skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This. Getting well-known by other pythonistas is very valuable. How you get that recognition doesn't really matter. Stack overflow, a popular blog, contributions on the mailing list, working on a lot of open source projects, etc...

Personally, I don't think terribly highly of Stack Overflow's award system, since it can be relatively easy to game, but if you're really contributing value, then it's not the badge that matters, it's that value. And so, I would recommend against saying "gold badge in python on Stack Overflow" on your resume, but I would say "Very active contributor to python questions on Stack Overflow", and let the reader see the value you have put into the system beyond from the silly little badge next to your name.
I don't agree about the comments saying it doesn't mean anything. We are currently looking for talented people and after Github I can't imagine any better validator than Stack Overflow. We can only dream of finding someone like you. Trust me, if someone walked in saying he or she had a gold badge on Stack Overflow it would almost be an instant hire.
Can Tony Haile save journalism by changing the metric?
I am curious if you bring up this attitude when being interviewed for a job?

I assume your attitude is the same that the 1 year 10x developer has. I don't want top work with them any more (though I have to). It definitely prefer working with colleges who do have some interest in the technology.

Doesn't mean that I hang around doing unpaid overtime. It does mean that I want to improve my knowledge and skill-set, and become more valuable a result. It also means I produce better code that doesn't break as often, freeing me up to build more, rather than repairing the same dumb errors as last month.
The author has a good strong point about leaving work at work when you leave. Unfortunately, he makes a logical error in thinking that this generalizes to any sort activity that resembles your work. Would anyone berate a mechanic who likes to go home to work on the classic Camaro he is restoring for fun? Just because the guy does similar things for work and fun doesn't make him absolutely wrong or necessarily worse at his job.

When I leave at 5, I don't worry about work. I go home, have dinner with my family, play with my kid, etc. Then, while I'm watching TV, I sometimes sneak in coding on some side project or open source fix, writing a blog post, or organizing a meetup. This doesn't make me a fool or bad at my job. If anything, I'm continuing to develop and retool to keep my competitive edge so I can keep getting paid well for work that I don't hate. That's smart.

I've worked with guys like this, and they drive me crazy. If you hate your career path, that's a you problem. Don't make it mine.
Purple Reign – The unmaking of a Yahoo
I TA for this class. The class is optional for non-engineering majors but has enrollment >= 700 people per quarter. So many people at Stanford take the class that it's a bit of a cultural phenomenon.

There are three "intro" programming classes at Stanford. CS106A is "intro to java", CS106B is "intro to C++", CS106X is CS106A + CS106B + a bit more in one quarter. People who already know how to program are encouraged to take one of the latter two, although there is always a contingent of people with /some/ background in 106A.
Artisanal sounds like the one to use, if a bit on the cheesy side.
I'm curious what is your web app?
Read our spotlight on: MassChallenge UK and receive a discount to enter
> paints you as someone with a lot of free time

I hate that this is considered a negative.
Hiring in tech should prioritize skill, not charisma
Sounds like a bad employer.
There are days when I love what I'm working on and I don't want to go home. But I still force myself to leave, because that work will still be there tomorrow, and I'll go in the next morning with renewed passion.
The icons are poorly designed, in my opinion - its very difficult to tell what exactly is happening by the icon. On my Mac, I have my Finder color set to black, and the little whale icon is completely indistinguishable. It looks like white-noise. So, some feedback: add some color to the GUI, like "RED = stopped, GREEN = running, AMBER = changing state" perhaps ..
The nuclear age – A great data visualization
حظك اليوم الثلاثاء 17-3-2015
It's an interesting idea, but it should not be implemented.

We all lose people of value: Terry Pratchett, Aaron Schwartz, Robin Williams, etc. The worth of such individuals is rarely objective and is mostly subjective, but sometimes on a large scale.

Were we to memorialize everyone of value to someone somewhere in such a manner, the weight of the headers could easily outweigh the value of the information we're trying to access.

Yes, it is proposed for one person only. Next week, it might be one more. The week after, a few more. And so on. Turtles all the way down.

Just because we can do a thing, doesn't mean we should.
Career Harbour is looking for a Unicorn – Humans, don't apply.
I don't know that I would compensate more for that achievement, but it would certainly stand out in an interview. The fact you gained that badge tells me you not only have the knowledge, but you also enjoy helping other people learn. That skill is much more valuable to me as an employer. A person like that can elevate a whole team.
The Nordics: 2% of Europe's population, 9% of global billion dollar exits
Your contributions on StackOverflow demonstrate that you're passionate about your subject, articulate, and willing to help other. The gold badge reinforces that.

You're asking if it's worth something, I think it definitely is, but it's up to you to leverage it. Bring it up in your next job or salary negotiation, or when looking for freelance gigs.

Perhaps the most important thing for you though is to figure out what's next. If you enjoy educating and helping others, there are a lot more you can do: start a blog, write a book, teach a class, etc...
I still don't trust them. Only 15% of doctors get this question right:

>1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?
He has a point but I think the title is misleading.

Am I passionate about programming? I don't know. I hope I am.

Do I focus on code for 8 hours straight? No. I can't do that. I would burn out.

This makes me think that I'm a fraud sometimes. I'm not talking exactly about the imposter syndrome. I do see my achievements. But I also see that I don't always put in the "8 hours" I'm supposed to put. Sometimes my brain just stops functioning, and I have to distract myself with something other than coding.
there is really too much regulation for a true disruption to occur, let alone any disruption might easily be perceived as criminal if the returns are too good either by over zealous Federal regulators or via subtle hints by your competitors to the same
This is hilarious. I'd love to see the source code of a large program written in ArnoldC :)
I will definitely be updating icons in the near future, I'm hoping to have a few sets that users can choose between.
They've already demonstrated that they have the means to inject into a binary stream, so unless Apple start encrypting everything - and I mean, everything - that happens between the App store and dragging the App into /Applications, there's little we can do to resolve this issue.

This is one of those cases where the betrayal of the NSA/GCHQ/Spy-Agencies-of-the-5-eyes-nations is really obvious. We can no longer trust our developer tools...
I received a CV request from a recruiter that specifically stated that my SO score was one of their metrics.
I suspect that all the programs meant to help people are actually a part of the problem. Not directly, because helping people doesn't really hurt (except maybe in a "don't feed the wild animals" sort of way, but most consider that negligible). But more in a "somebody else's problem" or a "bystander effect" sort of way.

In other words, the existence of programs to help people in need -- and worse, large federally funded and administrated programs -- make people feel as though it's not their problem and also that they're already doing something to help: paying their taxes and not voting against these programs. I say large federally funded programs are worse only because that makes the responsibility far more diffuse and the ability to influence ever more limited.

So the programs to help aren't directly bad, but the knock-on psychological effect is that they absolve people of any personal need to help (since they're already helping in a very vague and miniscule way) and that leads them to not take any (additional) direct action.

It feels like the inverse case of the tragedy of the commons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect
> "financial innovation" Yes that worked out well in the past.

Actually, if you look beyond the recent crisis, oftentimes it did. Examples: the invention of money (make O(nm) pricing problem into O(n+m) pricing problem), invention of debt (temporarily transfer savings from a person with excess money and no business idea to a person with no money and a good business idea), etc.

> How some people believe that shuffling money about will make more wealth is beyond me.

Money can help produce new wealth, depending on how it is invested. If you move it from a place where it is stashed and unused to a place where it buys land, buildings and machines and creates jobs then the latter will create wealth once the former will not. So yes, it is not inconceivable that shuffling money around may create wealth (when it actually does is a different question).

During dotcom crisis I once heard a complaint about software engineers: "you just sit there and move bits around". Well, it turns out some sequences of bits actually create value.
>or force them to support this (not likely)

Last time I've checked apple was an US company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

>If you distrust all software that isn't open source

Sadly, this isn't enough. A lot of people are pushing for deterministic builds for exactly this reason.
Mike here using old openid account, as I'm replying too fast.

The CA handles the verification, hence the difference in price. Symantec/Verisign is the most expensive, Digicert is in the middle, Comodo and the Symantec budget brands are the cheapest.

As mentioned elsewhere, I do have code written against the Comodo API, and it would be a lot more profitable to use them. However I (and the tech companies I'm targeting, eg, Stripe, GitHub) use Digicert certs, mainly for reasons of verification speed but also business practice compared to competitors, eg, Comodo: https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/866-PrivDog-wants-to-protect...
State of Angular 1 – Pawel Kozlowski and Lucas Galfaso
I don't know much about Manning, but from the article, first, he seems to have some kind of 'photographic memory' for gameplays. Not something you practise to be honest. But even if he watches 4 hours per day, if you add it to 4 hours physical practise, he still will only be on the 8 hour a day schedule, and it is two different things he focus on. He isn't on the field 8 hours + 4 hours a day at home watching games.

A lot of folks here do 8 hours in the office, then 4 hours at home with something else (side projects, carpentry, sports) as well, but I would be very astounded if (for long stretches, not for a week or two in a training camp) he would be devoting more than 8 hours/day to practise.

From the article: 'Twice a year, Manning would show up with a garbage bag filled with the VHS tapes he was done with. Harrington said every one had been watched.'

I know it was probably hyperbole, but even if we assume 50 tapes per bag, with 3 hours per tape (both generous assumptions), that gives around 300 hours per year, or one hour per weekday. Tyson was also an avid boxing student (early career). A normal day for him would consist of 3-4 hours practise and 1-2 hours watching tapes depending on how close to a fight he was.

ps: Again, I don't know much about Manning so maybe he really is different, but growing up I was involved and trained with various professional athletes in various sports, and what I'm saying is based on my observations of them.
The problem with GNU make for scientific workflows
Hi, GitLab CEO here. Installing GitLab should take only 2 minutes with the Omnibus packages available on https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/

Upgrading GitLab is as simple as:

sudo gitlab-ctl stop unicorn
sudo gitlab-ctl stop sidekiq
sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:backup:create
sudo dpkg -i gitlab_x.x.x-omnibus.xxx.deb
sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

And we're working very hard to make sure this is a flawless, uneventful & boring process for 100% of the users https://twitter.com/PentiumBug/status/569930640725946368 We're also working on a package server so you can just use apt-get to upgrade.
I have done quite a bit of recruiting and interviewing for Python in the past, and I'd say that if I saw it on your CV, I'd automatically invite you in for an interview.

If you fluffed the interview on Python stuff, I'd give you the benefit of the doubt and give you another go.

And if you happened to have answered one of my questions for me, I'd have a whole lot of good will towards you.

I think you'll probably end up with a lot of very small karmic rewards, rather than any one big one.
Ask HN: Has anyone used LeadFuze? What did you think?
Imho the author should have written AstroBuild in ArnoldC. Would have been the perfect use case ;)
i feel that if this was done, it was done 'over the wire', more or less on the fly, and not by wholesale appstore replacement but by mitm of internet traffic streams looking for xcode binary material and replacing it, or portions of it, transparently.
Definitely! I'll look into this one.
Updated the lexicon. Now more epic.

"Cachemonet for your friends' cats"

"Kindle for your cat"

"Near-field-communication for your Facebook"

"Manage your popular friends with grown-ups"
Indeed we are far far away from true AI (to me it implies self-consciousness).
The point is even if it happens in 100 or 200 years, it will be a huge change in human history.

I guess Gates, Hawking and Stark are talking about a further AI creation, they are kind of long-term thinking guys.
> I really hope Apple isn't going to make this a trend across their line

This model is a shot across the bow from Apple, but this model also isn't intended for programmers and IT professionals. It's meant for grandparents and a "lay about the house as needed" computer for (currently, rich) people. Apple differentiates things with a Pro line on purpose.

The original MacBook Air had a serious lack of ports and that didn't really trend across their line. It did not come with an Ethernet port, which instilled some major, major outrage. But since then, some of those bowshots have gained a foothold in the industry.

I have a MacBook Pro, and now it doesn't have a built-in Ethernet jack. But it's not a big deal at this point. Even as a network engineer, I only pull out my TBolt Ethernet adapter a couple times a week. The end effect is that I have less cables to deal with on a daily basis and I'm more mobile. I can plop down anywhere at work, open the laptop, get on wireless, and get chucked onto my special VLAN. This is way better than before.
BTW, Brazil has a population of 200million, and this protest's had at most 1 million people. This isn't as representative of people's toughts as right hand media tries to show.
Yeah, the Roadster 3.0 announcement started by saying:

The Roadster 3.0 package applies what we've learned in
Model S to Roadster. No new Model S battery pack or major
range upgrade is expected in the near term.

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/roadster-30
11 Rules All Programmers Should Live By
Show HN: Seria – Parse and Convert XML, YML, JSON
Actually, I conservatively estimate I'll be in the top 1% within a couple of years with no further contributions due to the passive reputation points I earn.
It will probably help you get your foot at the door and that's just about it.
Provided you have a "careers" profile. I've been contacted by companies through that.

Other than that, no. For example if I were your interviewer I would rip your answers apart and ask you "why did you choose that solution?", or "what if we change that condition on this problem?". So, if you thought that you are going to "skip" parts of the interview, I'd say nope! Au contraire my friend :D

Congrats on the badge though, I don't have a gold one :(
Stopping expensive queries before they start
That has not been my experience. What issues did you have?
At best, this is a hyperlink on your resume or a source you can easily point to on your website for people to know you are 'legit'. However, considering the difficulty of this achievement and that your skills and outgoingness should be apparent, the achievement should be obvious to anyone looking somewhat closely. However, these kinds of credentials are great to introduce some speaker for an event and they add color to your life in a bio or other blurb thingy. Along those lines, when they introduce you in a court appearance, these are things that can maaaaaaaybe e used.

All that said, CONGRTATZ! great job! keep up the good work.
I started learning to program in 1976, and in the 1980's I was one of those young, single guys who stayed up all night and wrote C for 14 hours a day. But it was never a _job_ when I did that. It was a hobby. The whole area of interest was new and not that many people were getting paid to write code. It was entirely a different era, but somehow this notion that real programmers code until they drop has hung on through the evolution of the art into an commercial trade craft. There are times when it may make sense to throw that much energy into a project, but those times are exceptional, and to consider it a regular feature of the practice is absurd and serves interests that do not have the practitioner's welfare at heart.
Mike from CertSimple here (using old openid account as my other one is replying too fast):

StartSSL don't do EV (edit: they do, just not for $60).

We only do EV, since we actually identifying companies is how SSL should have always been.

$60 is way too much to pay for non-EV, an automated process that doesn't check who you are. If you want a non-EV certificate, wait a couple of months and use https://letsencrypt.org
Just wanted to say that neither being the same of different is a goal for GitLab, we just want to have an easy to understand, efficient and beautiful interface.
Why do you think Japan's population is in a death spiral?

Birth rates are falling across the board in the first world, but unlike the west, they have few immigrants to make up for it.
It matters. Stackoverflow runs a careers platform and ranks users based on their scores. It's opt-in but if you place yourself in there, you'll start getting some calls from recruiters looking for python people. A gold badge is worth a lot on the platform in terms of visibility to prospective employers (it's much more targeted than, say, a linkedin profile). It shows that you are passionate about your programming. Don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.

If you want to quantify it in monetary terms, it's hard to say but it could mean an extra $10-$25k salary per year (due to better negotiating power at the table...).

Source: I've used their careers platform to find some people who are passionate about what they do.
That's really what munificent was arguing too though -- that the long-form options are preferable for scripting, but that no one prefers "tar --extract --verbose --compressed --file" to "tar -xzvf" when you just have to extract a file on the command line (in fact, many people don't even bother with the "-", "v", or "z", opting for "tar xf"). This optional brevity is important for utilities.
Under "common behaviours of our ideal candidate" in the HR doc posted:

> 8. Just a nice dude

It seems obvious to me that this is outright illegal gender discrimination, am I wrong?
I have ~42k points on SO and I don't think it's worth much to be honest. It's only worth something if you don't have prior professional experience. For example, you're fresh out of college, and the only thing you can do to demonstrate your competence is to point to your blog, Stackoverflow profile, and some of the hobby projects you've posted on github.

If you have worked prior jobs then a Stackoverflow profile wouldn't be worth much.

How did I earn 42k points? I was very active on SO for about 4 months (during the early days, long before Serverfault was launched (which, for those who don't know, was only the second StackExchange site; heck, StackExchange didn't really exist back then)). I used it actively because I had tons of free time. I had just finished University and didn't have a job.

When I stopped being active, I had about 9k points. I was hoping to get to 10k but I gave up, or rather, stopped caring. All the rest of the ~31k points were earned passively; upvotes I've been getting on a daily basis for the past 5 years for all my previous questions and answers.

That's why I don't think a Stackoverflow profile is worth that much.

EDIT:

For example, I have 1430 votes on this question:

http://stackoverflow.com/q/671118/35364

Does that say anything about my skills/knowledge? The only thing it says is I was an early user of SO, so I got to ask that question before anyone else.

I also have tons of votes for this question:

http://stackoverflow.com/q/1261975/35364

Whose answer I just googled and have no idea why it works. Still, it's the most upvoted question/answer related to VirtualBox. Someone literally contacted me because of that. They assumed I was some sort of a virtualbox expert.

I'm the third person on this list of "all time top users on virtualbox": http://stackoverflow.com/tags/virtualbox/topusers

I can assure I know very little about virtualbox.
Precisely. I see loads of people here working until late because "they have to hit the deadline". All it seems to produce is a bigger pile of bugs to fix in the next sprint.
Microsoft Signature is shameful (2012)
Loved the film but we aren't going to see robots look or move like that any time soon. Think? Maybe.
Stack Overflow can definitely be a part of a selection criteria, both for initially discovery and as a validation of skill - particularly linking to highest-ranked answers relevant to a potential employer's problem domain.

Careful though: if people start taking it seriously they may investigate how many of your answers were posted during normal working hours!
Agreed. Reminds me a lot of what Fab was, before it tried to compete with Amazon -- unique, 'quirky' goods that felt like they weren't just mindlessly mass-produced (even if they were).
It's definitely a factor in new construction in San Francisco. I wouldn't say it's a larger factor than the anti-development lobby but I think the anti-development lobby and the rent control lobby are closely aligned.

Height restrictions are another factor, as is the requirements around affordable housing.
...aaaannd there goes the "faith in humanity"-budget for the day. There can't be many people applying to such job offers, right?

(Also, video-pitch for a job as a backend developer? What's the logic behind that except "let's see through how many hoops they'll jump")
I think it depends on how I'm viewing the file. If I'm just editing in SM and building the tex as usual, then I don't need anything extra. If I'm trying to convert to all sorts of other documents (which I haven't ever really done) then labels, theorem environments, one-line macros, and bib entries cover almost every tex-specific thing I use.

Here is an excerpt from a typical paper's macro section [1]. As you can see they're mostly one-liners to remove the need to keep typing textup and mathbb, simple mathoperator definitions and such.

[1]: http://pastebin.com/RL1gejEZ
Is this a Magic clone?