skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In this most recent incident, at least, he was cooperating with police (who entered his home with an arrest warrant) until they refused to provide their names and badge numbers. At that time he dropped to the floor and refused to speak. He didn't actively resist their arrest, but did refuse to cooperate in any way.

I believe that taking the "suspect" to the hospital in this case is putatively for his own safety, just in case the reason he's unresponsive is that he's having a seizure or some other medical issue. But from Julian case, it appears that sometimes this is treated as an invitation to "soften him up".

(fwiw, I've never met Julian, but I've communicated with him by email and get regular updates on his work)
We don't have bugs. Any defects are put into the current sprint and fixed within the hour.
There is a thing in HCI called the End-User Model Fallacy, where engineers try to create an interface based on a prototypical end-user, and then the real end-user spends time trying to figure out how they think the interface works, and it becomes a vicious cycle where the engineers think they are improving the interface, but in reality are just causing the real end-users to come up with a new model of the interface that they can use to get their work done.

This Fallacy was first described to me in Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BrendaLaurel
Fred is confusing marketing with advertising. Advertising is one of many functions of marketing.
I lack the fundamentals of Computer Science, the things every programmer should know: Algo's, Data Structures, Operating Systems an understanding of compilers and being profficient with linux.

Relax. That's true for 99% of all programmers.

Eventually I plan on going back to a real University and getting a CS degree

Absolutely not necessary. You will probably learn more building anything than learning it in school.

I'm starting to think I may have a learning dissability

Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Just because the rest of the world is quick to diagnose everything doesn't mean you have to.

I have come to accept that I'm really not smart. I'm slow, forgetfull, concepts never seem to stick

Your performance shortcomings could be for many reasons. Being "really not smart" is the least likely of any of them. They are much more likely caused by other things like uninteresting work, poor environment, personal issues, nasty people, or even health issues. Whether you're "smart" or not, thinking that your aren't is pretty much a guarantee for failure. Please don't do that.

I have started going through the basic Algo's and Data structures again with a basic Java book about algorithms

Sorry to say, but you're just doing it the hardest way you can. You don't need a book; you need a project. I (like many others here, I'm sure) have achieved much, but have always had difficulty learning from books and theory. It's hard! You need to find work where the things you need to learn will be required. Funny how quickly and easily you'll find a way to learn them when you actually need them. I'm not sure how you should go about finding such work, but I imagine many responses in this thread do.

I just don't want to be a cargo cult programmer anymore.

Good. That makes your normal.

And finally trying to memorise all those linux commands I ALWAYS forget.

Then use less commands. I have never used more that 10% of what was available in any technology and I always got the job done.

I have to force myself

This is the most important thing you have said.

Have you ever actually enjoyed building stuff? Have you ever gotten really "jazzed" about the project you were working on? Have you ever leapt up out of your seat and danced when you got something working?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, then you really do have the passion to be a programmer. Stop selling yourself short and listen to the great advice you're sure to get here from fellow Hacker News'ers.

If you answered "yes" to none of these questions, then there's no sense for you to continue wasting your time searching for the passion. If you haven't experienced any by now, then you probably never will. No one should have to "force themself" to love what they're doing. Find something else.

P.S. Sorry about your father. Loss affects each of us differently. And don't worry about your English. It's fine. Please give yourself your best chance to succeed and keep us posted. Best wishes.
Graylog2: Java, Ruby, MongoDB-powered log management, monitoring, and alerting
Nastiest Python list comprehension ever
If you are are as skilled as you seem to be, why is the CS department rejecting you?

All the benefits of going to university only come into play if you actually leverage your experience (i.e. go to class, work with professors, network with profs and classmates, get decent grades & follow the structural rules necessary to get the right degrees, etc.). Getting into the right departments (and meeting their standards) is a key ingredient of this (sure, their rules might be quirky but they are the established social benchmark right now).

If you don't want to leverage your experience then you are in the wrong place. Though keep in mind that the inability to leverage a opportunity-filled environment like university is also a big warning sign for your future entrepreneurial career.
The claim is a stretch, even in areas of high internet penetration. It might be a shield, in the same way as a sheet of cardboard is a shield. You can hold it up in front of someone pointing a gun at you, it might make them miss your vitals, and it will slow the bullet, but not by more than a negligible amount.

The lion's share of people under threat of genocide (e.g. the 70 or so uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, that get in the way of gold mining, logging, and oil exploration), are not in areas of high internet penetration (zero, in the case of the Amazonians).
As a Perl programmer, contributions to open source (CPAN) are a plus rather than a minus. Even with code that is not of general use (mine parses chess games) such things generally add to managements estimation of your worth--- at least up the chain as high as they understand what CPAN is :)
This is certainly true. In past events, Julian has notified the media that something interesting might happen. (And the police have harassed his friends who have photographed and filmed these events, going as far as arresting them and confiscating their cameras, as I recall)

(fwiw, I've never met Julian, but I've communicated with him by email and get regular updates on his work)
I tried this streak method, and I had a bad shoulder for a couple days meaning I had to break my streak.

And the problem with the streak is that once you break it, you no longer have an unbroken streak to motivate you to return to the habit. If anything, you don't want to look at your calendar any more because it hurts to look at the broken streak.

So disappointingly, the streak calendar is as powerful at demotivating you to restart the streak as it was at motivating you to continue an unbroken streak.
Two of the github guys: kneath and technoweenie I believe, implemented exactly this for measuring contributions to open source projects.

site: http://calendaraboutnothing.com/
blog post announcing it: http://techno-weenie.net/2008/10/6/calendar-about-nothing/
The bigger picture for men :

Food -> Dinner date -> laid
Nice Big Bed -> Proof there's room for her in your life: laid
Best web apps for school
Julian is cranky, and I've occasionally disagreed with some of the details of his claims. But that doesn't invalidate the core truth of what he's fighting for.
Previous Discussion of the same article:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1033433
MacBook Pro teardown reveals battery tweaks, Thunderbolt details
First of all, do not ever call yourself "slow" or "not very smart". This is just not true. I haven't realized that English is your primary language until you mentioned it Granted, English is not my native language either, but the point is: if you could get this far with the natural language you're definitely have anything but the learning disability. And having a stable job after dropping out of college is no small feat either.

Algorithms and Data structures. I have CS and Applied Math degrees, but honestly - very rarely I have to recall the inner workings of specific algorithms and data structures. It is useful to know how it all works, but not as important as you may think. You can certainly follow "fake it till you make it" approach: you need to remember memory and time complexities of the data structures and some implications, e.g. "hash tables have asymptotically O(1) search time but may consume more memory than red-black trees that provide O(log(n)) search time but have guaranteed memory and search time constraints". And so on and so forth. So go ahead and read Cormen with that in mind.

Also, my guess is that you need only as much CS as you need to become a better software developer. I don't think you want to be a theoretical computer scientist, do you?

In your situation I would also recommend reading following books:

"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". Honestly, to CS graduate it reads like a book for preschoolers but it is very beautifully written and is almost zen-like. And it will definitely help you understand what programming is about if you did not get proper formal training.

"Design Patterns". It is not a CS, but Software Engineering book. It provides a framework for your software design skills. You can be a great programmer without reading that book, but then you have to be exposed to a lot of beautifully designed code, and that book will save you a lot of time.

Find a popular and stable open source project that is closest to what you are doing now or what you want to do and read the code, look at the build infrastructure, documentation, try to get involved and maybe even fix some bugs, starting from simplest ones and moving up to features. You'll get a lot of brutally honest peer reviews, just don't abuse it.

Hope that helps.
Racist? Which race is he against?
Löve 0.7.1 (lua game framework) is released
I had done something similar around 2000 though I wasn't very sophisticated at programming so I think it's off...

http://minus20.e-2.org/artists_projects_chriso.html

Last year I re-made it as a free iOS app which takes the time and converts it using a RGB>HEX function I found that I think is correct:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/time-as-color/id335133255?mt=...

I also made one that sets Hour, Minute to latitude,longitude
in Google maps which I like looking at:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/time-as-place/id336539483?mt=...

(edited second link)
These guys are on a roll. Makes me debate switching from Rackspace Cloud. They've got some catching up to do.
Which totally explains the existence of the NHS.

Either the Eton-conspiracy is less powerful than you think, or they have a bizarre concern for the health of the British people.

I apologize for the snarkiness, but really? Comparing the way that British politicians treat their constituents to the way that Qaddafi is literally gunning down his is pretty absurd.
link: http://superconf.net
I don't see how "open source" had all that big of an impact on software.

IMO, "open source" software fills the same roll as government spending on infrastructure. Basically, contributing a small amount of energy for a share of a public good has a net positive result. But, little changes from the perspective of a user or a developer.
Thanks for you answer, you tackle some of the other things I've been struggling with for the last few years.

1. I work with other experience programmers but they are not really into "mentoring", I have been looking for someone online who can lead me on the path of the hacker.

2.Good point, sometimes I do feel like I don't know how to learn. Thanks for the link I will check it out.

3.This is one of my flaws...I'm not very confident in my abilities, and frankly I never feel like I have something good enough to contribute, this is also why I've never felt comfortable starting a blog or participating in open source projects.
I was very pleasantly surprised to discover direct hypertext links to the primary source document. I did some additional scanning of Science articles, and it appears that the New York Times may have adopted a policy of actually linking to the published articles that are discussed in the article. Kudos to them.

This may seem like a small thing to be happy about, but amazingly enough, it isn't done that often. It's really depressing.
I am really curious what makes them $30,000,000 a year? Are they getting it for free, or are they loosing out on the income?
>Eventually I plan on going back to a real University and getting a CS degree, but I'm unable to do so at the moment

Come up with your own curriculum then. Invent homework assignments like the following:

1. Install a linux distribution: http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download

2. Install the languages you mentioned: sudo apt-get install sbcl ruby

3. Type 'irb', 'python','sbcl' to open interpreters for Ruby, Python, or Lisp

4. List the names of all the data structures and algorithms you've heard of and their operations. Be sure to include hashtables and b+ trees.

5. List the worst\best\average case runtimes for each operation.

6. Describe a practical use case for each.

7. Implement each by typing directly into one of the above interpreters.

You'll learn much faster, always get A's, and not have to spend any money.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this opinion will be unpopular... but it is mine, it's humble, and I'm entitled to it :)

You are stuck being a cargo-cult architecture-astronaut because you are stuck in a language that exemplifies and encourages it. ROR and python, while perfectly good in themselves, will allow you to stay there. My advice would be to take something 'horrible' but useful - PHP springs to mind - and play with it. Do fun stuff just for the hell of it. Do things quickly, not correctly. Correct things one by one and see which things actually make a difference, and which things were a complete waste of your time.

Memorising linux commands? What? Slap! Write yourself a cheat-sheet and remove that excuse from your head immediately. It'll take you 5 minutes. If it takes you longer, you're doing it again. Stop making the perfect cheat-sheet that covers every example of everything you may ever need, and write the 5-minuter that covers 95% of it.

Set a line between the front of what you're doing and the back. In front of the line, everything must be neat, useful and functional. Behind the line you can do whatever you please. The line is the part of the 'achieving things' model that cargo-cults miss - the difference between practice and theory. You might even surprise yourself about your coding ability once you start evaluating things that way.
"Chancellor Joel Klein terminated only three teachers for incompetence between 2008 and 2010."

This seems dishonest given how hard he tried-- only to be thwarted by a union which always closes ranks.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_...
http://gothamist.com/2011/01/30/joel_klein_easier_to_prosecu...
Bing is now as far ahead as Google was ten clicks ago.
Previously submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2259911

No comments, one upvote (from me).
Process migration (moving instance) is not easy. In the simplest level, you still want to have some kind of naming/binding scheme such that the migration will be transparent in application layer (well, DNS, maybe). Besides, with your proposal in "Moving Instance", there are still race conditions. For example, when you "slaveof no one"ed on the new instance, which instance (old or new) will handle the incoming request? It seems to me either way, you will end up in an inconsistent state (or handle some request faultily). Well, I need to lookup the underlying mechanism of "slaveof" to be confident about that, but it is worth to point out.

I'd like to be able to use Redis Cluster as soon as it is available, here is my question: how can I help? Recently, I want to start write some script for rehashing, but there are some problems, namely, I cannot just "get/set" everything (e.g., I cannot "get/set" a list with some serialized format). Do you have recommended way of doing that?
The World is Obsessed with Facebook.
> I have come to accept that I'm really not smart. I'm slow, forgetfull, concepts never seem to stick, I have to force myself to not take things for granted.

Congratulations! You have just discovered that you have an asset! Forgetfulness, an awareness of one's limitations and an understanding that learning can be challenging are all things that actual newbs are not aware of. You no longer suffer from hubris.

Your newfound recognition of your limitations is the foundation upon which you must build and shore up a structure for acquiring new knowledge, outlining plans which recognize your limitations and executing these plans in a predictable manner.

These problems are the same problems that most programmers (hell, most people) face. This is what the life-hacking movement is about. It is about understanding that we are all human, and that improvement in our lives requires recognition of our weaknesses.

If something is not working for you, what you should do is look for alternative methods to achieve your goal. If you do not absorb knowledge through reading books or theories, perhaps reading code would be better for you, or perhaps you are a social learner and need to talk to other programmers about what it is that they do.

Remember that every challenge is an opportunity. There are even people who have turned their quests for self improvement into niches and businesses in their own right. If you see something that doesn't make sense to you, it may not make sense to other people. If you find a way to make a task easier, others might find it useful too.

I hit the point you're at about 5 years ago. I'm beginning to feel competent and trust my ability to build things. There's a lot more that i want to learn and become better at. It's a long process, but many have tread the path before you, and many will follow in your steps.

G'luck.
As a graduate student, $50 seems like a lot of money to spend on anything except rent... Plus figuring out the return process and if its not super simple just seems like quite a lot of hassle.
Here's the one for programmers:

http://calendaraboutnothing.com/
This may or may not have been taken out of context. The way it was tacked on to the end of the article makes me wonder about the source. How did the writer get that quote? The writer definitely wasn't digging through court filings. Likely from the prosecutor or opponent of the professor. It's not hard to imagine a context where he uses that in a reductio ad absurdum argument that a judge/prosecutor intentionally misrepresents.
TinyCo‘s Big Opportunity
Thanks for this.

I'm currently using Ubuntu as my primary OS at home but I will give Gentoo a shot.
Fail Fast, Fail Often, And Fail By Design
Not only is this good advice for getting your own things done, but it's good to keep in mind if you're building an app that helps other people get things done. When I was writing "full-time" I loved using 750words.com - it's a sort of freeform journal platform that does a great job implementing measurement-based incentives like this.
Formspring Pageviews Are Up 65 Percent Since September
Can OnSwipe steal magazines back from Apple?
Twitter Apps for Small Businesses
For tasks with an "every few days" nature, it would be handy to have a calendar with, say, a box for each three days.

But you can adapt this method to a regular calendar by marking X's on that day and connected days when you do the action.

So for something like resistance training that you want to do every four days, you can "catch up" on the second, third or fourth unmarked day, but if you go more than four days, the chain is broken.

Note that you can potentially go a week between sessions by being early once then late the next time, so it's a little different than a calendar with multi-day intervals. But that extra flexibility might be helpful for some tasks.
Car crash reporting at its worst. What are we to learn from this - people died? We know that.
Download and install Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread on Nexus One and Nexus S
they just need up-votes - effectively a plus 1
Secret Service interviews "shoot Obama" questioner
You're right. I guess there's no comparable word for someone who's biased against followers of a particular religion, as there is one for someone who's biased against a race. So I used 'racist' as a proxy. Does my use of that word somehow take away from the point?
Read this http://www.andrewmunn.com/2011/01/how-to-land-an-internship-...

about halfway through there is a list of common things even the toughest interviewers in the industry ask about. Read about all of those just to get a good overview. He just talks about interships but those skills will get you fulltime also. Trust me a bunch of people would love to have that guy full time.

Second you have to read yegge.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

He'll help you fill out most of the rest of what you need to know but most importantly teach you about a subject that will make you feel alot better about what you feel like you don't know. The interview Anti-Loop. Basically two interviewers at a large enough company could interview each other and no-hire each other because of the questions they would ask in an interview but are only there because a third that has different interests interviewed both of them.

Now you've got the basics of what you need to learn more about which is largely data structures and algorithms.

Now you're ready to do some functional programming. learn some lisp. I happen to be reading the excellent Land of Lisp book myself now and recommend that also their is http://learnyouahaskell.com/starting-out. I'm sure there are other free online resources other guys here will point out also

Now you can get into Norvig and SICP and go even deeper.

"Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years"
http://norvig.com/21-days.html

"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

I didn't start with them because Norvig starts out discouraging you ,not that he isn't right about how it will take time to improve just that you will be amazed at how fast you can move when you really want it, and SICP can be really daunting if you start with it.

Also there is a great well of books and tutorials online about all the things you want to learn. Compliers to the cormen book you mentioned. The fact that you tried with that book means you are on the right track and you will get it.

Also I can't forget
http://www.topcoder.com/
http://projecteuler.net/

and newcomer
http://www.coderloop.com/

Those sites are places to hone your skills by working on coding problems. The biggest thing you have to do is pick some topics/ problems you are interested in and CODE.

You'll be surprise how far you get and how fast you can get there.
So if I understand correctly this is just a neat trick using existing Redis features (and relying on it's low memory footprint) to easily implement sharding today?

But in an ideal world (Redis cluster) you would run a single node per machine, and Redis would automatically handle sharding, replication etc?
Yeah, it's false. We don't have to consume any one carbohydrate to survive, but in the end, the body's core processes use glucose (and others) to produce the energy we use to do work. Fat can be metabolized into carbohydrates, too. But one way or the other, we need carbs.
More or less the entire web?
so far in this thread, there isn't a single post belittling the OP; almost everyone has immediately stated "you're not stupid". i think that's probably the most encouraging thing i've seen all week.
What I mean is, I love Ruby because I see so much Lisp in it. Lisps are about the only languages more metaprogramming-enabled than Ruby is.

And the software engineering dedication certainly doesn't hurt.
Look Out, Rosetta Stone: Memrise Has a New Vision for Learning Languages