldn't pay for it out of pocket, depending on the circumstances.

These treatments may well reduce my "health" by any objective measure, including lifespan, but they certainly improve my productivity and quality of life, something the article seems to ignore.
The coming-out stories of anonymous bloggers
i don't see how that applies to youtube urls and the entire 'should'. youtube controls their url space, why is it a given that more english words 'should' appear in them? why not fewer?

perhaps there is some aspect of you tube urls i'm not familiar with...
Well, the rest of the world also starts at 0:

1 sheep -> the number of sheep present when there is one

0 sheep -> the number of sheep present when there are none

Because you normally only enumerate things that are there it seems like you are starting at '1', but really you start relative to the situation where there are 'none'.

You can't have 'negative' presence of anything so it took a while longer to realize that there might be negative numbers too.

As for element 0 being odd or even, it's even.

So, it isn't silly and it has a reason.

0 is one of the biggest inventions in the history of mankind, programmers have given it it's natural place because we could not make our computers work if we didn't do that.

Imagine binary logic based on '1' and '2'....
The first may be disappointing but the second can be soul-crushing.

I don't have the hubris to say I can judge which is worse.
Singapore is a good base for traveling around Asia
concatenating the URL with itself tends to make for a broken link
Bonaire has largely avoided the kind of development that blights other islands
Oh come on, programmers aren't special. (I know, I am one). Clothes are communication. You dress to a minimal standard to show respect for others, and to communicate "seriousness". Sometimes, you have to spell the standard out out. I have worked with people who wear torn or worn out t-shirts and similarly worn out shorts. It turns off some potential employees and customers who catch a glimpse of them - fair or not.

Sure, it's a little silly to insist on suits for someone crawling on the floor (I still remember in incident with a skirt, an awkward cable, and a customer tour coming in at the wrong moment). But if you work in an industry where it's the standard, how hard is it to leave a jacket and tie at work in case of meetings? Really...
Vaccines as ninja trainers
I'm happy to see this. I should have submitted it when I found it. The version I found appears to be handwritten by Dijkstra and I like it better that way.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF
People don't care about the safety of their bank because of the FDIC, but they do care about interest rates. Rival banks will be able to offer higher returns because they will be earning higher, riskier investment returns.

Moreover, with a lower return on equity modeled in than every other bank in the industry, nobody is going to give you money to start with.

Lastly, there are severe limits to how innovative you can be with a bank, again because of the FDIC.

The only way I see this gaining any traction is as a niche bank for people with deposits over the FDIC insured limit who might want a little more safety. However, there are two problems with this. 1) He proposes to turn away deposits of this size at first and 2) people with that much money usually have better options.
Very true - simple patterns woven into a complex system.

For anyone interested, there is a great online resource for inputting any Latin word form and getting an instant output telling you its noun, verb, or other form, along with its base form and its English definition: http://archives.nd.edu/words.html (William Whittaker's Words program). You can also input an English word and instantly get its Latin equivalents.
Some hypothesize it isn't taste, but the way our minds treat language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_Theory

I'd pronounce it Gal lee lay
"forces"...

Did Sears thugs show up at the Reddit offices armed with craftsman crescent wrenches and nail guns?
Inciting Chaos:  Paranoia and the New World Order  | NowPublic News Coverage
Try Szeczin (town in Poland)

Polish has some of the best tongue breakers in the world, there is the word for toothbrush that I won't even try to spell because I'll mess it up.
Yeah, we shouldn't forget that a well-fitting suit can look really sharp. It can be a status marker (or status illusion), its default tailoring makes you look taller and thinner, the jacket provides convenient extra pockets (this is important to me), and if it has good materials it can be as comfortable as anything.
I'm a native speaker, and I agree with your usage. As I have heard it used, "artsy-fartsy" means "self-consciously exhibiting the accoutrements and mannerisms of artists (or art lovers) in order to enjoy the respect accorded to artists (or art lovers), without producing anything of merit or interest (or having any taste)." It also has a faint connotation of being a step behind society, imitating the stuffy pretensions of the last (and now hopelessly conservative) generation of critics, which makes it feel slightly imperfect for this context, but only slightly.

If one artist called another artist "artsy fartsy," it would mean about the same thing as "poseur." But usually it's applied by a non-artist to someone who has artistic pretensions: "Why are you being such a arrogant ass when you have done nothing to justify it?" People tolerate all kinds of pathological behavior from great artists, and they resent it when a crappy or mediocre artist tries to take the same liberties.
XMOS - Revolutionising electronics
Interesting take on this from Hamming's essay "You and Your Research" (http://paulgraham.com/hamming.html):

Another personality defect is ego assertion and I'll speak in this case of my own experience. I came from Los Alamos and in the early days I was using a machine in New York at 590 Madison Avenue where we merely rented time. I was still dressing in western clothes, big slash pockets, a bolo and all those things. I vaguely noticed that I was not getting as good service as other people. So I set out to measure. You came in and you waited for your turn; I felt I was not getting a fair deal. I said to myself, ``Why? No Vice President at IBM said, `Give Hamming a bad time'. It is the secretaries at the bottom who are doing this. When a slot appears, they'll rush to find someone to slip in, but they go out and find somebody else. Now, why? I haven't mistreated them.'' Answer, I wasn't dressing the way they felt somebody in that situation should. It came down to just that - I wasn't dressing properly. I had to make the decision - was I going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going to appear to conform better? I decided I would make an effort to appear to conform properly. The moment I did, I got much better service. And now, as an old colorful character, I get better service than other people.

You should dress according to the expectations of the audience spoken to. If I am going to give an address at the MIT computer center, I dress with a bolo and an old corduroy jacket or something else. I know enough not to let my clothes, my appearance, my manners get in the way of what I care about. An enormous number of scientists feel they must assert their ego and do their thing their way. They have got to be able to do this, that, or the other thing, and they pay a steady price.
This reminds me of the wonderful theoretical country discussions we had in my economics classes at college.

Forget a new kind of bank. Go total bluesky. What IF, we could design our own set of sovereign laws and principles.

What would the "modern" country look like?
I love Mark's writing. I learned Python from Dive Into Python a few years back (when I was still in high school).

His writing is simple and concise. Clean, just like Python code :)
Small: http://scheme-reports.org/2009/working-group-1-charter.html

Large: http://scheme-reports.org/2009/working-group-2-charter.html
I've always felt bad about this, I'm 21, grew up with a computer etc but if I'm going to be doing a lot of reading I'll take a printed page every time.

Sometimes I feel guilty for printing out online essays etc, I'd like to try an ebook reader/kindle but I'm a poor student ^_^
Thanks branden, I didn't re-read far enough down the article.
> Well, the rest of the world also starts at 0

Yes, they do, when they have no elements. But if an array has an element 0, it actually has 1 element, not 0. Whereas if I have a sheep 1, I have 1 sheep. There is no sheep 0.

I think it would be good to note that I have nothing against 0 as a number. It's useful for many purposes including to indicate that a set actually has 0 elements, but I'm not so sure it's such a good idea to actually call the first element element 0.
Hey man,

I don't have time to read it right now, but I'm told that I'm a decent writer when it comes down to it.

The only thing I'll say right now is you should probably reword your opening statement:

"The objective of this study is to objectively evaluate ..."

Maybe go with something along the lines of,

"The intent of this study is to objectively evaluate ..."

Or, maybe even something like this,

"The objective of this study is to give an unbiased evaluation of ...".

Basically, what you have right now just doesn't flow correctly, and using the words objective and objectively in one sentence might actually be repetitive. I know they have different meanings, but in this case maybe try whipping out the ol' Thesaurus for some ideas!

Hope this helps, I'll be reading this later today!
It still doesn't make sense. They should have charged your Mom for the local call and charged you for the leg between Maine and LA.

In India, in earlier days, each cellphone number will have a 'home area' generally conformed to the state you live in. If you are in the state where you bought the phone, you don't pay any incoming charges (voice/sms). Anyone else calling you will pay charges to connect to your number. If you are going out of your home state, you have to 'activate' roaming (it could be automatic if you wish to) and now you pay the 'roaming' charges from your home state to the current place where you are roaming.

Above is how it used to work when cell phones had just arrived. These days you pay a flat fee if you are calling another mobile from your mobile. Incoming call is free for the other party. Things do change if you call a landline phone from mobile (you pay higher rate because landline is mostly government owned in India).
Have you ever looked at Forth? It's postfix and stack-based, but is exactly what you want from the standpoint of bootstrapping from next-to-nothing and getting a high-level language.

Here's thoroughly documented source for a Forth interpreter (http://www.annexia.org/forth) in i386 assembly.
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Hi Emil,

I'm impressed with your drive!

But I do think you need to get a little bit more experience before you're going to strike out in this direction.

There have been - rare - occasions of teenagers hitting a home run, but your age will definitely work against you.

There are also all kinds of legal issues that would make it impossible to strike a typical VC deal with someone that is not yet of 'legal age'.

But if you keep at it like that and you continue to learn as much as you seem to have done so far then I don't doubt you'll make it big one day. Consider me impressed, I have a son roughly your age and I wished he was half as focused as you are.

best regards,

Jacques