skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
what you're describing there is a pretty information-free response, not terribly different from just saying 'me too'. that's what upvotes are for.
" It should be called "Learning how to read a textbook on your own." Successful self-learners don't just __read__ a textbook. They toil with it, try proving things on paper themselves, work through exercises, attempt to apply it to some real-world situation, and hunt down someone who's smarter than they are to explain something that seems unclear."

+n.

I wasted 3 years trying to avoid this bit. On the positive side, once you learn to do this you will never be afraid of any book or paper again.
Exactly you can do it without math, but elegance and performance are much easier with math on your side. The one I always find funny is the massive volumes of time money and energy spent "Load Testing" code, when some simple algebra and statistics can rapidly give you a projection of your scalability. Then you only have to run a test to validate you work. Yuo can test load without math but it sure saves a lot of time and money to do it with it.

It is always people that don't understand math and its application that say oh, I don't need it for what I do "web development I am looking at you" and then wonder why their systems are, complex, ill performant, and inelegant.

Please learn math before you say you don't need it. Or more specific to this article stating that programming is complex / hard and following that with you don't need math. It's only hard because you are not using math.

I have done 3D simulation, AI, robotics, embedded and now web over the coarse of my career and the only complex systems that I have run into where designed without the assistance of mathmatics.
!! Did you guys see that? I believe an angel investor just said he wants to be pitched :)

bpick, if you're looking to angel-invest the YC startup community is a really good place to start scouting, you're at the right place! I don't see any contact info on your HN about page. Can you tell us all how to reach you? My contact info is on my about page
I agree. Stuart's book spends a lot of time on the syntax and the constructs of the language while glossing over some of the details, and the idioms of the language.

This book (at least from what I have read of it) is attempting to help you appreciate and align yourself with "the clojure way".
Looks like the page is setup by a local Christian.

It's observable phenomenon that all Christian Chinese favor Google more than any other search engines.
May I suggest an answer. I started in computer engineering and have done embedded systems programming, in assembler though. Later I switched to software engineering and got a CS degree. In my experience there is generally very little proper CS in actual computer engineering education. Computer engineering is well founded theoretically and well taught generally; except when it comes to programming.

(Well, thinking about it, where do you find proper programming education?!)

(By the way I've never programmed in C - got 7/10 ?!)
To me, looks like Chapter 11 could be the most valuable, with all the "When to Use..." sections. It's a good thing that Clojure offers multiple paradigms for managing concurrency, but I've had a hard time working out how to choose one to solve a given problem.
May I ask which city you live in? Different cities seem to have different perceptions of public transit.
Just got my copy of the MEAP version and really looking forward to reading it later. I've looked through the authors' code before and they clearly know what they're talking about.
I first heard it years ago on Slashdot. It's a play on the term grass roots meaning a bottom up campaign started and supported by people who are genuinely passionate about a cause. Astroturfing means faking a grassroots effort.
Gamal Abdel Nassar, second President of Egypt. Thanks for trying with the point; I'm new and I guess still provisional.
There's a really interesting subtext about web-apps here. So much so that I think it deserves more follow-up.

Yes, you are correct: you will not take so much care in the future.

People are wonderful pattern recognizers. Show them a system where you vote up and things go up and you vote down and things go down? They grok it. Where you punish people by down-voting them and reward them by up=voting? Makes sense.

But start mucking around so sometimes when you vote up the article goes down? Or sometimes you can vote and sometimes you can't? Or you can't vote now, but you can vote in 12 hours? Or you can vote for this guy, but not this other?

Eventually they just say "Screw it. It's effectively either random or designed especially to piss me off. Therefore I will not take it seriously"

Oddly enough, the more attached people are to the gaming/karma aspects of the site, the more this will annoy them. Also the more annoyed they are, the more likely they are to start gaming the system -- since in their minds the system isn't giving them a "fair shake" to begin with.

Lots of interesting insights into human behavior with complex systems here. Of course I'm just speculating, but it's important stuff for anybody running a public site.
I assumed he wanted to hire people with GNU/Linux experience (and maybe had trouble finding them normally).
Effective or not, sending some bad links to a bunch of Google employees and hoping one of them clicks is not a 'VERY sophisticated process'. It's just a good example of how users will always be the weakest link in securing a network.
I wouldn't describe it so much as a natural need to repeat -- rather that we use references to link concepts.

e.g.

I have an allergy attack.
Allergy medication will relieve an allergy attack.
I desire allergy medication.
I will go to the drug store and ask for allergy medication.

The underlying model consists mainly of the concepts of allergy, attack, and medication. These concepts are repeated several times, because we are describing relationships between them. Note that each use adds significant new information.

However, the sense of repeat used in the submitted article rather concerns redundancy, whereby the concept itself or a particular relationship is repeated in a redundant manner, without adding new information. This is merely to prevent miscommunication.
A more robust comparison of the two, or something that explained why or when one would prefer Fantom over Ruby, would be great.

This isn't it.
Repeating yourself is also a very good example of how written natural language and spoken natural language are very different beasts.

If you look at good, effective oratory style, and write it down, it looks totally horrible. One of the major differences is more repetition. When all the words are present, written down on a page, it's easy to go back and re-read. People can also go along at their own pace, make sure they understand before moving on, and are generally more in control of their experience.

In spoken language, the opposite is true. You have one chance to express yourself, and you have to make sure it's successful, despite the listening abilities of the audience. So while written language favors variation of vocabulary, because the same word repeated a dozen times stands out as bad style, spoken language uses it as a basic tool of getting a point across.

When I deliver presentations, I insert tons of back-references, repeating previous points or conclusions. When using powerpoint, I also insert a lot of forward-references, giving a brief outline of the topics to be immediately covered. I generally try to mimic how, if I were reading an equivalent paper, I would be flipping back through the pages or how I would have to read something a second time to understand it.

At the lower level, even sentences are allowed to repeat themselves a lot more in speech than in writing. Where a written story may use a pronoun, speech is more likely to repeat the full noun for emphasis. You can also use the trick of repeating a phrase with different vocal characteristics to emphasize it, which simply doesn't translate into writing without being awkward.
I think the article is SPOT ON. And here's little background about me before I tell you why.

I am from India, graduated in 2001, worked for Infosys for little over 2 years. I have been in US since 2004 and I have been doing independent consulting for 5 years now. I have quite a friends who work for Wipro/Satyam/TCS or IBM/Accenture.

Let me share my experience working with Infosys. I worked on 5 projects for Infosys and all of them were disaster. Infosys hires fresh college graduates, trains them in programming langauges and asks them to do coding for the project. They have processes for everything. Requirements documentation, design documents, the actual code, deployment, you name a task and I can bet that they have a document which tells how you are supposed to do the task. And you can't really divert from the laid out process very much even when you know that the process doesn't make sense. Compound this with the fact that they have many employees who are not really in to technology, so if you suggest an alternate way of doing anything, you will get shot down. [Infosys hires graduates who have no prior Computer Science/Programming experience and some graduates join Infosys because of the brand name and the salary even when they have zero interest in technology.]

Let me give you a concrete example. In 2003/2004, CMM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model) was all rage. Infosys was obviously CMM Level 5 compliance company. As part of the certification, every project needs to do analysis of the bug count after every release. So it's like, there were 30 bugs during the first release of the project and 25 bugs during the second release of project which means that bug count went down 16% which is less than 25%, the number required by CMM. So we need to fudge the bug tracker. Unfortunately, you can't delete bugs. So we go back and add dummy bugs for the first release increasing the bug count from 30 to 40 and match up the numbers. I called it bullshit and no one would listen to me. In fact, I was threatned that I will not get good performance review (don't get me started on performance reviews) if I don't follow 'the process'. I left Infosys after 2 years and sweared that I would never join a consulting firm again.

Based on my heated discussions with friends, I can assure that the story is similar at other consulting companies.

I am sure when Infosys was started, it was full of smart people who did the right things and made it into a billion dollar company. But as it got bigger and bigger, the net output is of low quality.

And this validates Joel's main point in the article:

1. Some things need talent to do really well.
2. It's hard to scale talent.
3. One way people try to scale talent is by having the talent create rules for the untalented to follow.
4. The quality of the resulting product is very low.

I started reading Joel in 2003/2004 when I was really frustrated with Infosys and this article hit a home run for me. If you think his analogy doesn't describe the state of big IT consulting companies, I can gurantee that you have never worked at one.
To be entirely fair, it's theoretically possible that (if they didn't have to do these things) they could examine the average patent more carefully on the same budget.

It's unlikely, though. What would actually happen is an entirely different matter.
That would be open to terrible abuse! You can't undo a delete; there's no chance for the larger crowd to undo unfair downvoting.

I have my own favoured scheme, which is basically votes counting less the further they go above/below neutral. The first eight votes will get you up to 8. But then you need another 8 to get up to twelve, 16 to get to 16, 32 to get to 20, etc. Downvoting would be similar but without the positive bias, ie 4 to -4, then another 8 to get to -8, etc.

By removing the possibility of "windfall" results, that system might be reducing the incentive to appeal to the mob in the first place. And people will be less likely to add yet another vote if it's already +12, say - they know their vote's mostly impotent by then. Could settle things down.

I thought it wrong before, when unlimited downvotes were possible - there'd always be some sorry cur saying something the crowd didn't like and down he went, by 20, 30, 50. That was terrible, and has now been thankfully stopped. But ridiculously high upvotes continue and create undesirable incentives, IMO.

Wow, that was an essay, sorry, hehe
Nobody likes Chapter 11...
I think it's funny that people would be stressed out about your riding being dangerous to them, but as a reaction would cut you off, or drive too close to you.

"I hate how dangerous you're being; therefore, I'm going to be even more dangerous! I definitely showed you!"
Efficient input validation,
load calculations,
memory consumption calculations,
More efficient data storage,
Is the Check-In the Next Fraudulent Metric?
Why not use something we already have?

^ya, it's a great idea to pay these guys 1.99 for a symbol^
Nubrella: hands-free umbrella
No, I am not. The OP wrote 'continually calling McDonald's workers idiots' and Joel didn't write anywhere in the article that McDonald's workers are idiots.
Ask HN: Where can I find excellent graphic artists and designers?
I want to ask the HN community where they have found excellent graphic artists and designers. I'd like to contract out some work for a side project of mine.

Any websites or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
I would prefer the 110/102 comment. If it has that many upvotes, it's probably not rude or uncivil -- just controversial. Disagreement-downvoters have been nudging it down, but someone else always comes along an nudges it up. That makes it more interesting than a crowd-pandering 10/2.

(I think the up/down totals might be shown to good effect, not necessarily cluttering the main thread, but on the item detail/reply page.)
Why/How is McAffee involved?

Would a company like Google really outsource the cleanup/forensics of an attack?
Interesting that he left out the iPhone. To me, that is the most recent big innovation in usability. Of course, it is a different form factor than the PC, and that is the point. There is not much reason for a radical change in interface if the form factor doesn't change.

The other big example is Wii, and now what Microsoft has been demoing in their Natal project (assuming it ships in the near future). In these cases, the key factor is that you are operating a device from a distance. That allows the use of a wider range of human motion in controlling the device, now that the technology to support it exists.

I suppose the lesson is, form factor and innovative interface design cannot be decoupled.
The report stressed the need for checking Windows source code for security loopholes, especially in light of recent attacks

The irony is too rich.
Angry eyebrows.
Yes. It comes from a combination of two terms:

1. Astroturf. This comes from the fake grass installed in a large covered sports stadium in Houston, Texas. The stadium was the home of a sports team called the Houston Astros, so the fake grassy turf was called astroturf.

2. Grassroots. In politics, "grassroots support" refers to support from individuals and/or small, independent groups. The analogy is that you get scattered support from the bottom up from small groups, like grass growing all around, rather than the support of a single large group like a big tree.

So you combine these phrases to get "astroturfing" - fake grass, like astroturf, that is meant to give the appearance of widespread "grassroots" support. The term can be used more generally outside of politics to mean artificially creating the appearance that a person/thing is more popular with the general public than it really is.

For example, I once read that during the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Microsoft over Internet Explorer, Microsoft hired a PR firm that proposed to send letters to newspapers across the country under different names, each letter written in support of Microsoft's position. This would give the appearance of widespread support and popularity for Microsoft, even though all the letters would actually come from a PR firm. That's astroturfing.
Some people choose to stake their identity on the operating system that they use.
(One good answer: five evil traders on the 7th floor at Goldman Sachs.)

What did they mean by this?
If it's possible for somebody else to copy your invention without reverse-engineering your product, then you shouldn't be granted a patent.

No, you should be awarded the patent. It's the person who reverse-engineered your invention and did it a different way who shouldn't be found as be infringing. They should also be granted a patent for instructions on how to make the same invention a different way, this way both become public knowledge and once the patent runs out (right now that's basically never) someone who reads both may be inspired to again make the same invention, perhaps combining both into a more optimal device.

Other than that, I fully agree.
190% Improvement In Landing Page Conversions By Removing Content
I wonder whether the curved edges leave enough room for the base of your palms to rest while typing.
Are spot instances killing the performance of Amazon EC2?
Ok awesome, just wanted to check :)
* It was pretty cool that your new phone's number display was not only dot-matrix but could do 4 shades of gray

I remember this: it was back when the "complicated" in "I wish I had a phone that was less complicated" meant SMS.
Agreed. In retrospective, seems like Force related skills do develop better in unstructured environments... Oh, I now see where I went wrong!!! ;>
Compiz, guake, two screens and awn :) plenty of space and commands to see everything and switch between them. I'm thinking of ditching awn.

Though to be honest, I do have a small dock with the notification area, it's hidden most of the time.
I'm guessing they're leaving out the "sophisticated" details of the compromise. Using encryption to hide your malware from virus scanners and using some computer "social engineering" (ssl connection) is not very sophisticated. I don't understand why it needs to be sophisticated ? because it's google ? It's known that some of the largest viruses have spread to government comuputers (sobig).
I think that's just a coincidence. I received a similar notification about a year ago. I think they just get hacked from time to time.
Deciphering the Chatter of Monkeys and Chimps
Also Kashyyyk.

While I don't really think Lucas is that clever, he did have plans for nine films, so I suppose it's possible.
Indeed these business are quite successful (especially KFC and McDonalds) but I believe they're mostly joint ventures which in itself has a whole bunch of pitfalls.

More importantly they're in an exceptional business segment (that of selling western fast food) which local Chinese companies are unable to play almost by definition. I suppose Intel is another example, but that's really only due to the fact that it's also not practical to have a local competitor to it. They would if they could.

I'm sure you could find other companies where there's an exception, so my statements and that of the OP's article should only be taken as generalities. But I believe they're true much more often than not.
Yes, Windows' closed-source nature has allowed MS to rely on security-though-obscurity. Now that one of the entities MS has taken behind it's golden screen has turned out to be a black hat, MS' approach is looking foolish.
wouldn't each new torrent uploaded be a separate case of copyright infringement that could be tried?
Real World Immortality
Skip to 2:40 if you are impatient.

This particular species is Schmidtea mediterranea.
My votes haven't counted for a while, and my comment average is 2.64 according to http://searchyc.com/user/10ren?only=comments&sort=by_poi...

I think a respectful approach is to be upfront, and just say there's a cut-off, instead of making the votes appear to count. I assume you want to obscure it, to protect HN from scamming, but I'm not sure that valuing protection over respect will work in the long term.

EDIT I'd like to upvote some of the comments here, but what's the point? They won't count.
IANAL, but, this line does not seem very vague to me: "for [COMPANY NAME] internal use and for security and management purposes only." I guess you might question the definition of "internal" in this context, but I can't see any way for them to twist "internal" into "you're in a porno now."

Still, I must admit that I don't know why they need to you sign a consent form just to take a picture of you...
Unless you live or have loved ones who live anywhere near The Gulf Coast, in which case it is very much true.
I suppose the sticker (which the FSF send to you when you sign a contributor contract) implies a certain amount of technical knowledge.
I think keyboard/mouse -> touch is, itself, a trivial change. If we're just tapping virtual keyboards and 'clicking' on program icons with our fingers, what has really changed?

I think the kind of paradigm shift Gruber was getting at, is away from things like hierarchical 'file' systems and proprietary application-centric file formats.

Personally I think the biggest missed-innovation in the iPhone SDK was not having Newton-esque app-agnostic shared data stores.
Perhaps is was custom encryption not previously seen?

I would imagine that while using encryption doesn't imply massive resources, developing custom encryption does.
Hitchens doesn't do anything beyond making this observation

I don't think that's fair. He wove a lot of observations into the piece.

Hitchens is a man of letters, not an academic linguist. He carries on that tradition as well as anyone, and while I disagree with him about a lot of things (who, besides him, doesn't?), boy oh boy can he write.
I like the article and agree in the increasing threat of this nation. What it isn't mentioned, but I think it adds to the main points, is the relationship of China with Africa.
You can read about this situation in this excelent report [2008 fast company]:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/126/special-report-china...

In short, the complete report tells how china is extracting and securing its future flow of raw materials. China is extracting all that is possible from the continent by every mean available to them.
It's Not What You Do, It's Why You Do It
Seriously, for at least two of the three. I think the one thinks it's all a little silly and doesn't care so much, but the others defriended me on Facebook and tell our mutual friends that they still like them even though they hang out with me too.
I think what your saying is that even keys need to be managed well. I agree.
Hackers Helping Haiti: Find or Organize a Hackathon Near You
As long as copyright exists in its current form there is no way for a record company to purchase and make a site like this legit. The key thing about oink was the rarity of the material, old vinyl records that were converted an uploaded. Stuff that's been out of print after its first publishing 30 years ago....
>Why would I want to change something I like? It's a reminder to avoid getting into arguments with people who pay no attention to logic

In other words, you are happy to be rejected by those you consider inferior because you consider it a validation of your own perceived superiority.
Is there a reasonable approach to have electric cars match the "instant recharge" of a gas station? The only thing I've ever come up with is a hot-swappable battery, so they sit and charge at a station until needed, then you swap a new one into the car.

For instance, I live about 80 miles from the nearest BIG city. It's an hour drive to get there, and an hour back. All electric cars I see list that as a goal for a future generation, and even then, just barely.

I don't see a future for purely electric vehicles, it seems like hybrids cover many more use cases.