skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're (drastically) under estimating the difficulty of passing a series of interviews at the tops banks or PE firms. For example, in many cases Goldman's have interviewed candidates more than 20 times before giving them a job. Recently someone I know got a summer internship as a trader at GS, on her interview panel there were 4 interviewers and each one was asking her questions in a different language (english, french, german and russian). Finance jobs or interview aren't easy.
The question is, having that many string types are inherent for string handling? Or are they more of residue of historical artifacts?

Some data, represented in lists, may have extra constraints. If elements have meaning in its order relative to each other, reversing such a list doesn't make sense. If every elements need to be power of 2, putting 3 into such list doesn't make sense. Yet, having constraints doesn't mean they need to be a distinct type from lists. You can implement them in a general lists and handle constraints with libraries. Why do strings need to differ? You don't want to reverse string character-by-character, or arbitrary indexing into a string may not make sense, but yet a general list operations like fold, filter, take-while, etc. may be useful.

Now, to avoid further confusion, let's separate CES and CCS. Utf-8, utf-16, ucs-4 are all CES variations of Unicode CCS. They can be converted freely without loss of information, and there are no reason that implementation can handle it implicitly, except performance issues.

If you need extra constraints, such as ascii-only or length-limited, you can create a specialized type wrapping the basic string and implement constraints there. That can be done in user-level and doesn't require such special types to be built-in. E.g. if a legacy library only accepts ascii-only string, it takes an argument of type AsciiOnly [Char]. Check can be enforced at type coercion.

Composed characters are headache, but the library to deal with them can be built on top of list of unicode codepoints (if we adopt unicode codepoints as Char). What's important here is that you can build some algorithm, say normalization, on top of list-of-char view. If you, as a language user, want to try out a new normalization scheme, you can do that, and you can have all the list manipulating tools in your hand. And you can wrap the resulting normalized string in a specialized type if you want to keep integrity.

Incompatible CCSes are more of a problem; e.g. there are several different conversions between Unicode and other Japanese character sets, and that have caused loss of information. I wish I can write CCS-neutral code, but eventually I need to deal with differences. This could be handled by having distinct UnicodeChar and JISChar, maybe.

Actually, there is a more fundamental question: What is a character? Depending on an application you may want different unit as a character. I think that's a good argument against "list-of-character" view. So another way is to have an opaque string type, which can show different level of abstraction depending on what an application asks (e.g. it may return graphemes, fully composed characters, unicode codepoints, etc.). That is plausible. Although I argue that it can be implemented as a library on top of list of basic characters (e.g. Unicode codepoints).
Effective towards what goal? Finding the truth or making sure that everyone agrees on the same generally accepted ideas?

AGW is not generally accepted by all scientists. Judging from the leaked documents some of the scientists have to do very un-scientific things like manipulation of, deleting and hiding data.

Criminalizing dissenting points of view sounds like a horrible idea.
What the iPod tells us about Britain's economic future
qubovps.com
Orkut - Novo Orkut Temas
There are people that don't live in America and argue about climate change.
Let's forget Erlang. We've agreed that conflating [Integer] and string is bad.

I can't find the reasoning to back up your claim in your posts; if I miss it, could you point it? I think I explained a few points that a language does not need distinct string type, except from performance reasons.

Note that I've never said that strings shouldn't be a first class citizen. A list of characters is a first class citizen. You can have rich string library on top of lists of characters, plus generic list operators works on them. So, why do you want a string type disjoint from lists?
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

From the HN guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Fred Wilson: A Lot Can Happen In Five Years
So wrong I barely know where to start.

Why are drugs expensive when manufacturing them is cheap? Because discovering them is expensive. Why are games and movies expensive when burning a DVD is cheap? Because producing them is expensive. Why is news expensive when you can just publish it on the web? Because gathering interesting news is expensive and that's not changing anytime soon. People don't read a broadsheet to find out what's playing at their local cinema. They read stuff written by people who've been working on the story for 6 months, or 30 years building their list of contacts and their knowledge of a field.

The Times and the Encyclopedia Britannica, or some guy's blog and Wikipedia, world's gotta choose.
I wouldn't think you would need to be that selective in private equity. How hard is it to buy a healthy company with borrowed money, run that company into the ground, and then flip it a few years later?
How to be a cultural superpower
I voted your post down because you were rude and condescending. Here's an another (more respectful) way in which you could have written your post:

"I see that this story has a lot of upvotes, but it's not a story that I found particularly interesting. Could someone give me their perspective on why they liked this article?"

You also did what is often done to a large number of articles posted to HN: You asked a variant of "why is this hacker news?!," the answer to which is always the same: "because X number of people found that it gratified their intellectual curiosity and voted it up." It gets old after a while, but I personally wouldn't object to someone repeatedly asking the question as long as they were respectful and truly interested in the response rather than asking it as a way to complain.
While I certainly understand the interest in outsourcing journalism, I'd much rather see newspapers do things like http://www.mattwaite.com has been doing over at the St. Petersburg times. Matt was the journalist/programmer that created http://www.politifact.com (the first website to win a Pulitzer). I think he's a huge unsung hero in the journalism world. I met him at DjangoCon 2008, and I've been mentally referring back to that conversation ever since.

Here's other links to his work:
http://mugshots.tampabay.com/
http://hometeam.tampabay.com/
http://watch.tampabay.com/homes/

Journalists have a lot of training at tracking down public data sources, be it local home sales, sports scores or crime statistics. Those data sources things are just crying out for web applications. Matt's taken that idea and run with it. I hope other newspapers follow his lead, rather than simply outsourcing all their local coverage to Mumbai.
Some guy's blog and Wikipedia have been more accurate and interesting than news outlets for years now.

Most news outlets are just mills for regurgitating press releases wired over AP and Reuters. There's little actual reporting going on. It's much cheaper to run a paper this way -- fewer people working on the content itself allows you to print lots of paper with ads on it. Much of it is automated.

It's not like this is either some conspiracy or something unique to news. It's cheaper to run a restaurant by getting more of your stuff from Sysco. It's cheaper to build car lineups by basing more of them off of the same model and rebranding them. It's cheaper to print papers with ad space on them by automating the news portions as much as possible.

There's little reporting or fact checking going on. Only a few of the better papers aren't just regurgitation machines at this point, and even then, you're less likely to find hard-line reporting than years ago.
C# - Variables and Data Types
How to Organize Christmas With Your iPhone
It appears to be another search engine. Watch the video here: http://www.kosmix.com/corp/about
It's less of an issue for programmers. The only sure way to spot a good hacker is to hack with them, but there are still pretty decent signaling and warranty mechanisms. Look at what the programmer has done in the past and fire them if they suck.

In the US, signaling and warranty mechanisms are illegal in the context of maternity.
I gave a lightning talk at the Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference http://www.glsec.org/ with the premise that in-house, outsourcing, and off-shoring development can be modeled in systems engineering terms of bandwidth and latency. I posted the talk on my blog http://jerryjousting.blogspot.com/.

My conclusion from observing over the years is that companies with failed business models go offshore to die. Not all businesses that go off-shore die, but the ones that have business models that require close interaction with their suppliers and customers, that require quick reaction, or that require unique (domain) knowledge won't be successful with a move off-shore. The businesses that survive, even thrive, off-shore are ones that are or can become commodity suppliers (e.g. low bandwidth is sufficient for control and they can tolerate high latency on their product).

Sometimes the business model can be changed to adapt but a business is too ossified to adapt. Sometimes the whole business is no longer viable and the end is inevitable. Either way, historically, trying to maintain a failed business model simply by cutting labor costs fails.

Local news is not something you can off-shore successfully. It requires high bandwidth, local knowledge, and low latency. From the article: "Macpherson admits you can lose something in the translation — the Pasadena City Council Webcast that the Indian reporters now watch once missed two African-American lawmakers walking out in protest — but says the question is, how significant is it?" Ummm... like, everything?
Hmm. If you found that rude and condescending - and I don't doubt your word - then I'm rather pleased I didn't write what I first thought, and instead toned it down to what I thought was comparatively constructive. Obviously not by enough.

I'll take your comments on board - thank you for taking the time to explain.
Interstellar overdrive - Linux and astronomy
Buying a Smartphone? Here's What You Need to Know
I realize that, but shouted because it is imperative to obey copyright laws. Copyright violation is especially ironic on a story about news since news people (rightly) make a big deal about obeying copyright laws.

The original post was deleted very promptly, resolving the issue. Thanks!
"who can feel free to lower its employees wages across the board"

Companies can not just arbitrarily lower wages, it is a market.

I think in Germany the state pays money for maternity leave, too, but there are still other laws that burden the companies, like having to keep the job open. Not sure if it is so perfect in France?
This is not a changing social norms. It is just parents trying to get as much money out of the state as possible. It sounds as if the state pays 4.5 months for women and 4.5 months for men. So it makes sense for men to take off the 4.5 months and collect the free money (granted they don't earn their wages during that time, but it is still paid holidays).
"Gathering interesting news is expensive and that's not changing anytime soon."

The rate of social change in America is so slow that even if you don't really understand what's going on, you aren't going to miss all that much. It's not like there exists this layer of dynamism, intellectually honest debate, and emotional nuance that we're suddenly going to start missing out on. If newspaper writing is formulaic then that's not a flaw in the writing, it's just an accurate reflection of American politics, life, and culture.
I think you mean Erlang.
Yahoo Santa Clara campus could house 12,000 workers
Why Losing A Biz Plan Competition Is Better Than Winning
"Things take longer in the short run but they happen faster in the long run."

The way I've heard it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a day, but underestimate what they can accomplish in a week/month/year.
Also it wouldn't be a bad idea to mark them as "repost" somehow.
"Their pitch is that if your business requires $40,000 then you just need to convince 40 friends to lend $40, each of whom in turn just needs to convince 40 of their friends to lend $40."

Interesting concept but why $40? $80 is just as important of a decision - anyone who would loan $40 would loan $80 IMO - and it would cut the numbers of people required in half. I'd guess that, in this situation, $100 is a significant step that requires a decision - anything less would not.
I haven't seen that - I just upvoted this and it showed up immediately. Do you have some new Greasemonkey script installed that messes with it, or perhaps NoScript?
Dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=964497
I always thought it was camelCase and PascalCase. Googling gives me a handful of articles that support that distinction, but wikipedia doesn't make the separation.

Is the term PascalCase widespread, or does everyone just call it CamelCase?
Boundary makers
Which makes you sound like the average pseudo-science practitioner. They also keep telling others they "just don't get it", but perhaps someday, they will, of only the would 'embrace the teaching'. We scoff at that, but when someone uses the same approach with programming, while adding some Eastern sugar, we suddenly think it should be clear it's enlightening? Bollocks.
Oh, now I understand, if I give you this basic api you can implement genhash! Ok got it.

Very happy to read you are rolling out Redis servers, it is cool to see such a great community feedbacks after just 9 months of the first line of code written :)
I've noticed it. Just saw it happen here, when I upvoted Scott. For some reason it seems to take about 3 seconds for an upvote to register now, sometimes. Try refreshing again.
Obviously it's not desirable to have email accounts hacked.

But what has emerged so far is work related correspondence of public employees working on publicly funded projects. And the content of those emails is about trying to hide data that is supposed to be subject to public scrutiny and peer review.

Depending on what kind of organisation you work for, deleting that kind of "private correspondence" may constitute a crime.

It has been suggested that some of the data these people were trying to hide was subject to a FOI request (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_2000). I don't know if that's actually the case, but if it is we may see prosecutions in the future.
The practical endeavor of science relies heavily on researchers acting in good faith, and on deferring to authorities in other fields, as no one has time to go back and personally recheck everyone else's conclusions.

Although scientific progress relies on someone with integrity checking the methodology and results - peer review and verification of experimental results. The conclusions are the basis of the hypotheses on which the future experiments rest and so are tested by those experiments.

Climate is a chaotic system, non-Newtonian, we don't really know what's going to happen until it does. We have an idea of arching trends but the rationale of greenhouse effects leading to a mini ice-age (say) seems a priori consistent as an outsider.

"Because the experts say so" is, generally speaking, a perfectly valid reason to accept a scientific conclusion--which is why even the appearance of impropriety is grossly damaging.

Depends on what you have riding on the conclusions. In any field there are usually different factions of experts and you should consider all positions. If all experts agree (!) then assuming that position is probably not going to materially affect you even if they are not exactly on the right path. Often it takes outsiders to shake up a field.

Personally I'm with "House", assume everyone is lying (or at least wrong) and you're usually right.
Being older doesn't miraculously make it more fun, insightful or engaging. It may just not be your cup of tea.
Really 20 times? That seems completely unreasonable. Do they start paying the interviewees to come in?
But it doesn't mean that. The mother has the option to share the maternity leave time. In practice, men aren't as likely to take time off, not even in Iceland.
Actually i would prefer it if models do most of the major work. And views to convert them into a format suitable for presentation. Sometimes that not possible, but it just feels cleaner and more manageable if it is.
Motorola Droid Review - What Do Droid Owners Say?
Droid owners have now had their cool new Motorola Droid Smartphone for Verizon in their hands long enough to have put it thru its paces. When a new release rolls out, there's typically a split opinion about its acceptance.
Upvoting submissions works fine; it's only votes for comments that aren't working.

I have Greasemonkey disabled at the moment. I don't have NoScript. I do have Adblock, but it's not blocking anything from this domain (news.ycombinator.com), and I just disabled it on this page in case I missed something.
Myspace viral growth numbers [article from 2006]
The '00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade From Hell
Actually perlstyle suggests avoiding Camel Case:

While short identifiers like $gotit are probably ok, use
underscores to separate words in longer identifiers. It is
generally easier to read $var_names_like_this than
$VarNamesLikeThis, especially for non-native speakers of English.
I upvoted your comment, and even after reloading a minute later, it has still not upvoted.

At least it's not happening to everyone.
"Experience? Well, that was Jack Welch, until the value of experience expired."

Has the value of experience really expired?
Sourcing 101 Series Part 2 – Sourcing Agents
During our interview I was asking Martin series of questions about the nature of his work and how he sees the role and the value brought about by a sourcing agent today.
What's all this about wanting more money?

http://www.livemint.com/2009/11/04000017/Scientist-fired-fro...

http://news.rediff.com/report/2009/nov/06/scientist-vs-estab...
The Dark Side of Customer Development and Lean Startups
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=964020

Share away!
Murdoch bought MySpace with a valuation of 330 million. In 2008 their revenue was 600 million and they had a market valuation of well into billions. Buying MySpace was clearly a success.
Cost. Well, besides the need to maintain something that was never designed to be in space for a long duration, I would guess it would be because launching a Space Shuttle mission costs roughly 1.5 billion dollars (according to Wikipedia). And while there would be costs associated with decommissioning a shuttle, it seems likely that it would be significantly less than 1.5 billion dollars.
Natural scientists tend to not really believe in software engineering, they just write a procedure and munge it until it works, leaving dead code and mysterious comments in their wake. (Source control? That sounds like fluffy industry stuff...)

Not the ones I've worked with. While they may be a little behind the times (CVS instead of hg, fortran instead of c), most academics aren't stupid.

Even by academic standards, this code is fugly.
I'd once heard the difference described as BactrianCase and dromedaryCase :)
I can empathize with Shiva Ayyadurai. Couple of years back I was working for an eGovernance project http://mca.gov.in/

Govt officials in India want you to be subservient.

"The nail that stands out will be hammered down." -- Japanese Proverb

Edit: After http://mca.gov.in/ became operational, I resigned and ran away to Japan to join GS.
CRU's "very artificial correction for decline" is dead code
Kudos to The WP.
If the variable is never used, why does it exist nonetheless? It's a valid question.
I'm a student at NC State right now and we have one of these coming up in the spring. I will say that both the companies and the judges are somewhat in the dark for ideas that are even remotely complex with niche markets; however, it doesn't take away from the fact that there is cash involved that we're after and we're gonna give it a decent shot. I'm a graduating senior and I'm staying as far away from jobs as possible. Money from our business plan competition could keep me afloat for another 6-months or so while I bootstrap my idea.

I like that the author pointed out that no home-run companies have won business plan competitions, but it's not to say it won't happen. My observation is that it's going to need to be in a sexy category. The three winners from our competition last year were tuberculosis testing, biodiesel from trap grease, and college admissions...surprise surprise. The teams were good, I have to admit, but I would bet that an equally good team with a sub-trillion-dollar market wouldn't have had a chance. Akamai could have had an awesome business plan with great market research, it probably just didn't excite the judges.
It seems the key is having a good "Char" type, so that Unicode bytes turn into something matching the intuition of what a character should be. So the bytes for "a umlaut" or whatever become a single Char in the list. So the Char type is responsible for storing a representing characters at the right level of granularity, and then string operations can all be implemented as list operations.

Is there a case where this still breaks down?
Other possible interpretations of the data:

- People who have the patience to court a jury with a business plan, perfecting their pitch, etc. at such an early stage – while they could be working on their product – don't make the best entrepeneurs.

- The judges are teachers who've been entrenched in the academic world for too long to pass valuable judgement on a startup's viability; Their judgement is either counterindicative of success overall, or they may simply weigh factors that are only important for a more mature business too heavily for the judgement to have anything to do with startup success.

- Most startups fail, including those that come forth from these competitions, there's no measurable correlation.

Take your pick ;)

Any judgement of a startup's possible success that's based upon business plans rather than founders' personalities misses its goal because it does not account for the amount of change to the plans that is required for success, but which will only happen if the founders have sufficiently flexible minds.

A final point then: Does hearing a respected jury tell you your plans are the bee's knees make you more hesistant to change them or throw them overboard when things aren't taking off?
The TL;DR; of programming.
Lisp interpreter for Microsoft Singularity
Poor trademark research in 2003 leads to iPodRip hearing from Steve Jobs.
Apple lawyers and Mr. Jobs told the shareware software vendor to change its app's name: "Not that big of a deal."
Picking what approach to use based on whether it is "hip" is just a terrible way to write software.