skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been coding in perl and python since I was in about 14 or so and feel like I can accomplish pretty much any task I want in it, but I know that I'm nowhere near good enough to start applying for jobs as a programmer.

how did you finally know you were good enough?

I agree with mattm, but want to understand a little bit more about ''why'' you think you are not good enough to start applying, so I and others can comment better on if you have a legitimate concern or if you are underestimating your own abilities.

FWIW, it is a pretty common trend for especially good programmers to underestimate how good they are. Borrowing from pg, to echo my own observations: "I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent." It's anecdotal, but it is what I've found as well; the people I respect don't project the attitude that I owe them my respect. The more

But I will state a sentiment that hasn't been mentioned on here yet; your first derivative of ability is way more important most of the time. What you need to be able to do is almost never constant, especially at the places this article is discussing. You need to be sufficiently motivated and curious to be continuously finding better ways, better libraries, better frameworks that help you do a good job faster. The best way to develop a good ability differential is to give a damn; it sounds like you are already there.

As far as being objectively good enough, that is an extremely tough call for anyone to make about themselves, because you have biases; if you're really good, you can account some for those, but true objectivity is nigh-impossible. It's even hard for other people to know, for the same reason, and because they have incomplete information.

The way I deal with this is to err on assuming I'm not good enough yet. Not in the sense that I get down on myself, and assume I never can be, but in the sense that I shouldn't try to drown out my curiosity because whatever effort I will expend is futile. If I'm right, then I'll be doing what I need to do to become good enough; if I'm wrong, then I've still learned something, and haven't just settled with good enough being enough. Wherever I am, there is always better, and approaching that regardless of whatever arbitrary finish-line others might lay in my path is way more important to me.

Anyway, enough rambling. :-) Given your thoughts in this post, I'd say you have the right attitude; don't lose that, it's really what will get you the respect and attention of those you respect and look up to.
^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?

I found the w3 specs (rfc3987) suitable for my needs ~ http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3987.txt a nice Regex to parse Url formats. This Regex allows you to extract scheme ($2), authority ($4), path ($5), query ($7) and fragment ($9) ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/238916518/

There are problems I've seen with using Regex strings and expecting them to work in all cases on all Regex engines which is why I tend to stick with PCRE ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_Compatible_Regular_Express... a point in favour of the Gruber example.

"... The pattern is also liberal about Unicode glyphs within the URL ..."

PCRE supports Unicode but it's not switched on by default ~ http://www.pcre.org/pcre.txt
I imagine it's because a lot of climate scientists have had to put up with skeptics misinterpreting their data and then slandering them in blogs. My understanding is that scientists are more than willing to exchange data with other qualified scientists who have the training to be able to correctly interpret data, but not to conspiracy blogging hitmen.
I didn't hear it from the news on TV or Radio or the web or BBC News alerts, via email, IM or twitter.

Which is why the TV news wins over the internet - because I can turn it off. Misery from all over the world doesn't route around the TV's off button and get to me anyway - well, I guess it does these days. :(

"The internet treats off buttons as damage and routes around them", to paraphrase a famous comment.
This seems like a very general and somewhat misleading statement that's based on a naively instrumented/integrated analysis tool.
The worst is the Walmart brand, which is controlled by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. They use both forms in their communications depending on which is being referred to.
Win what? I don't even know who Tiger Wood is. And I certainly don't care if he had some accident or whatever so much, that I would want more than a short notice later that day (in fact, I simply don't need to know it at all).

If you think that "win" is delivering uninteresting tabloid allcaps "news" 60 minutes ahead of CNN, then, well... you have a problem.
Can Chrome OS become an alternative to Windows or Mac.
I nominate you.
While I generally agree with your point the way you present it smacks a little bit of http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694

(At the very least if you have been to an airport in the last 5 years you will have seen an Accenture ad on a wall somewhere.)
Yesterday, I was thankful for not paying any attention to the news while I cooked, served friends, and then relaxed. I turned the radio off and didn't check any websites. It was nice.

I don't mean to be callous about Mr. Woods' injury, but is this example really important? To put it a better way: it is of zero (maybe negative) value to me to hear "X happened to celebrity Y", or "celebrity Z died", for that matter, 45 minutes earlier than I would have otherwise. What would be of value to me (and seriously, I would pay a lot for this) would be some kind of magic device that filtered out such items out of my media consumption and coughed up a precis on Saturday afternoon after I do the crossword.
Do you sell a product or service online?
Neither can Clarkson, based on my brief exposure.
Things have advanced a lot since then, and there are thousands of people flying amateur UAVs today. Check out diydrones.com
Every site that decides they want to support OpenID now becomes yet ANOTHER option to login with.

I also prefer email because I have a set of spam/anonymous addresses I can use to test sites that I don't trust quite yet with my real information. Having spam/anonymous OpenID accounts would be a real mess to manage.

StackOverflow lets me pick a max of two OpenIDs. But why not instead let me specify an infinite number of verified email addresses to login with instead?

I'm not sure if one of the goals of OpenID is to show that I'm the same user across multiple sites. That's a feature I'm sometimes interested in with certain sites and sometimes absolutely not interested in with others.
tl;dr: Blog. Have a GitHub repository.

Longer: We just had a good conversation about this at work in anticipation of new hires next year. Here's the thing: we know nothing about your day job aside from what you tell us. But your ability to communicate in code and English is plain to see for your public side projects. And you don't even need to blog about code; you just need to be interesting about whatever it is you're passionate about outside of work.
Paper bags are reusable and [can] come from a renewable resource. You have a citation on your claim?
For the section titled "LINQ? Return expressions, not results", the query returns an 'Iterator'/'Query' and not an 'Expression Tree'. They are completely different things. The underlying point is valid that it makes sense to return the query so that the caller can do perform additional filtering/grouping, if needed.

It reads to me as if he's saying that query comprehensions like that essentially parse the code and store the structure of the query in a completely unevaluated manner, like the expression trees that a compiler operates on, including things like decomposing more complicated expressions into simpler lambdas, and that the whole thing is lazy-evaluated and hidden behind the enumerator interface.

So, if the queries are optimized before running, tacking additional clauses onto an unevaluated query would allow it to rearrange the execution plan in arbitrary ways, including moving clauses into different parts of what would (I assume) be some sort of a tree-structured representation of the query.

But I'm not an expert on LINQ, so maybe it is a misuse of terminology. I know I've heard expression trees mentioned in a LINQ-related context, but I don't recall the details.

For the given example, practically, there is no difference in performance for two code samples. I hate micro optimizations. Use the version which makes the code easier to read.

If you're doing string concatenation in a loop, this isn't really a micro optimization, it's a serious change in the algorithmic time complexity of the loop. His example was a trivial illustration, but the point is valid.
People who concern themselves with turning the water off while they brush their teeth also buy more fuel efficient cars, take public transportation, insulate their homes more efficiently, etc. The market responds to make the expression of environmental concern more efficient - but it only does so when it takes note of people wasting time on insignificant acts of efficiency.
people always butcher the camelCasing on our company name. It's supposed to be Setfive but people will often write SetFive or Set Five. good thing the bank really doesn't care.
Find? Look at his other submissions--I think he's the author. A lot of the other articles are excellent too.
What makes Steve McIntyre unqualified? The fact that he debunked some of Mann's work?
I don't fanboy, either I was just remarking at the level of hate for something doesn't seem that bad, its like the anti-fanboy effect.
A 4-Step Process for a Positive Web Marketing Approach
For validating emails, I've settled on /.@./, or if you really want to push for valid emails, /.@[^.]+\../. (Note the lack of anchoring to the beginning or end.) (That, and some limit on length.)

The rules are so flipping complicated and so easy to get wrong that you're better off just trying to send a mail and seeing what happens, and asking the recipient to validate reception if you care about the address. Is it really that important to exclude bad emails, at the cost of, say, blocking email addresses from the UK, as your regex seems to do? Even "validating" for sheer user error is only useful if you get it right.
If you have a high tolerance for pain you could try Office for the Mac. Not really an alternative but if you're happy with Excel it's something to consider. I use Numbers but a lot of Excel people tell me it's too limited. If you don't live inside a spreadsheet 8 hours a day it's probably good enough.
Yawn. It’s one of the best things you can do for your brain
"... Sticking exclusively with Twitter for now ..."

Great strategy. I noticed @joshu and http://a.tinythread.com use this idea making authentication simple without the login hurdle.
[citation needed] - certainly I hear a lot of bitching about people who think economizing in small things gives them the right to take a plane flight to Tahiti. I would neither be surprised if you were right nor surprised if you were very wrong. In particular, people in the social classes wherein being "green" carries some sort of cachet are also very likely to do things like flying a lot more than those who don't, since that social class tends to have more money than most other social classes.
Nobody eats raw mature beans. They have several chemicals that will make you ill if you eat more than a tiny amount. You can eat the immature beans raw, that's what green beans/string beans are after all.
A climate scientist who engages skeptics
TBH, it sounds like his software is a mess.
Amazon.com Software Developer Phone Interview: Any advice?
Hey people! Just landed myself a telephonic interview with Amazon for a Software Developer position (Description Follows).

This phone interview will be technical in nature and asks me to be prepared to do some coding.

Software Development Engineer Job Description:

Have a direct impact on the evolution of Amazon eCommerce platform and lead mission critical projects early in your career! At Amazon you will design, code, and contribute to solving some of the most complex technical challenges in the areas of Platform, Applications, Operations, Retail, Transaction Systems, and Merchants!
Software Development Engineer:
•	Strong, object-oriented design and coding skills (C/C++ and/or Java preferably on a UNIX or Linux platform)
•	Knowledge of Perl or other scripting languages a plus
•	Experience with distributed (multi-tiered) systems, algorithms, and relational databases
•	Experience in optimization mathematics (linear programming, nonlinear optimization)
•	Ability to effectively articulate technical challenges and solutions
•	Deal well with ambiguous/undefined problems; ability to think abstractly
•	Computer Science/Computer Engineering degree (or related technical discipline)
•	Previous technical internship preferred
•	Graduate degree a plus

I am seeking advice on what questions to expect if anyone here might have been through this process before? Any other advice will also be appreciated.

Thanks!
While it is possible that I have heard the name before, I didn't remember it. I don't live in the USA and I'm not interested in golf, I might have heard the name few times in similar short notices, like I have heard about thousands of other people that I don't remember either. It's quite simple, really, I didn't know who TW is, and said that only to stress my point. It's surprising to me that it could be considered such a basic knowledge.
One thing that is hard for most tech people to understand is that the line between news and entertainment is blurry. Why do you need to watch a sports event live? You don't, but you enjoy it.

There is very little news that most of us really need to know. However, many people enjoy learning about events that are potentially interesting to them as early as possible.
If this is also representative of what the delay would be for a more major event (whatever one might consider one to be, with the added caveat that getting the knowledge quickly be very important), it's quite relevant, albeit in a more "this could be an issue in the future" sort of way.
Freelancing is the bootcamp of software engineering; you will see stuff that will shock you. I have seen everything, from a medical billing package done in Excel, to a DSL in Ocaml for generating apache configuration files for a hosting company.
The CRU have publicly asserted that they have not deleted emails or data.

"No record has been deleted, altered, or otherwise dealt with in any fashion with the intent of preventing the disclosure of all, or any part, of the requested information."

http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/nov/homepagen...
> Too many of these graphs result from massaged/corrected/otherwise altered data rather than direct results, and quite often the methodologies have gaps that are left unexplained.

A publication generally has a page limit. Authors generally have a lot to say, so they leave everything out that would be "common knowledge" amongst experts in their field. After all, that's the target audience they're writing for. If someone with an honest intention asks about the methods or the data, I have no doubt it will be explained or given.

The problem is, the debate has been heavily politicised. Scientists aren't politicians. If somebody with pre-conceived notions comes along, they will do what any non-media-conscious person would do: tell them to get lost. Nobody wants to be the target of a show-trial. Unfortunately, because of the heavy politicisation, a strong "us against them" feeling has evolved, which makes people regard honest criticism as suspect.

It's not right. However, since these are humans, it is understandable.

The best thing we—people interested in an honest scientific debate—can do is to back out of the political discussion and let scientists handle it. Let sceptical scientists do their job. Let the debate be held in scientific journals, not in newspapers and blogs.
I found this book in bargain bin years ago. I guess it must merit reading.
I only mention the Esperanto studies because (1) they seem to confirm RiderOfGiraffes' intuition (2) AFAIK Esperanto is the only auxlang for which such studies have been done.

I suspect similar effects could be found with lojban, and would love to see more research in that area. However AFAIK no such research currently exists.

I read the ranto ages ago and while it makes many good points, none of them are particularly relevant to the suggestion that the studies were faked. In fact imperfections like sexism could be advantageous if the student then proceeds to a similarly sexist European language (i.e. most of them).
LINQ is made possible using Expression Trees but the query itself is not expression tree. Read this article, it will give you a good head start. http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/archive/2008/01/31/expression-...

Also, your understanding of his point is valid and I agree with it, I did mention that in my original comment. I was acting pedantic about terminology.

And I did not question the advice of using StringBuilder when concatenating strings in a loop, I questioned the advice to use string.Format instead of using '+' operator.
Joe Armstrong: "In my opinion Erlang is brilliant at handling text"
The Case for Burying Charcoal (2007)
Research has suggested that maternity leave of of around three to four months helps women’s employment but longer periods lead to what economists call ‘statistical discrimination’ against women in general.

One solution would be offer equal length paternity leave for men to minimize that effect. That said though, the bill mandating three years of maternity leave that the post alludes to does sound a bit excessive.
The question arises - do I really need to know about the details of celebrity golfer's lifestyles the very second something happens? If I read the news the following day, would that really make a significant difference to my life?

Maybe if I was an professional golfer it would.

But I generally agree with the idea that microblogging, blogs and other sorts of online media will eventually replace newspapers and even TV news reporting. Most newspapers already have a significant online presence and an entourage of bloggers.
Because people with good business sense avoid business models that feel like ponzi schemes.
> To call it "journalistic drivel"—or "journalistic" at all—is unjustified.

You're right, and in retrospect I'm surprised that I used that word. These days I expect this sort of inane rant from someone's blog that I will ignore in the future, not "nytimes.com". Maybe blogs have made opinion columns irrelevant? I can see how papers might have been boring in the past, but today we have an infinite tap of ranting idiots... maybe the papers should stick to journalism?
How many of you yawned when you read the title to this post?
Ok...maybe I'm in the minority here, but I'm having a hard time understanding what makes customerfind 1.0 different from any Twitter follow spam tool. If you're automatically following people by keyword and then unfollowing them if they don't follow you back in 2 days, you're just gaming Twitter and sending annoying spam.

As for 2.0, it doesn't really say what it does, other than that it helps you contact people who mention keywords you're tracking. Does that mean you can now auto-spam with them with an @ reply? I sure hope not. Is it a Twitter app with search built-in?

Full disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders of MightyBrand, a social media monitoring and engagement application. Early on, we made the mistake of mass-following to get followers, and I really regret it. We ended up un-following every single person and then following just a few relevant folks. It's slower, but more authentic, useful, and sustainable.
But that's exactly what he's complaining about: it simply doesn't make sense that you have to use parentheses, or crazy q// construct to create a list. At the same time they don't really "create a list", because it's flattened again. It requires remembering rules again, just like with the contexts. It just doesn't "make sense".
Security Lecture
We use it as a log server, a message queue, and as a mailbox cache (inter-user messages without attachments.)

It's a beast.
This was well-covered in George Gilder's "Sexual Suicide" in the 70's (later re-issued as "Men and Marriage").

It's an unavoidable fact of human nature that X% of women in the workforce are going to drop out to have children, and the market adjusts for this fact.
Despite what you might expect, there is actually a fascinating article behind this poorly-titled link; it starts at the fifth paragraph.
I'm more tempted to think of people as individuals who make their own life choices, rather than think of all women as 'pregnancy risks'. Especially in technology - a lot of geek women don't have or want kids.

And as an employee, I want at least the illusion that the company cares about us having fulfilling, valuable lives, rather than as producers in a harsh economic calculus. The same way they want me to think of them as something more than a paycheck. This kind of thinking is the fast track to having mercenary workers who constantly jump ship to other companies.

So glad I don't work for this guy.
That's a brilliant idea!

I agree I would pay for that!

Plus one to you!
Also relevant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

The seller knows more about the quality of the good provided than the buyer, and has an incentive to hide this information. There is no effective warranty procedure (indeed, such a procedure would probably be illegal). The criteria for a lemon market are satisfied.
Strangely, I yawn aggressively when lifting weights and when I'm nervous (usually before a public speaking event).
The first 10 numbers in skew binary are 0, 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 20, 100, 101, and 102.
Where the key word is correct. It would be very easy to spread a bogus story via, e.g. Twitter. It would be debunked quite quickly too -- but the fact that it can happen devalues the speed with which things are reported. Those in the profession of reporting news do provide the value of actually checking their sources (or, at least, they should).
Phil Jones, Wed Dec 3 13:57:09 2008: About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little - if anything at all.

http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=940&filen...

Hat tip: Steve McIntyre.

http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/denying-email-delet...
Awesome old-school debug console for managing node.js instances
It may have escaped games developers attention whilst rushing between deadlines, but the human race wasn't just beamed down like something out of star trek. Women occasionally give birth to...shock!...new humans. New games developers even.

It's just a reality today that many parents are single, so maternity benefits are essential if you don't want to cause harm to children at an age when they're especially vulnerable. Any business which can't deal with the realities of modern human civilization isn't really a viable business, in my opinion.

I agree that maternity and paternity benefits should be equalised, so that the costs of employing a man or a woman become similar. These days it's not only women who choose to stay home to raise young children.
I don't know very much about erlang but I can understand why it has the stigma that it doesn't handle text well as almost every introduction I have seen has said this is the case due to it being created by telecommunication companie[s].

However my familiarity is limited and whether this is true or not I cannot comment on, but comparing erlang to C in performing text based operations is probably silly if the other person has an option such as say perl available to them.
I use Python, and the only thing missing from it is ugliness.