skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If anyone in the Irving area has a electronics company, offer this kid an after-school job.

It doesn't sound like his love for science/engineering/electronics has been significantly harmed, but we, as a society, need to keep encouraging kids in these areas, and not shitting all over their passion, no matter what their name, nationality, or race is. It is thoroughly disgusting that the authorities, both the teachers/school and the police, are ignorant enough to make this a story at all.
What I really miss is the score against comments.
Having another person besides you pushing your project forward is the biggest motivator - be it a waiting/potential client, a cofounder, website traffic, any external factor that validates your goal. Internal motivation only gets you so far until you start losing steam.

I think the advice to set up adwords and an intro page before a product is ready really helps with this. My main issue with such a strategy is that you end up having to admit that the product is still vaporware and the time to launch may be too long. Probably worth having an early alpha ready prior to any marketing blitz.
> nothing like the "500k salary and 2 million in stock" articles I hear about happening in SV

Amusingly, the only American software engineer I know who is certifiably taking more than 500k USD a year in base (i.e. cash, pre-bonus) salary lives and works in Boston.
I've done in the life immediately previous to my current one a fair bit of enterprise netpen work, and I have never seen a large enterprise network that had anything effectively airgapped. Getting onto a single desktop, in my experience, is virtually a gameover guarantee for any reasonable definition of "gameover".
> 10 quadrillion calculations per second

What exactly is that based on? Does it count anything other than synapses?
For those that don't know, Alfred Aho is the "a" in awk (Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan).
This is such an awesome story. I've been two features away from launching my product from April. And that's just launching like an Alpha version of it. Beating procrastination is never easy. Just have to motor through. I'm determined to launch before end of the month. As a side note, I recently got someone who promised to bug me each week on my progress. I've also arranged to have a meetup with him once every month. Casual meetup, not a major deal. But put those two together and the fact that I haven't completed something yet weighs on my mind as an embarrassment. It serves as great motivation till I learn how to kick my own ass. The fact that I'm meeting my friend today isn't making things easier for my mind either :D
I think it depends, will the teachers need a degree to teach kids?

I can see someone who dropped or didn't go to college, but worked professionally for at least 4-6 years in different technical roles would probably take the ~$50k as long as they can have flexibility create their own lesson plans and don't have to teach to some fizz buzz test on pen and paper (part of society's tendency to drive things to the LCD)… might be a breath of fresh air from their typical corporate environments, at least for a couple years.

Do I think something like this will happen, probably not.
> 2008 happened for a reason

2008 happened because some d-heads decided to throw in the same bucket loans with good ratings and loans with junk ratings. And also because borrowing money was cheap, making it easy for a lot of people to borrow money when they should not have been able to in the first place. A pretty good definition of a bubble. Oh, and thanks to the Fed.
Not 5? :)

This is what happens when we try 4-minute fixes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205733 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9206427.

We've been working on a more thorough solution since then. I've posted about it many times, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10104936, and no one will be more relieved when those days are over. I just hope everyone doesn't still disagree and propose more 4-minute fixes forever.
Now you can find out if GCHQ illegally spied on you
Learning more about the GFW's active probing system
> HN is pretty Libertarian, and Libertarianism is the polar opposite of egalitarianism.

That's a pretty bold claim. On HN we see the recurring "growing inequalities are bad"-posts whining all the time. Libertarians are not against inequalities in the first place, so I'd say HN is rather not too Libertarian, while there are certainly more Libertarians here than on other communities.
> On the day to day level I'd say certain subjects might be more applicable to this sentiment than others. For instance, sexual education where the results can be life changing.

I'd argue acquiring skills that could take one out of poverty as pretty life changing.

> But as for computer science, like regular science, it will inspire a few kids who go on to learn their follies and produce work in the field and everyone else will either trudge through it or drop it and never have it affect their daily life in any manner so it doesn't particularly matter and is probably better to have those extra inspired children in society.

It's worth trying for the sake of the kids who do go on to make a difference. And even for the ones who decide not to pursue programming as a profession, it is a net benefit for them to know on a high level how a computer operates.

Regarding privacy, 100% agree. This could be a great sub component to a computer literacy course.
I am volunteering to teach in Seattle through the TEALS program (started by a Microsoft employee) for a couple of hours a week:

https://www.tealsk12.org/

We had a few summer training sessions to learn how to be effective teachers, and they have some lesson plans written out for teaching with Snap (a visual language based on Scratch). The high school in our neighborhood wants to offer AP Computer Science eventually, but we are starting with an Intro to CS class first. I agree that it will be hard to find professional software developers who will leave their job to become teachers, so it seems like we are relying on volunteers who have a good work life balance at this point.

Appreciate the blog post on your previous comment, sounds like NYC has its own similar organization. Anxiously awaiting school to start on Thursday :).
Eliminating branches in Rust for fun but not much profit
The gamma chunk can also be used for some interesting tricks:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10192413
Agreed. Having that option is an absolute must. I've been a programmer for 20 years so I think this is a step in the right direction. The point I was trying to make is that in the last few years, there's been a lot of talk about getting kids interested in programming but there's a lot more to the sciences than just programming. We need to make general math and sciences more interesting to kids. Maybe programming will be that catalyst to leads kids to a love of math and sciences.
Yes. What do you think of my https://github.com/alain94040/arguably, which is an extreme take on your suggestion?
"Three Days of the Condor" used to make the list too, because it was alleged to be one of Mitnick's favorite movies.
They got greedy like everyone else, they couldn't have made subprime loans if consumers didn't ask for them.
I'm glad to know I'm not the only person who creates "learning_xyz" repositories that may or may not progress very far, though I've yet to share any of mine online.
>magic box that could crack all encryption

Not all, just protocols used in the west. From the script:

"Your codes are entirely different from ours.
We never had any luck in breaking them so Lord knows, I wanted that box..."

Imagine heartbleed implemented on a RPi in a box.
CE Education in NY – I should be happy but feel like I've failed
By the time kids who are taught to program in K-12 enter the workforce, knowing syntax, computer details, and data structures will be a thing of the past or a thing for really hardcore engineers who have to use a strict language like Python. By that time, most common programming tasks will be a matter of writing plain English and testing the AI interpreters, and students will be stuck learning archaic programming just as they are presently forced to learn archaic and impractical math techniques that could be done very intuitively with a few lines of Python and arithmetic. I say this jokingly, but there may be some truth to it.
Try something for a niche audience, it is the easiest way to make something that people will buy in terms of technology products. Preferably something you could see yourself actually using.

Several years ago before chromecast et al, I wanted a way to control my rhythmbox music player with my phone, so I built https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.ruckusdj.c...

Over the course of 2 yrs I sold over 20 copies for $5 a pop...not retirement money but very satisfying :)
And consider just four years later "The Matrix" was released. It gives you an idea of how fast things were changing in the 90s.
Maybe add a link to 'cached' in addition to 'web'? You could either do your own caching when the link is submitted, or use a service. The link will be useful immediately if the site goes down over load, and keeping an archive will keep the comments comprehensible for future readers if/when the link erodes.
> We would have to store credit card numbers!

Haven't they heard of Stripe? It's really easy to use Stripe. They should just use that. I'm not sure they looked at all the available solutions out there for processing payments.
Over 50% of the nodes have to be compromised in order to double spend, or change the history of the shared ledger.

So assuming all of the banks have the same number of nodes/the same computing power, it would take >50% collusion to cheat the system.
I've always loved the license for awklisp – see the bottom half of the README:

https://github.com/darius/awklisp
Tell that to very prominent VC's in NYC that have been blowing this horn for years in contradiction to your sentiments…[0].

I think public schools (and schools in general as an institution) face the same problem universities are facing: the obsolescence on such a mechanism to effectively and efficiently disseminate knowledge as more and more resources are allocated for signaling of such rather than acquiring/pursuit of it.

[0] http://avc.com/
The State of In-Car UX
I don't know, if counted every modulation in every wire in a computer (CPU, RAM, cache activations, etc), you might get a signifant multiple of its FLOPS count, right?
Very cool! What curriculum are you following? And where do you teach?
I'm sorry, I still have trouble understanding why you did what you did? What was the reason?
> This is reassuring for those optimists out there, as it suggests that people are often honest even when they don’t have to be.

Or it could be that people don't realize there's no way for the experimenters to know if they're cheating, so they're on their best behavior until they become familiar with the system.

I think this is true in a lot of domains (jobs, dating, etc). In the beginning, people follow the rules. When they're comfortable with the ins and out of the system, they start gaming it.
HN is far from a firehose. The topics are not volatile, and junk-information full of rumour and innuendo rarely makes it to the top.

It also mixes some current affairs and talking points with industry specific information.

If I could liken it to the difference between a fast-food joint and a quality cafe. Sometimes the menu and the conversation aren't to my liking, but on occasions it is a good place to spend some time.

TLDR: learning can take place here, in fast-news there is no learning, just button pushing of the audience. The news industry has self optimised to push emotional buttons to get a response.
That's awesome! I think TEALS has a chapter in NYC too.

Good luck for Thursday.
Not exactly an impartial judge:

I recently left my job at Apple where I worked on the Prototyping Team, exploring new user interaction concepts for future hardware and technology. Before that, I worked on Apple's Video Apps Team and helped design the latest versions of Final Cut Pro and iMovie.
Lisp interpreter written in Awk
We could get rid of our Drones's remote controller?Solution from#EEGSmart #Touch
A Trader's view on Oil
I have to disagree. A car mechanic is akin to a car as a tech support or sysadmin is to a computer. Some tech support people know far more than I do about fixing a computer, even if they aren't programmers.

It's been about a couple decades since I wrote my first for-loops and if-statements in Qbasic...but even though computers have grown exponentially, not just in pure power, but in influence and capability -- I use the exact same logic and thinking, every day, as an application programmer -- and very close to the same syntax.

Loops and conditionals (and functions, and so forth) are so fundamental to programming that it seems like anyone could learn them -- and use them to some practical effect -- in a few hours of following a few tutorials. But I haven't seen it in the beginners I've taught...It's a profound thing to communicate my exact intent to a thing that only knows, at its core, 1s and 0s...but it's not just the ability to write code, any more than writing is just the ability to make dark marks on a piece of paper. It's the ability to take thoughts and intents inside of me and communicate it to something fundamentally different from me, and yet be understood...in that sense, it's not so much different from traditional writing.
State diagram will be useful.
So the solution is moving to a new method and process driven by the banks, and with the removal of third party oversight? No thanks. If there is a system, it can, and eventually will, be gamed.
How we built a world class engineering team in Jakarta, Indonesia
Note that for satellites, 100-200W /m² is about the peak radiation rate as well. Radiators for space-based power would be a massive cost alone.
I'd switch to this solution in a heartbeat if it were available in Canada. Stripe is great, be we deal mostly with businesses that would rather use their bank accounts as funding sources.
+1 for mentioning the cold war spending which is what put the 'silicon' in silicon valley.

In many peoples minds, Silicon Valley sprung fully formed to it's current state sometime in the 70s, when that is far from the truth. And I don't mean that just in the tech sense, but also the VC & funding model sense.

Arthur Rock wasn't just some rich guy that dropped from the heavens when he invested in Apple - that money came from much, much earlier and was already following a specific way of investing.

Worthwhile reading :http://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-val...
I think the very last one is my favorite. It has an interesting mix of modified and unmodified components.
Good catch - I was already unsure how a fair review would be possible of something that's only been shown and barely played with, so I guess my questions valid.
Really awful article.

Windows 10 may prove to be the de facto operating system of the Internet of Things

That's not even wrong...

Once the language had been named, things happened very fast and C started to look much more like the C we use today, including the addition of boolean operators like && and ||....These are extremely crucial programming building blocks for not just C but most any language since.

Since C? Booleans? You mean like the and/or/not operators in Fortran (1957), COBOL (1958), or Algol-60 (where they were even represented by funky characters) to name a few? Simula-67 even had a boolean type which C didn't pick up.

The C Programming Language, dubbed the "white book,"

Is there anyone who actually called it anything other than "K&R"? I've sure never heard it called the "white book".

In 1983, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) starting working on a standard specification for C, with the result ratified finally in 1989 as ANSI C. This basically enshrined a One True C, where programmers could be assured that the language would behave the same no matter how or where it was implemented.

I'm dubious the author has never programmed in C for anything other than x86. He's certainly not tried to use ANSI C on, say a 36-bit or 60-bit machine. Or a Harvard architecture machine. Or ported to an ISA with different endianness or different load/store alignment restrictions. ANSI C doesn't even define the size of a byte beyond "at least 8 bits". Need more? Google "undefined behavior in ansi c" for a good laugh.
As unjustified and horrible is this is, this is going to make a great college essay in for him in four years.
I will pay good money for either a) a modern computer that mimics the clear laptop or b) Penn jillette to be my assistant.
With respect, the facts are against you:

"It is easy to misjudge the Gulag’s contribution because its more lasting monuments—the Moscow metro, the Moscow University, and the Norilsk Nickel Combinat—are what remain. Forgotten are the “roads to nowhere,” long fallen into the decay that is not unique to Gulag projects. The countries of the former Soviet Union are
cemeteries of failed construction projects, which would never have been started if project analysis had not been distorted by the absence of market pricing in the national economy and by the country’s isolation from international markets. Many such projects came into being merely because of fleeting political considerations." [1]

[1] http://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/...

Typing "moscow metro forced labor" into Google returned the PDF cited above as the second entry in the search results that were returned.

Perhaps you could provide a source for your claim that there is no connection between the construction of the Moscow Metro and the Gulag system?
Admittedly, I'm not addressing the present essay. But it's caution based on context.
Don't forget Uncle Sam. "Subprime" means lending money to people with a poor credit history. The government was cheerleading the whole way because it allowed poor people to buy houses... until interest rates went up and they could no longer afford their adjustable rate mortgage payments.

The sustainable way to get more lower income people into home ownership is to reduce housing prices (e.g. by increasing the supply of housing). Subsidizing and encouraging mortgages does the opposite of that -- instead of making housing cheaper it makes borrowing money cheaper, which makes housing prices go up. Which means existing home owners love it and new home owners like it... until all the people who couldn't get a loan in a normal market demonstrate why they couldn't get a loan in a normal market.
> So my advice to anyone trying to decide between buying Apple Setup vs. Cintiq is run far far away from the Cintiq. Especially if you're a student. Specialized professionals that have their cintiqs hooked up to PC's running Solidworks, C4D, CAD, yeahhhhh.....I guess cross your fingers they make iPad apps.

Or, get a Surface.
She also worked on the iPad Pro + Pencil herself.

https://twitter.com/lindadong/status/641665748008435712

https://twitter.com/lindadong/status/641667180560420864
Antitrust wasn't bad either, but I'm not sure if it goes too far into drama.
No tilt support on surface.
I wonder if on-demand apps, like Uber, will ever switch to this method of payment. Wouldn't they save a lot of cc fees?
Actually since Paxos is meant to solve the byzantine generals problem they don't necessarily trust that the others are properly following the protocol. But the algorithm guarantees that as long as no more than N others are dishonest you can still reach consensus. Bitcoin does the same where N's value differs but with far more wasteful computation and less strong guarantees.
Although I have done pretty well at actually launching various projects (5 to date) only one has gotten any traction (200-400 users a day). The one with traction hasn't seen any growth and I haven't been able to figure a good path to spur growth or generate revenue.

That being said, I still really liked this article. Even though I do launch things, I think that there is a more subtle piece I am missing. One thought I've had lately is that I get a lot of satisfaction out of building something and launching it. When the idea initially pops in my head, I ride that feverish wave of emotion throughout the development process. I think if I could spend more time and develop some sort of process or methodology to validate the idea I could take the next step.

I think it's that the thought of "validating the idea" seems less fun than building it and a little murky (as far as I don't have a clear idea about how to do it) so I just skip it and figure the shotgun approach to building products will eventually hit. :)
From what I have seen gov't typically does things for the benefit of the lobbyist and oligopolies and not the general public.

So I have a hard time not thinking that all this attention and push to teach programming isn't really a ploy to saturate the computer field with software engineers and programmers to lower their compensation.

IMO it looks like software engineers are getting compensated fairly well , perhaps to well and to close to executive and director pay. Increase the pool of software engineers and the less you have to pay them.
50K SUV Email Scam Attempt – MailShark
While I understand and respect your motives for moving away from credit cards for a B2B company that does not do a high volume of transactions, your other reasons are, for lack of a better term, uneducated.

1. Development effort - there are many off-the-shelf carts available. And, even easier, is a processor like Stripe that offers the ability to simply create a "Buy Now" button that is placed on your page and they handle the rest. Shoot, even PayPal is easy and will allow you to accept credit cards.

2. Security - you don't have to store numbers. Stripe, Braintree, etc... all handle this for you. In fact, the credit card number and financial details should never even touch your server. In fact most processors handle this for you.

3. Service fees - true, debit and ACH can be done a lot cheaper.

Finally, you bring up development effort as an issue, yet the second to last paragraph touts a processor like Dwolla. Dwolla is a great service and I have helped clients in the past get hooked up with them. But there is a development effort there as well, so you sort of contradict yourself.

No offense, by the title of the article I thought you were going to give me some never heard before advice on why accepting credit cards is bad for business. Instead you simply told me that transaction fees are high and your company is no longer accepting credit cards.
This email campaign will probably be marked as spam by most of the recipients.

Why don't you just open a blog?
The short answer is "because we don't sell to consumers, and credit cards aren't necessary or even particularly desirable for business customers."

Okay, that's nice, but... not sure there's really a larger takeaway.
Ok, we changed the text of both https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html and the "would you mind" blurb to make it clear that the HN guidelines are an additional thing to read.
And it's not like the assessment matters when the author doesn't even identify which operating system exhibited the driver issues that are the source of the complaint.
I'd be nice if this turns out to be true. I'm hoping for pen support on the Air next year.

But the big issue for pros is software. If the software doesn't come to the iPad (and doesn't buck the $5 app model so it can survive) I don't think the iPad pro will be much of a threat.

Centiq prices are quite high. If this (and the Surface) put price pressure on it all the better.