skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Especially to reach the level of success of Zuckerberg or Gates you need a ton of luck. The more luck you have the easier things will be for you. If you're born into the middle class you'll have a much easier time getting further in life than if you're born into a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood with bad schools. We have to acknowledge that.

We also have to acknowledge that you can still take two people who started in roughly the same circumstances and get dramatically different outcomes due to different drives to succeed. To say "most successes had been a combination of being born at the right place and time, etc." leaves out this part of it. I went to a top university and was incredibly privileged to be born both very intelligent and in the middle class to be able to get there. Yet, while all of my classmates are doing just fine in life, there's a huge difference between those that were passionate and hard working and those who weren't. There are tons of people I know who are very smart and came from privileged backgrounds, but who you knew would never do something big because they didn't have the fire inside to work 60-100 hrs/wk for 10 years straight or who valued the prestige and reduced risk of a big company more. Honestly, I don't entirely blame them as it's not always the most fun way to live. But some people are just driven as hell and while it's not enough to be that way without the luck of natural abilities and familial resources, you shouldn't leave it out of your list of factors for things that contribute to success because it makes a really big difference even if not necessarily sufficient by itself.
How Edward Snowden Inadvertently Helped Vladimir Putin’s Internet Crackdown
Here's another problem: the code is in Matlab. What do you guys think about publishing reproductions in proprietary languages?
The Future of Layout with CSS: Grid Layouts
When Robots Hallucinate
Wellness,+Oneness+And+Living+Fully+Roundup
I don't think it's especially useful to think about emissions by country for the purpouses of thinking who can effect change. Any more than a small town resident should feel discouraged about voting in national elections.

People need to be doing their part in all the reference groups they belong to, be it their field of expertise, their local government, international communities they belong to etc. "Act locally, think globally".
I've actually done the next stage: researched a problem, found a really helpful Stackoverflow answer, which it turns out I had written, which was a reply to a question which it turned out I had also written.

The only disappointing thing being that due to causality constraints, I was unable to upvote past me's answer or further past me's question, which was a shame as they were both really useful.
+1

I'm happy enough to pay a subscription for intellij since the price seems about the same (oh actually they're putting it up by £20 or £30 per year after the first year). I'd rather get frequent updates, but since I've already bought it outright twice (upgrading when I feel I need to) it seems a bit lame to just pull the plug should you ever take a break.
You're building a straw-man there. A standard library can certainly be made to be modular and versioned. It doesn't have to be bloated for any reason whatsoever. This is Javascript - you can chop up your scripts however you want.

The problem with mixing and matching libs is that no two JS devs do it the same. Some will even re-build the same lib that has already been built by hundreds of JS devs because NIH.
SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote or New York

Looking for a Swift/iOS developer for a short-term project on a third-party keyboard.

E-mail: michael.oshman@gmail.com
This was years ago - about 15 I think - and I can't actually remember why. I could lie and say it was something that djb wrote in the manual about best practice at the time but I think it was more likely habit.
There's also putting radio on the internet.

I know it's a little weak to reference a fictional TV show, but the Silicon Valley investor who made it big with radio on the internet then spends the rest of his career flailing around with no idea what he's doing is more real than the mystical Great Man Unicorn.
Nutanix and Citrix Workspace Cloud
you are building a million dollar biz alone? what kind of product is it?

Just curious, are there any other examples of one man million dollar software business?
Yeah, MS has been moving in the opposite direction and making more and more of their developer tools free or nearly so.
> if the drug is not effective (at all), there is 27.9% probability that the drug would be approved by FDA.

Which is only one of two possibilities, and hence, it cannot be 'the probability the drug is approved by the FDA', for the same reason that 'a p-value of 0.05' does not mean '95% probability the drug works'.
My favorite Western game and probably in my top 10 personal favorite games.
> Kudos for the transparency though.

This isn't reddit releasing numbers, this is someone scraping reddit and estimating the numbers based on gifted gold. Notice at the bottom of the page:

> These numbers only include gifted gold, and don't take into account transaction fees etc
Playing God: Why ethical objections to interfering with nature are too late
So you'd rather they packaged all the updates into big yearly versions you paid for all at once, rather than getting things as they are done? That sucks.

If you still want updates as they come, either they are free if you own the version (in which case, you feel cheated if you buy a version then a new one comes out soon after), meaning people will avoid buying the product until the new version comes out.

With the year of upgrades included, it works. Now, in your case, you want to have your cake and eat it too - you still benefit from the upgrades the software got while you were not using it. You were not paying for using the software (that's the new model), you were paying to receive updates, so you either pay continuously for them at a reduced price, or pay for a new year when it runs out.

In fact, what is kind of crazy is what you are saying is you only want to pay for the software while you are using it, which is exactly the new model. You want to use the version you have forever, get all the updates, and also not pay when you don't use it. How is that going to be a sane business model from the other side?

Hey, sure, it's not worth it for you - that's your call, but what business model would actually be good enough for your standards?
Why the HN Wikipedia page is awesome
1. Because it contains the phrase:
"Graham has stated he hopes to avoid the Eternal September that results in the general decline of intelligent discourse within a community".
Except that I cannot find a single actual primary source anywhere in which Paul Graham is quoted using the term "Eternal September".

Having never heard this it ever myself, I found this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September to read about the same way, say, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England does. [ Although, if you're a little bored, you should really take a look at that code ESR has up for 'sdate'. ;) ]

2. This penultimate line:
- See also: gamification
Letgo app raises $100M to take on eBay
Checking that people actually live where they claim requires a big bureaucracy. For 2.5x the money a lot of people would claim to be homeless living in Manhattan.
What do you build to show off your skills?
The majority of the code I've written was for a company which was acquired. When applying to freelance or responding to recruiters I get the "let's see your code" question.

I have built nothing of note.

So my question is, what type of projects/apps could a person undertake to improve their skill set, while developing a repository of showcase worthy code?
A lot of JetBrains employees speak English as a second language, and can come off a bit too harsh and direct at times, so you have to give them some leeway when trying to read between the lines.

Just... never trust a business that says "we're doing this for you, beloved customers". They are not. Even if they did it to make you happy, it would simply mean they profit from your happiness in some way. A business does things to make a profit and expand, nothing else. JetBrains are doing this because they feel they have to, likely because of cashflow constraints; everything else is just corporate doublespeak.
Well yes and no. People keep saying this and in a way it's true but spec-wise, there are differences.

For example, Galaxy S4 launched more than 2 years ago, like 2.3 years or w/e. It has half an inch bigger screen, higher screen-to-body ratio (smaller bezels), twice the pixel density (the ZTE's is about 30% less than the 5 year old iphone 4's density for example, it's not insignificant).

Then the S4 had the Snapdragon 600, the ZTE has a 400. (i.e. S4 has a faster CPU and faster GPU, with all the ramifications you can imagine).

S4 has double the ram. That isn't as significant when making android vs ios comparisons (as they handle everything differently), but android vs android, double the ram (1 to 2) is a big deal.

S4's camera has almost 3x as many MP on the back and autofocus, better front camera, too, and higher resolution images and video.

And then there's all the S4 stuff that is useful to some, not to others. Like more sensors (temperature, humidity, gestures, wireless charging etc).

And lastly, 2600 mAh battery vs 2100.

Pretty similar for the 2012 Galaxy S3, too. The S2 from 2011 seems to actually be considerably worse in some areas, or equal, than the ZTE.

Of course it's pretty insane we're even making comparisons between phones that cost 10% the price 2-3 years ago. That's the significance. But I wouldn't say they're similar to 2 year old flagships.
"So, these poor farmers will demand low-cost solutions to manage these problems."

Poor farmers can demand lots of things. They won't get them.

" Entrepreneurs would sense this(Bill already did) and start building these tools. It's just how capitalism works."

Bill Gates is not an entrepreneur. He's a philanthropist. His activities fund a lot of entrepreneurs. And that's an important distinction.

The reason there are solutions in the works for these poor farmers is not that the farmers are demanding them. The reason is that BILL GATES is demanding them.
Cases for that would be interesting. Seems like the only thing you could get away with is a rubber bumper frame case like the iPhone has. Definitely an interesting idea, but I personally don't see the appeal of an always on e-ink display. I feel like you could get comparable battery savings from a lock screen using an AMOLED display.
There are benefits it provides: https://www.reddit.com/gold/about/ but most can be replicated with plugins

* Turn off ads

* Reddit themes

* Create a custom reddit alien avatar

* New comment highlighting

* Ad free, early access to the Upvoted podcast

* Remember what links you've visited across computers
Wow. This is terrible. I'm a user of a few of their products (PHPStorm, PyCharm, IDEA, and RubyMine), two of which I've paid for and gotten upgrades for in the past on a fairly regular basis. I've extolled Jetbrains and praised the to such great lengths you'd think I was an evangelist for them. But now, it seems like it's time yet again (something I though was over after discovering Jetbrains) to find a proper IDE.

Their products have been going down in quality. In the latest PHPStorm for example, I've had serious problems with the debugger not working and it rewriting my code to put many lines into one (fun!). Jetbrains hasn't released a new feature that I use on a constant basis for two major versions (multi-cursor is debatable, but certainly not a daily-basis feature). I seriously regret upgrading PHPStorm simply because I wasted $129 on a product that's worse than the previous version in every single way. I asked, but was not offered a refund. Not only that, but prices have already doubled in the last couple of years, with new versions being $200 instead of $100 as they used to be (and sometimes they'd have discounts like the End of The World Sale in 2012 when they were selling PyCharm for $25 and upgrades for $12).

Jetbrains, IMO, is close to failing to provide quality software and now we get this insanity. The only thing I can hope for is that someone takes this great platform and start writing plugins for these languages that are better than Jetbrains (was hard in the past but shouldn't be so now and in the future) or creates another IDE platform (Eclipse need not apply).
That's less than 38°C. At Brazil, we have huge areas of florest that rarely see a temperature smaller than that during the day.

Are plant leaves cooler than the environment?
How to Name Your Baby
Where have you seen the profit numbers for low cost phones?
Or wind and solar (including PV, CSP and domestic water heating) seeing how they are cheap and easy to roll out? Why wait 15 years for nuclear that is seen as too expensive as well as socially unacceptable in many nations, when you can get immediate returns with wind? Why poison the air with coal when you can use distributed solar and save on grid expansion costs?
For one, because the chances of shooting for the stars and failing is very high. You have to take on a lot of funding, spend a lot on user acquisition, etc. etc. etc.

Do you want a highly talented person to work on something for two years that ends up being utterly destroyed, or do you want them to work for 20 years on a business that keeps improving?

What the hell is the point of all of this if we aren't going for the big win?

Life? What you're saying sounds like the result of an absolutely off-whack work/life balance. There is, and will always be, more to life than work.
ReScience explicitly does not accept submissions that are not written in an open source programming language. It you can make your code work with Octave I assume it's fine.

https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/

Although I am sure you will find more reviewers ready to review code written with Python / NumPy / SciPy.
You still need to learn the new product, but if there is heads up time, it's easier to adapt your existing projects to that new product.
Okay then. I defer to your expertise in creating billion dollar companies.
Not quite - it doesn't support ObjC/C++/C
Link is http://www.musicoacher.com/

Looks like a tool that shows you guitar chords with fingerings under YouTube videos.

Cool part is that he's algorithmically determining the chords -- no manual entry. Very nice.
OP asked about shuffling multiple times and having the deck become less random intentionally. AFAIK, the only way to do this deliberately is with the riffle, and it only works from a sorted deck.

A deck can indeed end up more ordered after one or more shuffles than it was before. But if the shuffle has any randomness to it, this is coincidence, and it will only happen as often as it is likely, which is not much. The same way you do have a probability of flipping 10 heads in a row, you can accidentally organize a deck. But the chance of flipping 10 heads in a row is (you know already) slightly lower than one in a thousand. The chance of just happening to organize a randomized deck after one or multiple shuffles is "a lot" lower than that.
Ah, the "Disney Vault" is alive and well...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault
I've always wanted to try square monitors. They exist but are really expensive:

http://www.eizoglobal.com/products/flexscan/ev2730q/

A system with 3 of these could be amazing.
I'm with you on Adobe, but Steam is a whole different thing, even leaving out its OS aspirations. Probably most importantly, it's free -- I think of it as an unusually heavy e-commerce site that needed me to install a bunch of stuff to get it to work. Kind of like if Netflix let me watch stuff offline, but only if I put their Chrome app on my computer: It's a client for accessing their platform.
Michigan needs to ban noncompete contracts. This would go a long way towards reviving the tech industry.

Michigan originally banned noncompetes, but the lobbyists for the auto industry got the law changed.
The comment is obviously aimed at someone who does not use dynamic languages C++, Java etc.
Ironically I just switched back to Eclipse Mars from Intellij. Intellij is an awesome product and for certain development environments it hands down beats Eclipse... but if your just coding in a JVM language (Java, Scala..) Eclipse Mars is pretty decent. For me It really was never the features that made me want to use Intellij but the simple fact that shit never seems to get fixed in Eclipse version after version.

Eclipse Mars is better than previous versions but there are still ancient bugs:

Mac OSX scrolling:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=366471

Font Line Height (thank you Atom for supporting this)
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=26765

I have like 10 more bugs that I wish I could pay to have fixed. Intellij had this problem too (but lesser) and I really wish a company had some sort of pricing option to have certain bugs/features fast tracked. Eclipse takes donations and Intellij purchaes but you can't specifically say hey I will give you $1000 if you just fix xyz bug/feature. I know there are services that do this on opensource projects... I just wish that companies did it as well.

Speaking of Atom I just created an Eclipse Color theme that looks like One Dark syntax https://gist.github.com/agentgt/fcaf75eb8acf92e08926 . Combined with the Dark widget theme (yes Mars seems to have made this better) it really looks pretty decent on Mac. Its nice because I use Atom for frontend work so I have consistency theme wise.
Is "meeting and creating relationships with powerful people will help your business" really something you are disagreeing with?
> Survivorship bias does not apply here.

Survivorship bias always applies and it is the normal way.
Searching for BB-8 on Apple's website results to an XML Akamai Player beacon config.
Thanks for taking the time to write this. Really great stuff.
I'm with you in terms of productivity/results etc. I remember when I started with a new team that were all Eclipse. I gave it my all. I really did. No doubt much of it came down to familiarity but there was something about it that I couldn't jive with. It seemed to introduce concepts/abstractions that didn't need to exist. It crashed a bunch. There were more steps involved with everything. I had pick up after it. It was slow. Then I said, you know what? I can't hack this, I'm going back to IDEA. Suddenly it felt like I was in a ferrari rather than a trabant. Fully accept that a lot of that was down to me not being a particularly fast learner, that I was used to IDEA in the first place etc.

I'm happy to pay Jetbrains three times the amount I pay to continue with it. This deal is great for me because I wanted to use PyCharm and CLion, and have historically used Rubymine, and the amount I have to pay to have everything isn't that far off what I pay already.

I consider it money well paid to be able to be more productive. Understand other people feel differently... it's nice to be idealogically consistent and beholden to no-one. That's worth a lot to many.
Meanwhile, Dropbox could have been started by a solo college student. There only gets to be one Dropbox and it takes luck to be Drew Houston, but it takes an ungodly amount of work and sacrifice as well. We shouldn't lack acknowledgement of skill and drive anymore than we should underestimate luck.
Bear Gryls?
I am afraid this author has no idea what he is doing - and is loosely throwing around terms he does not understand. What the hell was his normalization procedure. Dangerous to readers who do not know a lot and will get confused while reading.
> Larry / Sergei

What's so special about those people? Their success is probably due to their connections, and mostly luck in timing. I'm sure there are people that are better than Larry or Sergei and are much less successful.
Lost C64 Games: Daffy Duck – 1992 Hi-Tec
I found prions to be the most fascinating thing in my biology classes. And the fact that we still don't know that much about them bemuses me. The debate section from the Wikipedia is worth reading [0] due to the fact that we still don't know "Whether prions cause disease or are merely a symptom caused by a different agent is still debated by a minority of researchers".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#Debate
Ask HN: Why (and where) did “Apply to YC without an idea” fail?
BlackBerry acquires Good Technology to solidify its enterprise business
A taxi driver will need their car fixed periodically at their dealership. If they don't pay up, no car.
It also makes it easy to write a bot for it: https://github.com/smoak/jackbox-bot
For me, the small screen is not an issue, because I typically develop on as much screen as I can muster.

As far as the editor, there are some good attempts at code completion from other systems, but I have not found one nearly as good as Intellisense. That is coupled with the jump to definition and declaration.

Also, the integrated debugging and some of the edit and continue functionality is amazing.
In our business, we're building software -- not software tools. I give my engineers full reign to determine what tools they use. For our build vs. buy evaluation, we don't have a need to modify or extend tooling beyond their existing capabilities (I find the JetBrains plug-in model fairly decent.) We use a lot of JetBrains tools in our operation.

It all comes down to build/buy assessment, because build still costs money. JetBrains has a price point that puts a tight margin on that build decision.
Seriously, someone on HN equating SAAS to extortion...

Much like the OP talking of not being able to do development if your employer fails to approve the payment in time. Resharper is nice and all but you can actually write C# without it. (I know PyCharm etc might be harder but the article was about Resharper).
Seems like it'd be easy to rescale the notifications to every Nth transaction, or whatever the goal is, when the rate got higher.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment Mike.

#1 is a good idea. Defining 'good code' is hard, but I know bad code when I read it, and certainly code with a philosophy that I disagree with!

I am definitely going to have to learn TDD after all the comments in this thread. Thanks for the recommendation of books, esp Feathers - a lot of my work is with legacy code.

Thanks again!
Something relevant to the sort of job you want.
Also, it doesn't support all the plugins for each language, only some languages.
We use a subscription model at Fogbeam, but here's the twist: all our software is open source, and you're free to use it as you like, with or without a subscription.

So why buy a subscription at all?

Because you get the kinds of things big companies care about: certification, maintenance, support, indemnification, somebody to sue if things don't work, a vendor to shift blame onto if the shit hits the fan, a discount on professional services work, perpetual upgrades, priority access to influence the roadmap and direction of the product, etc. Subscriptions are also a win for customers in that (depending on the details) they may be able to pay for a subscription out of an operational budget, rather than needing to go to some committee and get approval for a large one-time capital expenditure. And with subscriptions you are paying a portion of the cost in future, inflated, dollars instead of today's dollars.

Of course, like any vendor who does OSS, we run the risk of having a lot of people using our software and never paying, but that's just something we accept.

But here's the thing... we don't sell development tools - IDEs and the like. Our stuff is backend/middle-ware that costs in the tens of thousands of dollars and up (for companies with thousands of employees, anyway), which makes things like worrying about capital expenditures more of an issue. At the kind of price-points you are talking about for IDEs and what-not, I'm not sure the advantages of a subscription (from the customer POV) really carry much weight.
Chimp attacked drone with a stick