skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My observations: The contest started at 7:00. I didn't visit the site until around 8:45. My first submissions of problems A and B were around 10:00 (because I couldn't submit the first one thanks to the aforementioned problem.) and my time was marked as 3 hours.

So I think the timer just started at 7:00 for everyone. I agree that 10 minutes per problem is remarkable and intially shocking, but I think it's correct because it's proportional to the times that the same caliber of programmers get in Topcoder matches (where 3 problems of on-average-higher difficulty are presented with a total time limit of 1:15.)
Why do you think subversion is easier to start with?

the program model of a system like subversion pretty much == the user model for source control for someone who is new to source control. Hence, easy to start with.

You have to understand the difference between the local copy and the repository

Which is about as hard as understanding the difference between "your wallet" and "the bank."

And I personally don't think the day-to-day use is any easier, either, unless you're only working with one branch

Which he would be almost all of the time, and when he comes to grok version control pretty well (as stated) he could certainly move on to something like git.
Think about cost and scale the already existing power infrastructure of oil fields, coal mines, pipelines, refineries, supertankers, gas stations and power plants.

That's mind-boggling too, you just don't think about it because it's already there.
The word for this kind of thing is "heist".

Using words like "hack" and "engineering" for every type of clever human accomplishment is getting tired.
Am I the only one who doesn't think in any language at all? I just see little flashes and sort of feel ideas. I realize this is a very sucky explanation, but I've never heard it described. When I think about a program it is again a combination of images and feeling how a given algorithm I am designing will work. I only ever think about words when I sit down to write words, and then it is almost like I am transcribing for a voice in my head that feeds me one word at a time. I very often can't think of a name or the correct word for something, but can describe around it (like I might forget the word 'well' but I can just say in frustration "hole you drill to get water out of").
I want this feature in my code editor. :)
it isn't BS to get attention. it may be BS in your opinion and that's fine to say that.

but i put the list together as talking points for a talk with the entire Etsy team yesterday at lunch.

it was a serious effort even though it only took me 15 minutes. some things that you learn over 25 years in the business can be codified in less than 15 minutes
Linux Weekly News - something needs to change
As a long-time Rubyist and admirer of _why, I completely agree with this.

The whole thing saddens me. I wonder how _why could ever repeat such a public endeavor, even under a new guise.
Ask HN: How do you fire a startup employee?
We have a small startup and we hired one guy a couple of months back. His programming skills were OK, but when it came to delivering, he scored a blank. Apparently he had never shipped software before and seemed to be more of a "software processes" zealot than being a hacker (which we intended to train him to become).

I understand that it was probably a bad hire, but the question is how do we fire him with a nice Email now?

Any example of a informal but nice termination letter (with little legalese) would be appreciated.

Edit: s/funny/informal
and first-class anonymous functions
Runs great for me on Chrome/XP. Everything else seems to be bogged down. (including Safari on OSX)
I think your redefinition of illusion is problematic:

"Hey, I see an oasis on the horizion... no, wait, it's not actually there. I guess my definition of 'oasis' was wrong."

Typically, when we use the word illusion, we tend to make a couple of basic metaphysical assumptions: 1. There's some reality external to my perception of it, 2. My perceptions can be wrong, and 3. The illusion I'm perceiving doesn't refer to anything externally.

When used in the case of free will, I think we mean something more along the lines of "generated by our own minds," which is not necessarily how people have historically viewed it. Yes, "something is there" as you say, but only in our mind, like dreams, hallucinations, or mirages are only in our minds. So I think "illusion" is a perfectly reasonable word for this self-generated phenomenon.
"You know? They're growing mechanical trees.
They grow to their full height. And then they chop themselves down.
Sharkey says: All of life comes from some strange lagoon.
It rises up, it bucks up to it's full height from a boggy swamp
on a foggy night. It creeps into your house. It's
life! It's life!"

Laurie Anderson - Sharkey`s Day
For an alternate view, see this paper:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1457848

The paper argues that patents recognizing the inventions of vulcanized rubber, sewing machines, and incandescent lightbulbs, for example, were all valuable ideas. Violating these patents would have destroyed the ability of the inventor to profit from the years of work necessary to invent them. The paper further argues that IP rights are a part of basic property rights, perhaps even more essentially so than physical property.

Property rights, at least classically, don't say that you can do anything you want with whatever you own. For example, you cannot shoot a random person with a gun and bullet you own because it would violate their rights. The protection of the other person's right to their life is not leading to a violation of your simple property rights. Similarly, this is the reason that traditional analysis of the protection of intellectual property did not view it as a violation of anyone's property rights.
Change an Organization Like a Startup Does?
What about Bosnia beforehand?

Thanks for the links. I think your statement

there were certainly terible masacres going before the bombings

gets to the point of why I was skeptical about your earlier post. It would be incredible to say that United States bombing started Serbian-inflicted atrocities, when Serb atrocities were plainly occurring before there was any aerial bombing anywhere in the Balkans. I do not claim that the United States policy under the Clinton administration was ideal (or even beneficial to the United States) but I do claim that massacres were already occurring before there was any United States intervention.
You mean apart from the original definition of the meter as one ten millionth of the distance from the north pole to the equator passing through Paris? That means the circumference of the Earth is 40*10^6 meters, so the radis is that over 2pi.

I guess, then, in addition to the pendulum, stopwatch and calendar we also need a ruler. We can use these to measure the size of the Earth directly using either the method of Eratosthenes (who also created the sieve for finding primes, and invented the system of latitude and longitude) or using the method used by Abu al-Rayhan al-Biruni.

That last, by the way, is cool, and I intend to use it in my next maths masterclass field trip.
I thought to post this here for two reasons. Firstly, I'm sure many here frequently enjoy LWN's excellent writing. Also, perhaps people have some ideas about what sort of business model might allow LWN to keep going and to grow stronger in the future?
highly engineered, sustainable facilities that create jobs requiring solid educations

You're suggesting building in unnecessary complexity?
Don’t quit your job. Just quit thinking. Start experimenting.
Why do you need to be funny? What's wrong with an honest, clear explanation that you need to fire him, and the reasons why?

Getting fired isn't (generally) a funny thing, and if you're an employer you should probably be considering the well-being of your employees (even if they're about to become ex-employees), not trying to make yourself feel better about the process by "making it go down easier" with a jokey dismissal.
VCS all the way, make that your priority. Matter of fact, I use VCS for more than just my program source code; I use it personal documents, files, etc...

Subversion is my preferred tool, others seem to like the GIT/Bazaar/Mercurial bandwagon too though.
Indeed. I'm always surprised at the number of people I meet (and, distressingly, the number of posters on this site) that honestly believe that "most" software is written by web geeks or IT droids in scripting languages or Java or .NET.

That, and the fact that this belief persists as they turn off their digital televisions, click their garage door remotes, text a friend on their phone, fire up the engine in their personal vehicle, and drive to work stopping carefully at all the carefully automated traffic lights, swipe their ID card and sit at their desk where they can finally get to see some software.
A few lessons on charging from a guy who launched a membership site
We don't don't need to balance the cycle, it's perfectly balanced on it's own, we want to avoid generating large amounts of CO2 that won't go into that cycle, because it will make a greenhouse effect -- either by not emitting, by scrubbing and storing (this solution) or by enlarging the cycle (plating actual tree, algae etc.).

I'd think that if we can convert the CO2 back to coal, we'd want to dump it in a hole somewhere, not burn it. The point was to get it out of the way until then.
The only thing that the phrase "with almost 24/7 sun" can logically apply to is the word "areas", because otherwise that word makes no sense.

But it's a silly oversight that is irrelevant to the practicability (or lack thereof) of this proposal.

In any case, you'd probably still need some sort of power storage, not because of night and cloudy days, but because of demand variation and peaks. The big problem would be around midnight GMT: lots of demand for power in Europe and North America, but most of the sunlight shines on the Pacific, with its distinct lack of desert areas (or dry land in general).
Now if only the PNE version was the same version as what etherpad.com gives you...
JBoss portal technology to become more user-friendly
Lisp macros.

Whether Python would actually be improved by macros is debatable, though.
Obviously there is a trade off on file size here. I'm curious on how the implementation works.
Depends what I'm looking at.

If I'm looking at a website, I think in SQL (cf. dude I can write SO in like 4 minutes ;)

If I'm looking at stats/ML stuff, I try to think in pictures (usually of probability densities being transformed in various ways), and sometimes slip into "pseudomath," which is basically English that sounds like "argmax integral x filtered by f times hessian of g".

If I'm doing information theory I tend to think geometrically or graphically, seeing distributions as points/nodes and then reasoning about what the picture looks like as distances/edges between them grow and shrink.

If I'm looking at an attractive member of the opposite sex, a good bottle of wine, or someone that needs cursing at, I think in French.
I agree. I didn't mean jokey by funny. I meant informal. You are right, I was wrong.
Is covering 500,000 sq KM of desert (which has a relatively high albedo for a non-frozen surface) with dark solar panels really going to help with global warming? Especially considering that as our power needs expand, we will decrease the surface albedo even more. However my biggest concern is the effects on the local regions, it's been shown that when rainforest is cut down, the change in surface albedo and evaporation can increase temperatures by 3C.

Covering 1/18th of the Sahara with solar panels (a number that will drastically increase as African economies grow and as the large majority of Europe is still growing quickly) will not only raise the temperature in one of the hottest places on the planet, but it will cause significant changes to the climate of Eurasia and Africa. The weather in most of Europe is heavily influenced by Saharan winds, and I don't think it's especially wise to screw with the one thing that keeps the region temperate and capable of widespread food production.

Their predictions don't appear to include the fact that solar power isn't 100% guaranteed, you need extra production if you're planning on powering a region. Most wind and solar production has to be turned off after meeting a quota, because they have to supply customers with the same amount, you can't go producing 500MW one day and then produce only 50MW the next because it's cloudy.

Perhaps I'm just a doomsayer, but all the gung-ho environmentalism that gets proposed seriously disturbs me. Farmers get paid to have wind turbines on their land, not only does this cause demineralization of their fields, which increase fertilizer use, which no matter what causes nitrates to get into the water, but it also decreases bird and bat populations that act as natural pesticides. Now you have to increase pesticide usage too, which gets more into the food and more into the water. There's a solution to all this, whilst sticking with wind turbines, but I've yet to see a company deploying helical wind turbines (which significantly reduce demineralization and bird strikes).

I like good old green nuclear, it produces guaranteed amounts of power on a daily basis rain or shine, windy or calm. Modern reactors produce significantly less waste than old reactors, produce medical isotopes. Reactors also often cause a benefit to the environment as the majority of their land is a buffer zone, which goes untended and becomes a natural habitat.

I'm sorry but when nuclear frequently increases biodiversity and 'green' frequently reduces it, you've got some serious shit going wrong with your plans to save the planet.
Works great for me on Safari 4.0.3 (on OS 10.6).
Facebook to launch Message Folders
Stupid elephant! He had almost triggered another day of crash at wall street.

Glad fella is ok.
Sounds like some good places to start to learn more. Thanks!
How's the wireless support in Slackware?

To me, the distro serves only two main purposes: Hardware compatibility and package management. Community support and philosophy are bonuses too, but really aren't deciding factors for me.

That said, I believe Slackware has done wonders for linux and open source in general, and for that I am grateful.
iPhone developers are getting pretty desperate these days. :)
Haha, definitely agree with this. I took some time to override much of the Kama skin's CSS (including the dialogs) for Wygwam. Ended up with something much more clean: http://brandon-kelly.com/fieldframe/showcase
That's what I was trying to get at. I am always excited to be doing what I'm doing, even if it's slow going or under pressure or whatever.
"Your programming skills are OK, but when it comes to delivering, you scored a blank. Apparently you've never shipped software before and seem to be more of a "software processes" zealot than a hacker. You'll probably do alright at a larger firm where you have a better chance to develop but you don't really fit what we need. We wish you the best of luck finding another job."

I don't see any reason to be less honest with him than you're being with us. Save the hand-wringing over how to "nicely" fire someone for when you're big and rich enough to hire an HR department and get back to real work.
It's perfectly possible to express solutions at a high level without much regard for formal semantics. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming expresses most of its algorithms in a combination of informal English and ad-hoc pseudocode. It's usually not difficult to translate them into languages with semantics varying from machine code to Haskell.
I used to think in terms of methods and data structures, say about 5 years ago. I was thinking bottom up. I learned (slowly) that I could not sufficiently communicate to the business folks what was happening. Their eyes would just glaze over. They also rejected 90% of my work by the time they got to see it. We were simply out of phase with our communication.

Today I have learned to think in work flows and the visualizations of the UI. This is how the users of the program view it. To users the UI is the program. Now the users accept my work 90% of the time. I seldom think about the methods or data structures anymore until I am actually sitting there typing it in.
While I doubt that the United States will find it expedient to accept this claim, I have to admire the chutzpah of the people who are making it. People in Taiwan would probably assimilate to live as part of the United States just about as readily as to live as part of China. (My wife was just on the phone with relatives in Taiwan yesterday; most of daily life goes on as normal, with no discussion of this interesting news story.)
Can anyone speculate on at least the class of algorithms they are using?
Thanks. That helped a lot. I really need to be honest with him.
I was initially wonder how etherpad could be useful...now I know.
Works perfectly on Safari and Firefox (OSX)
You mean like right now we just need enough oil fields to hollow out a quarter of Spain? Here's the numbers:

Size of Ghawar oil field: 280 km × 30 km

Fraction of global oil produced by Ghawar: 6.25%

Size of Spain: ca. 500,000 km^2

Do the math yourself.
Some constructive criticism about the screencast, because the dry smacking of your mouth while you're talking is really hard to ignore.

Drink more water between takes, of course, but also try slicing up a granny apple and having a few bites before and during (that supposedly helps your mouth toe the line b/n too wet and too dry).
This is very in line with the discussion of Free Will in Waking Life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VxQuPBX1_U

They mention quantum mechanics and the randomness there may have some impact on free will.

Also, I think the double slit experiment is interesting. If we observe some things with our mind, then the outcome can change. We can ignore things as well. Introspection may enable free will.
Do it in person if possible, not by email. It's harder but it's more respectful of the fact that this is an important decision. And it's too easy to misinterpret tone in email.
Introducing Facebook Connect for Mobile Web
My development enviroment has this, 's called git diff and git log?
Probably pseudo-code which resembles whichever language I most recently used to solve a similar problem.

As a really low-level example, previously when I needed to make a comma separated list of items I would do something like this:

$result = "";
$sep = "";
for ($items as $key => $val)
{
$result .= $sep." ".$val;
$sep = ", ";
}

of course now I just do join (", ", $items);. all languages I currently use have such a join function or method, and that idea is in my head; the exact syntax is not.

This does result in minor annoyances when I for example solved something in my head with a coroutine, only to realize that I'm at work coding in php, which doesn't have them.
If none buy by then, then say you didn't say than.
I can't remember the last time I ever cared for more than just the previous revision lol... this would be WAY overkill (for me at least)
I would have told that to him in person, but he bunked office again today.
Now with 90% fewer snickers.
I don't actually know what's going on, but it sounds awfully a lot like you like this person and are being taken advantage of.
i try not to think.
Yes, yes, you win. Show off!
REALLY smart school kids would go to wolfram alpha to get the distance to the Moon, and let the suckers analyze echo's from old NASA clips.
In vim this is called :earlier.
How to Build a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard
wow, firing via email. Man the hell up and take him aside, look him in the eye and explain the situation.

You're a startup founder - lead from the front.
So does this feature handle history branching and merging? Or are all revisions in one single linear history?
Snow Leopard Services - Google Text In Firefox instead of Safari
The article reads like a viral ad:

The magsafe cords detached instantly, offering no resistance and leaving power sockets undamaged.

Finally, the stiff unibody shells means that the villains could grab the notebooks one handed from a corner with no flexing, and no risk to the internal circuitry, the tough aluminum bodies resisting the jostling clanks inside the sacks.
Huh. I'm surprised by the responses on this.

I think in "flow". It's hard to describe, but it's not entirely visual -- it isn't like a flow chart in my head. Instead I get an idea of what I want a particular thing to do, and then I "feel" how it gets there, kind of like I'm mentally bouncing through a pinball machine.

I use the same approach for working on engines, circuits, and other complex things.
Be Selective and Make a Point, Any Point
It seems like Atwood is concentrating more on StackOverflow and the Dev Days Conferences. It seems like Coding Horror is falling by the wayside right now.
No. i am a programmer. i think the hiring practice you describe is asinine.
On the semantics of pseudo-code
Or, if sub-atomic particles can behave truly randomly, then perhaps they might have free will, deciding what to do for themselves, which we can only see as randomness (I do not think this is true, it’s just an interesting thought). Sadly, that does not grant us free will, only randomness.

Basically, we are completely mechanistic above the quantum level. At that level may exist some randomness, but if so, it’s just acting like a random number generator, where the generated numbers are then fed into the deterministic process that is ourselves.
I completely understand. But as I have already said, I would have told that to him in person, but he bunked office again today. I am fed up with his lack of professionalism.
Who Invested How Much to Buy Skype
Depending on the problem domain: either C, mentally compiling into pseudo-ASM, or a sort of blend of Haskell and math notation.
The Breast Cancer Threat to Women
C-/
Gems of HN: What is your candidate for best comment ?
I know that you can vote here to express that, but a vote is just one tiny bit of information and it can be that you think that some stuff is undervalued.

Maybe HN was still small at the time, or maybe it was the dead of night when it came by or the superbowl was on...

What comment have you come across over your time at HN that you thought deserved more credit than it got ?

One favourite per person, don't post your own stuff ;)
Whats the Difference Between Youtube Today and Broadcast Networks?
Um... how exactly do wind turbines cause demineralization?

How do modern reactors produce less waste? The underlying nuclear reactions can't really be influenced by technology.

Not to mention that your "green" reactors' fuel is

A) produced in strip mines that devastate entire landscapes

B) running out about as soon as oil is, unless you start using breeder reactors, which are a much less tested technology and pose a massive proliferation risk.
Sad Soul Still Trying To Unload Google Chrome Comic Book On eBay
To kick it off, here is my nomination:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5793
Mh, I have to say, this is far less impressive if you think in interfaces everywhere (or haskells type classes everywhere)... This is just something like:

interface TypeConstructor<T,V> {
T buildType(V value);
}

List<TypeConstructor<T,V>>;

or something like this.
I think in English, but it looks and sounds similar enough to Python anyway. I find this awfully handy.
Change the locks tonight?:-)

It can wait a day, say it in person.