skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I was trying to say was that we have to make a decision and thus decide what's better for those people. We can't even ask them without influencing them.

Therefore we have to make a decision that seems best for them, even considering our cultural bias and imperfect view of their society. I can even say that we will make a decision for them, maybe just wrapping it into some feel-good distractions. When you decide not to interfere you're not really letting them evolve on their own, you're starting to avoid them. It's more subtle influence, but influence nonetheless.

I'm not really saying that change is inherently good, that's a view that can be easily disproved by samples from our own culture. I'm saying that change is an inseparable part of culture, and we shouldn't try too much to protect a culture from it (but we shouldn't actively try to destroy a culture without very good reasons -- like, I don't know, mass killings or something -- as well). Especially considering that (at least for me) people are more important than culture (while keeping in mind that culture is quite important for people).

As for preferences like those you've mentioned -- actually, here in Poland I know people from the whole spectrum on each of those issues, and soft mattresses are easily available. When you don't show a person a mattress you're not really letting the person choose to sleep on a bare floor, you're forcing the person to sleep on a bare floor.
Actually, BMI is kinda BS. http://www.npr.org/tablet/#story/?storyId=106268439
Of course, monopoly doesn't actually ruin people.
I agree with the general direction that you are going, but consider at least one exception: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_diagram. I find these sequence diagrams useful in whatever kind of systems that I am working with.

I feel that the disconnect is the presumption (which at one point in my career I was fully on board with) that Everything Is An Object.

Additionally, I have grown resistant to "methodology" more than anything. In my harsher moments, I argue that methodologies are insisted on by PHB who don't really understand programming and want something to insulate them from the reality of software development.
Interesting -- I did not know about this one. Looks like it was implemented in OpenSSH 5.4, which isn't yet in Ubuntu LTS or OS X (the two environments where I spend most of my days), so it may be a little bleeding edge for general use just yet. Good to know, however.
Confirmed. Adding such sensory detail to narrative descriptions is pretty easy to do in American Sign Language (I can't speak for BSL or others, though French Sign Language is pretty close to ASL, from what I understand).

I'm no longer good enough with ASL that I can do all that simultaneously (I'm a native speaker as a result of 8 years at a school for the deaf, but use spoken/written English all but one or two days out of the year).
The Role of UI/UX in the Big Data Revolution
I have been in a similar position as, like you, I find it easier to do stuff when someone else is expecting me to do it. In the absence of a co-founder, one of my strategies has been to create that sense of expectation by outsourcing parts of the work which then requires work from me to provide the outsourced person with what they need to do their bit.

On one recent project, I got going by knocking out a rough plan in Pivotal Tracker and then doing some pair programming on some portions of the code with someone I hired on oDesk. Having booked someone for a couple of hours a day for a week or two meant that I got started, and by using them only for small portions of the functionality meant that it didn't cost too much and I was motivated to get the other bits done myself that were dependencies for the next bit of functionality I was going to be working on with my pair programmer.
You meant "betting on", right? Not trying to be that guy, just wanted to make sure I understood your comment.
Ask yourself, if 3 years and I haven't made my app will I be disappointed? If yes, then set 30 mins a night to work on your singular project. Write a general plan of attack, then flesh out the 1st 20 objectives. If it helps, pretend your boss asked you to complete this project. good luck!
EDH SSL still uses RSA.
I'm also hard-of-hearing, but went to a school for the deaf for several years.

When rooming with others (say, on school trips, which were fairly frequent), some of my schoolmates would talk in their sleep, and others would sign.

According to my college roommates, I used to do both with some regularity.

As for telepathy: you're probably correct in asking "How would we know?" Perhaps self-reporting after dreams?
I went to their home page (http://www.thedaily.com/) and clicked on the link "Am I going to be billed automatically after the free period". It told me "The URL you requested could not be found."

So let's get their value proposition right. This is a paid news source, appallingly badly executed, that doesn't bring any value that I can't get from free news sources such as Reddit or the BBC or Guardian.

I predict it will sink without trace, after wasting millions of dollars.
"The main groups of vaporized compounds generated were monoalkyl-substituted aromatic hydrocarbons and their oxidized products, of which styrene monomer and benzaldehyde were the most abundant."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/734408
Cool but you should post some examples.
I try to work the hardest I can without burning myself out.

- Justin Kan (@justinkan)

http://startupquote.com/post/3144888909
There are no currently known viable attacks on that cipher suite.
This is how you don't give someone feedback
Why corporations should stick to maximizing profit
HackerBuddy
Yep ... when I'm training, I get thinner and heavier as I replace fat with muscle. How out of shape can an ultra-marathon wannabe be?
Please ignore the title/first paragraph, which are the only political points in the article. That's just a jumping off point into an otherwise interesting essay pushing the thesis that corporate "social responsibility" is a bad idea.
A fun exercise, but somehow I distrust infographics on principle. Overly big fonts make feel stupid and foolish for example. OK, I got it he programmed for FIVE years

FIVE!!!!!! 5555555 5 5 5 5 5 55 5 5 Five five five five five

FIVEFI

F

FIV

E

FIV

That's how it makes me feel. In general if you treat somebody as if he is stupid, it'll make him feel stupid. Infographics treat people as if they are stupid - bright shiny colors, big fonts, short sentences...

Maybe it already has to do with chunking. "5" is really just one chunk, the number 5. But a big, ginormous 5 doesn't fit into one brain slot anymore. It fill the whole brain and bounces around inside of it.

Anyway, I don't like infographics...
Sadly, programming is not a step-by-step process, and so the search for methodologies is pretty fruitless IMHO.

Instead of looking for "proven" programming methodologies, one should develop an aptitude and taste for how to write good programs. This can only come from "doing" it and seeing how other people do it.

"Bottom up programming" is not a methodology. It's not a step-by-step process, nor is it a set of strict rules and guidelines. It's just a general idea; and it's not something you implement, it's a mindset you absorb and imitate.

By the way, UML & co. are horrible abominations and you should steer away from them. If you want to sketch something out on a piece of paper, just use your common sense: draw boxes, circles, arrows, trees, or whatever you like.
The Size of the Human Radio-Broadcast Bubble in the Milky Way Galaxy
Hi

Thank you, yes we know about haystack and are very aware of the dangers. I also have a heavily annotated copy of The Net Delusion sat on my desk right now. We're not going into this blindly and each of us has a tin foil hat ;)

I do apologise if we're coming over as distracted by this conversation and in a hurry to get back with our work. I fear this risks becoming an "emacs vs vi" thread that ultimately resolves nothing - I've worked close to 100 hours already this week and will be working flat out until well past midnight GMT tonight. To be brutally honest while security is critical participating in this particular conversation cannot be an immediate priority for me and the team even though we do welcome your interest and criticisms.

I asked for patience. I'll repeat that again. We are exhausted and rushed off our feet not least because we have to earn a living when not working on Sukey. Please give us time. By all means if you don't trust us, don't use it and don't sign up now. Wait and see.

We are in a massive crunch to get ready for the TUC demonstration on 26 March. We are supporting the legal, democratic right of peaceful protest within a democratic society. If and when we extend the tool - as we hope to do - so that it could be used in authoritarian regimes then it has to be bullet proof security but right now we want our users to go into it with open eyes - aware of all the criticisms you guys have raised and having read our: http://sukey.org/idiotwarning

I hope that we will have addressed all of your issues and will have got the code up under a licence that makes everybody happy before the 26 March.

I'm really sorry if that answer doesn't satisfy some of you. We are not bad people just very busy and under enormous stress. I apologise if that has made us seem curt or evasive. I do hope that you come to realise that with time.

An email from RMS has to be one of the high points of my life so far: front page, however briefly, on HN comes second :) You are important to us but our priority right now has to be getting the code right and ready and addressing criticisms in the code rather than debating it online.
Very nice. Please fix: "repository by it's sum of watchers" => "repository by its sum of watchers".

No one wants to have a typo in their resumé. :-)
"I was shocked to discover that most men view negative emotion as a signal that logic has ceased."

Yes, that's pretty spot on, for me at least. (I'm male)

At times I know I can be overly blunt and appear insensitive - in the vast majority of cases I'm not trying to make a value judgement, just calling it how I see it. Thus, getting an emotional response back is somewhat shocking - to exaggerate for effect:

A: "Two plus Two is Four"
B: "OMG really!?! You're a horrible person for thinking that!"
A: "Um, I'm confused... what's wrong with you?"

I wonder where this puts me on the aspergers spectrum...
Hah good point :-) Should be fixed now, I just pushed to the repo.
Fear of failure? If you never finish the project, you can always think / say what it could be. If you actually make it, then you have a chance to fail.

I'd say write 1 of the many features your trying to work on. It could be because you're overwhelmed with the whole project.

Also, it seems like you have a "sheep" mentality rather than a "wolf" mentality (when your employers asked you to make an app but wont make one for yourself). If you can recognize it, you can most likely change it.
New Bingo Sites 2011
Of the distros I have used, only Ubuntu ships images that only boots on CDs. Debian, Arch, OpenSUSE all ship images that boot on "normal" storage (such as USB sticks, HDs, SSDs) and can be DD-ed to them.
Ask HN: In NYC is $40/hr a low rate for an experienced Java guy?
I put my resume up on Dice to look for a Java contract (3 - 12 months).

I received numerous contacts but the only one to mention a concrete figure was an agency that said they wanted to put me onsite at a gig right away for $40/hr.

I haven't done contract work for many years but this seems very low to me.

Are they low-balling me to see if I'll bite.

And, if so, what's a reasonable minimum to expect, considering that I've been programming enterprise Java since it first came out and would be able to "hit the ground running", as recruiters like to say?
Why the OS X Menubar should be dark and not bright
Believe it or not, this has actually happened to me. I was going through a long literary dry spell, and my SO of the time turned to me once and said "I miss those poems you used to write." I told her, "the only thing I can write right now is soulless but amusing battleraps. I could write about how weak your rhymes are in comparison to mine, but it wouldn't be quite the same."
I thought this article was going to be about how to properly punctuate and pluralize abbreviations.
These are all great questions to ask about any software that powers a business. Of course, if you are "selling" software on the basis of the question "who are you going to call?", then you have to embrace the fact that you are not in the software business, you're in the "You can call me" business. You're really in the software support business.

Everything about your pricing model is really a kind of fiction. The charge up front, the license, everything. It's really a support business, pure and simple. Oracle and IBM know this, and so do their customers.

And thus the business proposition as a developer comes down to:

1. If I'm in the support business, writing and selling my own software places my customers in thrall to me. I have a monopoly on support. Of course, that means they have a certain risk since I'm the sole vendor. And I have to develop the software and compete with other vendors just to get a customer for my support business, which has a certain risk.

2. If I'm in the support business, supporting free software outsources the part of my business that isn't my core value proposition, and lets me focus on the value I charge for.
In a similar vein to what Fred is saying...

Free software, paid support, amass users, then...

Watch and listen to what features are missing and what solutions the software isn't providing... and charge for those.
Ask HN: Best search option for a Rails app?
I've been working on a new project lately where a fantastic search engine is crucial. It's a rails3 app hosted on heroku and I'm looking into possible solutions(a rubygem would be ideal) which offer a easy way to have powerful full-text search.

Right now, I'm using acts_as_tsearch which leverages PostgreSQL and performs a basic MATCH query. Though, it's not really pulling back good results(for example, if I search for "create a project" and "how do i create a project" exists as a query, it doesn't find it).

Can anyone share their experiences with full text search, anyone tried out Solr ?
Cloud computing is dead.
Yeah, considering my two largest projects are Organizations, this ends up looking quite different for me.
> The science is clear, for example, that although the female brain isn’t designed to compartmentalize personal feelings the same way a man’s brain does, a woman can — if she chooses — force a calm demeanor when she is starting to feel defensive.

That's a lie. This statement has nothing to do with science.

Can you point in the direction of something that proves or disproves that statement? I've witnessed a lot of anecdotal evidence that women don't do as well at compartmentalization as men. I didn't make much of it until I also read a book that points it out ("Viva La Diferencia" by Pilar Sordo) as one of the differences between typical male and typical female behavior.

All in all, it seems that the typical behavioral patterns are different enough between males and females, so I'm interested in evidence both for and against it. Your categorical statement makes it look like you can produce some of that evidence.
One of the interesting things IME about those swipe locks is that you don't have to use a credit/debit card, you can use anything with a mag-strip. If you're suspicious about a lock, I suppose you could try using your AAA card, reward card or something else that doesn't have any sensitive info.
Also increasing the cost of any ongoing maintenance and support (and the need to charge for that support and maintenance) are the "unhedged option calls" [1] made when the idea was first expressed in code.

[1] http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2010/07/23/bad-code-isnt-technical...

I'm also reminded of the joke: "How did God manage to create the world in only six days? He didn't have any installed base he had to worry about backwards compatibility with."
EatDrink.It: Helping You Remember & Discover Great Meals | Food+Tech Connect
The insidious side. When you begin to smell this with any regularity, it's time to check out.

(On the other side, I've worked with some people in Big Co. who role up their sleeves, diagnose the problem, and then tell and/or work with the vendor to get it fixed. Those kind of actions make it enjoyable to stick around.)
wondering the same thing...
A must read--both the article AND discussion here.

This article and the discussions below are truly one of the more fascinating topics to be had.

It is always great to read amazing topics submitted to HN (which is a large portion of the point here, right?) and to read comments for better understanding and discussion (which is the other potion here), but to have both an intriguing article matched with equally thought-provoking and explorative discussion is a complete intellectual gem.
Pretty cool. I wonder how it decides which repos to show though. It listed my dotfiles repo but not Leiningen, which is the #1 most-forked Clojure project.
Shouldn't that be "geometrical" instead of "geographical"?
mm I don't know about UML but I take two approaches. When going through concepts I use boxes with arrows and texts - I bet UML people would laugh derisively if I claimed what I drew was UML, my shapes arent even consistent from diagram to diagram.

On the next level I use type diagrams ala category theory of functions to figure out what will be needed in code. The diagrams help in terms of thinking out the concepts, also about composition (how FP manages code reuse and extensibility) and setting up guard rails to guide my thinking. The diagrams are also underpinned by a mathematical language and I can do some basic algebra with the concepts before writing code. I use only the most basic parts of category theory though.

Through out this process, and most heavily at the start, I am usually also at the interactive testing out ideas.
"What's wrong with me?..."

How to beat procrastination: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2185174

Perhaps you feel that your idea doesn't help someone else, even if it is interesting to yourself (hence it's easy to do work for others). Convince yourself either the idea/product would help people (ask if people are interested?) or do it for fun/hell of it. Otherwise, cut your losses.
> I don't it's fair to say that opting for the Tiger Mom approach necessarily implies that all self worth comes from winning.

Quoting Tiger Mother: "The only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal, and that medal must be gold."
i cant believe people are still beating this dead horse
This kind of stuff always blows my mind away.

How insignificant we all are, in the grand scheme of things.

(Then my mind overflows when I ask myself the question of "what the hell is the universe?")
edw519 has one form to complete, two database tables to configure, four functions to test and an app to deploy today. But instead of getting started, he minimizes his test environment and Textpad and opens a browser window to Hacker News. He knows he has 6 hours of work and only 7 hours before the Super Bowl and he understands that he'll probably be too drunk to program after the game. But he is too caught up in stories of software development, scientific journeys, industry trends, the pratfalls of rich and famous hackers, and silly articles about procrastination.

edw519 is lazy. He should close his browser and get back to work.

(Simple story, but too boring for a scientific study.)
oh sorry, I had not seen the note. To be honest, I do not see it now either but at least I found the github project :D
https://github.com/resume/resume.github.com
The page states it is only your first 30 created repos; did you have 30 before Leiningen?
The most widely used languages, C and C++, do not offer any support for concurrency. Programmers roll their own by using threading APIs. Languages that do support concurrency, such as Java, Python, .NET, and Ruby, do it in a brute-force manner. Depending on the implementation - there are over a dozen Ruby interpreters, for example - they may offer "green threading" or true multithreading. Neither approach scales, due to reliance on locks. It is left to exotic languages like Erlang to do it right.

You know how I wrote my first concurrent programs? Create threads with pthread_create(3), and pass ownership of objects by sending pointers over connections created with pipe(3). Which sounds an awful lot like this cure-all actor model (which I hadn't heard of yet) that requires languages almost nobody's ever heard of.

Of all the approaches taken to multithreading, only one is known to work properly. That means, it scales to any number of cores, ...

clone(2) and socket(7)

... avoids all locks,...

Your threads/actors still block waiting for messages. I've seen an example of someone using this to write a mutex in Erlang.

... costs little more than conventional single-threaded programming,...

Probably depends how much you have to twist your code to fit this functional+actor model.

... is easy to learn,...

If you discount having to learn a whole new language and turn your code inside-out.

... and does not crash in strange ways.

Instead of crashing, it hangs because you accidentally wrote a mutex.
Right, but the important thing is that you're much more valuable to your paying job because of your experience writing free software.

In most other fields, if you ask for someone with experience, that means they must have had a job in the field. With software, you can get all the experience you need in your spare time.
Imagining the Ten Dimensions
This is something I always found interesting. If this kind of stuff interests you, be prepared for it to take over your brain for the day.
I really don't know what MS did to the slides on their web page. The PDF contains just images of text.
I cant answer you, but when I started to work as programmer, my salary was $150/mo.
CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) also seem similar:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_proces...

There's a patch for Python that does CSP!

http://code.google.com/p/python-csp/
Facebook The Second Most Valuable Web Based Company
Sigh... the term "cloud computing" never had a firm meaning. Or rather, the firm meaning was never what people (particularly those most excited about it) wanted it to be. Basically cloud computing came about like this:

1. Software designers, network guys and so on have long used a picture of a cloud to represent the internet, some wide area network, existing infrastructure that needs to be ignored for the purposes of "this discussion".

2. It became common to draw services inside the cloud, e.g. dns, webpages, and so on, or as simple boxes just off the cloud.

3. Naturally people started referring to stuff on the diagram as 'in the cloud'.

4. Someone decided to turn this vague thing into a real term for his services, since they tended to be digrammed "in the cloud", (s)he called it cloud computing.

5. The english language, doing its thing, caused a vague term to be applied vaguely to vague concepts but retain a kernel of meaning.

Now, cloud computing means what it always meant "can be drawn such that the thing I'm selling can be abstracted to a cloud". Seriously the reason so many different things are called cloud computing is the person calling it that has a particular view of what should be an abstracted infrastructure cloud. Looked at in this light it, the whole term has always been the same.
"...there is an ever-expanding bubble announcing Humanity’s presence to anyone listening in the Milky Way."

This 200ly sphere does not equal detectable radio signals from Earth. SETI is looking for radio signals from the stars, yes, but they are looking for a focused and high-energy attempt from ETs to contact someone by beaming at specific stars. Radio "leaked" from regular transmissions typically does not carry a signal over interstellar distances.