skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The best programmer I've ever worked with is done at 5. He has lots of other hobbies. But at work he's incredible efficient and solves really hard problems in brilliant ways. You don't have to give up your whole life to be a good programmer, contrary to what many people on HN seem to think. This mentality drives me crazy.
Many companies have a hiring process that favors hiring very similar engineers. Hiring different types of programmers would increase their diversity, which for me is a great quality of a team. The challenge here is to identify the competent engineers when you can't use cookie cutter assessment tactics.
I assume at least some of the downvotes were given simply that he was off topic. The ethical issues of using embryonic stem cells are hardly applicable to grafting one's own cells from one part of the body to another.
All I remember is that Webvan attracted ridiculous investment as well and look how well that turned out. Google can waste billions on utter speculation and never notice the blip. If you can attract such enormous funds why not, the worst that happens is you fail.
Ask HN: Microsoft Shop (ASP.NET MVC 4/5) for a New SAAS Web Project
We love to talk about PHP, Ruby/Rails, Python (Django/Flask) etc for web applications. But what are your thoughts on using Microsoft stack specially given the advancements they have made so far with the whole ASP.NET MVC stuff.

I am asking because I have a SAAS project for which I need a technical co-founder and ended up talking to my brother who is excellent at MS stack (he does it for a living). of course he is biased and for every question I had for him (can it handle sessions well, ORM etc), he had an answer.

I know that stackoverflow is a huge MS shop but anyone else doing it at a large scale?

To give you more background, this SAAS project will involve latest web functionalities including drag drop builders, lot of client side javascripting (jquery etc)

For me, it is critical that the technical co-founder knows the stack more than what I think is good (i personally love to play with Flask btw:). So I am leaning towards giving him a go ahead but I know there are shit load of licenses to buy :)
There is nightlife and such in the east bay...
@logicX would love tot alk to your friend Paul. I run RefreshMiami, the largest startup community in South Florida, we'd love to get someone from MagicLeap to give a talk.
Could someone ELI5 this pro-systemd/anti-systemd thing?
Mysql does have a much better durability solution -galera cluster IMO... Does Postgres have something similar?
Not really, remember daemontools? There are almost a hundred init systems very superior technically compared to sysv and systemd, the truth is that sysv has NEVER been considered the best.
We wrote some custom OS X code to capture frames from individual processes. That way the simulators don't need to be positioned in any way or even visible. Cheers.
Thank you!

1) I'll see about tweaking the hit size of the MF control
2) Yep, that's definitely on my to-do list. No ETA on when it'll come (I am still learning Apple's APIs), but it's something I do want to add :)
I've been doing this for a year or two with dropbox. I've tried vcsh and others and stow has been by far the best so far.
Show HN: Hpenc – high performance encryption command line utility
Strangely enough, the kind of immersive experience technology that Magic Leap is developing might just help with that problem.
A Consensus on the Brain Training Industry from the Scientific Community
Ahh. Thank you for reminding me. It's been added now.
> In front of the imaging devices there are high speed mask device (LCD?) that blocks off portions of the image that are not at the current focal depth.

It would be interesting to see how this works in practice. The eye can't focus on something that close. For an example, imagine a speck of dirt on your glasses - it shows up as a blob in your vision, not as a dot.
Its going to be very difficult for them to hire such specialized skill sets ANYWHERE. They need to find very high end optics and microprocessor experience, and thats tough to find either in palo alto or hollywood, fl
Interesting discussion! I would have liked it if the author had provided some background information (for the uninitiated) about some of the other related issues mentioned. For example, what was meant by "the horrors of PulseAudio", "the udev debacle", and why was HAL bad?

I realize that I could probably find out "bad things about HAL" via internet searching, but it would be more interesting to see the author's take on the issues in the context of the article.
How is this correct, mysql has synchronous replication. does Postgres have something equivalent to galera?
Lol, this made me laugh out loud.
Seems cooler? Magic Leap didnt even properly presented their technology, so how can you know?

If they gave $500 million to this company it must mean it is either better or have better perspective. As simple as that.
I think most of it is ok, such as the init system, except the logging. Why did they have to touch logging, and change everything about it, and put it in a non-text format...
Yeah, that lowers cost considerably. Copper is attractive even when it needs to be cut out of signal cables. The Norwegian railroad authority is switching to aluminum cables in certain parts of the country to avoid it.
Product Hunt Gets Social with Twitter-Like Profiles, Following, Notifications
Ah, didn't realize that there was this dimension to the debate. Sorry for the hasty/inaccurate comment, and thanks for correcting me.
Lean Startup Machine Johannesburg Ticket Giveaway
How to Style Pastel Coats
We're building the perfect notebook: Kickstarter, goals, and lessons learned
Lessons in growth and increasing signups
The pinning is actually buggy: it pins the Mac to the wrong vertical offset when you scroll past the threshold the pin hits. At least on Chrome on my Macbook Air it does, anyway. Maybe it works correctly at other resolutions or browsers.

So not really "parallax right" if you're counting the whole page from top to bottom. I like the images a lot though, they're very nice.
Mysql is fast and easy to scale and make durable, what features of database do you really use that is not met by, fast, durable and scalable... Sounds more like perhaps some sort of belief rather than data?
Best stick to the shallow end of the pool if you can't swim.

Do you program? Then you are a programmer. However, in some circles, where extremely complex problems need to be solved, they would say, " No ", because you can't do any of the programming required, and you'd be as useful to them as a rock, only less useful because you take air and food.

I play volleyball occasionally, but if I went to the olympic men's team, they would tell me I don't really play volleyball, I've not yet earned the right to say that I have.

It's a matter of skills and standards. In the right context I can call myself a car mechanic.. like if my car needs air the tires, but beyond that I'm not.

If you can program simple things on the web you can get away with calling yourself a programmer until you run into problems that make you realize you're not, like complex graphics algorithms.

I can cook food at home, but if I walk into a 3 michelin star restaurant and try to get a job, it's not like I'm going to write an article if they don't like my food. Boo hoo, they made me cook for them, how dare they? Whatever they're doing, it's working, so why knock the process that produces success when you can mimic it?
Trouble with single pixel thermal imaging is inertia - thermopiles have thermal mass, you cant take 1000 readings per second, you cant even take 100 readings per second. So while 1 pixel camera in visible light spectrum can work thanks to hi speed acquisition, thermal one will be beyond useless.

not to mention the wave of extremely cheap thermal imagers we got this year -Flir one, seek thermal, all in ~$200 price range.
Health Care Accelerators Evolve Towards Specialization [pdf]
It's not about what the public want but what they need.
Yo, dawg... http://i.imgur.com/Ib0WUeT.png
Once upon a time I was a programmer, building CRUD apps for enterprises. I hated puzzles, too.

Then I discovered quicksort, and graph search, and Bayesian inference, and Dijkstra, and Karatsuba.

I'm still a programmer, but now I love puzzles, too.
Agreed on all points.

But how would you interview a candidate? I see what not to do.

Here is what I do:

* Ask about their previous work. Dig into something they are excited or proud of.

* Try to solve a problem together. Usually a simplified version problem I am actually solving at the moment at work.

* If it is a new grad. I will ask them some simple questions about data structures, school projects.

* If there is any sample code, anywhere, I like to see it and it is a big + sometimes.

* See if and what kind of questions they ask.

Does that work? What would you add/remove?

I try not be a "dick" and take the approach of "ok, let's work on this together" approach because that is how things work here.

Another approach (which I don't like as much) is to go by the "we want to hire smart people" mantra. "smart" here is is nebulous of course. So how do you do it? IQ tests. Oh but those are illegal, so just write a tests that looks like one without calling it an "IQ test". That involves puzzles usually too. So I think that is how puzzles became popular.
To say that this is not fair would be an understatement. systemd-journald is only one component, there are more than 50!
I agree and perhaps see if you can shard between multiple servers.
I have to admit, I don't understand what you are trying to say.

Are you saying puzzles are somehow the higher level of programming? You are completely wrong.
African Countries pass on hosting Soccer Championship – fear Ebola
definitely a possibility :)

we'll check that out, thanks for the heads up.
I personally dislike puzzles (of the toy/jigsaw variety), riddles, and so on. But I love solving problems when programming. A programming problem abstracted to a word problem is no longer fun - you've taken away half the toolset I have for tackling the problem. It's the synergy between mind and machine that gives me deep joy when programming - the fact that the tedious repetitive parts of mental gymnastics are turned into creative problem solving, which in turn leaves me more time for creative solutions to the problems that weren't repetitive.
That's the exact strategy that worked for Amazon.
Interview with Jack Groetzinger of SeatGeek
This thread has included some interesting discussion of how everyone handles the different tasks of a) committing individual units of work, b) saving works-in-progress, c) syncing files, d) backing up files, and e) persistent undo editor features.

I thought I'd toss out what my setup is right now on my personal machine, for a bit of reflection/discussion...

- I compulsively save to disk after nearly every edit, so I'm a big fan of editors that provide some kind of persistent undo functionality. Right now I'm using live-archive inside the Atom editor, and it is wonderful. I hit cmd-shift-y and it pops the current buffer open in a live-archive interface that includes VCR-like with rewind/fast-forward buttons, etc. It leaves me feeling quite free to mess with code a little more dangerously that I would otherwise. Whereas before I might briefly comment out a line while I try something out, now I'll just delete it and hack away. Anything that was there is just a cmd-shift-y away.

live-archive is actually maybe the foremost reason I'm still using Atom. I'll probably switch away from it eventually, but I'm grown to like the customized little hole I've built for myself, inside that particular editor. I might try out a JetBrains IDE next, sometime ...

- I don't do a lot of work-in-progress saving. Maybe I should be better about this? I'm not a fan of git histories that read like "went to lunch," "stuck, think on this--" etc. Even when I'm the only one that's going to be seeing them. I keep a gitignored text file where I tend to scribble down notes like this, but maybe I should play around with WIP commits.

- For syncing I have an hourly cron job that does a rsync -av --delete-after for my important directories to several different locations. This is mostly meant as a true sync and not backup, but I do find myself using it as a way to lose no more than an hour's work at a time. I might change this to running every 30 or 20 minutes since it doesn't seem to tax the machine too much.

- For backup I have crashplan backing everything up to a local external drive and then their cloud service too. I haven't put a terrible amount of thought into this. It only runs when I sleep. I want to play around with using arq and amazon glacier eventually.

For git I just do small unit-of-work commits for myself, and then cleaning up when necessary.
Algorithms and puzzles are different things.

If I asked someone what is an algorithm and they replied 'it's a puzzle where you solve...", I would laugh my ass off.
It doesn't really need to be a cop/reporter. If you're doing something unethical/illegal, don't show nor tell me, period! If you do, count on me reporting on it, if nothing else to save my ass. Unless you're a really good friend, that is, and even in that case there would be a big ethical dilemma (I would probably still report on you if you harm another person).
The incentives are nice but the "True" ride-sharing organizations would take offense to calling Uber and Lyft a ride share. They are currently defined as a TNC- Transportation Network company.
Are you sure you rewrote a "system"? Or a program?

Fred Brooks makes a distinction between a program, a product, a system, and a "programming system product" (what I believe Joel was thinking about when he was talking about Netscape)

"A product (more useful than a program):

can be run, tested, repaired by anyone

- usable in many environments on many sets of data.

- must be tested

- documentation

Brooks estimates a 3x cost increase for this.

To be a component in a programming system (collection of interacting programs like an OS):

- input and output must conform in syntax, semantics to defined interfaces

- must operate within resource budget

- must be tested with other components to check integration (very expensive since interactions grows exponentially in n).

Brooks estimates that this too costs 3x.

A combined programming system product is 9x more costly than a program.

http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~parrt/course/601/lectures/man.month...

http://books.cat-v.org/computer-science/mythical-man-month/t...
Uber Rival Gett Increases Driver Compensation to $0.70/minute
As far as jigsaw puzzles go, it would be interesting to see if there are unique ways to optimize your piece search.

There's the edge pieces and sorting by color. I've found that sub-sorting by pegs/holes can dramatically help - I had a "picture made up of pictures" puzzle which allowed me to correctly orient the pieces. Knowing even just two of the required slots, combined with the color, reduced the search to a reasonable brute-force search. Plus, by sorting the pieces you could actually do a brute-force without feeling like you might have missed a piece.
Android L is for lockdown
> Then I discovered quicksort, and graph search, and Bayesian inference, and Dijkstra, and Karatsuba.

I would guess most "discovered" those because they had to interview. The % of programmers who need to Karatsuba or Bayesian inference to finish their project is very much smaller than the % of programmers who thought "oh shit, I better learn this because Google and Facebook keep asking about graph theory".

It it is perhaps an interesting secondary effect. CS concepts become useful not just because they are useful (and they are) but also because recruiters at many companies think they are. If tomorrow juggling skills somehow become popular during Google interviews. You'd see a lot of juggling programmers out there.
Firefox 'Metro' app abandoned because no one wants Microsoft's Modern UI
Ask HN: How much JavaScript do you know as a Python/Ruby dev?
Does it make any sense being a real full-stack engineer? Client-side JS is getting more and more complex with all that AngularJS/React etc stuff, it really pushes the limits of the one-man show approach for web development. How many JS do you know as a web/backend developer?
The link below seems to be the pre-existing relationship between The Guardian and Whisper. It's not exactly a business relationship in the terms of investment, for example.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/17/iraq-wa...
The top 10 Indian Startups
Dude, congrats on the hustle! How did you land your first artist and convince them to crowdfund? Was it a weird experiment for them or totally natural?
Consider this somewhat similar to booting up an 8-bit home-computer and get thrown into a BASIC prompt. It's a fun toy and a great experiment. It's not a "product".

Play with it if you want to experiment with Lua and/or experiment with a simple OS built around a higher level language. Don't play with it if you want something to build your next app on.
So when did a browser stop being "client software"?

Around the time Netscape relegated Windows to a bunch of device drivers?
I kind of stitched this essay together haphazardly, and it certainly does require some background knowledge to fully understand.

Nonetheless, "the udev debacle" refers to systemd merging udev into its codebase, along with tying it to systemd's shared files, the recent "debug" parameter fiasco and the rather blunt statement by Lennart concerning migrating the transport to kdbus: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May...

PulseAudio (originally PolypAudio) is a networked sound server most often used in Linux systems coming with a variety of centralized features (see here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/About/), which proved to be highly controversial initially and less so to this day. People realized it was buggy and unstable, and different factors were blamed: poor integration, sloppy ALSA drivers, or PulseAudio itself. The most common narrative these days is "PulseAudio was bad because Ubuntu rushed it", but I haven't studied things in enough detail to pinpoint exact reasons.

As for HALd, it did solve problems at the time, but I'll quote the Ubuntu wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Halsectomy
I see the whole pro/anti systemd as a philosophical debate. Basically each part is arguing where the complexity should be in the system and how dense it should be distributed.
I think we need two competing init systems to really know maybe in 5-10 years what the best trade-offs are. A modern sys V init and systemd.
RegEx is just ludicrous a general requirement to "program" as anything else. I've never particularly wanted it to write the mathematical models I work with. I can think of just a single instance where I've used one in the last year and that was to display integers as ordinal numbers (hardly a sizeable task).

Every job needs a spec. Every spec should inform the interviewer and the interviewee of the skills and competencies expected by the role, and therefore what will be brought up in the interview. Adding "everyone should be able to criteria unrelated to role" is madness
Stop it with the sign up landing page and VALIDATE your idea with a Demo
Lol.. How can you say I am wrong when you don't understand what I am saying?
UC Berkeley AMP Camp 5 Big Data Bootcamp (Nov 20-21)
emacs is the one true editor...

same thing all over again :-P
Yep... used to design anime sites with that all the time, font was 04b03. Size 10 with 2 pix border (black text, white border!)
>> However, what does not make sense to me is the asinine requirement that a web developer needs to know or understand algorithms. A front-end developer working with HTML, CSS and Javascript will never EVER need to know how to write an algorithm. In my 12 years as a developer thus far I have never needed to solve a complex math problem or write an algorithm to markup some HTML, the closest I get to math problems is simplistic operations in Javascript like calculating the scroll distance from the top of a page or mathematically moving an element around the page in a particular way and I generally use a calculator for these problems.

Perhaps some folks want to automate your job. That's not to say you're obsolete, just that some people want the machine to do absolutely everything automatically and that often means algorithmically. That's probably more effort than its worth in many cases, but sometimes it's well worth it.

A facebook feed or Google news have a fairly consistent layout, but what content goes into it is definitely chosen by an algorithm (IMHO a poor one at facebook) and the layout is probably tweaked by algorithms.
This idea that you have repeated several times...

> A front-end developer working with HTML, CSS and Javascript will never EVER need to know how to write an algorithm.

> In my 12 years as a developer thus far I have never needed to ... write an algorithm to markup some HTML

> A developer working with HTML, CSS and Javascript does not need to know algorithms whatsoever.

> Only a developer working with data or writing an algorithm to sort it should need to know that stuff.

This is either a spectacularly narrow view of what an algorithm is or it is totally wrong.

I've done both front-end and back-end/data for years. I frequently write "algorithms" on the front-end. Several of these were recent:

- Retry method for AJAX form submission

- Distribute assorted icons evenly among primary keys in a table.

- Dependency chain to check and execute asynchronously fetched scripts in the right order

- Even CSS can be somewhat algorithmic, as when I optimized by about 100X the hiding and showing of a huge amount of table rows with cascading style rules instead of JS

I don't think I need to go on, but the point is that if you think front-end developers don't need algorithms, then you are doing something wrong. I would check your assumptions about whether hiring for this is actually helpful. The companies you are talking about are leaders in both front-end and back-end technology. How do you think that came to be?
Anyone can add something to jsDelivr, not just the library author. You can add it yourself if you'd like them to host it.
Suppose x is the price before lunch, y - after. Then we get the following equations:

ax + (10-a)y = 3500; bx + (16-b)y = 3500; cx + (26-c)y = 3500

Which is equivalent to (assuming x = y + d):

ad + 10y = 3500; bd + 16y = 3500; cd + 26y = 3500
As someone who has been teetering on both the Ruby/Elixir fence and the Ruby/Clojure fence, I have to admit to not looking close enough at Goroutines. A glances left me feeling like they were an abstraction at the wrong level, at least for the type of concurrency I want to write. But I'll have to take a look in order to play with Agent. Does anyone have a favorite guide/overview to Goroutines?

Beyond that, the big conceptual takeaway/conclusion for me was this line, and which is definitely going in my quotes file:

"So, the question is not whether threads need to exist, but rather, whether they actually make for the best high-level interface to write, test, and manage code that requires concurrency, regardless of runtime."

It reminds me of listening to JavaScript Jabber's episode with David Nolen on ClojureScript and Om. Amidst discussion of how Om leverages ClojureScript's immutability to have a performance advantage over standard React.js [0], there was a discussion (admission?) that "our immutable data structures, the reason they’re so fast is because under the hood we do use mutation. That’s why they’re so fast.".

So to use Ilya's words as a template: Like threads, it isn't a question of whether mutability needs to exist, but rather, whether it actually makes for the best high-level interface to write, test, and manage code.

[0] Is it a slight one? I don't want to misspeak or oversell it. JSJ is transitioning to a new site design that currently makes the transcript hard to read and find the exact quote on performance: http://devchat.tv/js-jabber/107-jsj-clojurescript-om-with-da...
He's better at jigsaws.