jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I completely agree.

Whenever I'm in a position to video chat, I'll be sitting somewhere, in private, with time on my hands. That means I'll probably have Skype handy.

I've had video calling on my phone since forever, but I've never been inclined to use it – because I tend to call people when I'm on the go, and who the hell would want to watch my dull commute?
They always remind me of Rolls Royce in that respect, merely asserting that 'adequate power is available'.

I think the interesting thing is where they go from here. Apple being Apple, perhaps we'll have two years of iPhone 4 whilst they get the next OS X ready, plus probably a big rollout of iPhone 4 tech into the iPad next year.

Two years from now, it'd be nice to see displays on both sides of the phone, stereo cameras for free space gesture recognition and some kind of high bandwidth peripheral bus like Wireless USB3.

Now that would be the future!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8800193
It's "he".
Or just sign into your wikipedia account.
I consider myself smart and rational, so I was surprised that I stumbled on many of the test questions. I got this one wrong, though you would think, having been programming computers for 15 years, I surely should have gotten this one right:

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

A) Yes

B) No

C) Cannot be determined

Oddly enough, I feel that if this had been presented to me as a bit of Java or Ruby code, then I would have gotten this one correct. It's the informality of English, and the assumptions I make when reading English, that tripped me up.

Computer code engages the rational side of my brain in a way that English does not.

And to follow up on a point made long ago by Jeff Atwood, I think this (that IQ and rationality are different) also explains the strange inability of some smart people to learn how to program computers. I'm thinking of the post here:

http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-fr...

Jeff Atwood discusses this quote:

"All teachers of programming find that their results display a 'double hump'. It is as if there are two populations: those who can [program], and those who cannot [program], each with its own independent bell curve. Almost all research into programming teaching and learning have concentrated on teaching: change the language, change the application area, use an IDE and work on motivation. None of it works, and the double hump persists."

And also this quote:

"Despite the enormous changes which have taken place since electronic computing was invented in the 1950s, some things remain stubbornly the same. In particular, most people can't learn to program: between 30% and 60% of every university computer science department's intake fail the first programming course. Experienced teachers are weary but never oblivious of this fact; brighteyed beginners who believe that the old ones must have been doing it wrong learn the truth from bitter experience; and so it has been for almost two generations, ever since the subject began in the 1960s."
Ghostery can help block this. (Not DoNotTrackMe; they sold out and put spyware in their add-on.)
>This is very unpalatable, and makes me reconsider whether my next phone will, again, be an Android device.

For me, this is the last nail in the coffin. I won't be purchasing any more Nexus phones. Looking forward to the first Ubuntu phone in a few months.
I think your parent is referring to the fact that the Productivity graphed for PHP is the worst of all the languages, even at t=0 (except Haskell, which is shown as starting out with 0 productivity for a while.)

I also strongly disagreed with that for the same reason your parent comment did. The self-assessment bar is funny, but hte blue (productivity) graph needs to be way higher.
Three more resources:

http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~cscott/rsi.html

http://www.rsipain.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Repetitive-Strain-Injury-Computer-User...
"I hope everyone actually does take offense to this: When I hear someone say they want to be filthy rich, I hear it as them saying they want to be a boring douche bag."

Straw man. Nobody wants to be a boring douche bag.

I agree with Ramith Seti when he says:"I never want to have to make a bad decision because of money (e.g., staying at a job I don’t love because of car payments).

Isn't that the situation of most people? They stay in bad situations because the rent has to be paid and the kids have to be fed. I just don't want to have to worry about that.

Besides, many of history's great artists were able to achieve what they did because they had patrons. What if daVinci had to work. Look what happened to van Gogh.
Probably is, but that's why I put the disclaimer in the first sentence. Would love to see if there was somehow a way to grt stats on this, even if it's random sampling. Updated: refer to daekns comment above. It says what I wanted to say.
In much the same way that x86 is not the most used computer architecture, due to all of the embedded devices out there. Yes, SQLite is probably used by more people than Excel, but it's not used directly. Excel is used directly by non-programmers constantly.

Edit: Clarified my first statement.
The least expensive solution is not always the best. I formerly used Paypal exclusively, now I lose out on some work because I refuse to use it. They can lock your account at any time for any reason. It's nearly impossible to get support and it doesn't matter. Paypal is easy to game in that a buyer can use a credit card, and initiate a charge-back. Paypal sides with a charge-back 100% of the time that you can't prove shipment which of course is impossible with digital goods. I've had my account locked down for 6 months in the past for attempting to use some of my funds to buy actual physical gold as an investment. No fraud anywhere, but they decided that's money laundering. I am happy to see a new start-up come through and try and change something because Paypal is broken.
We moved from Authorize.net to PayPal Web Payments Pro. Much happier now.

Braintree was outrageously expensive when I looked at it, so I didn't even consider it.
I think he's saying it's more complicated than that, and has to do with a certain organizational culture with roots going back many decades.

What 'government intervention' do you make (or remove) to change a culture?
ASO has $25/year web hosting that is solid.
Something like the #line directive [1] from C# would be useful, though it would only work in pre-compressed JS. The real challenge would be adding support in the various 'developer tools'/consoles.

1: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/34dk387t(VS.71).aspx
No, no, a thousand times no. You do not have to prepare for the astronomically improbable. UUID collision is a myth, and should be treated as such.
Let's apply that to your comment...

turtles all the way
Disappearance of facebook would affect me less than zero. Like throwing away a pair of socks with holes in them.

I could not work or live without email however.
We show Exploits of a Mom (http://xkcd.com/327/) with the moms last speech bubble blanked out to candidates during interviews. You might be surprised how many have trouble explaining what is going on.
Often, people will organize an IRC channel somewhere if they want to actually work on something together, and it'll be announced in a post on /b/.

> Given that most of 4Chan does seem to be...

/b/ is much more complex than you're giving it credit for.
It works in Safari, but that's because the Safari command for bookmarks is Option+Command+B
I think you’re overlooking the potential rewards that such a “loser thing to do” can have. There can be quite a bit of overlap between a like-minded gaming community and Hacker News.

It may not be possible to accomplish all of the things you’ve got on HN while playing video games themselves. But it is when you have a chance to meet other creators that share a passion for this hobby and how can you have the passion to create if you don’t consume a little? I’ve met my share of talented creatives and entrepreneurs through my hobby, which have lead to business acquaintances, contract work and also hiring other ”losers” to help me create.

I assume you’ve done the same thing I’ve done through gaming, by having a genuine interest in startups/creating and sharing that interest with others here.
Their website doesn't load:
http://amherst-networks.com
This is just a web app.
I'd argue the opposite. Email is going to experience a rebirth. Why? The reason why email declined at all was because of an ubiquitous messaging platform for the masses, SMS, while email wasn't nearly so (reading web email on a mobile device a few years ago was a rarity).

As mobile technology evolves, the use case for SMS disappears. Email apps become as ubiquitous on mobile devices as SMS apps.

And once that happens the "immediacy" advantage disappears. Today it is just as fast for me to send a quick email as it is for me to send a SMS. The speed is purely the software, where SMS was, in the past, the only one integrated with the phone contact list.

Now that your email and SMS accounts will tend toward having parity in the phone's software, I think the argument for 70 or 160 character limits disappears, especially on a phone (yes, people make the argument), where I'm already constrained by they keyboard and the fact that I'm usually on the go. And especially since on a mobile device, I HATE having to refactor my message to get the last 7 letters to fit.

The rebirth and re-emergence of email... it will look like a better SMS.
My only two good insights are:

1. Pick your niche with the greatest of care! The App Store is flooded with apps for everything — so if you do an app in a niche where the big dogs are it's an uphill battle (big dogs can also include anyone with a well known brand). Something to keep in mind is that people search for apps by terms, so even naming your product is a bit of an SEO exercise. Also aim to please the Otaku in any category!

2. Once you pick your niche try to build the very best app within that niche. By the way it's not just the functionality but the content surrounding the app. Make sure your app can win over the Otaku — if you can't do that there isn't any point in trying. Also give away as many free copies to the leading Otaku to try and build word of mouth.
That isn't noise. Our own galaxy looks similar to that when looking at it in person with a telescope. This is a truly incredible image.
Thanks for tracking these down!
Could not agree more – I've lost track of how many times one of iOS/Android developers I follow on Twitter has mentioned getting a nasty email, tweet or 1 star review because they had the audacity to charge more than $.99 for an app, even if it's targeted at business users who benefit professionally from using it.
Great job man. Skimmed your book a couple months ago.
Aren't you a downer.
And they actually thought slapping a "fragile" and a "this side up" stickers on the crate would help. It shows a naivete. It's sort of like the "do not copy" prohibitions embedded on a set of keys.
You're describing a situation where the recording ought not to be admissible anyways. If you can't trust where evidence came from, it's not evidence.

Again, nation states have always been able to doctor video of adversarial political candidates. Lookup pictures where the KGB made someone disappear.

Yes, if an attacker can compromise any device they can produce a signed forgery. But that's a really big if. There are a lot of potential attackers who can't compromise any and all devices, and signatures protect against them.
Sorry to hear it's happening in the latest generation product too. This is really disgraceful by Dell as the issue has been known about for years and they don't seem to care. Same with the crappy thermal pasting job that their factory does.

Do not expect the issue to be fixed. People bought XPS's years ago thinking Dell would release a patch in some reasonable amount of time, but it never came.

If your use case involves a lot of time away from a charger, I would send it back. Maybe splurge a bit more for a Surface Book, assuming Microsoft cares a little more about putting out a well finished product.
It really surprised and disappointed me recently that native macOS apps have the same problem outlined here. For example, the standard system-wide ‘back’ shortcut (e.g. in Safari, Finder, Preview) is Cmd+[, but this is inoperable in many keyboard layouts that don’t have any key that produces [ without modifiers.

(For context: I was writing a simple mouse gestures utility that sends that keyboard shortcut to accomplish backward navigation for an appropriate gesture, but discovered this to be unreliable across keyboard layouts).
> if I'm reading "32 bits" in a french text then yes of course it sounds exactly like "32 bites".

My impression in France was that "bite" had the "i" sound slightly longer than in "bit". Some of the pronounciations at https://forvo.com/word/bite/#fr definitely lengthen it, but not all. Unfortunately there is only one recording for https://forvo.com/word/bit/#fr for comparison.
> For example, on my German layout, / is produced via Shift+7.

This is my #1 annoyance with German keyboards as someone who learned a UK layout and who needs to do lots of programming and terminal hacking (#2 is the swapping of Y and Z). I take it this layout was invented before Unix and its heavy use of forward slashes, but it does show how shortcuts are rather discriminatory. I know more than a few Germans who use UK or US keyboards because they dislike this unhappy feature.
But the snapshot-model also doesn't really make a lot of sense for merges. It's a snapshot of what then? A merge of all parent trees? What's a merge of two files then? Defining this merge-operation on trees is at least as mentally taxing as the alternative.

Accumulating all the diffs from two (or more) ends (until they are common again) is at least as useful.
Would it be possible for you to try at least to contribute to the discussion? This out of hand dismissal seems to be a bit of an issue for you, maybe try harder?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26743591
100% of it is premined.
I ran across this notion for the first time when I started a job in finance a few years back and as an interview question they asked me about it. I hadn't heard of the notion and so afterwards tried to find some good resources online to read up about it.

What I found was not great. So glad to see this idea getting a good write up.
Oh man! I knew the answer to this before I read the article. After I heard about contentious community meetings about Google Wifi, I went myself, taping them for posterity.[1] The community seemed generally receptive. I was sad when it fell through; in case of an earthquake, I think a wifi mesh would be much more robust than fiber.

The Google wifi FAQs / complaints I remember:

* radiation concerns.

* extra hardware on telephone poles.

* "low bandwidth." I think someone was miffed that YouTube would take time to buffer.

[1] http://pronoiac.org/recordings/category/wifi-for-sf/
I would argue that in this case the problem lies in the macro, not the lack of braces. You can't program defensively against broken macros.

I've seen quite a lot of discussion surrounding the coding style around this "goto fail" vulnerability, but IMO that's missing the forest for the tree. If this coding error was truly a mistake (which I tend to believe) it was probably the result of a bogus copy/paste. Shit happens, no matter the coding style.

In my opinion the real problem is: why wasn't this code properly tested and audited? For crypto code it borders on gross negligence.

In particular, I disagree with TFA that "The flaw is subtle, and hard to spot while scanning the code". When you're used to read properly indented C code the 2nd "goto fail" with its weird indentation jumps to the eye IMO. Also the fact that the same statement is repeated twice in exactly the same way. I'm used to reading a lot of kernel code using the same kind of error handling and it really stands out IMO.
For anyone above a jr level developer position, I would assume they'd have code or other artifacts you could review. If you weren't satisfied with their approach or style, don't interview further, or ask for clarification.

If you can not find anyone at all with example code/projects, perhaps then start employing fizzbuzz on folks, but... I can't imagine it's too hard to find developers with at least a minimal portfolio that demonstrates something at least as complex, if not moreso, than fizzbuzz.
I'll second this. In my case, fear of famine (which never actually happened) often led me to take on too much work to have a side project. Sometimes, I couldn't do as good a job on concurrent projects, but was afraid to do things sequentially or turn down projects.

FWIW, the business and sales skills tptacek talks about end up helping when the startup bug strikes again ... which it probably will.

It's been said elsewhere, but one of the most important things is to hold firm on price, probably a much higher price than feels reasonable coming from startups. If you're not charging by the project, charge by day, not by hour. You have extra costs as a freelancer, and you provide extra value. So build that in.
It is because the men are behind the curtains making the actual money:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-15-wealthiest-people-in-f...

(Note: everyone there is a white old dude, other than the two women, who inherited the money from white old dudes)
That's right. Pretend the other three points not only didn't exist, but weren't directly contradictory to the point you quoted.

But I'll be down voted to oblivion for calling you a propagandist for doing things that propagandists do. So this is me not calling you one.
>This is not true and this type of fatalism is just not warranted.

No? I bet I've spent more years in Africa than you have (my entire life). Also spent thousands of nights under mosquito nets. Ever seen someone fish with a mosquito net? I have.

"ecology of a country"? Spare me the armchair commander BS.

"Western" people mostly miss the plot. Eg vaccination. Massive freaking supply chain operation to get the stuff to Africa (great success) ... Mobile LPG powered refrigeration etc. High Five. Local witchdoctor says these things are evil - entire shipping of mission critical vaccines expire on site. (true story)

One step forward two steps back. ..
It's a terrible feedback loop. Nobody who owns a house in SF in their right mind would vote for anything that could substantially decrease the value of their home.
F-Script is also an example of an array programming language in the style of APL. There is a paper on how they combined array and class constructs:

http://www.fscript.org/documentation/OOPAL.pdf
We need easy solutions because hard solutions won't scale. We can't create modern economies in places that don't have the infrastructure. We tried doing that once, it's called colonialism and it generally sucked. Your "sustainable food system" is something we can't give to people.
Hi, I work at IA. We know the UI has issues, but it probably isn't going to change anytime soon. However, we are building more APIs to let communities who use archive.org build their own front ends, and let IA handle the storage. Using our JSON Metadata API you can build your own site or browser plugin that fixes some UI and UX issues.

Also, we support an S3-like API to ease uploading to IA. Also, we have just deployed a new python module that you can install using pip:

pip install internetarchive

In addition to a python module, this installs a command line tool called `ia`, and you can upload from the command line easily. IA `items` are similar to S3 `buckets`, and you can create an item like so:

ia upload itemid file1.txt file2.mp4 --metadata="title=foo"

You can also use existing S3 libraries such as boto.
That converts ruby programs to Arduino compatible C program.

The project linked from the thread's title says that Python runs on the chip itself unlike the RAD for Arduino that compiles down to a C program.
holy crap I didn't want to and ended up writing up a bunch of reviews... bravo.
I admire your optimism. Perhaps I have been in the industry for too long, but these days I much prefer being a specialist in a particular niche as opposed to be known as the guy in the office who gets emailed when the printer breaks, a server goes down, a Wordpress site needs to be built or someone has a question about why their email is broken.

I have been in that situation a few times in my career, when I worked at a digital agency especially. My job varied from Javascript, CSS and HTML, to developing HTML newsletters, building Wordpress websites, setting up servers/databases and tonnes of other things. At the time it was an invaluable learning experience, but also meant I worked long hours because my list of responsibilities was longer, friendships suffered because I worked a lot of weekends/late nights. As a result of that job, I didn't feel like it made me an expert in one particular thing. I was good at many things, but not truly great at front or back-end development. I felt like I had to learn outside of work hours to get good enough to specialise in my chosen field (my day-to-day job was obviously also a factor).

If I went for a job advertised as one thing, but then discovered that they expect you to be good at a lot of other things it would make me think twice (at least now I do). When I first started out, I was willing to do anything because I was young, naive and excited I had a job doing what I wanted to do in life.

My initial thoughts would be, "Please, not again. I don't want the responsibility of wearing multiple hats. I've worked hard to get to the point where I want to specialise in a chosen field", followed by, "This company is trying to get a combination stir-fry developer so they can cheap out and not have to hire a separate database administrator or back-end developer."

If you want a developer who knows a lot of things and is expected to work with a tonne of different languages, deploy a server and make coffee: there is nothing wrong with that, just be upfront and honest about it, so people like myself don't waste your time and have their time wasted. Don't lure candidates in with a misleading job description only for them to discover the job is actually more than you initially led on.
I'm waiting for the years to pass and the time will come when I will have time to delve into Robot Odissey and try to finish it.
I'm extremely interested to learn how the dance moves were programmed - I'm guessing the standard tablet controller probably doesn't cut it for the level of control necessary.

More generally speaking, I'm especially curious if "anyone" buying a Spot would have adequate access to be able to do similar things.

I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to not been possible for warranty reasons...
Funniest thing is that is Hyundai the carmaker and not Hyundai the robot maker.
As far as I was aware, this problem was mostly ignored.

It was expected (again, as stated in the whitepaper) that truncating transactions (in order to shrink blocks that are "old enough") would be able to manage block size well enough to stay reasonable.

In my experience (circa ~2011,) this expectation seemed to be generally accepted without much question by anyone talking about bitcoin. If it was acknowledged as a flaw it was usually hand-waved as only likely to be a problem 10+ in the the future.

edit: Or that a new network would learn from the bitcoin experiment and implement a protocol that works better at large scale.
On iOS your location data, as far as Apple has it, is not associated with you or your device but with an identifier that is changed weekly.

If you choose to use iCloud to store your contacts (and you can choose any other service that implements the carddav standard) Apple declares the information is transmitted and stored encrypted and can’t be used for any other purpose.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303