skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Completely agreed! I would be astonished if anybody my age was sophisticated/mature enough to have novel thoughts about one subject, let alone multiple. Particularly not in an era when public understanding of most of the arts is 30-40 years behind what we'd call the cutting edge right now. Maybe people specializing in the Internet, because it's so immature, but even then the closest I think it comes is somebody like Blake Ross and Firefox, and I don't think that's quite brilliant enough to count. (It is very popular, though.)

But it's easier nowadays to educate yourself than it ever has been before. That was partly my point: More people are teaching themselves about more things than has been possible in the past. Certainly if I'd been born 10 years earlier, I wouldn't be nearly as well-off as I am now (though this theoretical 30-year-old me would be wiser than the 20-year-old actual me, of course). People are better able to connect to one another, and to test out their ideas, and to experience others' ideas, now that we have this monstrous network that lets you access anything at any time. When I was 13 I was attempting to debate Communist philosophy on a game design forum; I doubt I'd have been doing that without the Internet.

Don't worry. I have no illusions about my prowess. I'm only this year starting to work on things that I think say something meaningful. Maybe five or ten years from now I'll be a legitimate expert in a field or two. Even that would be faster than expected.

(I fail to see, though, how self-publishing somehow prevents me from interacting with others or letting them comment on my work. When my novel was published in 2007, self-publishing let me distribute it freely and thousands of people did — more than would have bought it, I'm sure. Many of those people, including some of the community here, decided to directly respond to it; loads of them, I assure you, were critical. Similarly, I've launched web sites on Hacker News and learned a lot from the critical feedback; my essays and the subsequent comments were similarly devastating.

If anything, I'd say that self-publishing makes it even easier for others to rip me to shreds. It's a self-perpetuating game; the better I get, the more people see my work, and the more informed the subsequent criticism is. I've gone from a community of dozens to a community of tens of thousands. I'm a masochist. I love nothing more than hearing people tell me why I should eat shit and die, especially when they're right.)
You can probably take my word for it on this one; if it's remotely possible we can end this branch of the discussion on that note, or on agreeing to disagree, I'd be happy for it.
Interesting. I'm considering doing the exact opposite (10 years web/server-side development - switching to embedded). Currently, I'm taking some extension engineering classes at UC Irvine while still working full-time.

Any ideas on where to start to get my foot in the door in the embedded world? I was thinking newbie kernel bugs and eventually Linux drivers.
> man, when did i get so old that i'm cynical of generational pride? every generation feels this way, at the edge of the new and exciting.

Hahaha. Aren't they? I mean, the thirtysomethings and late twentysomethings that I know do CRAZY cool shit. I hope when I'm that old I'm as cool as them. I mean, I love my generation, but I love the generation right before me too, and I'm really looking forward to what the kids who're 10 right now are doing when they're my age.
it's fixed now... (9.0.597.16)
O APÓSTOLO DOS PÉS SANGRENTOS
In vimium you can press 'i' to go into 'insert mode (sort of)'
which works similarly (albeit not as well as) vimperator's passthrough mode.

Adding the exclusion is probably the best route though.
I love using the 'smart tab positioning' example: how many times have people moved the mouse to close 4 or 5 tabs?

I would expect that most people close multiple tabs with [cmd|ctrl]-w, precisely because of the back and forth mousing otherwise required. One thing I've worried about while using Chrome has been accidentally closing more than one tab at once, since, being a klutz, I don't have wonderful control over my index finger, and triple-clicking to select a paragraph is so common that I do it accidentally sometimes when intending to single click on a button or something. So far, I don't think it's actually happened very often, though.
Very true, but when you're dealing with a financial firm that deals with margins, good employers should see that as a sign of being thorough.
One vision of pair programming is to explore on your own and save the technique of pair programming for the code that you are going to keep. Keep meaning put into production, with the implication that 6 months later some-one is going to be trying to debug it or extend it.

In this vision the two person aspect is inescapable. The issue is when does the second person say "Whoa! Dude, that is such an obscure way of writing that, no-one will ever understand that piece of code." Do they say it when you have just typed it in and can be persuaded to play about a bit, searching for consensus on what makes for clear code. Or do they say it when it is too late?
I'd just like to say "Thanks" for keeping track of all these HN submissions. It seems like almost every time there's a duplicate post, you're there to provide links to the other instances and comments. It's especially nice when there's more discussion on the articles. Just figured I'd let you know I appreciate what you do.
Theodore T'so: Don't fear the fsync
I think the context you're missing is in the article. The narrator doesn't hate gays, he hates all of the people that have allowed his situation to occur. The whole (broken) social relationship between the media, society and homosexuals.

For others that might be busy at work thinking this is a bigoted piece, it's not. The narrator was walking with his friend (both male), when an unknown assailant threw a brick at his friend, landing him in the hospital, because he thought that the two friends were gay.

The hate in the title is a line from the story, in which the narrator describes his hatred for everything around him (concerning the situation) in a blindingly detailed and empathetic level.

Edit: As rightly mentioned as a reply to this comment, the piece is fictional, but poignant nonetheless. I've edited my use of "author" to "narrator" to try to clarify.
Ideal assembly size is the cube root of the population it represents
I wonder if there will be a next generation of hackers that learn this way. I had a similar story, learning "programming" by poking around inside giant dungeon crawl type games written in basic. However, any game that is interesting enough for "kids these days" won't be a text interface written in a couple thousand lines of basic. Are there languages and tools simple enough to create a game that would be interesting enough for a potentially budding hacker to bother digging in to?
Thanks for keeping me in line, wccrawford, I always mix them up :)

I hear you - I often question my motives. I simply cannot come up with so many ideas for the same thing at the same time.

But when it works, it's awesome.
I'm currently learning to code for the first time, and it is a bit more of challenge than what I imagine it might be fore a non dyslexic person. It took me awhile to find a typeface that agreed with my eyes, and I think Lucida Sans Typewriter is good as it differentiates the vowels very nicely. A strong commenting system also helps. Hacker News is great though, so many smart people to learn from. I mostly try to be quite in the comments and just listen... But I don't see myself ever being an engineer, as I focus more on 'creative' work.
Ask HN: European country TLD - legal/tax issues?
Hi,

I just registered a new .it (TLD for Italy) domain name for my startup - incidentally, works great with a verb (stuff.it, eat.it etc). However, the registration process was more involved than your usual .com/.net in that I had to give a passport number (it's limited to EU citizens). More importantly, there was a clause that said the domain would have to fall under Italian law and jurisdiction (or something to that effect). I can't remember the exact wording, but I was wondering whether anyone had any experience and could explain what this meant. Apart from pedantic legalities about what content could be hosted on the domain, would it have any financial effect in terms of tax status/registration? I'd be grateful if anyone could advise.
Oops! No! I'm sorry if it sounded like I was suggesting you were insecure. I think I misinterpreted when you said "making already insecure people feel more insecure about themselves". I worried you were referring to yourself.

If I could go back and edit my original post, I would, but the edit window closed. I legitimately didn't mean that to be dickwaving. And I tried to say that I don't think I'm a polymath. I'm too young and too stupid. Maybe one day. Anyway, I didn't write it that well and it came off as me trying to look like an Internet Superhero. My apologies.

I go to an art school right now and boy oh boy does the cockiness and one-man-against-the-universe-ing get old. I agree; the only way to really do interesting things is to constantly self-doubt and push to expand. My favorite artists/people in general are the ones who to this day insist on trying to be better than they are.
The 4th Annual Mashable Awards - Nominations and Votes
I would speculate that the reason that the polymath seems less common is that:

1. Counter-intuitively, polymaths are now ubiquitous. The WWW as well as better information access in general has made it much easier to BECOME a polymath. Because of this, polymaths have to be so much more impressive. My local hackerspace contains several individuals who know/achieve SO MUCH in a variety of disciplines. We have baker, artist, roboticist, biohacker, hardware engineers and Dancer, juggler perl hacking political scientists. All of whom are making important contributions to their fields. However, they are lost in the noise because:

2. The pace of scientific discovery is growing at an exponential rate. This means that it is difficult to keep track of, or notice any particular discovery, regardless of who makes it.

3. And I admit, unlike the previous two, this is subjective. I think that we make more of a discovery at the edges of our knowledge than we do of a hybrid. We are all interested by a new type of particle being discovered, but when that happens, we pay more attention to the discoverers' titles as specialists, ignoring the likelihood that the particle physicist working at CERN could also be considered a solid materials/superconductors/computer engineer, as they would need to be in order to understand and utilize their test equipment.
Cheap programmer reporting!

I concur, a sort of an apprenticeship program would be quite useful. If an expert can guide 1-3 people to do most menial tasks, it would serve the dual purpose of getting stuff done and educating a lot of interested people.

Currently we have university projects, internships and the like. However those are often slow to react to technology changes, or are too rigid and lacking proper employee orientation procedures.

It is a nice pipe dream to have a sort of a board where one could find a mentor in a particular subject, while working on a real-life project that shows all the dirty stuff that most undergrads are sheltered from before they enter the job market. E.g. topics of the "I'm doing a Django project and I could use some slaves to do this, this and that" sort.
Good point. God, I'd love that to change. Imagine communities competing to have the most professional moderation. Almost a tournament.
PHP is like legos or loxblox, mmmkay? And I'm not saying legos aren't awesome, or that you can't build a house out of it. Absolutely you can.
I honestly can't remember, I've only seen the movie once, like 6 years ago, when a girl I was dating showed it to me primarily because she liked this quote. Other than this, I don't recall much of the movie.
It's joined the list of words whose definitions are so overly broad they're pretty much meaningless. See also: literally, ironic, etc.
24 occurrences of ";-)" — true happiness!
"We're also eliminating explosives from the ship, which brings significant safety benefits and logistical benefits," Ellis said. In other words, there is less danger of an unintended explosion onboard, particularly should such a vessel come under attack.

The first half (logistics benefits) is a good statement. The rephrasing the the second half is bogus.

Joules are joules the world over. If the enemy fire hits the caps full of joules, it ain't gonna be good for the good guys even if there are no conventional explosives involved.
Compared to closing several tabs in Chrome, doing a similar thing in the Win7 shell (close several open folders) is infuriatingly difficult. The target size of the close icon is so small, and missing it is doubly bad: it makes you start the task all over again, plus a random window is now positioned to the front destroying your work context.
I've been reading through this lately:

http://ask.metafilter.com/158740/You-were-doing-it-wrong

Somewhere in there, about half way down, is

Was 30 before I realized that it's not cheating to study to learn something or to work hard at something to get better at it.
You can always just post the job as a normal post instead of in the jobs section and then you get all the upvotes on the same thread as the comments, so people can find it more easily.
Facebook removes the Status Box... who directs UI over there
Checking out Facebook a few minutes ago, I noticed that the Status Box on the wall was missing. Now you need to choose Status, Photo, Link, or Video before getting a status box. Instead of typing a status and clicking a button, you now click a button, enter the status, and then click another button. From 2 Steps to 3!

On the new profile, if you want to see the person's email, phone, or website links (for example), you need to click on their profile and still click info to see the rest of the details. I'm not sure that is an improvement either.

Who makes the UI decisions at Facebook? What were they thinking????
Joel Spolsky has a great piece on doing a self-funded sabbatical:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000076.html

If you can swing it financially, that's probably a really good place to start. Get out of California for a while. You're quite correct in that it's different from the rest of the US, in some ways better and in some ways worse. You're (I'm assuming) legally entitled to work anywhere in the US, so consider taking advantage of that.

Finally, I think the whole "finding something you're passionate about" thing is largely bullshit. This article:

http://calnewport.com/blog/2009/11/24/are-passions-serendipi...

lays it out much more eloquently than I could. If you can get really good at one or two things that you don't hate you'll start to see interesting work in those fields come your way.
It should be pointed out that this is a fictional piece.
This is a cool idea; basically an SMS version of (excuse the French in my link) http://whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com

Looks like a cool idea, I hope you find a way to monetize it!
You needn't make any irrevocable decisions immediately, obviously. Three things that could help that come to mind are to try new things, a short vacation, and lots of time outdoors. Like this:

Take three weeks off over the holidays and spend it hiking in New Zealand and swimming in the ocean. Eat new food, meet new people, but stay outdoors as much as possible.

Although you say you don't thing you are suffering from depression or burnout, it is possible you are in a mild sort of way. Exercise, sun, and healthy food could all help if that were the case, making it easier to make good decisions upon your return.
American Slavery: United States Coast Survey’s Map of the Slaveholding States
"I was walking to a business dinner in NYC. Someone told me they were going to start working with a new manager and asked me if I knew him. The name sounded familiar and I thought I had done something with him during the Broadcast.com days. A quick GMail search from my phone and I found 2 emails we had exchanged when he was trying to sell a company he was involved with back in 1996. That’s why I use GMail."
Order of magnitude cheaper than 4chan I think, since there's very little going on server side. At least for right now.

The most expensive thing will probably be the pusherapp subscription. Right now it's free but tbh it looks expensive. I'm always investigating alternative solutions, there are several services that look way cheaper that I would switch to whenever pusher starts charging.
I don't think it's a bad thing that HN's upvotes/downvotes aren't as good as they could be. Honestly I don't think anybody cares about who has the most points in a given thread. What matters is what people say, and how they interact with one another. While Hacker News has some problems with that sometimes, on the whole it does a damn good job of being a community. Even the irritating things about it are kind of adorable in a way.

When I said it's meaningless, I mean relatively rather than in some nihilistic sense. Obviously, things on this site matter. But if we have a front page on which I'm only interested in 5 or so posts at a time because I think the rest are silly, that's not too bad if other people are looking at those other posts. I'm not going to get too pissed off at the sensationalism and the dumb stuff. That's just the way this site is. Trying too hard to change that might ruin all the things that I like.

HN is not particularly Serious Business, you know? It's a fun site with some great commenters, but it's not like MetaFilter where the culture is so unique and good that I'd get upset if it started deteriorating. Or like the old threads I read on Slashdot or Usenet where I realize there was such a good thing once but now it's gone into decline. HN has always had these community guidelines that nobody follows, and its successes have been despite that. If that makes sense.
>the abstract ontology is derived from the behaviour of the individual specimens, the ontology does not define the behaviour of the individual specimens.

In other words... Do you like Plato, or do you think Aristotle had it right?

There are lot of cool isomorphisms between philosophy (particularly metaphysics) and software design.
OOP in my country is poo.

Programación Orientada a Objetos.
You're right sorry, it was work safe when I posted it. But now... :S
Thanks for mentioning this - I'm talking Steve/Chris into doing a tornado talk at pycon right this moment. This is great ammo.
There are a couple of ways to find slashtags:

* The autocomplete info contains suggested slashtags for the search you're typing
* Use "find slashtags" to browse or search the list of slashtags
Sadly, I feel the same :). The catch-22 is that if the site is able to grab a user base, we'll be in a far larger company. I feel so torn...
I read it and understand it isn't really an anti-gay article.

It's a thoughtful and very well written fictional story. What I don't get is why it is getting up voted. I am doubtful it really gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. IMHO, HN is just not the right place to share that kind of content.
Fun thing is that "object oriented programming", in French, is "programmation orientée par objets", which is usually shortened to "POO" (pronounced Pay-Oh-Oh).
It only takes a few calculations to realize that picoprojectors are unlikely to become a "big thing", simply based on power requirements. The only possible exception would be projection directly into the human eye. Even very powerful projectors are difficult to be seen in anything other than the lowest light conditions.
This makes about as much sense as using command-line interface to drive a car.
Disk is cheap, your time is not. A simple and effective backup strategy for OS X
If the conclusion is to not write a web crawler, the next step is a service like http://www.80legs.com/.
Thanks for the link. That was helpful.
That developer switch (linked from http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-fo...) is interesting. What I really want to know is whether the switch is one-way -- can I switch back out of developer mode without things breaking?
Awesome name. Great look.

The only thing that caught my eye was a vertical scrollbar that only scrolls about 20 pixels worth shows up on the homepage on a 13-inch macbook running chrome.
Exactly. The OP thinks that when I ask her to reverse a linked list, I expect her to whip out the perfect code from memory on the fly. I would be even more suspicious if you did that actually. I want you to structure the data. I want you to try out variants of reversing. It is ok if you can't give me the optimal solution in 5 minutes, as long as you demonstrate the capability to reason with data structures and pointers and tools at hand.
It made for an interesting read, but I think there are too many generalizations in that type of writing. The truth is, we have just experienced and extraordinary explosion in the amount of valuable data and information that it available to almost everybody. I think that we have not yet come to grips with this and that it has caused some disciplinary boundaries to be rewritten. There will still be heroes after the revolution!
1) That's irrelevant. I'm speaking to the importance of the ability to reason a linked list which is not really related to 'practical examples of linked lists in a web development context'. To quote silentbicycle above: "It's a linked list, people." We're not talking about 'the latest developments in red-black tree algorithms'.

However...
2) Probably every list of objects you throw around in whatever abstraction providing framework you're using.
It is an interesting observation that the brittleness of inheritance hierarchies stems from the fact that they have a semantic meaning in the program and are not just logical classifications. A simpler (and well-accepted) explanation for inheritance's problems is that it is a code-reuse implementation technique that people mistakenly use for software design. I suspect these explanations are related.

I'm not sure I completely followed your ideas about hierarchical classification being more useful for testing... perhaps because using animal categorization as an example was difficult to follow since people don't write tests for animals. What does it mean to have hierarchies for tests and what benefits does it provide?
Kudos. Too bad that special page didn't also include a job interview offer.
I believe Jquery is doing at least some of that
Eh? Window close buttons are larger than tab close buttons.
What is the possibility of using these for space launches?

edit: obviously would have to be slower then these for the sake of any fragile cargo (including people)...
Not exactly - one recomends a meal (and is designed for humour rather than actual helpfulness), one recomends a place to eat.
Google "Reading Level" filter
A Linear Clock
It's an interesting question. As far as making one think, the piece succeeded (at least for me). I'm straight, but a definite supporter of gay rights.

The most interesting part of the piece (to me) was this excerpt:

I hate somebody’s sign saying you’re born that way, accusing your genes. I hate somebody else’s sign saying it’s a choice, and gays made the wrong one. I hate that either of those things would matter.

For some reason it struck really close to home. I see people debating the cause of homosexuality all the time, whether it's conservatives making guest appearances on CNN or Tea Partiers at protests. The truth, though, is that it really doesn't matter why homosexuals are gay. They're people, just like everyone else, and deserve to be treated as such.

Maybe HN isn't the best outlet for this kind of story; I'll definitely give you that. As far as stimulating thought, though (if perhaps not intellectual curiosity), I would call this one a win.