skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>This is why it's helpful to pick a motivating project while learning to code.

Very much the case for me, yeah. I've tried learning from tutorials and books and I just get bored. But if I come up with an idea and try to make it, I love it, learning the bits I need as I need them.

Should note that I think that if one is capable of learning the academic way, that's probably a better approach. Understanding programming in the general and thus being able to apply it to the specific. You'll certainly make better code that way.

But for me, for whom learning that way is never going to work, the ad-hoc way is fine. It doesn't really matter if my code is scrappy so long as it works and doesn't do harm.
CVE-2014-4943 – Linux Kernel PPPoL2TP Analysis
Well, good chefs do, it's called author's cuisine I believe. Someone, somewhere, has to come up with some recipes - and hold on there, I know it sounds like crazy talking, but why wouldn't these people be chefs, who already cook for a living?
Gearslut hang-around and long-time synth collector here.
Is it just me, or does this story make Yamaha silently seem like the coolest big-co ever!?
Or someone who wants to be a photographer referring to it as "clicking".
Up to 3 people and two different works can share a Nobel prize. Seems to me there's an obvious way out of this mess. At least from the Nobel committees pov.
ShareX has been turning into a feature creep over the time. I don't really understand what the developer is thinking about.
Azure Credit at Half Price
I would like to Sell my bizspark plus account which offer $10K of Azure credit each month at a reduced price of $5K. Email me to discuss further ali7611858@gmail.com
I never really understood how the 'the universe is vast' argument is humbling. What does size have to do with importance? That's like saying a bar of gold has less value if you store it in a bigger room. There are many humbling things in the universe, like making an off-by-one error in C++ with more than a decade of programming experience, but the vastness of the universe is not one of those things.
My point was that chefs do create recipes, but not while cooking the food.
They might arguably have become a more powerful country, but I don't think that necessarily equates to being better off. After renouncing (being forced to renounce) war as a mechanism of policy, Japan has enjoyed seven decades of peace and the fastest rise from bombed-out shithole full of malnourished kids to the second largest economy in the world with one of the highest standards of living.

Now China has risen, and overtaken Japan in economic and military terms, and it's a good case in point: certainly more powerful than Japan as a nation, but you can't breathe the air, you don't have rule of law, you can't vote, or even reproduce as you might see fit. Not a real great outcome for the average Chinese person, though I guess it beats starving.

My point was that Japanese militarist totalitarianism, awful and evil as that was, ended up being a shortcut to a level of peace and prosperity that is, as far as I know, unprecedented.
Do poor students not get to go to college anymore or do you have another system in mind?
Thanks for hunting the link.
I disagree. Keep asking questions, but do it only when you don't have an answer. If you deconstruct the question at it's simpler form, chances are that you'll find the answer yourself.
That's true when programming for a job or otherwise trying to get serious work done.

But programming can (and also should) be play. For me it's explorative and playful, I'm just trying to make a fun thing happen or see what things I can connect together in what interesting ways. I imagine it's the same for kids taking their first steps by making lights flash with a RPi and Python and then wondering what they can do next (led by imagination).

The latter is very much like being in a kitchen and throwing ingredients together, trying things out to see what tastes good.

I think limiting ones thinking of programming to the former sort devalues it.
The article states this - "Well, it turns out that all this environmental friendliness is starting to trip over itself, because most devices now start up in standby mode."

Is this the best way for energy efficiency or should there be a different standard?
Can someone describe to me what this is? Is it trying to unify IoT services or something?
Scientists to nudge asteroid off course as practice for protecting Earth
"What did your face look like before your parents were born?"

There's a quality in these one-liners from the Zen tradition that I haven't experienced since I was obsessed with physics in high-school.
Oculus Connect 2 Keynote with John Carmack [video]
A few corrections :

> but you can't breathe the air
yes you can, air is not polluted in ALL of China.

> you don't have rule of law
frankly examples in Western democraties where the powerful beat the small guys are numerous. And look at DMCA and shit like that constantly used with abuse.

> you can't reproduce as you might see fit.
you can now have more than 1 kid, if that is what you were referring to. This changed since last year if I remember correctly. And on top of that in the countryside many folks have several kids but don’t declare them.

> Not a real great outcome for the average Chinese person, though I guess it beats starving.

If you actually talk with Chinese people, they are actually very happy with the amount of progress most have seen in their lifetime.
Libsq3: A modern C++ wrapper for sqlite3
There's two problems when students choose an institution:

1. Poor and too often manipulated information about a school's job placements.

2. Students are short sighted about debts and schools don't care because the money is government guaranteed.

Solvable problems! Have an independent party collect and report on job placement. Then tie a school's loan eligibility more closely to the ability of recent graduates to pay.
The base of that goes back to a very simple realization: On a cosmic scale nothing that we do is of great importance. This planet likely is not as special as we would like to think it is and we are not as special as we like to think we are. We are to the universe as a single bacterium is to us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

Is a nice recap of just how vast the universe really is and how utterly insignificant we are within it, in spite of all we're figured out and have achieved collectively. It certainly humbles me.
Ask HN: Will “book in progress” count as a show HN?
So I am writing a book (well, two), and subject matter is HN friendly, but sticking it up and asking for (ongoing) feedback seems ... Not quite right.

Any opinions?
There's broadly two approaches actuaries use (I can't speak for this particular site which uses UN projections):

- One is to look at the average level of mortality improvements in the past at a population (or cohort) level and project those forwards. There are lots of models that do this, for example based on some combination of age, sex, year of birth and calendar year. You make the assumption that even though the specific advances in the past won't be repeated, future advances will follow a similar trend. The Lee-Carter model is an easy to understand example, although it's not particularly cutting edge.

- The other is to look at individual mortality factors (falling smoking levels cause less instances of cancer, etc) and project those forwards based on a mixture of historic advances and expert judgment. With these models you have to take into account that the people not dying of e.g. cancer are now at risk of dying from something else. These models are a lot harder to create because they rely a lot more on expertise. You also don't get information about the whole population, so you would end up using a combination of this with the first model.

Also, the site sounds like it is using period (i.e calendar year) life expectancy rather than cohort, so it might not be projecting ANY future improvements. I'd need to find their actual data source to be sure.
The ambitionless entrepreneur
If this were an episode of any TV series, we know how it's going to end ...

It seems a sensible idea, but everyone must be thinking it right?
When a good friend of mine started to ask about learning programming
I answered that

“be ready to do it every day, be ready to learn for the next 10 years”

asked him to seriously think about that and we’ll talk again in a week

there is much more to it, but imho those are the 2 points that I’ve seen
somehow valid for the last 20 years or so

and when I read “I’ve been on again off again with it” I thought
“first mistake”, really if I would have 2 quick advices to give

do it everyday: because it test how much you can take, if you feel
programming 2 days in a row is “too much” that’s probably a good sign
“it’s not for you”

be ready to do it for 10 years: search “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” by
Peter Norvig and you will understand why.

A lot of ppl when it come to “learn how to program” underestimate very basic stuff like the involvement and the time it take, I saw ppl give up just because it took too much time
or because they thought they would be good at it much sooner.

So yeah staying in front of a computer for hours, for days, solving problems with code,
it may not fit everyone, but to me the longer you can keep at it, or if you forgot to eat, to sleep while doing it, are in general good signs of “you can do it”.

All the 8 points are very valid, even if some could be argued,
I personally remember the fear, back in the 90s for a full month I was paralysed
because of the fear to do wrong, the fear to break stuff.

If it was not for this older guy who kept encouraging and reassuring me
I would have probably gave up, so I would say try to get a mentor.

But the opposite advice would work too: don’t get a mentor and try to understand everything by yourself, or in another context: resist the urge to go ask your question on stack overflow and try to solve as much of it by yourself. Solved it? then keep not asking questions on stack overflow as long as you can.

IMHO there are many ways to learn programming, some advices would not fit everyone,
there are no best ways to do it.
"3. Equals is a lie: = ≠ ="

This is why languages like Pascal (and it's descendents) use := as assignment.

There are contradictory opinions about sytnax among programmers. Many programmers don't like the example assignment syntax above, but then many programmers also say that syntax is a relatively minor aspect of learning a language (even though the syntax of a language shapes the way you think about solving problems).

And many programmers do avoid certain languages precisely because they dislike the sytnax.

Nikalus Wirth, who created Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon, had this to say about using the equal sign for assignment:

"A notorious example for a bad idea was the choice of the equal sign to denote assignment. It goes back to Fortran in 1957[a] and has blindly been copied by armies of language designers. Why is it a bad idea? Because it overthrows a century old tradition to let “=” denote a comparison for equality, a predicate which is either true or false. But Fortran made it to mean assignment, the enforcing of equality. In this case, the operands are on unequal footing: The left operand (a variable) is to be made equal to the right operand (an expression). x = y does not mean the same thing as y = x."
Ask HN: Feedback on upcoming Docker course material
Hey guys.

I would love to hear your opinion about a course that I'm preparing to release in the near future.

Currently it's on Kickstarter to gauge interest, which can be found here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nickjj/docker-for-devops-from-development-to-production

Are there any Docker / specific deploy related tasks that you would like to see covered?
Coding is a Privilege
The grandparents comment about 'green ones' is from an American m&ms commercial from 1985.

http://youtu.be/ap6pAUBsl30
Perhaps something could be added to the TechEmpower benchmarks, which I assume are going to include Phoenix soon.
TLDR, Amtrak will add your train car to a normally scheduled passenger train for $2.80 per mile, plus fees. Lots of fees.
Valeant’s Drug Price Strategy Enriches It, but Infuriates Patients and Lawmakers
How to make sure nothing gets done at work
Show HN: Feedback on My Ashley Madison Search Engine
Last time I tried Gyazo, the free tier didn't support direct url clipboarding, just a link to a page with more ads than content.
So Mono being released in 2004, is recent?
10 steps to get into a startup accelerator
It has nothing to do with a comment being PC and everything to do with nationalistic flamewars that have popped up in the past, e.g. the one that involved Germany and Greece. The purpose of moderation isn't to police opinions or thought (I think this is obvious by inspection) but to keep this a civil place where people have something interesting to read instead of some shitheap like comp.lang.lisp or #startups on Freenode.
It's supposed to be a decentralized network. Blocking all non-google or non-typekit webfonts is an example of breaking that vision for the web, which is a shame.

I think the better solution is more browser security work and transparent & common limits on computation time and download size that browsers will do the accounting for and enforce.
How does BuiltWith decides which sites to crawl? assuming it is too complex to crawl everything.

And how is the data/queries being sold without compromising it...
> I certainly believe that the collective poor health of the country in general is a good argument against socialized healthcare

I think that rather it is a good argument for. If american's people health is so low it's because most people avoid doctors and hospital at all cost.
How crowd disasters happen, and how they can be avoided
There's no need for condescension (especially on HN). I presented that as an opinion rather than a scientific assertion. In terms of practicality, it is no more valid or invalid than most of the other theories/models of the human mind we entertain. But yes, I share your disdain for evolutionary psychology theories not backed up by data (I suspect these are what you call "cheap").
What Is XAMPP? How to Install XAMPP on Windows 10 AnsMachine.Net
I completely replaced these things with the flavored sparkling water
The article was about tinnitus caused by muscle tension and the tips related to the causes described in the article.
Or more specifically, from an intelligence viewpoint, what the Germans could be doing. Intent was well established when Hitler declared war on us (big mistake), but before that always comes capabilities. They had the uranium (something that Japan never had), they had the industrial capability for the plutonium path (ditto), and they most certainly had the scientists (even after chasing all their Jews away). If they'd gotten serious about it sufficiently earlier than we did....
I'm of the opinion that devices that have a standby mode should either have an option to power on in standby mode, or remember the mode they were in when powered off. Many computer firmwares have a setting like this.

Though I think what's really missing is a reputable general standard for device control. The master/slave power board thing is a kind of hack using the most primitive kind of signalling we can manage at the moment.

In my ideal world I'd have a control panel somewhere where I could set up rules like "the sound system needs the TV to be on". Maybe the TV could even know that it should turn on the sound system it is connected to, though that's crazy optimistic for the current state of home automation.
The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times (2014)
ChicagoBoss is like a Rails for Erlang. Uses Cowboy as httpd. I've only played with it a little, so I can't say how well it holds up in production, but it sure seems neat.

http://chicagoboss.org/
lol seriously. What crosses your head when you just remove the scrollbar?
One lesson I took from the first .com wave in the early 2000 was never to use a scripting language for application software again.

Performance might not be on the top list, but when it comes usually a full re-write might be the only way out, as it was on our case.

Depending on the overall business situation such re-rewrite can have a huge impact on the company, due to shift on the development resources.

Since then, I only advice languages that have either JIT or AOT compilers available to them.
What helps today is skipping the translation phase (syntax checking only) using rustc -Z no-trans.

This makes the edit/fix syntax cycle 20x faster.

A way to configure this in vim:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/3kc6s7/fastest_editco...
I agree. While learning it is (or should be) playing with the code and having the most fun, somwhere along the career path you find yourself being an engineer first and everything else second.
Borrowing money is risky, and includes risks beyond a straight up cost/benefit analysis. It also makes the borrow more vulnerable (not just to the lender, but to others as well). It should never be entered into lightly.

I sympathize with these folks who have gotten themselves into this situation, but they did make the choice of their own free will. If they didn't do a proper analysis ahead of time, it doesn't seem fair to shift the cost of their decision onto others who did, or who are responsibly shouldering the burden that they took on.

There is a definite moral hazard in the current system (it encourages indebtedness and inflates the cost of education), but that doesn't make it right to create another moral hazard in trying to correct it.
I think the point is to stop asking broad question like "Why doesn't this work?" before trying to figure it out yourself. In the process you will learn much more than just have the question answered in an equally broad form of "Oh there's a semicolon missing here". You still don't know why that semicolon was required in the first place afterwards.
It talks about Encrypt-then-MAC, but unless I'm missing something, these examples just do the "encrypt" part and leave it unauthenticated.

Also, quoting from the NodeJS manual, you shouldn't be passing a password directly into this function:

createCipher derives keys with the OpenSSL function EVP_BytesToKey with the digest algorithm set to MD5, one iteration, and no salt. The lack of salt allows dictionary attacks as the same password always creates the same key. The low iteration count and non-cryptographically secure hash algorithm allow passwords to be tested very rapidly.

In line with OpenSSL's recommendation to use pbkdf2 instead of EVP_BytesToKey it is recommended you derive a key and iv yourself with crypto.pbkdf2 and to then use createCipheriv() to create the cipher stream.
After seeing the associated considerations of forced obolescence/vendor lock-in, I'm not so convinced we should have more software in batteries... and that's not even getting into the basic idea that it's yet another thing to go wrong, whether security-wise or else.

your device would learn how to charge, just as it learns your schedule, your voice, and other things about you

...no thanks.
This immediately came to mind when I read this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGi6j2VrL0o
I'm not sure it's that simple. If you look at what aspiring entrepreneurs are complaining about it is the difficult of finding a worthwhile idea to pursue (on the one hand) and the difficulty of raising capital to make it happen with (on the other). These complaints are too numerous to just dismiss. I suspect those who are inclined to dismiss them are people who have already cleared those hurdles.

On the topic of ideas, there is a similar phenomenon among aspiring writers. Some beginners complain bitterly about how difficult it is to find with good story ideas. And then professionals come along and tell them that ideas are the easy part; execution is what matters.

I suspect the sad fact is that both sides are right on this one. Some people really do struggle to come up with novel, actionable ideas. Others don't. But the pros are right that a good idea doesn't even begin to guarantee success, and awful lot of hard work must follow to make it happen.
both works: asking questions or not asking questions.

it mainly depends on the person

some ppl will learn by doing, they just want to go out there, break stuff, break it, break it, break it again and then they understand it

other ppl will want to know the subject even before writing the first line of code, so they ask questions and questions till they feel they have the thing figured out and they can start

yet other ppl will make an honour point to never ever ask a single question, they would rather spend hours reading doc, specifications, RFC, and whatnot

Who is to say there is a best way? I don't think there is

as a dev what I don't like is beginners asking a bit too obvious questions when all the answers are in the documentation if they took few minutes to read it, and what I really don't like is ppl asking questions feeling entitled to an answer like you owe them

but again it's my personal view on the thing, it's different for everyone

for example, I'm mentoring a friend and he often comes "I will bother you again with a question" (he is learning JavaScript) and it does not bother me at all, whatever the question is: 1. already agreed to help him and 2. it's easy to answer

I would be more worried about someone who want to learn programming and who doesn't care if he/she understand stuff, or is not curious; eg. the "asking questions" part is more about being curious and/or motivated enough to understand things than the act of asking a question, there many ways to understand "asking questions" is just another tool among "reading documentation", "reading previous answers to other ppl questions", etc.

my point: the pace you learn things is totally personal, if you think asking question is faster and you are concerned about the speed then ask a question; but then I could argue in some case you can ask a question and never get an answer (stack overflow) and maybe it is faster to read the doc.
Drools yes, but Cucumber? Cucumber isn't a programming language, it's just a sequence of steps. There's no logic, iteration, calling, etc. There's substitution of table values into steps, but that's no more programming than a mail merge.
If all you're doing is asking for help, then it feels a bit off, especially if you do it more than once. Once is probably OK, especially since you say it's an HN friendly subject. More starts to feel a bit much.

But you can turn it around and look to contribute things to HN, and only ask for feedback as a natural extension of what you're showing us and contributing. That's not always possible, and it's certainly not always easy, but on those occasions when it can be done, you are contributing to HN, while at the same time creating the opportunity for people to interact and provide feedback.

So in parallel with writing your book(s), every time you want feedback, write a blog post explaining the issues that make you want feedback and input on specific sections.

We'd all win then.
That seems only to be a problem for native English speakers. Programming, coding, hacking, tinkering, etc... is all pretty much the same. Also, personally I think it has an elitism smell ('software engineering' is the worst). We shouldn't pretend that a 'professional software engineer' fresh from university can in any way produce better code than an 'amateur' who's at it for 20 years, because in my experience the experienced amateur is always a better programmer/coder/whatever...
That $45k / year is for private non-profit colleges, which are the most expensive kind (even worse than for-profit), and not the norm. For an in-state public University, the number is more like a quarter of that.

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cua.asp