skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I come to this as a self-taught programmer and I think like most Ford-Chevy arguments the reality is somewhere in between. After working as a professional software developer for eight years on desktop apps, web apps, and mobile apps, I can see there are places where having a foundation in computer science could absolutely improve quality of my work, mainly algorithms and data structures, but also higher level subjects like OS and database architecture, security...etc.

And I also think CompSci folks would do well to work on a personal software project on nights and weekends and see it through to release and get actual people to use what you wrote. There's so much valuable experience that comes from that process that can never be learned in a classroom, or even from most jobs to be honest.
Sure, but that misses my point. It's not that I just don't have the skills to make AirBnb or Zenefits; I just don't have the passion or understanding. While the AirBnb founders spent 1000 days with no traction and powered through; I would have given up after 100.

My point was, the idea and the founder need the right chemistry.
As someone who doesn't know what WebRTC is, I can only guess after reading the article that it has something to do with video.

The article goes through an effort to explai WebKit and Safari but never makes a single mention about WebRTC. Title of the blog doesn't help either.
It makes me sad to see culture equated to simply a collection of catchphrases.

Some of the stuff is still around, and embedded so deeply it probably doesn't come to your mind just because it feels like part of the environment.

For example, do you ever use emoticons? :D That's a fundamental part of Internet culture that originates from long before it was practical to send images around as part of casual conversation.

Another example would be acronyms like LOL or ROFL. Some have died out, but LOL is still extremely common.

How about this one. Ever see people quote parts of other people's comments by leading them with a > character, then reply bit by bit? It's pretty common, and is enshrined in the markup support of sites like Reddit. That's ancient Usenet culture.

Heck, the very use of the word "trolling" as a way of describing someone who deliberately antagonizes people online is a piece of internet culture from that time. The originator may be forgotten, but nearly everyone knows what a "troll" is.

Long after all the current "memes" are forgotten, I wager people will still know what emoticons are or what LOL means. That's culture too.
Thats a sweeping statement which, in many contexts, is in error. A given ML algorithm is not effective with any kind of data or problem. Typically you need to understand the domain to pick the right algorithm and/or features and to tweak it right.

Of course, a case could be made for a product where prediction is just one not-so-significant feature, and here you can use something off-the-shelf without worrying too much about performance. But where predictions are the driver, you would need to put in some serious work to get good results. (not talking about Grid here - this is a general statement)
People keep underestimating this about the web. Sometimes people don't care how awesome your app is, they just want something that they can do that works every time. Something passable that runs on ever platform everywhere. That's HTML, and for music, that's YouTube
In that example, it may also simply have been that Jobs had been prepped (or prepped himself) thoroughly with answers to a lot of likely questions.

I don't put a lot of credence to the speed thing here. I know one senior executive who made a point of writing down question on cards when he was asked them live at an event. Which I always thought was a rather clever approach to 1.) Make sure he understood the question correctly and 2.) To give himself some time to formulate the best response.
A couple of other suggestions I like but nobody else ever seems to mention:

Meslo LG [1]
Droid Sans Mono [2] - the version with the slashed zero

[1] https://github.com/andreberg/Meslo-Font
[2] http://www.droidfonts.com/info/droid-sans-mono-fonts/
Just a heads-up, Japanese import stores sell these for about 4 bucks:

http://www.gouletpens.com/Platinum-Preppy-Fountain-Pen/c/280

It's a great fountain pen for four bucks, I use them exclusively now (and don't worry too much about losing them, because four bucks!!).
"The ergonomics of the handle was a focal point in the design. Additionally, the acoustic, production, and aesthetics aspects needed to be resolved. The handle was fitted in size according to the dimensions of an average face, which had been taken as the starting point of the design process."

Superior ergonomics & one of the reasons I dislike modern smart cough spy-phones. The audio is shite and software keys are no replacement for actual tactile feedback. Luckily they (rotary dial 800 series) are still available ~ http://www.vintagephones.com.au/ccp0-catshow/refurbished-tel...
They've managed to develop a condition which mysteriously ensures they should always be the centre of attention in the modern age while pleading to be victims of everybody else.

If we left them all alone somewhere, then somehow I'd be unsurprised if they kept turning up complaining that some distant thing was also infringing on them.
I see plenty of mentions of WebRTC but yes, the blog's target audience are people who are in the WebRTC space. There is also a link to slides explaining WebRTC in the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC is helpful in case those aren't enough.
Sometimes an idea is so stupid that there's nothing really to say. "Billionaires are billionaires because they care about their cost of living"? It is just demonstrably untrue. Which is why we see billionaires with megayachts, penthouse suites, private jets, private islands, obscure car collections, etc.

Billionaires are billionaires because they've made amazing investments or have created companies or products worth billions. That's it. It has nothing to do with how they deal with their cost of living.
It's 'web real time communication' - you can use it for peer to peer voice or video chat, as well as passing arbitrary data between peers w/ javascript.
Download+cydia+iOS8.4.1+with+PanGu8
So what are you saying? That his advice to develop your own ideas is a bad thing? I don't understand the objection to self-expression and creativity.

My best ideas to date came from simply repeating this process over and over - creating an idea and then developing it out a little, then poking holes in it. That's all he really says in the article. That ideas are cheap to create. So create.
RE: "vs. doing the work to write a PAM module that behaves in the required manner." - That's easy, the functionality necessary to create a clean login in a container is beyond the scope of what PAM does.
Practice might be another aspect of this. When I was a young child, I had the ability to write longhand all day, and a callus on my middle finger where I rested my pen or pencil. As an adult, that is all gone.
It kind of makes you wonder if there was any contact between aboriginals and Maori. I was never taught anything at school, but the distances don't seem too far...?
If its None, it neither looks, acts nor quacks like a duck.
But how do you find the one you want to work on without ever developing them and determining which ones are worthless?
As someone who does know what web RTC is, I find your comment interesting. Strange that a hacker news reader wouldn't know what webrtc is nor how to handle being unaware of a technology.

This posting is interesting because webrtc support has lagged in safari.

Webrtc is about more than just video and worth looking up.
I switched to Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pens a year or so ago for daily use and will never go back to a ball point pen ever again. I also switched to vertical writing a when I was very young. I could never get comfortable writing with my wrist all twisted over the top like the teachers wanted me to do. So my note pads all sit with the lines vertical and I write up.

Even worse, for my own personal note books and random writing I use steno pads and write from the bottom to the top of a page. My wife hates it because when I ask her to read something I've been working on she has a lot of trouble reading it. But I've been doing it for so long it's natural for me. If I need to share something with people I can write "normally" or type it out. But personal use my system works for me.
Related to this I recall reading (somewhere) about going from a keypad back to a rotary dial and how infuriating it is even though there's only a tiny difference in speed.

We humans get used to the speed as little as it is and having to go back to the old way and it's only 1/2 or even 1/10 second slower drives us crazy.
That was the one thing that stood out for me too
On the other hand, I certainly used ballpoint pens a lot when I was taking primarily handwritten notes or taking exams and I didn't get writer's cramp the way I do today if I write for any length of time. I never really cared for fountain pens and the mass market alternatives weren't available at the time so all the way through high school and college I mostly used ballpoints. I did type in college for papers and articles but notetaking was all by hand.
Yes indeed, sorry :)
In those cases, restricting the use of unapproved firmware seems to be exactly what these regulations are supposed to do, and as I've argued elsewhere, I think it is a reasonable step to take given the damage one ignorant user can cause with these systems.
What you mentioned are all bad ideas only because they have no soul (You're just saying them for the sake of making your point) If someone could tell me with conviction why sending 1 email a day is meaningful for certain reasons and why the rest of the world doesn't realize it yet, then it's a different story. Most people who complain about "I had that idea too" are not lying, they probably did have those ideas, but were not insightful enough or didn't pay enough attention to see the real value in it. (Or maybe just lazy or lack of confidence) The idea came to them, but they didn't deserve the idea so it slipped away.
I did what is taking government years and millions to do
Right now you can not easily send photos or videos to the police. The government has been trying for years now to make 911 handle photos and videos without much luck. Today I coded the ability to send photos and videos to the police. One goes to https://sendevidence.org and uploads their evidence. If the police department is in the database then they get an email with the data and links to S3 to download the evidence. If not I'll try to find an email address and send them the evidence. By doing this officers won't have to go to people homes, can take hours in a major city, to pick up say surveillance videos of car prowlers. This also helps officers who don't want to give out their email addresses, see http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattle911/2015/07/24/seattle-cop-who-bungled-westlake-groper-report-suspended-2-days/
None of those are really hard tech problems, though. They can be hard at scale (like FB has hard infrastructure problems at scale), but they are more about domain expertise, initial sales, and having the right mvp and a path to small number of initial sales, IMO.
Show HN: Open source Pure CSS3 slider with multiple animations
How TV propaganda is affecting Russian society
1989. I was 14. For the previous several years, almost every week my friends and I would go to the mall's record shop and buy (or steal) cassette tapes (right after visiting the arcade). The cassettes were $14.99, and the best that you could find then was whatever junk was playing on the radio. Music was only the radio then, or maybe MTV (You have to remember that 'cable tv' had only recently become available, and the original 13 channels had exploded to a whopping 20-some channels). If you wanted to express yourself, maybe you were into hair rock. Otherwise, the top 40 was generally music that your parents would listen to.

My friends and I recently discovered skateboarding around that time, which had finally transcended the west coast. And, alternative music (via 120 minutes) was almost turning the corner.

I think I discovered N.W.A. from Thrasher (a skateboarding magazine) or maybe a skateboarding video. I can't remember. But, I remember having to special order the cassette from the record shop. I got the tape, and immediately went home to pop it into my boom box. It was amazing. It was like punk rock for the RnB genre. Before then, our world of 'hip hop' was Tone Loc, Fat Boys, JJ Cool J - all record company sanctioned, lifeless, commercialized, censored.

N.W.A. really spoke to us kids, who were feeling massive angst, ennui, despair, rage, and desperation. The lyrics were clever, memorable, and violent - but most importantly it was truly rebellious. We had grown up in a tough time - crime was almost at its peak in the US, inequality was rampant, we were forced to conform, against our will, and our parents (the baby boomers) were largely absent. The police were, in a way, much worse than they are today. To me, it was the voice of struggling youths talking to the struggling youths throughout the country.

I probably listened to that tape until the tape wore out. My boom box eventually shredded it into bits and pieces and the tape reeled itself out onto my counter. But, I loved that album. I'd memorized all of the lyrics. It wasn't the last 'rap' that I'd listen to, but it was incredibly influential. It was a time when rebellion was still truly rebellion, before the corporations had analyzed, optimized, and regurgitated rebellion into a billion dollar industry.

I recently listened to Straight Outta Compton, and it was pretty bad. But, at the time, it was amazing. So much nostalgia and memories.
Although I possibly recall Hofstadter has remarked he is not a fan of hierarchical pattern recognition architectures like deep nets.
In working with corporate clients, webdesigners are rarely at fault. Editorial committees and boards make sure sites are as featureless as possible claiming they must be "sober" and "serious". The same virus, different host.
> "Declarative blanket statements are worthless", he declared, in reference to all blanket statements.
I'm sure in such an emergency we could find a way to switch to a crop that is more calorie dense for the amount of energy it takes to grow it. Wheat is in a lot of products we eat, but not as the main ingredient with just a few exceptions. Just like corn, it's not a terribly efficient crop to grow so we probably wouldn't grow it anymore.
I also use faux cursive. I find it faster to print initial letters. Also printed "m", "n", "r", "s" and "w" are as fast, and more likely legible. That evolved over many years of note taking. I used to prefer Rapidograph, but now its rollerball.
This was a well known trick for 8080s and Z80s as far back as the 1970s. Back then there were a lot of assembly programmers, tricks like this were stock in trade.
since you went through the research, what do you think of the other "methods". I ask because of this:

The Palmer Method began to fall out of popularity in the 1950s and was eventually supplanted by the Zaner-Bloser method, which sought to teach children manuscript before teaching them cursive, in order to provide them with a means of written expression as soon as possible, and thus develop writing skills.[6] The D'Nealian method, introduced in 1978, sought to address problems raised by the Zaner-Bloser method, returning to a more cursive style. The Palmer company stopped publishing in the 1980s.
I thought Linux had antialiasing if you used cairo? Its tough to see the difference in the quality of your image versus the one in the article given the disparity in file size / resolution. Your image is 3000x1800 / 222 KB versus 720x432 32 KB in the linked article.
Netflix profiles are pretty helpful
I'm also left handed and have tried out way too many pens. As others have suggested, Uniball Jetstream pens are fantastic and are nearly impossible to smudge by accident. They also come in a variety of sizes. I really like the 0.38mm for taking notes on the small margins of academic papers.

The main pens I've been using these days are disposable fountain pens [1]. They write great and somehow the ink rarely smudges, though more often than with the Jetstreams. But overall I find it more pleasant to write with fountain pens.

[1] http://pilotpen.us/brands/varsity/varsity/
The "m" in Ubuntu Mono is just so adorable it makes me smile every time.
Wikipedia has an interesting page on Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co... ... see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_indigenous_...

The Nature article states "some Amazonian Native Americans descend partly from a Native American founding population that carried ancestry more closely related to indigenous Australians, New Guineans and Andaman Islanders than to any present-day Eurasians or Native Americans. This signature is not present to the same extent, or at all, in present-day Northern and Central Americans or in a ~12,600-year-old Clovis-associated genome, suggesting a more diverse set of founding populations of the Americas than previously accepted." That's basically saying "mainstream academia has been wrong to date on an issue as basic as how and when people reached the Americas". There was, however, prior evidence:

Research by Ludwik and Hanka Herschfeld during World War I found that the frequencies of blood groups A,B and O differed greatly from region to region. The "O" blood type (usually resulting from the absence of both A and B alleles) is very common around the world, with a rate of 63% in all human populations. Type "O" is the primary blood type among the indigenous populations of the Americas, in-particular within Central and South America populations, with a frequency of nearly 100%. In indigenous North American populations the frequency of type "A" ranges from 16% to 82%. This suggests again that the initial Amerindians evolved from an isolated population with a minimal number of individuals.

I have been studying traditional navigation techniques of the pacific ocean over the last year or so and visiting museums across the world with surviving traditional and reconstructed craft. After learning the amazing variety of techniques used for navigation (celestial and otherwise) and the innovative food preservation and water collection techniques in recorded use for long sea voyages, I really don't doubt the ability of people to have crossed the Pacific in early craft.
Sustained fine grained and fluid hand movement is more difficult to learn then drawing a sequence of geometric shapes and a lot more challenging to read. School should be about understanding ideas and the value of critical thinking. Using or requiring the use of an inefficient presentation method does not help with that mission.

I suppose the mass move away from cursive writing started with the printing press. By simplifying the symbols we gained a powerful tool to spread the ideas they convey. This has just become more true with the computer which, much like the printing press, has a much easier time with distinct disconnected symbols.

I believe it's more important to learn how to write and express your ideas using all available technologies then spending time learning the particulars of one.

The hammer doesn't need to be beautiful to build a beautiful house it needs to be efficient. Writing does not need to be elegant to convey a beautiful message.
Holy shit. You just made me realise why I actually love Menlo. (I'm an iOS dev, so I type and see a shitload of asterisks on a daily basis.)

Many alternatives "felt" wrong, but I never quite could put a finger on what's wrong with them.

Inline asterisks definitely feel just right at home when writing Obj-C.
Serious question: what kind of codebases are you working on where there tokens in which it's not immediately obvious from the context whether they contain digits or numbers? I have never seen such a situation.
Thank you for expanding the police state, citizen!
Nestle’s California Water Theft Censored by Reddit
I don't know why anyone would want to write in print, I can't stand it.
What is an acceptable timeout? What if the answer is no, there is actually nothing else they could be working on? What if the problem is "hey, you forgot to add this file and the build is broken?" When is it appropriate to interrupt someone to get them to respond?
For some reason New York City is unable to keep a couple of 1970s train cars in motion cough L train. Given this fact is unlikely to change I see the move towards more bike heavy infrastructure as a good move. Citibike has done pretty well in New York and they keep installing new way stations or "bike ports" as I like to call them. Very exciting.
... will employ you for the rest of your life.
how would you compare them with Gel Rollerballs ? [1]

I am partial to the Parker rollerball refills - I use a Parker Chinese Laque Ambre - but do not want the inconvenience of a fountain pen.

I believe a rollerball is like the Nespresso to the fountain pen's espresso. Slightly worse - but much better than ball point pens.

But the best part that I like about rollerballs is how you can get an expensive experience in a cheap pen. For example Mont Blanc refills can be hacked to fit a cheap G2 [2]

[1] http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/241755-which-p...

[2] http://www.instructables.com/id/Save-$200-in-2-minutes-and-h...
By "developer" is this from the perspective of say, a company looking to use Glitter as a starting point for something?

Glitter started off as a quickstart for students taking Computer Graphics related classes at my school, not as the foundation for writing commercial game engines.

Was there something in mind that you feel like is missing? I'm happy to add to the readme.
The author, Mark Wagenbuur, is hugely influential in America. Without his videos America would still be stuck in its vehicular cycling rut. I doubt there's a city planner in America who doesn't get sent links to his videos all the time. Now if Americans could only stop losing their shit every time on-street parking is removed ...
That's painfully true. When I got my 13" retina mac, I literally couldn't decide on a terminal font for two weeks, switching them every few hours.

Nothing looked right.
Nothing does even now, half a year later. Though personally, 12pt Monaco feels least "wrong".
Oh, I see. That is more sensible.

Regular polling, IME, happens when you're trying to "keep abreast" of a decision making process that you are not directly involved in. Say you are the SME for data security and there is a discussion which could involve you but presently does not. You initially pay attention, but work on some other tasks in the background and poll on the discussion to see if there is anything that would affect you.

The danger happens when you start thinking that everything could affect you and you spend more time keeping up to date on what everyone else is doing rather than doing stuff yourself. Eventually the pendulum swings the other way and you stop paying attention to anything, until Something Happens and If Only You Were There, and then you start paying attention to little things, a few times, again. And the cycle repeats itself.
Coast to Coast AM – ET Hybrids, Crop Circles, and Mini-Ice Age – August 27, 2015
What about gel ink?
> Edit: In addition, giving into stupid beliefs does the world harm. It promotes further poor thinking and suboptimal choices that hurt other people. (Or even, innocent children, if you want to play that card.) That's why, in as far as we have any responsibility to society, we should fight irrationality.

I agree with you on that point, though of course you walk a fine line - I understand it hasn't been proven yet, but remember in the 90's you would have been called a crackpot for saying the government was listening to your phone calls, etc.