skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "We feel your pain, NPR. We had an office full of kids at Gawker today, too, and it is only by the grace of the blog gods that the place didn’t come tumbling to the ground. Mostly, we just talked sports and politics with them, and pretended to roll over dead when they pointed their Nerf guns at us.

:)
For me it was Altavista and Usenet and DeJaNews [0] (which indexed usenet). Before that it was hard copy manuals and phone-a-friend.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News
I've been taking a PLT[0] class in school and while the list above is extremely comprehensive and thorough, I'd argue that you do not need to read up all of it to get a good idea of programming languages.

Without even learning all the theory, you can get pretty far ahead (IMHO) in a building your own programming language (if that's the goal). The two resources that I've found invaluable are - the prog lang course[1] by Dan Grossman and PLAI[2] by Shriram. Lastly, there's also a whole bunch of interesting university courses that you can refer to - https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome-courses#programming-l...

[0] - http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~sedwards/classes/2016/4115-sprin...

[1] - https://www.coursera.org/course/proglang

[2] - http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/book/
You can afford a Mac, but you begrudge the author of a useful utility $30 bucks for a perpetual license?
Simon Peyton Jones Elected into the Royal Society Fellowship
Related is being good at debugging. There's something about having a certain intuition (in reality probably experience) on what it is that you are looking for that is critical.
At the age of 45, and with 20 years of software development under my belt, moving to London from the backwaters of Croatia.
The US Army once taught me to use an M-16.
This really needs 2007 attached. Things have changed a lot in the last 9 years
Make Your Django Query Logic DRYer
I don't know the expected success rate for these missions, it just seemed odd that each time this particular instrument has been launched, an issue occurred to render it unusable. Maybe it is par for the course, but it does raise suspicions (at least in my mind).
I could refer you to an endless list of professional doorkickers who would strongly disagree. At most the lead man in an entry team would have a pistol solely because it is impossible to hold a ballistic shield and aim a rifle at the same time; but every other man in the stack would have a carbine or shotgun.
Yes, Google is actually crucial.

I didn’t realize how uniquely good Google’s programming results were until I tried Bing or DuckDuckGo and was left confused because their top results didn’t even mention some pretty significant page on a target subject.

I am however noticing a trend that I don’t like in Google results: they are trying to interpret pages more and more instead of just being a proxy. (No thanks, Google, I don’t want your attempt at a pretty summary of a Wikipedia page or StackOverflow post; the link will do nicely. Besides, it is just a little obnoxious to lift content from other sites that may prevent people from visiting those sites entirely.)

Google is not my sole search tool though. I still find it faster to search offline for a lot of things; for instance, if you have a Mac and haven’t tried something like Dash for quick access to API documentation, you are really missing a potential productivity boost. And, offline search helps a lot on airplanes.
Marketing aquatic vermin as 'Sea Monkeys'? It could be worse. They could have tried to push cockroaches as 'Fridge Gorillas'.
You get MSDN on 3+ CDs, do a full install and make couple searches using the built-in search.
For the most part you were on your own. I used books myself since I didn't have colleagues back then.

But software was in many ways simpler. The complexity was in squeezing out performance rather than piles of abstraction layers on top of one another. Knowing the hardware was more important and that was gleamed through trial and error.

The internet enabled the complexity that made software development dependent on it.
This raises an interesting question: how did Snowden get the documents out of the NSA? I don't recall reading much about how this was accomplished. Has that been discussed/reported anywhere?
A friend of mine ported this to client-side JS a while back:

http://gazs.github.io/canvas-atkinson-dither/
Weixing SAB[1] has a good brand reputation if you're sourcing your zippers from China. In my opinion, their quality is better than the lower-end YKK zippers for a similar price.

[1]: http://www.sab-cn.com/
This times a thousand.

Google is also very good at what I call "meta-guidance." If I search for something and don't find any good results, there's two possibilities: a) I'm not asking the right question, or b) I'm trying to solve the wrong problem.
The problem is, left leaning politicians constantly threaten their fundamental constitutional rights, either overtly or not. Every time a gun is used in a crime that rises to national prominence politicians sprint to the microphone to decry gun ownership or at very least to make it harder or much harder to acquire a gun. Bigger than that though, the entertainment media is largely left wing and extremely vocal of their disdain of not just "allowing crazy to buy guns" but their hatred of all gun owners and the second amendment.

Never mind belligerent crazy people, I can't remember a single TV show or movie in the last thirty years that depicted responsible gun owners, i.e. the vast majority of gun owners, in any positive light. Can you? Every time I see a gun on TV it's either used by a police officer or used in a crime of some sort. Test me on this next time you see a gun shown on TV or in a movie that comes out Hollywood.
My example was about retail prices: You're correct that due to clearinghouse there are hardly any charges exchanged - as in most cases the outgoing roaming volume of a provider is comparable to the incoming roaming volume.

But if you have two countries where retail prices differ a lot, this can lead to people from both countries to buy SIM cards from the cheaper country, causing an asymmetry in the roaming volume: Now suddenly one provider has lots of outgoing roaming, but much less incoming roaming - which means that this provider is going to have to pay the wholesale prices for the difference in roaming volume.
I'm not sure I'd call Atkinson Dither "sophisticated" (the author does). In fact it's a mathematical error that happens to look very cool on certain material.

Sadly, the effect falls apart when scaled. You can craft a beautiful Atkinson dithered vibey image but you pretty much can't deliver it. Text it, put it on a web page, drop it into iMessage, Skype it -- nobody just delivers bits any more. It looks particularly awful when not at 100% zoom.

Also the page's comparisons to Photoshop are misleading because you can do a Atkinson dither in Photoshop by setting the "Dither" slider to 75%. You'll probably find it looks better at 87.5% which throws away 1/8 of the error instead versus his 1/4.

While I realize this violates the "if it's new to you..." rule, Atkinson dither has long since been strip-mined to the bone for blog posts and karma. Flickr did it as an April Fool's joke years ago. Frankly if there's a graphics tool that doesn't support it I'd be surprised.
That's very debatable.

Under stress, people are much more accurate with long guns.

On the other hand, they have terrible weapons retention properties, as I've e.g. demonstrated to my taller and fitter nephew about the time he graduated from high school, quickly ripping my shotgun out of his grasp by gaining a longer lever arm by grasping it outside his grasp. And without injuring him, but an adversary wouldn't be as gentle, especially after gaining the weapon.

This is what the all too common recommendation of a shotgun for home defense hinges on. And in more than a few states that highly restrict handgun ownership, a shotgun is much more practical, which is what I did when I lived in Massachusetts, the first gun I ever purchased.
Honestly? Yeah. I printed a lot of man pages and docs out, kept my references closer at hand than I do now, and made a lot of handwritten notes to help bury peculiarities and API into my swiss cheese brain.
> Hell if you customize one you can probably get it to hold a huge amount of data.

Even without customising it, 200GB on a single microSD card is no small amount of data.
I do this for the PIA menubar icon
Google is a DSL for troubleshooting.
> We are watching you, and want you to know that we are watching you?

This. People they watching doesn't represent any real danger to regime as otherwise they would easily put them in prison for no reason. So in that case intelligence only goal is to make activists life as hard as possible and force them to leave the country or stop being activist.

They periodically confiscate their personal phones / computers during searches in their property and offices. People smart enough to use crypto and it's not that easy to get control over accounts on services that are not hosted in Russia.
Yeah, not much "rethinking" going on here anyway. Thought this was going to be something actually valuable not "doing exactly what PID 1 is already suppose to do"
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11603023 and marked it off-topic.
It's readable fine on mine as well, but the screenshot in the article (black text on white) is much more pleasant to read.
Mapping with the stars: Nuns instrumental in Vatican celestial survey
http://www.openml.org/
>In 1983 the average CEO was paid wages equal to 50 average employees. Today the ratio is over 300:1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...

The government failed to do its job since 197x. The growing income disparity is the result of free market let run completely free by the government. It is the basic example from statistics 101 - in completely symmetric odds situation that thus looks fair at first ("free market"), the player with deepest pockets wins with higher probability. The government by not increasing minimum wage provided for much significant disparity between the "depth of pockets" and thus the resulting increasing income gap.
And then there's all the dramatic productions of written works where positive uses of guns are somehow dropped on the floor. Schindler's List I remember reading about, he armed "his" Jews before they left, and as I recall, being armed made a big difference in their subsequent survival.

This sort of thing was dropped from the dramatization of a novel by a totally PC woman black? author, I could probably find a reference if anyone is interested.

At minimum this is part of a wide spectrum culture war which these gun-grabbing politicians are on one side of, at worst, well, we gun owners know our 20th Century history (see above).
How many IDEs _lack_ a context menu containing a "Search" or "Search with Google" item nowadays?
The course also uses Matlab. Perhaps we can avoid the Octave vs Matlab debacle by linking to this previous discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10232595

Consensus (I'll use the term loosely) was that you get what you pay for. Either spend the bucks on Matlab or preferably use Python. I'll dare to provide a stronger opinion: Octave just sucks and is one of those unfortunate GNU tools that forever seems stuck 15 years in the past. Many people moved to Python, we're all eyeing Julia, the rest of us are largely stuck in Matlab.
More often than not I will very deliberately type my search phrase one character at a time paying careful attention to all the autocompleted results. Very useful habit to get into as I have solved quite a few problems much faster than had I gone down the rabbit hole of my original query.
You mean Google Aided Development (GAD) with AutoGAD as the promised culmination/nirvana of our field.
May I ask you what other search engines are you referring to?
Interesting to me how many people feel so strongly about a topic, often to such a degree that they openly void having an understanding of views counter to their own and unable to express the reasoning behind their own beliefs in any meaningful way.

To me, this is the real issue, not that there's a topic people disagree on.

_______

Re: SmartGuns — People kill people, and if someone wants to harm someone, they will. To me, a more natural solution would be to have areas, much like schools, that're gun free, and others that are not. Clearly this won't fit the issues, but it might end the debates.
A rifle, particularly a short carbine like a Sub 2000, is eminently practical for close range. They're faster to aim accurately and are more likely to incapacitate a target with the first shot.

The only exception is perhaps at ranges of < 1m where you're grappling with an assailant, in which case a snub-nosed revolver is probably the ideal choice. But that's not really a typical scenario, and I'd wager sight lines in your home are generally > 1m.

Consider that soldiers use carbines, or occasionally shotguns, when clearing rooms, not handguns.
We can't all be so lucky as to have caught and remembered the original release of this masterpiece of an album 522 days ago.
Functional MRI scans are the equivalent of looking at what transistors are switching in a chip at any given moment, only more useless since the brain is much more generalized.

"Oh! Cache is lighting up!"
So actually longer than the "7 minute workout". :)
Same for me. I also tend to say, that sometimes (especially when in consulting jobs) I feel more like a housecleaner than a software developer.
I subscribe to quite a few podcasts. Here are the ones I consistently enjoy listening to.

- EconTalk - Interviews on many topics with an economics focus. - http://www.econtalk.org/

- In Our Time - Experts discuss an important idea, person or event. - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl

- Software Engineering Radio - Probably the best technical podcast I've found. - http://www.se-radio.net/

- Switched On Pop - I don't know much about music theory but I enjoy listening to these guys discussing it! - http://www.switchedonpop.com/
<offtopic rant="yes" sorry="i am">

I always really wanted a browser that'd be just a bunch of programs adhering to UNIX philosophy and then striving for simplicity. I mean, components interacting together by talking to each other through the simplest means available, with simplest protocols possible, and with every component being freely swappable. But without a DIY approach to things - instead, trying to bring a Firefox/Chrome-like experience by default, but being hackable and with everything very loosely coupled under the hood.

uzbl is somewhat close, but it's not really portable and still a has a pretty big monolithic webkit engine component, that handles rendering, scripting and networking.

</offtopic>
My congresscritter a while back put out a statement supporting the 50 BMG ban in California, because she wanted "these dangerous weapons off our streets." I emailed her, asking how many of these weapons, exactly, she'd happened to find on our streets! I figure, they're so rare and expensive, if I could walk outside and trip over one, I might as well go out and pick one up that'd been left in the nearby hedges! She didn't respond. :-(

Tangent: It made me wonder what the longest distance criminal shot in American history is. Anybody got any ideas?
I hear there is gold out West near California. Pack your bags boys and girls, we're going West!
After doing a lot of interviewing, particularly when asking the same question over and over again, I've noticed the quality of what an interviewee decides to Google varies greatly and can give a lot of insight that just solving the problem alone can't. I've been amazed by some of the incomprehensible things people Google, even among those with the supposed same credentials, skillsets, and backgrounds.

Aside from whether or not they can do the actual problem, it seems to be a good proxy for skill. You can quickly distinguish between those that copy-paste their way to a solution and those that thoughtfully attempt to solve the underlying problem. Seeing what they choose to research, and sometimes having to step in and after a while and say "it seems like this is talking about X, which doesn't have much to do with this problem," speaks volumes about the candidate.
Previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ykk_zippers_why_so_many_design...
I listen to a lot of the popular ones that have already been mentioned (Serial, Radiolab, This American Life, etc), but here are some others I listen to:

- Freakonomics Radio (WNYC). Favorite episode so far: "The Economics of Sleep" [1]
- 60 Second Science (Scientific American). Short synopses of new science.
- Developer Tea (spec.fm). Targeted towards developers, and episodes generally revolve around tech work and/or career development. Generally around 20 minutes. Good place to start: Interview w/ Sam Lambert, Director of Systems at GitHub [2]
- StarTalk Radio (American Museum of Natural History, I guess). Astronomy/Science. I'm especially a fan of the "Cosmic Queries" episodes.
- Reply All (Gimlet Media). Tech related, but no specific target audience. 30ish minutes. Favorite episode so far: #53, "In the Desert" [3]
- Planet Money (NPR). Economics. Lots of good stuff.
- Stuff You Should Know (How Stuff Works). Usually informative, but generally conversational and not heavily edited.
- Gastropod (Radiotopia). Food. Also generally conversational with little editing.
- Codebreaker, by Marketplace and Tech Insider (NPR). Tech/Ethics.

[1]: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-economics-of-sleep-part-...
[2]: http://spec.fm/podcasts/developer-tea/30505
[3]: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/53-in-the-desert/

Edit: spelling
Oh, and you're more likely to end up in jail for political activism than for inventing things.
You're splitting hairs. If we're going that route, then the A-10 has had plenty of improvements as well. Laser targeting pods, inertial nav systems, computerized aiming, autopilot. The first A-10C emerged in 2007.
Is the guy playing acoustic guitar on the street for tips not the sole creator of his work because some number of people were involved with manufacture of his guitar?

Most Vocaloid songs become popular in part because of videos that were animated by a single (usually different) person.

As for their voices lacking emotion, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
The only exception is perhaps at ranges of < 1m where you're grappling with an assailant

In which case you should strongly consider transitioning to using it as a club, which has been a point in at least one (Clint Eastwood) movie. Especially since your retaining the weapon is much harder than if it was a handgun (see my comment elsewhere about my demonstrating this to a nephew).
I have to say I agree with a lot of your point but your tone comes off really agressive, I think frameworks are good particularly for inexperiences developets that will have a really hard time writing simple and maintainable code, but all people are saying is that in development you cannot just cross out bespoke development altogether there will always be a use case when you need to fine tune your software.

Saying that please bare in mind that I love react it's a great tool but like everything it has its place.
Now I know there's tons of drama around systemd, and I'm really not trying to re-start any of those flamewars. (please!)

But I never followed the topic that closely, so I'm honestly curious. Looking back on this, he makes a pretty compelling case for his ideas. Were the objections to systemd mainly disagreements with the concepts (parallelizing socket services, etc)? Or was it more the way the ideas were implemented in systemd that traditional sysadmins didn't like? (binary "registry-like" config files, etc)

I only ask because, if most objections were about the implementation, then it should be possible to create a system that achieves the benefits he's extolling here, while keeping a lot of the "Unixy feel" that his detractors prefer. If it's a more fundamental disagreement, then it's harder to see a path that could make both sides happy.
And the rest will be replaced by people from India and China...

Also, the neat line, we at.. Will help.. Hm
Your stand is not clear. Are you in favour of a complete lack of governing bodies or an enlightened tyrant or something else ?
Slightly redundant, but I also enjoyed the (apparently contemporary) Planet Money podcast episode on the same topic:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/04/08/473581490/episo...
I don't want backdoors in my guns just like I don't want backdoors in my encryption. It's really that simple.

Also reminder that Marx was an advocate of widespread gun ownership by the working class, much for the same reasons that the founding fathers of the USA were. Solving the underlying economic issues causing suicide and violence would make far more sense than covering up the symptoms. At the end of the day it's all about poverty.
When I saw the headline, I thought to myself "the most amazing thing about her is that she is still around" I think this explains it a lot.

That is really cool.
I think I'll use something like -> https://developers.google.com/apps-script/articles/sending_e...
Wasn't he working from home from Hawaii as a contractor with a remote login and could easily transfer data from NSA systems at his leisure? Isn't this whole framing of a Jason Bourne-esque exfiltration of the data just a myth?

Aside from Snowden you don't have to elaborately hide an SD card in a Rubik's cube. Just strick it in a condom and shove it.

From what I've read security against this sort of exfiltration is focused on disabling USB ports and the like. Not trying to detect something the size of an SD card leaving the building. They're not doing a full cavity search or giving you an MRI each time you enter/exit.
The objections I tend to hear aren't so much about the parts of systemd listed in here, but about the way it seems to have grown to take over the rest of the system.

For example, it has its own syslog replacement, login manager, dbus implementation, network connection manager, dhcp server, udev implementation, boot manager, etc. There's talk of making it a dependency of Gnome, which would make Gnome and its components impossible to run on systems without systemd.
I use this pretty extensively for work. I don't really need to keep a todo list for home things, or if I do, pen and paper is the most ideal.

At work, we use Jira for task management. My philosophy is that taskwarrior is what I use to track things. Jira is what I use so that my team members and management can track things. So when a bit of work comes my way, whether via slack, email, or other methods, I add that to taskwarrior. I then use the tool bugwarrior to pull down my jira tasks (every 15 minutes or on demand). If I end up entering a TW task in Jira, I mark the TW version done. I can use TW itself to set task priority, assign tags, or move into "projects" according to my view of the work needing accomplished.

I did look into using the TW hooks and a python jira library to manipulate jira tasks using the task command. It was technically doable, but I feel I'd always be fiddling with the logical side (each jira project has different workflows for moving a task through statuses, some requiring acceptance criteria at the end). Instead, I either use jira-cli, or just edit the task in jira.
Ars has really been getting into the whole Red Dragon mission this past week. I am very hopeful this is a sign of things to come. Namely a greater media focus on advances in space exploration, which hopefully leads to a greater "buy-in" from the public.
Being trained in a device's use does not an expert on its design make.
Actually with the right ammo .338 and .50 are pretty similar for precision long-range fire. The difference is the .50 has anti-materiel/anti-armor capability at many ranges; the .338 is just anti-personnel.

(Source: Sako TRG-42 .338 Lapua Magnum owner. Would own a .50bmg rifle, but California, and not yet rich enough to keep it fed either.)
Replacing the Unix tradition [video]