skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me one of the big things that I need to constantly remind myself of is to read what is on the screen, instead of what is in my cache. While this trick may help with testing for equality I'll often mix up the bit-wise and logic operators as well, not so mention the misplaced semi-colon that is so hard to see. Reading what is actually written has saved me numerous errors and is invaluable for code reviews and the like.
Which independent researchers did you have in mind? One example I can think of is in politically sensitive areas, where think-tanks bypass the peer-review process and try to get their "research" straight into media, through good connections. I think that is rightfully viewed with suspicion.

If your point was that researchers unaffiliated with universities have a harder time to get through the peer-review process - I don't think that's true at all. Often I do not even remember if a paper I read in the past came from a university or an industry lab. For example, in computer graphics, one of the most prolific institutions when it comes to publishing papers is Microsoft Research Asia.
Remote Access Made Easy -Tonido Relay Service
Lots of time small embedded programs, especially on underpowered micro's, see this sort of attention.

Additionally, low level hardware interfacing is often done with hand coded assembly, because it is easier to "get right" on some crappy compiler toolchains that you face, then C.
2,500 technical interviews? That would mean that you've been interviewing someone every day for 6 years straight. Assuming 3 interviews per day, that would be 2 years straight including Saturdays and Sundays.

I don't doubt you but having been a manager myself for 7+ years, I real have trouble believing that "every single one of them has had to code". I've done 500+ interviews myself and most have focused on coding questions but not all. I personally think that focusing on code 100% is really a big mistake in interviewing.

Of course, if you mean by "interviews", interviews done by a team where some someone on the team focused on code, then I agree with you. I would often find myself focusing on character questions or past experience while other members of my team focused on the coding questions.
It's interesting to see how many people support Pre syncing but not hackintoshing (not an observation about you, just an observation about hackers in general).

I can't figure out why hackintoshing has such a bad name in the hacking community. I would imagine that hacking, the art of using things in clever and unintended ways, would be a great fit with osx86.

Plus the osx86 guys are some of the smartest I know. The good people contribute to Darwin and the other core Apple projects and their code ends up in mainline os x. Hackintosh users are some of the most prolific driver writers and help get tons of USB drivers written that are useful to macs and osx86 machines alike.

There's something really satisfying about building a mac, the same way there's something satisfying about building a linux or a windows box. Apple's DRM just makes it more fun.

I really don't understand the hate.
aside: I like how he uses mul and add as production names.

I've always found the expr, factor, and term names a bit confusing (maybe because factor is the only one that's specific to its operator).
"Long Jumps" is a myth imho.

What appears to be a long jump to a non-expert on first glance, on deeper inspection will usually turn out to have involved multiple small incremental steps culminating a final discovery. Since we have to acknowledge somebody we usually pick the guy/gal who finished the job. I'm not saying that all work is equal, but imho planning for long jumps is impossible (it's not like researchers don't want to make big leaps in understanding).

Examples which have changed my mind about this: Andrew Wiles' Fermat proof, evolution of RISC, quantum theories. I am pretty sure that if I dig into it, I'll find that relativity and evolution also built upon previous work.
This is very well done.

Is there any 'bed friendly' hardware that could run this? Ie a cuddly toy with an Internet connected PC built in? And by 'bed friendly' I mean not just safe to have in bed, but also one that isn't so frustrating to use that it causes a mini-stress just before bedtime. I'm guessing a parent who is away from their kids on a business trip might well shell out $500 guilt dollars for such a device.
Everytime a Hackintosh thread comes up I wonder why no-one ever mentions that they don't have a software license to run OS X on that hardware.

Excerpt from Snow Leopard license:
... you are granted a limited non-exclusive license to install, use and run (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-branded computer at a time. You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-branded computer, or to enable others to do so. This license does not allow the Apple Software to exist on more than one computer at a time, ...
Most of the satellite pictures are many years old so seeing empty fields wouldn't be a cause for worry. In my area there are many suburb areas that still show as empty fields despite the fact that they are huge neighborhoods now.
Looks nice. Here's the part I don't get: I read to my 4 year old son. I do so while he is in bed as part of the purpose is to settle him down. I set the lights low, just enough so I can read and he can see the book. I don't see how a web site allows me to do this.
Vinsol is the featured consulting company in railsdevelopment
Awesome design, but I don't like the concept :/ You can't substitute real quality time spent with kids, and that's what this seems to do. Maybe I'm missing the concept, but I don't see why parents or children would rather watch a video than have proper 1on1 storytime.

I guess I don't see what problem it solves, and IMHO it could promote lazy parenting. But I'm not convinced a kid would really be willing to use it to listen to a story. I don't think it'd be effective putting kids to bed.
I agree with the theory that the town was added as a trap to catch people who are harvesting data off the maps. Either that or it was a practical joke by some Google developer.
Below-average developers aren't really software devs. They're requirements engineers who use a semi-formal spec language.
This was true years ago (and may be true still if you have to support legacy or niche compilers) but in current standard C and C++, the null pointer is guaranteed to equal zero in integer comparisons (and therefore false in boolean expressions).

http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html#null

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/C-faq/faq/
Joel posted about it once.

(Found the link:) http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html

"Occasionally, you will see a C programmer write something like if (0==strlen(x)), putting the constant on the left hand side of the == . This is a really good sign. It means that they were stung once too many times by confusing = and == and have forced themselves to learn a new habit to avoid that trap."
Of course, this should also go the other way. As an interviewee, your task is both to prove yourself and to make the interviewers prove that their company is somewhere you want to work. So, ask probing questions about their culture, their code, their processes, their structure, the foundations of their business. And if they don't give good answers, or get upset about the questions, run away.
It turns out LN2 is cheap and easy to get, but a Dewar flask costs around $400. I haven't been able to find a place to rent one.
It also replaces /bin/init, init scripts, xinetd scripts, and more! Almost everything that executes something automatically is now done through launchd (except LoginWindow still does its own instead of providing input to launchd).

The only annoyance is Apple's worst-of-both-worlds XML plist format, which replaced something fairly close to JSON with an awful pair-wise angle-bracket shit-pile.
Calorie counting doesn't even work well in the short term. Metabolism drops dramatically at the cellular level on restricted calories. Insulin levels are the key to fat catabolism/anabolism. Calories are secondary. You can get fatter in caloric deficit if you're just eating sugar, or injecting loads of insulin.

The value of exercise for weight loss has little to do with burning calories. It's about hormones. Brief, intense exercise boosts growth hormone and testosterone, which make you shed fat independent of calories burned. Your body reconfigures. Note that endurance exercise doesn't really have this effect.

Anaerobic exercise on an empty stomach directly burns fatty acids released from body fat. A quick lifting session (20m) while hungry followed by a one or two hour fast will burn a lot of fat. Aerobic exercise with a focus on calories is fairly useless, as you indicate. It simply burns down glycogen levels which are then replenished at the next meal with little impact on fat reserves, unless you go for a very long run or bike ride. But then this has the effect of dramatically boosting appetite, which can negate the effect.
"how a candidate thinks" sounds like a very subjective criterion.

I wish there were more data behind people's interview practices. Do we know that people that think in way X are better employees than those that think in way Y? Why has HR mostly resisted empirical analysis?
Maybe it is a town that used to exist, but does not anymore. Some map services (i.e., Bing) report the location of "Census Designated Places" (obviously a US term, but I'm sure there is a UK equivalent), some of which have not existed for many years. Example: "Bartonsville" in this map http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCP...
About 2): So does "string".equals(variable), which is also 'backwards' but safer.
Excellent wisdom. I've been reading Four Steps to the Epiphany and find it pretty confusing, however. Somebody needs to turn it into a "How to find customers" manual and then write a companion "How to scale" manual.
I prefer the model where my kids can get stories read to them by anyone.

Also I think you could have a hit with moms if you do an autoplay feature. Moms need 30 mins of time to get something done. Moms dont like it when their kids watch TV. Your app should allow a Mom to click play and then deliver 30 mins of books to the child, uninterrupted. IMHO if it's a high quality experience moms would pay for this.
I'd be surprised if they did't do sanity checks to ensure the hardware is what they expect it to be.
I really like the awesome bookshelf interface. It is really a brilliant design. I think that your service would make a nice bookstore for children, but I wonder how many parents will actually use it for storytime.
The empirical data that I've read and used was to...

- count calories, and ensure that I maintain a calorie deficit (which is the only way to burn body fat).

- eat frequently, to reduce hunger and maintain an optimum metabolic rate.

- brief bouts of difficult exercise (3x30 minutes of anaerobic and 3x30 minutes of aerobic exercise a week) (the on an empty stomach part isn't very helpful).

- but, first and foremost, set goals and measure progress.

I've lost 25 pounds of body fat and gained 7 pounds of muscle mass in the last 14 weeks using this approach.

For the first 4 weeks I used the "Lose It!" application on my iPhone to help me better understand my calorie intake and burn rates. I couldn't recommend that application more.

My best source of information that I've found had been this...

http://www.amazon.com/Body-Fat-Solution-Principles-Maintaini...

(Note that the paperback is coming out in December.)
@jhancock you're right. we're working on an iphone reader so the site is more "bed-friendly". :)
@axod: You're right. This isn't a replacement for 1:1 storytime. But sometimes that's not possible. Like when a parent is on a business trip, or stationed abroad in the military, or with remote grandparents, or in a split family situation.
Agreed and a more general case of that is something like:

if ($result = $o->someMethod()) {
// Do Something with $result, the method returned a value that cast to true
}
Unfortunately, there are a lot of families that are divided (divorced/separated/traveling/etc) and this would give the children a way to be connected with the distant parent.

As a side note, I think it would be nice to have a karaoke style presentation of the words available so that it's also educational at the same time. Kind of like running your finger along below the words as you read them.
I've skimmed the paper (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2009/essay.pdf) and all I'm seeing are semantic games:

"An abstract data type is a structure that implements a new
type by hiding the representation of the type and supplying
operations to manipulate its values."

"An object is a value exporting a procedural interface to data or behavior."

It then goes on to conclude that it is wrong to say that an object is a kind of abstract data type. Could someone summarize the actual differences between Abstract Data Types and Objects? Or is it just a matter of cocktail party semantics?
Excellent design, very cool.
Ibis Reader and BookServer [HTML5 Application]
www.watchmouse.com
So you sit on bed with your kids showing them the iphone?

IMHO it's best to be active and there while putting them to bed, and so you may as well read the story yourself. If you do it well, they'll ask questions, interact, and learn things, laugh, etc. I can't see this being replaced by technology any time soon, and I don't know why anyone would want it to be.
He's not saying it's a Rails issue, he's saying he learned the technique via a Rails-specific talk.
"If you vigorously lifted weights for an hour, you’d only burn ~400 calories, less than a single cheeseburger! You’d have to keep that up every single day without increasing your diet to lose a less than a pound per week. I decided it’s easier to simply eat less."

What he is missing here is that lifting weights is anabolic and re-building damaged muscles from weight lifting takes lots of calories. Therefore, your metabolic rate increases and your fat burning increases 24/7 when you are progressively challenging your muscles by lifting increasing amounts of weight. Therefore, burning 400kcal in one hour lifting weights isn't the extent of the effect of that workout! This guy doesn't seem to know very much about physiology or metabolism...
On the other hand, if during the interview she asks how often you do performance reviews, that means she doesn't understand the startup culture

Or she doesn't want to work at "employee #1" wages forever, and is being up front about the fact that she expects her compensation reviewed down the road. I agree with everything Peopleware (and Spolsky) say about performance-based compensation, but even tiny startups need some kind of plan for promoting and improving compensation.

"Always be hiring" is a principle we've had hammered into us over the past 4 years, and people don't say it enough.
Amen. This should be titled "What's your level of formal educational attainment." I know more than a few people who never graduated from college and have far more education than I do.
"Extreme environmental changes invariably lead to evolutionary changes."

Absent mechanized farming, medicine, hospitals, and everything else modern civilization affords most of us, this is approximately correct.
This would work much better as a desktop application. That way you could have the whole app fade out after a story is done and then shut the computer off 10min after a few stories have been read.

Also, if it were a desktop app, it would be much more like the book from that Neal Stephenson novel The Diamond Age ;)
The Greatest Trade Ever: Profiting from the Crash
This is in my project coding standards document and one I actually like :)
Startup sells Wordpress as platform for newspaper websites
I guess i read it in Code Complete. Yes, it looks ugly; yes, it avoids many bugs.
Why an iPhone? I see this as most useful for an absent parent (e.g. on a business trip / separated). What then is the chance of their being an unused iPhone in the house?

Why not a standard PC built into a teddy-bear, simplified and locked down for just this application? Sell it as a $500 dedicated device to the business (wo)man who's away from their kids on a business trip.

[EDIT] p.s. - wouldn't the iPhone screen make the text too small for the child to read along with the parent? Is reading along an important part of the experience?
Great service, I checked the demo and it worked well.

My question is this, what is your intended market?
The only reason I see myself using this is if I where to die soon, and wanted kids to still have stories read by me, but I don't know if I would do it then. Maybe if I commuted a lot.

I'd be very interested to understand who the user is.
Very nice website.

For my kid, the actual story is not such an important part of the bed time routine. The fact that I am in her room, comforting her while she winds down and spending some time before she sleeps, is key. Swapping me with an iPhone will probably not help.
Ask HN: Are parents essentially AI researchers?
Doesn't parenting give insight into AI and vice versa? Are similar methods used?
Some graduate work, now it's all informal education
More like... your spouse/partner is on a business trip. Your child misses them and wants a story read by them. But they're not there to do it. You sit on the bed and show the child a video of the absent parent reading a story to the child.

I don't think we ever positioned the site as a replacement for a parent or grandparent who is there. That said, my three year old requests stories to be read to her "on the computer" where we record them together and then she watches them back sitting on my lap.
I object that calorie counting doesn't work, especially coming from a summer of losing 6 kg with no exercise. Granted, I did pay attention to my insulin (lots of fat, no carbs for the first month or so).

However what you say about anaerobic exercise sounds interesting. I'll google it more thoroughly when I have the time.
Just to compare it - does anybody have a link to some _modern_ surgery tools?

Because, while cleaner, I don't think they would be less likely to let your blood run cold.
FWIW, I was in a split family situation with my son since he was 18months. He's 10 now. I really don't think this would have been a good idea. I did think about getting a webcam setup at the time, but you need some boundaries, and things worked out great in the end.
Phone is good, and obviously making every effort when you are together, etc.
Having too much webcam/phone/etc can just make everyone miss everyone even more, and make things worse rather than better.

I'm sorry to be 'down' on the service, but it just makes me kinda sad :/

I guess for parents who work far away, or abroad, it could be useful. Or it could just make the kids miss them more...

Would a kid rather watch a video of an absent parent telling a story, or have the parent who is present read them a story in person? I'd expect usually the 2nd option.
Thanks. We think this is appropriate for parents who are on business trips, grandparents who live far away, split family situations, parents stationed in the military, etc. We also have gotten reports that people are interested in using it to record kids reading books to show off to their remote grandparents.
Has anybody here ever heard of/used joe's datacenter? http://www.joesdatacenter.com/dedicated_server.php

They offer some insanely cheap servers, which makes me pretty skeptical. Does anyone know anything about them?

(I'm not affiliated with joes DC, but thinking about switching from slicehost)
Maybe when the apple tablet comes out? :)
Amazing changes have been occurring virtually daily in the past couple of centuries. Conspiracy theories tying them together on the basis of mere correlation are profoundly uninteresting.
Whether or not this move is an intentional swipe at the Hackintosh trend, I'm rooting for Apple here:

(1) Just from a pure CS perspective, the Hackintoshers seem awfully smug, and I'd like to see them get knocked around by Apple for awhile. In a theoretic sense, it's far from established that Apple can't lock clones out. We have no idea what tricks they might come up with to reject non-Apple gear, and I for one really want to see what they are. When Microsoft did this to the Xbox and X360, we got some incredible systems research out of people like Bunny Huang and the MIT hackers.

(2) Just on general principles, if you don't have a monopoly and you aren't specially regulated, you clearly should be able to sell whatever combination of hardware and software you want to. Other people don't have the right to force you to sell some random configuration of your stuff. It's a really skeevy kind of Geek Exceptionalism that says "there's no GOOD reason why OS X shouldn't run on my Netbook, so you can't stop me".
Thats awesome, I understand the need a bit more now. Thanks for the explanation.
How Not to Drop Out
What axod was suggesting was that the people who need a laptop that small might be well off with what the iPhone's capable of. Certainly my iPod touch is what I use when I'm on the move, and it's capable of everything up to responding to people on Hacker News.
How Not to Drop Out:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=917395
Great idea. :)
And every time a EULA comes up, someone should mention that nobody really knows if that's an enforceable contract.
Agreed, it feels like I am reading arabic mixed in with english. Code flows top to bottom, left to right and suddenly there is this one piece that is right to left.
I am quite into breadmaking, keen to take on something else. We'll need these skills when the West collapses!
No, the point is that reasonable, restrained advertising doesn't work.
Are plants AI researchers? Reproduction and parenting isn't limited to humans.
Short answer: the latter is more true. The reason why {mi} is unmarked for number is simply that it’s defined that way.

In Lojban, everything is unmarked for number by default. It’s actually quite rare to see things explicitly marked for number, as it’s usually either irrelevant or obvious from context.

The pronoun {mi} is technically unmarked for number, but is restricted to refer to people that the speaker represents, just as you guessed. For example, it would usually be weird or incorrect to use {mi} to mean “we” in the sense of “me and you”, since representing the very people you are talking to is a rare situation — although theoretically you could come up with examples where it would make sense.

So in practice {mi} is usually singular. On the other hand, {do} (which means “you”) is as often plural as it is singular.

There are other pronouns that mean “me and you”, “me and others”, “you and others”, and “me, you, and others” — respectively, {mi’o}, {mi’a}, {do’o} and {ma’a} — which is another reason why the need for plural {mi} seldom arises.
I don't necessarily disagree. Instead, I would modify what I said originally. There are structural factors that make taking large risks less profitable to the researcher than taking small incremental ones. The small incremental steps are important, but the large risks are also important. I think that the portfolio of research that results from "professional academia" tends to underweight risky projects. I am not claiming that it shift towards a total random search; I only claim that we need more risky investment compared to what we have now.
It kinda fits the gap for me. In terms of functionality, it's a netbook pretty much. The only difference is it's got a smaller screen, and a touchscreen instead of keyboard.
Sure, it takes a little more fiddling, but I can easily ssh to servers, and fix things from my iphone, as well as any webapp/website things I need to do.
Wow, he may end up in the dictionary next to the word 'capitalist'. I love that he has positive cash flow. I know websites and Internets are all the rage but he may be actually making more profit than Facebook, and certainly more than Twitter.