skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it seems to me that the possibility this device does not in fact exist deserves more investigation than is given by the article.

for instance, if you assume for a second that this device doesn't actually exist, then the current russian response makes perfect sense... it would be in their best interest to neither confirm nor deny existence of of such a machine. i.e. the benefits of hesitation on the side of a potential enemy that believes the machine may exist far outweigh the dangers of accidentally ending the world (since there is no danger at all).
What about certifying the software that Joe the developer creates, rather than Joe the developer? This is the approach the FAA takes with DO178B for the flight software on the jet planes that we ride.

These are very large projects, using hundreds of developers. The quality of the team members varies. Half are below average for the population at large.

Adding certification on top of this doesn't change the fact that half the developers will be below average. The projects are too large.
Well, so while Twitter "deprives TC of revenue as punishment" (can you even say this with a straight face? Really?) is a crime, but TC hurting Twitter's image is perfectly OK? I'm lost here...

Also keep in mind that providing TC with this revenue from Twitter is strictly their good will and should not be taken for granted. Do you really not see this?
I've always found the rules quite simple, once you think of everything as expressions (and not lines):

"." ends an expression in the shell.

In modules, "." ends forms. Forms are module attributes and function declarations. Forms are technically not expressions as they don't return anything. This is why they are terminated in a different manner than the rest.
Given forms =/= expressions, It could be argued that the shell's use of "." is what's not standard here.

"," separates expressions:

C = A+B, D = A+C

Note that 'if ... end', 'case ... of ... end', 'begin ... end', 'fun() ... end' and 'try ... catch ... end' are all considered expressions as they return a single value. As an example, it's possible to do

Var = case ... of ... end

to get a single value out of it. As such, you might see conditional expressions followed by ",".

";" Has two roles: separating different function clauses:

fac(0) -> 1;
fac(N) -> N * fac(N-1).

And separating different branches of expressions like 'if ... end', 'case ... of ... end' etc.:

if X < 0 -> neg;
X > 0 -> pos;
X == 0 -> zero
end

It's probably the most confusing one because the last branch doesn't need to have the ";" following it: it separates them, not ends them. As such, you might encounter code written the following way, which is arguably more readable:

if X < 0 -> neg
; X > 0 -> pos
; X == 0 -> zero
end

This makes things a bit more explicit. Because function clauses contain expressions, you might see a 'case' construct followed by ";", too (and similarly for nested constructs like the aforementioned 'try ... catch ... end' and others).

So as you can see, "." is for Forms, and ",;" are for separating language constructs/expressions. This is why You can see an if expression's 'end' done the three following ways: 'end.', 'end,' and 'end;'. Depending on where the expression is, it will be followed by different stuff.

You need to see it more like a template you can fill in than "here, let me put an end to this line!":

head1(Args) [Guard] ->
Expression1,Exp2,...,ExpN;
head2(Args) [Guard] ->
Expression1,Exp2,...,ExpN;
headN(Args) [Guard] ->
Expression1,Exp2,...,ExpN.

I don't see the rules as complex; they make sense, but you need to get used to them. If you think about it, things like 'for(int i = 0; i >= x; i++){ ... }' (or even 'for(...);') have a weird syntax when compared to most other constructs in languages supporting them. We're just so used to them we don't mind them anymore.
I'm sympathetic to the idea and curious to see how it works for the author. A clear subset of salespeople have a distinct entrepreneurial streak. They work in sales because, similar to being a business owner, you get paid based directly on the value you provide. You would definitely lose these people, but depending on how strong your sales systems are, that may or may not be a net loss to sales. Losing entrepreneurially-minded people from your company, though, seems like a general negative.

Incidentally, one of the commenters had an effect on me quite opposite to his intention. The commenter noted how much he liked restaurants where the tip is included. This is completely foreign to my experience. My experience is that tipped service is consistently among the best service.
Are you counted as one of the Unemployed?
Pair programming to me is a managerial gimmick to keep trench people in check, like those timesheets with specifics down to five minutes. To make them look over each others shoulder, and not surf the web. To address the near-universal management suspicion that your employees slack on the company time. (Disclaimer: yes I did read that book about the (failed) Chrysler project experience generalization to whole industry, so am familiar with the official hype part).

Many people just like the way people normally work better. To do the job you assigned as you see fit, to possess quiet minutes for thinking at will, and to have full control and sole responsibility for what you do. There is time and place for interactions, that's why people have code reviews, meetings, brainstorming sessions, et cetera. If sitting on the degenerate case of meeting of two throughout all your worktime is your thing, fine, do pair programming. But as the author clearly says it is not for masses, although I beg to differ about the actual reasons.
Apart from the fact that we're still missing a serious study of pair programming (isolated from other Agile hooplah), it's also a false dichotomy. Isolated damsel programmer in the ivory cubicle vs. paired mind meld.

I would say "Pair programming? Yo, Obie, I already gotta pair!" in my best Andrew Dice Clay manner -- but with a German accent, my best Andrew Dice Clay manner is rather abysmal...
> The way I see it, if you can get 20% of the way to 10,000 hours just in your sleep, there's no reason to not be doing it.

If there is no downside to it.
So TechCrunch behaved like jackasses and showed stuff Twitter didn't want to have shown, while according to your theory using Twitter as a way to make money, and that's okay?

It's called biting the hand that feeds you, and it's an old old saying. If TC still hasn't figured out it's a bad idea, nuts to them.
Delete Records With Effect Using jQuery And PHP
>> "Joe the Developer is entrusted with writing code that can cost people money and cause damage. In some cases, it can endanger lives and businesses."

That's what tests are for.
I was slightly boggled to read the bit about Alan Greenspan and thought: "wait, are we talking about that Alan Greenspan?", turns out we were.
Empty Directories from the files
I agree that the existing certification programs may be lacking, but I don't think that negates the need for them. It just means we need to come up with better certifications.
Google Sync: Now with push Gmail support
They make sense once you get them, sure, but I still think that ';' or 'end' or {} are a lot easier.
Dude, we're talking morality over a list of recommended people on Twitter. That's Twitter's way of saying "We like these people!" Saying that their removing TechCrunch is immoral is like saying that it's immoral to stop dating a girl who cheated on me.

Twitter would be justified in what they did, even if their "recommended" list was important enough to be worth an argument, and it's not.
Finally a way for Twitter to make money! Grabbing or securing spots in the SUL.

http://pulse2.com/2009/03/12/jason-calacanis-offering-twitte...
Google losing in China as new users go to Baidu
Clarifying point - although coliveira's comment was as something of a true outsider, the original comment in the linked article was from a published phD student in theory who felt snubbed based on his response to "What school do you go to?"
The next time I use the colloquialism "Damning with faint praise," I will think of this comment :-)
Exactly.

Remember, that password is only strong until someone pulls it out of a database that has it stored in plain text. After that, you might as well be using "password".
The certification argument seems to forget whose benefits from certification. It's not the developer - it's the people who are able to ensure that there is a baseline level of competence among software developers entrusted with certain kinds of development work.

You're making one huge assumption here: that the certification actually certifies anything at all. As a matter of fact, it does not. Certifications are useless. Having or not having a certification is no indication of presence or lack of programming skill.

I'll go further, though. The certifications do you, as the public who makes use of developer services, a disservice. They imply that someone has verified and certified "a baseline level of competence" - but that implication is a fabrication, a lie.

All the certifications do, effectively, is give people who shouldn't be in programming jobs working for people who shouldn't be hiring programmers.
Cello made from Lego
> What about certifying the software that Joe the developer creates, rather than Joe the developer?

There's a simple reason why - it costs x to certify 1 developer, and y to certify a piece of software.

For most software, "y" is still too expensive to offset the potential damage caused by software failure (compared to a jetliner, where the potential cost is huge).

A programmer may create hundreds or even thousands of pieces of software during a career. Average x over that number of projects, and it's negligible. Multiply that number by y, and you have an enormous figure.

Also, the cost of certifying a piece of software to provide any kind of assurances of quality is time consuming and expensive. Compare this to a certification that shows that anyone who wants to claim to be a "software engineer" actually knows the first thing about software engineering, and is at least capable of producing software in a systematic way.

It's just like we license drivers once and assume that that basic level of competency will ensure "quality driving" on a variety of road types. We don't certify each driver for each road individually.
I would argue that certification has very little do with the quality of software that a developer would produce or a baseline level of competence.

We generally hope that a degree would give you a baseline level of competence, but I'm not sure that is entirely true either.
Simplistic, contains typos, trivial, flagged.
I'll be the dad that will shell out $400 for Tylenol to avoid the risk of my child becoming retarded.

Not to mention, $400 for peace of mind is pretty cheap, and would probably buy me a decade or two of ulcer-free living.
Woah. People usually oppose certification because it creates barriers to entry. (In particular, I subscribe to this point of view even though I'm a long-time programmer.) Now this guy opposes certification for the opposite reason - that it makes entry into the profession too easy. In a better world this would've been some kind of clever postmodern provocative trick, like Alan Sokal or whatever, but something tells me this is for real.
It "got" you?
> You're making one huge assumption here: that the certification actually certifies anything at all. As a matter of fact, it does not. Certifications are useless. Having or not having a certification is no indication of presence or lack of programming skill.

Bet you're not a fan of driver licensing either, right? 'cause a driver license is no indication of the presence or absence of driving skill, either.

Oh, wait, yes it is.
But the tests are only as good as the person writing them.
> Joe the Plumber heard that you can make more money programming than plumbing and decided to suddenly become a programmer.

Where did Joe the Plumber get that misinformation?
Clickable:

http://shapado.com

http://blog.ricodigo.com/2009/09/22/shapado-a-foss-replaceme...
No, tests ensure certain functional behaviour under one input.

Certification would ensure that Joe is capable of writing tests that actually test anything, for example.
was pretty sure I already had this with JOGL :P but I understand. Do you think in the future we'll be pissed when we go to a page that has too complex of 3D model for our system?
Age versus average revenue per user: Real data on who monetizes best
"The rigidity of this approach surprises me"

That is because you don't know Obie. HashRocket is Obie's vision about how sw dev should be done made manifest. I would go crazy working at HR, but hey the man has a right to his vision.

The interesting thing is how "agilists" who pride themselves on their , err, agility are very rigid about "the right way to develop software".
I met Simon Peyton-Jones at a dinner once, and he came across as a really nice guy. He seemed interested in what I was doing, even though it's leagues away from what he does, and not nearly so 'interesting'. Highly recommended.
Sometimes people include top-ranked private universities like Stanford, but never for public universities, and never to refer to top schools in a particular field where the rest of the Ivies are notably weak.
I spent a month at Princeton this summer, working alongside current Princeton students and a handful of the people that work at Princeton.

Princeton people are usually very bright. Not all of them are—many of them are capable of regurgitating academically and not much more—but overall it's a community of smart people. It is not, however, particularly brighter than a handful of other communities. Perhaps there's less riffraff, so you only have people above average there, but there's this perception that you have to be a genius to be Ivy and that's simply not true.

Until my stint at Princeton, I was a "Princeton child". I grew up loving Princeton, I wanted to have a Princeton degree on my resume and live in the enormous castles that Princeton calls dorms. After staying there, I came away with the perception that Princeton's a great college, but it's not head-and-shoulders above any number of other great colleges, and there's nothing special about the people that go there. (They also put up fake ivy on new buildings, which I consider false advertising.)

Another way of putting it: The smartest group of people I've ever worked with was a group of twelve writers who I met when I was sixteen. They were all pretty remarkable people. Of that group, two went to Princeton, one went to Brown, a handful went to schools like Vassar and NYU, and a few went to shitty NJ public schools like I did for a year. So when you're talking to people from shitty public schools, remember that there're people there who could put half of Princeton to shame. Not everybody there's going to be brilliant, but not everybody at Princeton's brilliant either.
FWIW, this isn't an EU thing, it's a national thing. Immigration from outside the EU is 100% left to the member states, and it's why I can't work in the rest of the EU until I get off my arse and apply for my British citizenship: member states have complete control over their visas and citizenship. It's just that once you have citizenship in any EU state, you're allowed to live and work in any other without any discrimination based on your nationality (assuming you're not from one of the New States of course).

I love that the UK has same-sex immigration rights, and had them before much of the rest of the EU. Now they're common-place, but when the UK did it, it was pretty new and special.
Causation, Prediction, and Search by Spirtes and Glymour is much more accessible than Pearl's Causality, and they cover a lot of similar material.

Video lectures has a workshop from NIPS '08 with talks by Pearl, Spirtes, et al at http://videolectures.net/coa08_whistler/

The UAI and NIPS conferences are a common venue for this research to be published in if you're interested in the latest results.
Is it only you writing the code? If it's just me, generally the names of my variables imply the type ("price" is probably a float, for example). But say you're joining a project with 100 Python classes. How do you write the code so that someone else will know that the arg named "network" is a ip address string and not a network socket or a class, presumably named "Network"?
I hate seeing PDFs.

(and that include scribed ones too)
Security Alert – Antivirus2010 | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
This (and several other syntactic / stylistic quirks) made vastly more sense after I learned Prolog, FWIW. Erlang was originally implemented in Prolog, by someone who wanted to make a variant of Prolog with better support for concurrency, so it's not surprising that Erlang inherited several of its surface details.

As introductions go, _The Art of Prolog_ is also a great book (like SICP great), and spends a lot of time on the logic programming paradigm and its big ideas rather than Prolog-specific details. _Clause and Effect_ by Clocksin is a _The Little Schemer_-like intro, though its style is a little more conventional.
There will always be ways to game the certification process by teaching the test. And there will always be talented, passionate developers who don't test well or don't see the need to memorize something that Google could reveal in a single search or who just think that the certification process is bollocks.

Requiring certification would, it seems to me, make it more difficult to determine which developers to trust. Just because Joe has a piece of paper saying that he knows X, Y, and Z doesn't mean that Joe isn't going to take shortcuts that end up costing the company thousands or millions of dollars (or human lives!). Because Joe has this piece of paper, companies may be lulled into thinking that they don't need to test him as hard or give him as long a trial period before entrusting him with critical systems.
apples does.

http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/248/2041/1588/store.apple.com/Cat...

we're talking desktop here, remember?
Degree programs that contain certain requirements could be accredited as being equivalent to a certain certification.

Not all degrees programmes include even the first thing about software engineering - they have plenty of programming, but nothing that would actually ensure that people have a systematic approach to software development.
Modelling the probability of a single typo in a long but simple password shows it more likely than in a short but complex password.

Long-but-simple: type 40 characters correctly, each with 99% success (independently) and you're only 67% likely to get it right.

Short-n-complex: type 10 characters correctly, each with 98% success (independently) and you're 81% likely to get it right.

Choose your own numbers. People will type long passwords incorrectly.
>The above simply creates a lazy sequence of all of the numbers between (inclusive) 1 and limit - 1.

> (range 1 (- limit 1))

this is wrong, it should be:
(range 1 limit)

which will produce:
(1 2 3 ... 999)
Ask HN: investing to create employment
While waiting on my never ending immigration process to complete (or even make progress), I'm thinking of starting a business to help create employment in my local area. I can start and invest in the business but can not work for it. I'm currently looking for the right people to run it. A couple of my friends are possibilities.

I specifically don't want to start a web or software company. I'm not looking to make a ton of cash off of this either. I'd like the business to run at a profit so we can have money available to reinvest in growing and helping more people. Any insights or suggestions for suitable types of business to investigate? Off the cuff, it seems like something labor intensive would be good. I'd rather have people building things than in a service oriented industry.

Halp?
That's why it's wrong to charge $400 for tylenol.
An anecdote.

Back in late 90s I managed to get second best score in the country (for that year) in Visual Basic exam under Microsoft Certified Solution Developer program. The catch was that I had have never written a single line in Visual Basic nor had I have any substantial database development experience.

So, yeah, it is entirely possible to get certified and not know a thing about a certification subject. Guy's got a point.
the correct term is "top tier" or "tier 1" schools. The "ivies" are a sports league of schools that all happen to be good at academics: dartmouth, harvard, brown, columbia, yale, princeton, upenn, cornell.
I've always said that certifications are a base level of competence for a job, not a proof of expertise.

When a senior dev rants about how they don't need a certificate, I agree, but counter them with the question:
If certificates are so easy to get and meaningless, why haven't you bothered to get them?

Note: I can think of a number of reasonable answers why not... but their response to that question is often enlightening as to exactly what kind of dev they are.
Does anyone else feel that one of the most interesting parts of the entire article was introduced in the last sentence?

"After all, he says, Dead Hand is continuously being upgraded."

This seems contrary to the spirit of most of the rest of the article. The fact that is still active is presented as it should be - a surprising fact - but constantly being updated shows a commitment several steps beyond that.
Salespeople who sell big-ticket software tend strongly towards the bully type. This would be fine if it were only outwardly directed, but they often use the same tactics internally.

I think the same phenomenon manifests with corporate managers. It's all well and good if a middle manager has the teeth and claws to hold his own in the corporate jungle. She/he shouldn't necessarily use such armament in other contexts, such as when dealing with the craft-oriented techies in her own group.

Some buddhists would say something like, "One is shaped by their livelihood."
Yes, uniformity is assumed. Difference must be proven. Think for a moment - how could logic work the other way? Given a categorical set of entities, if we could assume prima facie that there were differences in an arbitrary subset of said set, our categorical heading would be meaningless! For you have derived a contradiction before you even started; Set of A properties, subset of set have not A property, wtf...
This is basic. I would hope that if someone offers up an explanation for some event, that they would have taken the time to be sure that their explanation is rational. If they haven't, I am well within my bounds to call that explanation what it is - stupid and illogical - regardless of how long I have had an account on this forum. And in that regard, how can you be sure I haven't been an avid reader of this forum since its inception? And what does it matter...?
As to the "" around idea; that was meant to convey the notion that this isn't HIS idea, nor is it a new one. You can google eugenics for an eye-opening history lesson on his "idea".
Ash HN: question regarding code generation in compilers
I am no compiler writer but I like to read about them a lot. :-)

I have a question to ask which I don't know a better venue than HN. Basically it is
about code generation for AMD64 platform.

For a long time I have been seeing common complains about "inferior" and "poorly designed"
architecture of x86 command system. Most often people would complain about lack
general purpose registers.

When AMD launched their 64-bit extensions (and even Intel with SSE before that) they have
added a lot of that, yet telling GCC, for example, to utilize those capabilities doesn't
make general purpose C programs any faster. Targeting AMD64 vs plain vanilla i386 doesn't
give you hardly and performance boost.

Why?