skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you already know any hackers/programmers who you consider reliable?

Request a few small code samples from candidates with some short (a few sentences description) of what/who/how the code was designed for and a little bit of context (ie, was the code produced under a 24 hour deadline to fix a critical bug or the result of a six month side project).

Have your existing reliable programmers skim over the submissions, looking for a quick yes/no. Bring in (or video conference, whatever works for you) the yes candidates, and actually treat the interview as a short work session. Brainstorm about your project requirements, technology approaches, talk about challenges you see, ask them for what challenges they see and how they would approach the problem. [EDIT] - oh, make sure to vet the submitted code samples too - if a candidate can't talk coherently about the submitted samples, I would be in "thanks for coming" mode.

Ultimately, I'll echo what most posts here are saying - if some hacker/programmer in your network says good things about a fellow hacker/programmer, you're probably way ahead of the game.

If you're completely unable to evaluate technical candidate skills and have no hacker/programmers in your personal network, I think you have to move back to a suggestion by bjclark - "Hire a reputable company." Maybe you can even pay a reputable software company to vet candidates for you - I've had poor experiences with IT recruiting companies, but I've always been on the other side of the table, trying to find a good technical recruiter to work with.
I'd say this is mediocre satire.
Yeah, most soldiers go through daily training and usually before they even get to the daily training they have to go through 3-6 months in an actual training facility.

I doubt after only 5 weeks of training that a soldier would manage 1110 miles in 51 days. The OP comments are asinine, he's criticising Izzard for a truely amazing feat. Terry Fox managed 3339 miles in 143 days meaning he only managed about 23 miles a day. I suppose to the OP this would be unimpressive too. The OP has a pathetic attitude, and criticism for a feat he (nor anyone on HN) would likely never be able to accomplish, it's simply pathetic.
Capital allocation only works towards efficiency if you remove capital from failing businesses ... but no one would prop up a failing business with billions of $USD and negate the whole process would they ...?

Also, you need people to want what's good for them. Suppose we need better food supplies; food production companies need more capital to optimise their production. But, people want nicer trainers (aka sneakers) and so we allocate more money there for growth to recoup more profit from that id-ish desire for fashion. That's not efficiently running the system that's efficiently recouping the greatest profit. People's desire for better food needs to be improved but instead the profit from the shoe sales feeds-back and more money is spent on advertising and marketing and enticing people to want slick shoes in preference to healthy food. The feed back loop rolls on and more resources are allocated to shoes still at the expense of other sectors.

Capitalism is not really about optimising production, IMO. The essence of capitalism is to maximise profit and the two ideals are not co-terminous.
You explain in your post that the biggest boosts to the petition came from celebrity sponsorship and getting coverage by the Independent, BBC, and radio. Throwing around hype about "2.0" just distracts from an otherwise lovely accomplishment.
Isn't the argument that using operator[] for read-only access has very unexpected performance issues?
Define theft? What if eBay doesn't own the code - why should the founders simply give their IP and core tech away?
I see the problem with return, but is it really important enough to have the confusing multitude of options? I wonder if it could at least be approximated with labels in languages without "blocks" (like break, next, retry and so on).

Also, what will the return do if the block has been defined outside of the method, will it also return from the method?

Anyway, thanks for the clarification. I guess to_proc was what I had been looking for back then when I ran into the problem.
The X tablets are a little heavy to casually hold in one hand. They run fullblown Windows which is good for running Windows programs, and less good for quickly looking up who that actor is while watching a movie.

Ideally, a tablet would work a lot like an iphone. You could leave it on the coffee table for a couple days in the sleep state, but it comes fully on with the click of a button.

Unfortunately, the specs link on HP's site goes to a really lame landing page with even less info.
In terms of performance, I couldn't tell the difference between a real NES for Zelda II (like 40 fps). The performance for Chrome for me was stellar, almost perfect. (v3.0.196.2)
Banc Public
"that disappear when not in use"

It just means the buttons are displayed on the screen and aren't physical.
Great story. Thanks for sharing the details of how things progressed. It's incredible how much pull BBC News online has.
Its inspiring to be sure. I used to not think about it very much, but I live in Ottawa, and I pass a big statue of him every day on my way home and always serves as a little reminder.

In the end when you look at the positive effect the organization in his name has had its truly remarkable. The 29th annual Terry Fox run was actually last Sunday.
Probably because they aren't hungry for
money after all
> If you don't use operator[], then you don't pay for it

The feature you pay for without using it is copy on write, not [].

In fact it's very clear in the paragraph before the last chunk of code:

> If you do use these functions, you risk paying for a write that you don't make
Private Company Valuations: Brightcove
How about "It's Not Very Interesting"?
From what I understand, Google makes a clear distinction that "don't be evil" is not synonymous with "do no evil." One's about intent, the other is absolute. The test is whether they correct course when they discover that they had been doing evil.
From the video, that would appear to be a digital picture frame, not a "tablet".
Agreed, I think the nay sayers would be shit scared cowards if they had to attempt this and all of them never will. I never will, I have the balls to admit I'm totally incapable of achieving this, but as a half-decent human being I could never criticise someone for such an amazing feat and I believe anyone who does is a complete and utter hack who doesn't deserve the title of human. It's pure envy and all these nay sayers have let it consume them, it's utterly pathetic of them and shows sub-human decency.

In Europe there's a 100-club for marathoners, for those who complete 100 marathons within their lifetime. In less than 2 months Izzard is almost half-way there. He did in a few weeks what most marathoners dream of for half their lifetime. That's simply amazing and the fact that he increased his speed considerably despite injuries and damage makes it even more amazing.
I can see why the Masonic myth continues. I pass the building in the picture every day while on the S2 bus. It is so outrageously out of place that you almost assume something odd is going on -- or, that it is a tomb.
This seems quite the same as saying that listening to a CD is exactly the same as listening to an old LP.

No, it's not. Some humans (not many, though) can tell the difference; music simply can't be reduced to bits (without loosing some very, very, very fine information, not accessible to every instance of Ear on Planet Earth).

In this case: I would swear that there are ears able to tell the difference...
I was writing a plugin system for hexfiend a year or so ago to cover complex data definition overlays, a la 010 editor, but I think I might have mentioned it on here before. I lost the need for it and lost the time needed to put into it.

I had a chunk of c-like struct definition grammar done in lex/yacc that was turned into an AST that consumed some bytes from a hexfiend document and populated an outline view with a description. But it was messy and not what I wanted it to be.

What I'm trying to say is, I love hexfiend also.
no, but as a business, they should be hungry to serve their customers. or they'll, you know, die.
Ed Felten: Finding and Fixing Errors in Google's Book Catalog
Here are a couple tips:

- Use the keyword tool instead of traffic estimator: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

- Look at the difference between exact, phrase and broad matches. (On Keyword tool)

- Rumor has it Google changes the broadness of broad match to suit their needs. I have heard of "Bed Frame" broad match showing ads for "mattress" Therefore the broad match number is probably higher than reality.

- The country settings seems mainly useless.

- The numbers returned are rounded to certain fixed values which seem to spread out in a logarithmic scale. So the higher the estimate, the less accurate.
Original article: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn.238...

I was inclined to be skeptical---breaking news, shocking the brain during sleep impairs performance---but they used three different groups of rats:

...we tested the role of SPW-Rs on memory consolidation.
Three groups of rats (test group, n = 7; stimulated
controls, n = 7; unimplanted controls, n = 12) were
trained to find food rewards ... .

During post-training rest and sleep, all of the online-
detected ripples were suppressed by commissural
stimulations in test rats (average online detection rate
was 86.0 ± 1.3% (s.e.m.) of post hoc detected SPW-Rs;
...). Stimulated control rats underwent the same
protocol, except that a random delay (80–120 ms)
was introduced between SPW-R detection and stimulation,
ensuring that the stimulations occurred mainly outside of
the ripple episodes.

Now check this out:

Thus, these control rats received the same number of
stimulations as test rats, but their hippocampal
ripples were left largely intact. The global architecture
of sleep and the local field potential power in distinct
sleep stages were not modified by the suppression of
SPW-Rs ... . As stimulation outside SPW-Rs had
no detectable effect on task performance ..., the two
control groups were pooled and compared with test rats.
Performance of the test rats was significantly impaired
... .

Cool experiment design with an intriguing result.
If you click on the big graphic, it'll take you straight to the content.
I have been doing paid search for a couple of years and have had different results when comparing the Traffic Estimator to Adwords results:

The most common outcome I find is the estimator tool shows more traffic and a lower cost per click than actual adwords results. I have even had the cost per click off by 40% more than the estimator tool.

The problem with the tool is there are too many variables that the tool can not account for. Other than cost and keyword, you have to deal with the quality score that looks at the ad you write, the landing page the ad is pointing to
and click-through-rate (ctr).

In the SEM industry, the rule of thumb is to take a small amount of money and test paid search. It is the only way to get a good idea on the environment you will be competing in.
The free masons or the building ?
Good point, but I guess it's more of an entertainment device. Something like a social media client + Web radio: I guess they'll add a real browser soon in order to sell more than a few of them.
I guess the price is crucial.
The best part, I think, is Jon Orwant's response (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1701#comment-41758 , link is from the 3rd paragraph of Felten's post) to Nunberg's rant (the errors are real and widespread, but the tone of Nunberg's original post was excessive).
1. You select the area (country, city, whatever) you want to target.

2. Take the numbers with a grain of salt. They're good for directional or relative comparisons (same KW in different parts of the world, or KW vs KW) but by no means present an absolute measure of demand.
Yeah, that's not a bad idea, but I don't need it myself. If you want, please go ahead and fork the code on github and send me a pull request, though.

http://github.com/trevorturk/pygments
Facebook will tell you the # of people you're targeting, but not the expected clicks. They might not have enough data to estimate clicks. Google indexed my site, and probably has more comparable data than FB does.
and we used to use ttcp (for it was more efficient with slinging around large files.)
This is not a blog. The "stories" don't have permalinks. This is a page about DIY traffic calming with several examples.
As some already pointed out, this isn't really a "google homepage redesign," but just a clean, simple startpage for a variety of search engines. I know you've got to figure it out at first, but once you do it works I think.
Unless you happen to be 4chan
Whether something "looks like it should" in the browsers is a function of the browser makers. Whether code is valid and meets the spec is a function of the coders. If the browsers are well programmed then designing to spec means that the pages will appear as expected in those browsers.

The MSIE team basically created an undocumented system called hasLayout and didn't bother to tell anyone until the fixes had been found - if I add "zoom:1" there's nothing to say that the next update of MSIE won't balk at that or that W3C won't adopt zoom using % making my pages potentially (only in later IE I'd warrant) zoom to 1%.

As for "looks like it should" I'm sure you know that (X)HTML & CSS are not intended to convey the same visual expression to every browser. If you want identical visuals then web pages aren't what you're after.

Yes I have used zoom on pages when clients haven't been bothered about web standards. I contend that accessibility of pages by _all_ well-made browsers can only be assured by coding to the agreed standards.

MS: whacks man on head

man: "hey, wtf?"

MS: whacks man on head

man (putting on helmet): "please don't do that it's not right" (doesn't meet the arbitrary standards of public decency!)

MS: "Put a helmet on or when we whack you it will hurt bad"

MS: whacks

man: "Stop hitting me and it won't hurt at all"
Facebook does tell you the estimated clicks.

I'd like to know how accurate the estimates are.
The focus of this and other comments here seems to be to critique how this UI works for the majority of Google users. IMHO there's room for several alternatives interfaces for any popular service.

> 8% surveyed (by Google) in Times Square knew what a browser was

So 92% need the UI that works for them. There should also be a UI for the 8% minority that Google is, who know to hit enter for submit.

We've come to value multiple interfaces adapted to the client device. Isn't it time to have interfaces adapted to the skill-set of the user as well?
I've found that most of the time, the Google Traffic Estimate usually OVERESTIMATES how much traffic each keyword get. For example, I have the #2 google spot for a food keyword. I get about 1,500 visitors a month from Google for that keyword, but the traffic estimate tool estimates "74,000" searches for that keyword a month. So if 74,000 is really accurate, only 1,500 are clicking the second result
I had a similar experience. I naively used the Google Traffic Estimator tool very early on in the planning process of my startup. Unfortunately, I gave a strong weight to these estimates -- which turned out to be very, very wrong (I was using it to find CPC and traffic for major metro areas).

Lesson learned. Get lots of estimates and be as conservative as possible.
You are now result #1!
Ask HN: What payment solutions minimize transaction costs?
I'm curious what payment gateways or other solutions developers are using to minimize the revenue lost due to costs associated with handling transactions online. The standard 3-4% credit card processing fee may not seem like much ... and can be built into the price of whatever it is you're selling, but for websites such as a charity or non-profit, are physical checks still the only way to avoid taking a 3-4% loss on the benevolence of those that wish to contribute online?
A list of about 50 scientific articles on "captcha" available at http://www.citeulike.org/tag/captcha
Reminds me of Pockets (http://pocketsapp.com/), for short messages and voicemail, which was one of my favorite entries in this year's Rails Rumble.
Does the world need another java-like language I wonder, even if its blessed by the google Gods?
I am annoyed at the tone of both corporate and government involvement in China. I don’t expect things to change, but for some reason it still bothers me.
Hang on a second tho'. Western governments can and regularly do stop tech being exported.
http://codepad.org/ is pretty similar, it can do lots of other languages though as well like C, C++, Python...
I should have made more clear I never really expected COW, so I'm not terribly disappointed when I don't get it. The standard allows but doesn't require it, IIRC. But I don't see how I ever "pay" for COW. It's cheaper than copying when it works.

Or, like I said, if you want copies, it's because you want copies. If you just want cheap references, use references.
Thanks jojosime.
Think of all the sites which use recaptcha for their signups - google will get some interesting stats through this.
Tenancy Agreement
Residential Landlord, gives information to private residential landlords about an assured shorthold tenancy agreement.
I remember installing BeOS back in the day. I was very impressed. Glad to see continued interest. Anyone running with AmigaOS ?
Maybe they have to play along in order to make change

I think this is often the case.
VC Control Provisions: Keeping The Rug Under Them
MarketSamurai should give you a wealth of information about your intended keyword.

(Disc - no affiliation to the product, i just use it a lot!)
Are they still claiming copyright on the books? I was a bit disappointed to see this previously, but a quick looks doesn't show it anymore. Maybe they relented?
Music Sales
TV licensing seems like such a weird concept after living in the US

And now looks a bit corrupted if they are going so far as to put DRM on broadcast streams
Really? I see a recommended bid, but not estimated # of clicks.

Let me know and I can let you know how accurate it has been for me (been running test ads for 2 months).
Do you mean they should be as cheap as netbooks are?
Geez. All this Be nostalgia lately has had _me_ pining for it, and I've never used it. Gonna try out R5 on my old pentium II. Hopefully it'll replace XP. It seems fitting, as that computer is nothing more than a toy for making art.
Could the C++ standard have fixed this? Sure – the C++ standard goes into great detail about when iterators and references into strings are invalidated, and all it would have taken would be to add the copy constructor and operator=() to the list of reference-invalidating functions (section 23.1.5, for those who are following along in the standard). A second option would have been to declare that operator=() invalidates existing references for writing, but not for reading. But the standards committee preferred simplicity, convenience and safety to performance – uncharacteristically, if you’ll forgive a smidgen of editorializing.

Yes, it was uncharacteristic...but good god, imagine the chaos if your references were invalidated by any copy or assignment operation. I don't even want to think about the consequences for complex code. The standard committee was exactly right to choose the (avoidable if you're careful) performance hit over the complex "fix."

I disagree with his fix of casting non-const strings to const for a quick fix. The best way is to use const in the first place for any strings you don't plan to write to.
Gene therapy has successfully restored vision of 2 male squirrel monkeys.
You should see "Estimate: 74 clicks per day" at the bottom right above the Create button.

This is ONLY if you do PPC. If you do CPM, you'll see impressions(which is probably what you are doing).

If you are doing CPM, mind sharing your click %? I'll do the same when I start my campaign and hopefully we can learn together!
http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&sa=1&q=%E5%8...

June 4 incident in chinese, as they call it like that there... I don't see any picture related to it.
Because we are trying to build a tower from the machine to the abstract?
Exclusive Free WinX DVD Ripper Platinum License Giveaway
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I'm getting a solid 60FPS in the Chrome beta for Mac (4.0.207.0) - I was only getting about 15 or so in Safari.
completely pointless. anyone here could churn out a post like this everyday for years without ever really saying anything of substance.
This is very true. I like to think that, in a lot of ways, Be was what Mac OS 8 (the original Mac OS 8) should have been: a massive, massive improvement on the design of System 7, while retaining the general feel of the operating system. NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP were always more about being a vast improvement on Unix. Yes, Be had some POSIX emulation, but there's a huge difference between that, and actually integrating properly with a complex multiuser Unix network with shared directories, site-wide logins, and so on--something that NEXTSTEP had had time to hone to perfection due to its heavy use in academia and government.

BeOS is still interesting to me, but mostly in a historical sense. I have to agree that purchasing NeXT was a vastly wiser decision.

EDIT: As a quick addendum to my post: although this has changed in the intervening years, the one thing that Be definitely did have going for it back then was that its kernel was technically superior, delivering mostly the same benefits of a true microkernel design, but with vastly superior performance to Mach. I have no idea what the current state of things would be on that front; between Apple merging BSD into the kernel space and replacing DriverKit (Objective-C) with IOKit (eC++), the differences are probably minimal.
I know about the novel, and about that character, but haven't read it (or seen the movie).
I agree, I think it's more a case of an incredibly misleading article title (ie, linkbait).

...does it even have a battery?
There was a project called BlueOS to do exactly that, but it appears dead now.
What I Hate About Gmail...And How It Reveals Google's Achilles Heel(s)
Better aim for perfection and only achieve good-enough that aim for mediocrity and "achieve" it... To get better you have to play at least a bit above your skill level, out of your "comfort zone". If you constantly play below your skill-level you will get worse.
This Week's Finds in Math. Physics (scroll down for colliding planets)
" I wrote Sleep several years ago and am not as active on it because it's stable for my needs."

Too bad you couldn't make the JVM summit. I would have been interested in a session on the language powering "After the Deadline" than this piece of almost-vapourware.
"Just imagine the nightmare it would be (because nobody does it) to do any kind of analysis on this mess. It's nearly impossible."

This is actually what we write software to do at my day job.

We work in the electronic discovery/computer forensics industry. Parsing and analyzing multi-terabyte collections of Outlook PSTs (and NSFs, and whatever other file type you can imagine), to be reviewed by lawyers and corporate attorneys as evidence in litigation, is one of our core service offerings.
I love the fact the .com version suggests searching for "tiananmen square _massacre_".