skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not much education to talk of.

As a kid I loved playing on my dads Atari console thing (the one with the wood panels!) and later he bought a Sinclair ZX81. For a school project we were asked to create our own musical instruments and perform a song - I programmed a song using the BEEP command through trail and error.

After that, we got an Amiga and I pretty much just used it to play games and do some pretty art things.

In around '96 we got a PC with internet access and I started playing around creating batch files in DOS and some basic web pages. I created a pretty popular joke website that was getting quite a bit of traffic but didn't know enough to make the most of it.

In '99 I started an apprenticeship with a company that did EPOS systems and spent a lot of time soldering serial cables. After about 6 months they let me go because I couldn't drive and they wanted someone who could go out and fix machines on site, so I got dumped.

By this point, I was about 18 and I saw a job advert that simply said "Wanted: Internet Guru". I applied and it was basically this guy that had an existing business and wanted to get into this internet thing. I got the job and after a long talk we decided to set up a domain / hosting / web design company. He had some fax spam machine and sent out hundreds of faxes promoting domains at over £100 each (they're now more like £6 in the UK). We were flooded with responses and I spent a few days manually registering domains with our registrar before I realised I could automate most of it.

After about a year, I left and got a job with a small startup as a domain administrator and learnt a lot more about web development. I'm still with that company ten years on even though the founders have cashed out for over £25 million.

I'm now working on my own startup in my free time as I've been dreaming about being free from the rat-race for about 8 years now having seen other people making a mint from their own web startups - I'm finally doing something about it and focusing on my own future rather than making money for other people.
I don't understand what they are doing? I don't recall @ having special significance in a URL?

I can only guess that they have two separate steps for transforming URLs into links and transforming @replies into links. Then they first run the URL transformer and then the @replies transformer, which would of course mess up the URL.

I have solved that problem in one of my Twitter apps (transforming both in one go), maybe I should send them a code snippet...
> You can always leave. They're called feet: use them.

I'm not sure. I've never been poor, so I can't speak from personal experience, but being poor is not necessarily about choice. Certainly I can start off rich, and make bad decisions. Perhaps that's my fault, perhaps I got unlucky. But if you start off in poverty, it's not easy, as I understand, to get yourself out of poverty. If you had a crap education, and a rough home life, you probably didn't leave school with good grades, so you can't get a decent job etc etc. There's a whole life-defining set of knock-on effects. And if you're trapped in debt, struggling to pay the rent and keep yourself warm, how easy is it to get out of that? If an opportunity does come along, will you have the cash to leverage it (think train ride to job interview).

I don't know how you got out of your fix, I'd be really interested to know.
Christopher Hitchens isn't exactly an impartial source when it comes to Mother Teresa.
Make your software require parts that you do not sell them. This is the SaaS model.
From the comments:

> Being poor is discovering that that letter from Duke University, naming you as one of three advanced students in your class invited to test out of HS early into their scholarship program, is just so much firestarter because the $300 it costs to take the test may as well be $3 million.

Despair is finally realizing, at nearly 36 and with a barely-afforded AA in English from a community college, just where you could have been by now had you had $300, and what that missed opportunity has truly cost you.
The question was about static methods, though.
Oh I'm certainly not arguing for more handouts. As an other commenter pointed out, these tend to mainly go on keeping your head above water anyway. For true betterment I agree totally that it's up to that person to make it happen. They just maybe need a bit of help to get started.
Being poor means having to constantly worry about money to the point where you're not sure where your next meal is coming from.
Twitter introduces reply-to-all and autocomplete of usernames To #NewTwitter
Mozilla Joins Open Invention Network
See also

https://www.socialtext.net/perl5/index.cgi?history

Perl 5 was released in 1994. The current production version of Perl is 5.12. You can really consider Perl 5 as something very, very stable by now.
to get more traffic & users to yr site, one thing you can do is to dominate a small niche that represent yr site. i.e. if it is a sewing community, write tons of articles on just how to make the perfect sweater and nothing more.. this could take months. work out an articles plan, get writers from fiverr, ezines, etc.. to help you out. and if yr social community site is any useful, it will start to take off a little. work on those users slower... roman isn't built in a day too.
The geographical disadvantage of the US is probably to blame for this. I don't think that there's a substantial number of rural poor in western Europe.

I don't think that there is any town in Germany that is not reachable by bus, and our inner cities have at least adequate public transit.

Apart from free health care, good public transit could turn some things in the US.
Twilio USV Contest
Most salespeople are just making "booty calls"
One more thing I want to comment on that you wrote:

> From my own experience, the whole thing tends to dull the mind to an extent where opportunities are no longer so obvious - or so easy to pursue

The way that is written shows a huge problem in peoples' perception - why do we assume the poor can only get by if opportunities are "obvious" or "easy to pursue"? Working your way up society's ladder is HARD, but people are capable of amazing things when it's their only way out. Throwing scraps to the guys at the bottom of the ladder will only take away motivation to make the long and difficult climb. Don't we want people to look back on their lives with pride on what they accomplished, in the face of difficult odds, rather than disappointment that their lives were spent living off of others' charity?
"Enforce minimum wages that people can actually live on. Most poor people work significantly harder than your typical white collar office worker. The only thing that separates most of the middle class from the poor is that the middle class had a solid foundation from their family on which to build their future."

What would stop companies from increasing the costs of their goods and services because they know minimum wage is higher (and people can now afford it)?

Minimum wage in the US is $7.25/hour (many states are higher). A person couldn't support a family on this, but they could find a place to live (either renting a room, cheap apartment, or sharing a bigger apartment with friends) and have enough left over for the bare-minimum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._minimum_wages
This is highly variable. My wife was a high school teacher for two years. She was up and at school by 7:30AM each day, and worked until at least 6:00PM each night just to keep up with grading. Couple that with lesson planning and hard to grade assignments (like essays) and she was easily putting in 60 hours a week. At least half of that time was spent in front of students (who can be a fairly adversarial audience). At no time did I look at her and think she was having an easy time of it. Also, if you do the math, you'll notice that she worked -more- than the average professional, despite the 10 week break.

In the interest of full disclosure, this was a very good school that had high expectations of both its students and teachers.
Every item on the list applied to my upbringing I had to stop half way through to avoid depressing myself too much this morning.

There's two reactions to this. One will be people saying these problems aren't like what's compared to "real" poverty in third world countries. Well, perspective doesn't feed you, pay bills, or support a roof over your head. Because there are people living in situations that is really fucked up doesn't invalidate you. Suffering is not a zero-sum game.

Second, the common thread of being poor is the inherent limitations. You do and behave certain ways because you have no other choice, stuck on a treadmill. Some will never get an opportunity to learn the skills to make better choices. It will take an overwhelming amount of energy and effort to change the momentum of where a life goes. Being full on dollar meals and drunk on two dollar wines doesn't help with that situation.

In all these years I have not been a god-believing man but I have become a faithful man. I have kept hope that things will always be better down the road. That it's up to me given the hand I've been dealt to play it as best as I could. And at the end to let go the bitterness or the awkwardness. There's no choice to be made when you're blinded by your own madness of being hopeless.
Python needs something like the "Go PHP 5" campaign (which pressured projects/hosting companies to drop support of PHP 4: http://gophp5.org/).
In terms of business I did well, I turned the place around and it started posting positive cashflows (excluding my take)

In terms of personal toll it was very high, had it gone for few month longer it would have ended in a divorce and hospital most likely, due to physical and mental exhaustion.

I sold the restaurant and moved on back to the start-up world
Internet will be gone for months
Unfortunately, providing solid autocompletion for dynamic languages implies solving the halting problem.
This completely misses the human equation. What people will remember is how much notice they were given, and whether they were provided with some kind of reasonable severance. If people work their hearts out for you and lay them off without notice, that's just bad business.
I believe the new flash player versions do respect the private browsing modes of browsers.

Back when I used to use windows, I used to touch two files called "#Security" and "#SharedObjects" in the flash player app data folder, which prevented it from downloading anything at all. In retrospect, it was an overly heavy-handed way of doing things :)
If they are smart and powerful enough to do:

"develop four previously unknown zero-day attacks and a peer-to-peer communications system, compromise digital certificates belonging to Realtek Semiconductor and JMicron Technology, and display extensive knowledge of industrial systems."

then why did this happen?

"In recent weeks, they've broken the cryptographic code behind the software"
Because without the ability to machine it, you have far less of an insight into how hard it will be to do so, or how long it will take, or how much wastage there will be. That can have an orders-of-magnitude effect on the cost. In your story, Chuck is ordering parts sure, but the guy who designed those parts was a specialist in designing parts...

In my first year of Mech Eng they sent us all off to a machine shop to learn to weld, use a lathe, etc, I couldn't give an example to you now, but it really does make a difference, you start to think as well as "how will this work" but also "how will this be made", "how can this be repaired", "how will someone get at this part to replace it", etc etc.
I've verified with some people I know who work on Windows. _Every_ checkin requires code review, except those in the individual dev branch (if the dev opts to create one). Merging also requires code review and additional suites of testing each level up the tree one merges.

Thank you for checking in to this. I'll try to remember that data point.

"Why would you think that you are blocked for a day? Implicit in there is an assumption that there is a nightly build process, giving you a one day feedback loop"

Actually, I wasn't assuming a nightly build process. I was thinking the time it would take for me to realize that the bug was actually in the new code, then for the dev to get a fix, have it code reviewed, have tests written, and then check it in. And given that maybe 1% of the users broke due to it, they want to be careful with a fix that they don't fix me, but break a different 5% of users who are using the NVidia GeForce 9831. If you're working in one branch, my expectation is that you can pick up the fix as soon as it is checked in, but the fix to that is minbar one day in most cases.

This is what continuous builds and regression tests are for. You can automatically identify which check-in caused something to break. If it broke something, anywhere, that check-in needs to be rolled back. No actual thought is required. The code without this check-in worked, with this check-in failed, we have a known good state to revert to. Debug at leisure, but DON'T leave it broken for everyone else in the meantime.

My point is that when you have a thousand people doing checkins per day. The odds that some one breaks goes up a fair bit. Let me put it another way. The single branch is the simplest way to write code. The reason that so many places don't do it isn't because they like to just make things complicated, its because they've all had things go bad with the other system.

How many people do you think Google has checking code in? I'm not allowed to tell you, but I'm curious what you think it is.

Google has a lot of people who have a lot of experience in lots of companies of all sizes. We didn't settle on our current system out of ignorance of how other large projects work. But I'll completely agree that if you try to naively scale up smaller development processes with one branch, you'll fall over unless you address a bunch of other problems. Most people at Google believe that we have done so.

With Google, my prediction is that Android/Chrome will eventually move to a system where there are branches for certain parts of the product. I think the rest of Google can probably work out of a single branch.

My understanding is that Android and Chrome are already both are in separate repositories so that they can interact better with outside groups. (Both are open source projects with outside developers.) Given that Android is in git, I am sure that it has a ton of branches.

That said, the rest of Google is a much more complex product which is under very rapid development.
The EPEL5 repository has Python 2.6 available - http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/SRPMS/repoview/...
Well of course it's not worth the cash outlay, that's the point! That's one of the hallmarks of nerd-dom. Taking a joke or a concept, and going to extraordinary lengths to bring it into reality, for novelty and to impress people. "You know that one _____ thing? Somebody actually made/did it!"

Prime example: http://blog.xkcd.com/2007/04/19/life-imitates-xkcd-part-ii-r...
This is a rather impressive list of panelists!
It seems more and more that the only real reason to engage in the patent game is mutually assured destruction or forcing somebody to come to the table and talk about licensing.
from http://www.digitalbond.com/index.php/2010/09/16/stuxnet-targ...

I’m surprised at how often project names for secret projects have some relation on the project. This is really for you conspiracy theorists, but read the Book of Esther in the bible where Esther informs the King of a plot against the Jews. The King then allows the Jews to defend themselves, kill their enemies, … Esther’s was born as Hadassah which means Myrtle. According to Symantec, “While we don’t know who the attackers are yet, they did leave a clue. The project string b:\myrtus\src\objfre_w2k_x86\i386\guava.pdb appears in one of their drivers.”

Seriously you couldn't make it up!
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_infringement_under_Unite...):

> If an infringer is found to have deliberately infringed a patent (i.e. "willful" infringement), then punitive damages can be assessed up to three times the actual damages. Legal fees can also be assessed.

If it cannot be proven that an infringer had knowledge of the patent, though, the damages that can be assessed are substantially lower.
It's my position that the question "why are singletons worse than static methods" is ill-formed and implies a dichotomy where there need not be one. Static methods are already instance methods on an implied singleton, whose state consists of static state; except this singleton doesn't have an identity and isn't a value that you can pass around, and so isn't composable, isn't first-class.
Old but still useful: App Engine printable cheatsheet for Python
KindleTwit (Twitter site for use with a Kindle)
The code in that github account is linked directly from the Twitter open source page:

http://twitter.com/about/opensource

twitter-text.gem - Text processing routines for Tweets.

Since twitter does contribute to open source software, it is highly likely that the source is related closely to production code.
Have you filed bug reports with those packages?
Why Companies Should Insist that Employees Take Naps
I think you may have missed Hilbert Spaces' point (as halostatue may have). His thesis is not that "diversity" is a cause of low performance, but rather that genetics is. Holding up Canada as an example of another "diverse" country with better scores doesn't contradict that thesis if that diversity tends to be from the higher performing ethnicities.

Unforunately, in US politics, it is taken as an axiom that ethnicity (read: skin color) is not correlated with innate performance, and thus any difference in measured performance must be due solely to inequality of opportunity.
Get Rich Quick On The Internet: Learn Online Fraud
The hard part is: how do you get it? Customer service, quality products, an extrinsically motivated vision? Its probably something not able to be determined in a forum.
(a) Sex is cheap, good entertainment. (b) If you are already poor, children aren't going to make it any worse. (c) For some reason, most people really want to have children. (d) Humans aren't exactly rational creatures.

Free birth control, as well as better sex education (which is, from what I've read, hilariously bad in the US) would probably help quite a bit.
U.S. Debt Actually $200 Trillion?
Indeed. This is why I would never install Eclipse from synaptic on Ubuntu because the Ubuntu schedules and Eclipse schedules differed. And perhaps they wouldn't coincide anyway even if they synchronised temporally. Which means that someone somewhere is wasting there time packaging Eclipse for Debian/Ubuntu.
They also don't look too bad in the IE9 beta.
The bug reports exist for the two main bugs I come across.

The main problem is that I could upgrade a couple of systems to fix the bug but doing that tends to break python (with the infamous _md5 error) spectacularly :)

Catch 22.
Monte Carlo Analysis of TDD's Zero Defect Mentality
Hey. I am a web designer and I can create videos, so if you need either of these services, please contact me. My email is alexwyser@gmail.com

For more votes, other than a better website and an interesting video, you should market like crazy on facebook, twitter and some relevant blogs.

Also, I not entirely sure how legit these are, I suggest you might try the offers on gigbucks.com of promoting your website on facebook, at worst you lose $5 or $10
FreeBSD installs all packages in /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/sbin

You can blow away your /usr/local and start from a new ports tree and build it all back up without adversely affecting the system.

Everything system related is in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin depending on whether it needs to be accessible when the system has just / mounted or when /usr is mounted as well.

So in single user mode with just / mounted you have access to various different utilities. Mount /usr and you can expand upon that.

Back in the old days when FreeBSD required perl in its base system switching to a newer version didn't break any of the base system tools (or maybe I just never noticed).

There is something nice about a layout that is properly documented and makes sense: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier&apropos=0&...
True, but it seems to me that Scalzi's article was focused on what it feels like to be poor, not on the actual objective reality, etc., etc.
Bad Mathematics: A Trillion Dollar Problem
The 'clarify and 'X' buttons show their corners in Chrome, looks a bit messy.
C Indentation Based Language Lexer Tutorial
Unfortunately he's also the guy that tells the customer "yes we'll do it in Blub!".
http://www.wikihow.com/Rest-with-Your-Eyes-Open
The Essential Psychopathology Of Creativity
Study Finds Apps Use Up 50% Of All Mobile Bandwidth
I agree... being robbed induces sharp feelings of rage and helplessness that don't fade for a long time. That said, I voted the grandparent up (from -1) because there are a couple good points in there.
LoverHugs.Com : Download High Quality Wallpapers
Loverhugs.com the portal of latest High Quality Wallpapers, Islamic, Bollywood, hollywood wallpapers & images, Fantasy girls, Birds, 3D, pic, photo SunViews, Architecture, Aviation, Butterflies, Animals, Bikes, Cars, Digital Art, Fractals, Foods, Games, Guns, Military, Miscellaneous, Mobiles, Nature, Quotation 1280 X 1024 resolution wallpaper, Celebrities, download, pictures, Free Desktop Wallpaper, image.
memcached's ASCII protocol is known to be slower and less effective than the binary protocol and using TCP for memcached is slower than using UDP. It's not a fair assertion that redis is faster than memcached when you're picking the slowest way to communicate with memcached.

Also, one should not expect to see parity in get/set ratios or you're doing it wrong. Cache get with a good hit ratio/high effectiveness is the point of memcached. While memcached gets effectively plateaued in his low concurrency example, redis get performance degraded as you added more clients/concurrency. In an unoptimized use of memcached, high transaction rate environment, I see sets at 10% of gets.

Redis may very well be faster, but an effective benchmark should be closer to real world use case and shouldn't hold one party back for parity in protocol complexity.
:e f<tab>.b<tab><return> or similar from command line often using history. After using a code base for a few hours/days I pretty much know where everything is and exactly how many chars I need to type before tab autocompletes.

After I open a file once it is in my vim and or bash history which means opening it again is only a couple keystrokes.

I use <ctrl>6 and multiple (3-4) non-overlapping terminals (with text mode vim) in various directories. So "jump to file foo.bar" is often look at the vim/terminal to the upper right or <ctrl>6 or :e<space>f<up><enter>

Don't remember what this does excactly but it's in my vimrc and might have something to do with it.

"freakin awesome file completion
set wildmode=list:longest

I also use this form of "history"

bind '"\e[A"':history-search-backward
bind '"\e[B"':history-search-forward
Have you made a good faith effort to research this yourself, before asking us to do the work for you?

Surely if this information is important to you, it's worth taking a few hours to see what you can find out.

And if it is not worth a few hours of your time, why should we bother?
Cloudfront works great
How serious is the Padding Oracle attack?
This is the result of a known bug in Chrome/Win and Chrome/Linux:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=29427