skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The company I work for has a policy to take your full name in the local part. So if you are

Juan Alfonso de Borja y Estevez

then by default you'll have a email-address of

juan_alfonso_de_borjy_y_estevez@company.com

This is just the first hit for "long spanish name" I found on google, but I have colleagues that have email-addresses that are that long or (in a few cases) even longer.
The current AppSumo deal* includes fresh underwear delivered monthly. A wider range than that?

* manpacks.com
No. It's not polymath enough because you haven't acquired the subtle art of impressing other people without coming off like someone who needs to brag about themselves or making already insecure people feel more insecure about themselves.

Without proper social-skills you are just a douche in lab coat/pocket-protector/drama club/hipster enclave. The true modern polymath, IMO are Frank Abagnale, Larry Ellison and Craig Ventor.
I e-mailed Steve Ballmer with this brilliant idea and got a response. Hope he'll get on it.

https://skitch.com/danielspronk/rrc2s/inbox-14307-messages
FWIW, I never had a steady girlfriend till I was 23 (married to her and have a kid now, 6 years on) and it didn't bother me. Definitely don't feel pushed by society or embarrassment into prematurely settling down (or ever settling down at all, I know several people over 40 who have been permanently single and have rich lives).
"I think that we’ll continue to see more companies like [Groupon] who will put us to shame a couple years from now with their rate of growth."

I firmly believe that this is correct. A lot of product pitches from current or previous Google employees start with the words, "there are 6.8 billion people in the world and this product solves a problem the majority of them have".

I think that in developing new products, we get so wrapped up in current trends and crazy valuations that we loose sight of just how quickly the majority of people continue to jump on the Internet bandwaggon.

A good number of folks will complete their first purchases online this holiday season, this realization alone makes me confident that the web is far from over and that there is room for a lot of bands beside 'N Sync and The Beatles.

While I may be tired of hearing about Groupon and their clones, I know that there are more companies just around the corner that will blow 6 Billion dollar valuations out of the water.
I hope you'll post a followup on HN once you make a decision, this is actually a very interesting post. Good luck!
Thanks, I really appreciate that! Hopefully, we'll see deals coming in about a week.
First, decide whether you're going to have a career change or a career interruption. If you decide on the latter, give it a few weeks. Just do whatever you want and don't feel guilty or wonder how it will extrapolate into the future. You are a smart and productive person; eventually you will find yourself doing something you enjoy and are proud of.

It's natural that you're scared of the vacuum. A good friend of mine, a very nice and moral person, told me that if he didn't believe in God there would be nothing stopping him from stealing, lying, killing, and raping as much as he could get away with. He was completely wrong, of course. Your worry that in the absence of obligations you will waste your time and not do anything worthwhile is wrong in the same way.
The following video, narrated by Alan Watts, and animated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, eloquently describes exactly what you have figured out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4&feature=playe...

You essentially have come to the realization that the things you have been lead to believe (career, wealth, social status, possessions) are not what will make you happy. This realization can go down a dark path of depression if you're not careful, so be careful and stay level headed. Definitely take time off, pursue interests you never had time for and completely stop worrying about the future. That's the important part, to stop thinking there's some sort of end goal that you're working toward.
Of course! All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection!

More seriously, are you saying that SSL/TLS and SASL are both insecure?
I'm 26, and if I were in your shoes, I guarantee I'd feel the same way (primarily, because I do already somewhat).

If I read this right, you're struggling to feel needed. I know this isn't exactly the same thing as the need to make a difference in the world, but it seems close enough to be actionable.

I say find some people who truly need you and do your best to help them. Is that teaching? Is that fixing their situation? Is that creating a new idea or product? This will take some exploration, but it has to be worth it, right?

And, none of us are perfect. I put the same pressure on myself (I've been programming since 7th grade, and I feel the exact same way about my questionable programming skills). But, we're all still learning, and I'm betting you're smart enough to make a difference in at least one person's life. Then you can extrapolate from there.
Blekko is certainly interesting, specially with /seo slash tags. I think there is space for blekko where Google does not return interesting result. After Google instant its becoming place where you should find something in first 1-5 seconds. If not, its lot harder to find on Google. Blekko on the other hand you can run queries with different dimensions running slash tags (eg. you can sort by date with \date if you want liberal perspective you can do \liberal etc). So Blekko to me is becoming more of a search tool. Its certainly a niche, but i think there is space for these niche search engines. Another good example of niche search space is wolfram alpha.
> Any time a step isn't clear, break it down further.

And that really is the key to programming. Which makes pretty much anything solvable from scratch. Whether or not you'll come up with the most efficient solution (or at least one that runs reasonably fast) is another thing but at least you'll come up with something, or at a minimum a well defined little black box that you know you're going to have to fill based on the name you gave it.
There are far fewer human-readable combinations. There are even fewer with fewer than 10 characters.
I'd go one further - if I thought somebody was giving me a rote answer for how to reverse a linked list, I would push them to see if they actually understand why it works. Or switch to something a bit more exotic, like a skiplist or radix trie, and see if they have any intuition about data structures.

It's a linked list, people.
Are Business Plans Still Necessary?
Nice. Last.fm has a nice post at http://www.metabrew.com/article/how-we-use-irc-at-lastfm.

We also have separate channels for each message type. IRC is pub-sub, yay! Plus you can direct-message a bot and it will DM you back, to not pollute the channel you're currently in.

Do you have any bots that take commands? I think that's where it gets really useful.
Oracle Response to Apache Departure from JCP
Doing is easy. Finding out what you want to do is not - at least not for me.

It also seems you are self-deprecating. You must have some value - you were not paid for doing nothing!

But maybe what was found valuable in you by corporate america differs from what you define as a value.

Have you tried reading philosophy? It helped me. If philosophy is not your thing you can try more accessible literature. My biased suggestion would be Atlas Shrugged.

I would also suggest trying to define your life values (what's important for you?) and following that, defining your life goals (where do you want to make a chance?) - then it's "just" a matter of implementation.
Now its time to figure out how to set up a server that can handle few thousand viewers.

Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
True, today was the first time I logged in my hotmail account since last summer. On the other hand, what I read on this thread made me understand why I haven't open this mailbox for months.
I think the main difficulty for Web Development is the separation between the Front-End and the Back-End. In Desktop development, the two are linked together, so if you want to handle a button click, you do that in the back-end and no other hassles.

However, for Web Development, you'll need something called HTTP POST or GET and you want to improve it with AJAX (and make sure that it still works even without JavaScript). The user input become sensitive, and you have to take into account many other thing to secure your server.

Still, Web Programming is fund. Having a server that answer requests is funny, for me. The author found Web Programming is hard, because it underestimated it.
Reddit is actually pretty good for 'hacker news' if you unsubscribe from the front page and everything not related to hacking, then add all the programming-related subreddits you're interested in.
The Credit Suisse comments are particularly interesting:

On 2010-12-06 Credit Suisse voted Yes with the following comment:

Credit Suisse's vote is purely on the technical content. We strongly demand open standards and an active community around Java as we selected Java SE & EE as primary pillars for our application development (as many others in the industry do). The current battle around licensing term, however, reveals that Java never actually was an open standard. FOU restrictions clearly discriminate open source implementations and prevent competition, and with that, innovation in that space. While Java had a considerable head start, it lost a lot of momentum over the last years. Fragmentation (or a fork) of the language and its platforms are clearly not desired. But today, customers are already facing competing models for developing enterprise applications (e.g., Spring, OSGi, Java EE). The main problem, in our view, is the lack of modularization, clear delineation of Java IPs owned by Oracle and truly open standard extensions, and the ignorance of developments outside of the JCP (even though OSGi has a JCP blessing). The OpenJDK framework is not sufficient for all aspects of the language. Java must be kept interesting for researchers and universities: researchers not only contribute to the standards (e.g., Doug Lea for concurrency or Michael Ernst for type annotations) but also decide on the languages (and paradigms) that are taught at universities -- and this in the end determines the knowledge and mindset we acquire with our software engineers. While we recognize Oracle’s intellectual properties around Java, we strongly encourage Oracle to re-think its current position around licensing terms. We strongly support open source as a licensing model for contributions in the JCP.
You certainly will encounter harder things that you need to invent (not just re-invent) during the course of any job.

Ha! You'd be surprised at how many "programmers" spend years just cutting and pasting code without really understanding any of it.
You're defending your honesty, but your honesty isn't what's being attacked; it's your competence.

I've been asked in interviews before, how to reverse a single-linked list, and impressed interviewers with my answer to this seemingly trivial problem; but I also remember when I first met the problem, in a newsgroup posting nearly two decades ago, and I had temporarily convinced myself it couldn't be done in constant space. But then I saw the problem as pushing and popping of stacks: view the old list as a stack to be popped, and the new list as a stack to be pushed, and thence the list shall be reversed.

But doing it elegantly - in constant space - is besides the point. Reversing a linked list is a problem which can be solved, even clumsily, without much thought. But demonstrating problem-solving in an interview situation, that is the point.
That is correct: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3392636/slang-goldman-sac...
Canon camera signatures cracked
Takeaway quote: "Hire people who really understands [sic] security".
Google the article's title.

If you are referred from Google, WSJ will show you full content.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle.
Tim Gowers: What Proofs require fundamentally new ways of thinking?
he did link to another post he'd written elaborating on the subject

http://hacksoflife.blogspot.com/2007/01/inheritance-of-imple...
Full text: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://online.wsj.com/articl...
Absolutely. We have a few ideas we're looking into at the minute though we're concentrating on getting it off the ground and growing the user base first, as is a necessity with this type of site.
Thanks for your reassurance.

The problem is that I have evidence to the contrary. I have already started wasting time and not doing anything worthwhile.

In any case, I don't see myself doing anything other than programming for a career, though I ought to take some time to explore as well.
Myvault: shell utility for easy access to an encrypted text file
> I tend to prefer underannouncing and overdelivering...

Yes, assuming that you hear about the project at all. Overannouncement is lying, but it does get you more publicity.
Now I'm curious how you got that cache, I tried to grab it from google also but the link was missing..
I can only view the cached version. Looks like he needs a mirror.
Wallets that Metamorphose Depending on Your Financial Situation
I thought it was clear that you were not bragging, simply describing as best you could the problem-space (and the resources currently available).

Regarding the prioritization of cars, houses, and relationships....

I would say that owning a car is just what it appears. If it doesn't seem appealing, don't do it. Owning real estate, pretty similar. Moving out, maybe a little more subtle (i.e. the costs/benefits are less obvious to someone who hasn't done it yet), but not enormously more subtle.

But I would argue that girlfriend/relationship is not like these things. (Obviously I speak here for my own experience, and I claim that it's somewhat generalizable.) Relationships are rewarding in weird and surprising ways, and difficult in weird and confusing ways. Also, they require practice to maximize your benefits, so if you figure you're going to want this at some point, getting some low-pressure practice in might be prudent.
I have such mixed feelings about Facebook as an engineering company. I think that Facebook is the antithesis of Google's "Don't Be Evil", but I get quite giddy when I read about some of the crazy stuff those folks are pulling off over there.

It is quite awesome that parity files can save an organization 4 petabytes of storage. See kids? Stay in school: petabytes matter.
You've struck a nerve here. I don't have a response yet... but thank you.
Where is everyone? - Five tips for the Remote Project Manager
First, yes, it's in "professional speak." Given that some people from marketing are overseeing this, I would just expect that. The answers, however, don't strike me as condescending.

For IE9 we really focused on what customers, partners and developers told us mattered most, their sites. Developers wanted the ability to create richer and more immersive experiences on the web, and so we invested in fully HW accelerating HTML5 through Windows.

Dev translation: we actually tested this. People didn't care enough about built-in spellcheck.

We started by building a tool to look at the top 7000 sites and what web APIs they used. In IE9, we set out to support the standards that showed up among those sites. We also spoke to developers and partners to understand what they were going do in the future and what they couldn't do today

I don't even have anything to add to this. They looked at who's using websockets and the standard. No one is using it. In fact, I don't see why IE is getting a bad rap for this -- none of the browsers currently have websockets enabled while the standard is being fixed. The rest of their comment is marketing-translated: "We do care about standards though, which is why we implemented the more common ones."
Rather than memorizing stuff forever, you could develop your intuitions about data structure design trade-offs and what makes them behave the ways they do. After I learned OCaml, a lot of data structure design seemed obvious.

Also, read _Purely Functional Data Structures_ by Chris Okasaki. Unlike (say) CLRS (http://mitpress.mit.edu/algorithms/), it's even a pretty short book.
Did Visa & Mastercard Cut Off Wikileaks Because Latest Leak Was About Them?
This is getting to be a really silly off-topic discussion, but I have to admit, I would be totally curious to hear if you could identify what is difficult for you about this task:

A) Pressure of an interview situation makes it hard to think straight?

B) Absence of familiar IDE, environment, REPL/compile-run cycle makes it hard to work or think effectively?

C) Something else?

I just don't see how it could be difficult for someone who understands loops and pointers (as I assume you certainly do.) I would have filed "reversing a linked list" under the Fizzbuzz category of things-that-anyone-who-has-ever-actually-programmed-can-do.
BlackBerry Curve 8520 | Curve 8520 Sim Free | Buy at PrePayMania for £199.89
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1988666
The other problem with this article is that it really says nothing about algorithms. The title, "Next gen algorithms inspired by..." implies that someone actually wrote new algorithms. That didn't happen. Instead its a lengthy pronouncement of how ants explored a maze, with the author throwing on the normal uninformed speculation statement at the end to add some keywords to the text.
Making sense with Ruby's "unless"
Show HN: TextMunch, a new SMS app to answer the daily question "What to eat?"
Txt "Munch [Address]" to 41411 and get instant recommendation for what to eat and where.

Check out other options at http://textmunch.com.

Only covers San Francisco at the moment. Any feedback greatly appreciated. :)
Auto Transport Medford, Oregon
NIST Announces SHA-3 Finalists (Skein is One of Them)
Argh. Going to get a Master's is NOT a solution to doubting your programming skills! Professors cannot teach you how to write code, because they don't know themselves.

(Going to school may or may not be a great move... but not for this reason!)
Have you considered TinyMCE?
I'm currently working on a set of SOAP web services using tomcat, cxf, mysql, and hibernate among others.

I decided to do a switch from embedded to web development about a year and a half ago after being laid off. My paycheck is smaller but I now work on a whole new set of problems. After working about 10 years in embedded and everything around it, I felt that I needed a change. It was as if I was solving the same problems over and over. And don't get me started in the state of the tools. I remember thanking the heavens when we switched platforms to PowerPC and ELDK.

At first I did not know were to start in web development. But I did decide to concentrate on the back end quite early. At first I approached each technology separately, mostly because of my ignorance. For example, I saw that tomcat was very popular, so I decided to take a look into it. But I quickly realized that I needed a birds eye view of the whole web service stack and not its individual components. At least not yet.

I started to look into frameworks. After realizing that there are lots of those and that I learn about a new one almost every week, I had to narrow my search. I've been working and learning Groovy on Grails which is all based on the JVM since then. What sold it to me was the fact that Groovy is a language very similar to Python, which I know, and that Grails is a web framework that integrates all the necessary technologies to get a decent site up and running thanks in big part to the amount of plugins available for it.

Like grayhairmomma says, it's a humbling experience.
No, actually it's ideally suited for SSD because it never write twice to the same place and manage garbage collection in an SSD-friendly way (wear-leveling). NILFS has been enhanced with SSDs in mind lately.
I disagree with your first assertion; a Hayabusa could make you very happy. ;-)
The Perils of Web Crawling
So at what point at those organisations going to start getting heat for being in possession of classified documents?

Why is Assange taking so much heat (yes, I know he wanted to be the lightning rod)? Is it merely that it would look bad to go after 'name-brand' news sources?
Yes, web programming is hard. The amount of techniques and the haphazard way in which they interact (jsonp??) are terrible compared to 'real' software development in a controlled environment.

But you really should be grateful for that. If it were easy a large number of us would not be earning what we do because things that are easy tend to devalue quickly.

Remember when being able to write HTML would net you $80 / hour?

Ten or fifteen years from now, when web programming is 'easy' you just might long for the times when web programming was hard but you could basically name your price if you were competent at it.
Or he needs to implement caching on his Wordpress site.

Almost every day there's a popular blog post that misses a large portion of its audience because the author wasn't caching. You'd think that more authors would plan for a traffic spike from aggregators, since that's sort of the holy grail of blogging.
Wow, that name alone is amazing. Simple, easy to remember and clever. Combined with the simple design, and novelty you're off to a great start! This will be really interesting to follow.
I think the comparison was with embedded programming, which can be pretty hard in its own right.

Also, with lots of embedded stuff, you don't get the "do over" of being able to update your server with the latest code. Once it has shipped, it had better work. In some cases, people's lives may directly depend on it, something that's probably fairly rare in the world of web programming.

I'd hire someone good with C pretty quickly, if I had the time to let them get ramped up, and they demonstrated the flexibility and willingness to learn.
Yeah, but aren't some interview questions specifically intended to screen out those kinds of programmers before they do too much damage?
If you want to boost your programming chops while doing something you care about, why don't you join an early-stage startup for equity? They need people who are willing to work for lower pay, and you will learn A TON about something you enjoy. And usually super-early stage startups give you flexibility of no official HR to dictate when you have to be there and when you have to take a vacation. Sounds like a pretty simple solution to me.
Wow. Well, can I just say I loved EverQuest so much between 1999-2004 that when I found out there is an EverQuest Mac Client that still runs with a population AND also has a "time-lock" until PoP... well let's just say I started last week and I'm having a blast!
All this claiming would certainly benefit from being more specific on the motivations for the claims, otherwise, this is just yet another mindless debate.

My understanding is that the original article was making this claim because one reason used to push OO is that it is a more "natural" way to represent problems because it fits what we experience everyday, the point that the widespread implementation of OO relies on classes which have little to do with the real world.

To refer back to the blueprint example, modifying the car you purchased in ways the manufacturer hadn't intended doesn't require you to modify its blueprint. Also you may repurpose the car for something else, naming this things a car is just a matter of convention about describing its use, not something fundamental about the object itself. These limitations still apply to procedural or functional programming, the point is just it wasn't a selling point for them.