skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is from 2006, five years ago. Aaron Swartz's latest posts have been about decentralizing DNS, and his Twitter viewer.

I'm going to guess that political writing hasn't totally worked out either. I think it was plain from this piece that he thought writing was important, but it wasn't something that he was passionate about. If you're going to make a career of writing, you have to be unable to NOT write.

Anyway, when Aaron wrote that, he was 20, and now he's 25. At this point in his life he should be allowed to try and abandon different philosophies without censure. Actually, maybe we all should be. ;)

On the overall point, I think picking what you do based on "importance" is a fallacy. We don't often see it in comp-sci, but this happens all the time to graduates of law school or med school who have tremendous discipline but little self-knowledge. Almost a decade later they find they hate practicing law or that sick people just make them depressed.

Importance is good. But you also have to pick the thing you're suited for and that gives you some pleasure. Otherwise you will get burned out. I can't help feeling that this also had something to do with Aaron burning out on programming; instead of seeking things that he just likes, he's been drawn into doing "important" things, and judging his own work that way. I wonder if, given his history, it is hard to escape the feeling that he has to work at some world-class scale or do mega-important things. It must be hard to just try something with beginner's mind again.
It's a marketing thing. Startups won't pay crap because we're cheap. Socialite fashionistas working the art gallery circuit will drop big money on pretty pictures. You just need to find someone who really values what you do (which is quite good in my opinion).
I was once followed by the FBI (without my knowledge). They were following someone I knew and I was at their house frequently. They did this for quite some time. I ended up having to meet with an agent to answer his questions. I made sure to meet him at lunch time so he could buy me lunch if he needed me. It ended up being at a coffee shop. He explained to me a situation and wrapped the case (it was a false alert). He promised I would never hear from him again or his agency, but with these guys who knows. I felt a bit weird, but one thing is for sure, if the FBI is following you at least you have somewhat of a protection.
The Register's article http://www.reghardware.com/2011/03/04/sinclair_zx81_annivers... is not bad.
edit: perhaps you should change 'cursors' to 'arrow-keys' or some variant in the instructions.
How long before legislators start drafting up laws to require SSD firmwares to have commands to turn off the garbage collection?
That isn't how science works.
That brought back a memory. Only instead of a wobbly RAM pack I had a tape recorder. This was about 15-20 years ago.
How long is Last.fm gonna last?
I don't think it would be good for developers for Google and Facebook to settle their differences. The last thing we need is the internet in the hands of a giant cartel.
I know i might get downvoted. But, how is this different from places that show a sign saying "no outside drinks or food"? It's not like fb has a monopoly advantage in anything. On the other hand, google has a near monopoly in online ads. This might be a good thing for smaller ads companies.
http://www.middle-east-info.org/gateway.html
Hirednext opens its resume service Internationally
> disassemble the drive and read the memories directly

What will this accomplish if the data has actually been erased? Some sort of low-level analysis to recover erased data? That seems like something that would only be at the CIA/NSA level, and they probably wouldn't want to tip their hand just to put a 'common criminal' behind bars.
My grandmother lived to 95, and was very healthy into her early ninties. Her diet, while generally good, made plenty of room for curries and lager, and she liked to get pretty sloshed on her birthdays. Single data points: Useless.
First comment: What made me faster? Practice, practice, and a healthy dose of more practice.

What made me faster? Copy, paste, and a healthy repository of stuff to copy and paste.
Isn't a consequence of what you are suggesting that in exchange for appearing in the Google search index, websites would be legally forced to accept Google Ads at Google's discretion?
Do you say the same of all people who are paid as professors? For example, Knuth has time to do all that "algorithms", write books about Jesus, and give away software for free, because he doesn't need to work for a living.

As far as I can tell, Hardy was born to a fairly middle-class family (parents were schoolteachers), and got his job at Oxford because he was one of the best English mathematicians of his generation.
I wonder where the asker's degree is from. With the exception of entity-relation diagrams in my Database course, my CS degree didn't touch any of the things he mentioned (I haven't even heard of some of them). Even my DB course didn't focus much on ER diagrams; a significant chunk was over relational algebra.
>Some Microsoft updates did disable Netscape and not in the nice "do you want this to be your default browser" kind of way.

Reference?

I think 'Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence' is true the case of the article. Browsers are extremely complicated things.
The Evolution of Anonymous
>Exactly what is the damage this guy suffered? What's he suing over?

That's what we are trying to find out!
He was being spied on because he has a foreign sounding name -

is he now on a no-fly list?
is he on a secret do-no-hirelist for defense companies? for telecoms companies? for any companies with govt contracts?
Does the FBI secretly OK who state colleges accept?

If being secretly tracked by the secret police is no real damage - at what point is there damage? When the cattle trucks arrive ? Or when they get over 6Million
Kiosk Mode Library for Windows Mobile
Some times when developing Windows Mobile Application you might want to make sure that users cannot navigate to and use any of the other programs except your program . This means that the windows start button in the taskbar must be disabled ...
Great! I'm probably an hour away from releasing version 1.1.1 which makes installation easier and adds a bunch of features. Might want to give it a little bit.
Old but good: The waterfall trap for “agile” projects
Dint work for me (Also in india)
"I haven't read Hardy, but you make him sound like a jerk."

Hardy wrote of Srinivasa Ramanujan's untimely death that it was "not a great tragedy" that he died at the age of thirty-two, as he was already too old to do serious mathematics.

"A Mathematician's Apology" is the bitter rant of a man who only valued one thing in his life and had largely lost the ability to do it in his old age. If I had read it and believed it ten years ago, I never would have gone for my Ph.D. in mathematics.
Fabric hits 1.0
The answer is NO.
Unusual Ways to Live Forever
I agree with you that this doesn't seem to be leading us towards a great utopia.

The problem isn't just programmers creating their own prison though - it's about business models. How do we create this seamless brand-free info sphere and still get paid?
It's easy to keep that discipline when your a billionaire!
Looked great! Maybe you can write up a post or article about how you made it?
These tools serve two, very useful, purposes that aren't often readily apparent unless you have to use them.

1) Organize complexity. UML, for example, is extremely useful as a language capable of describing complex information systems -- just like the periodic table organizes chemical elements or the biological classification taxonomy organizes life -- or perhaps a better analogy are skeletal formulas in chemistry and life sciences.

You can probably get away with not using this language on small projects, maybe less than 10 people and under a quarter million lines of code. But on larger projects, 300 developers on one project spread over a continent and tens of millions of lines of code, some kind of formal organizational method becomes a necessity. Ad hoc diagrams just don't really cut it. You'll be glad to know that UML is not just stick figures anymore, some of the other diagrams do a much better job at modeling and organizing deeper into the design than others.

But like I said, the utility doesn't really become apparent until you deal with this kind of scale.

2) Communication. Similar to the above, but distinct. UML also provides a lingua franca for communications between business people and tech people. It forces business users to apply a rigid logic to their requirements (which can often become contradictory if not controlled by some kind of formal framework) which aids in communicating with engineering staff and forces engineers to stop talking about code and to talk about higher level abstracts that are more easily relatable to business people. The ability to actually communicate between these two parties has been extremely powerful.

In smaller organizations, the business people are quite often the tech folks as well so this isn't as necessary to have. But in most traditional companies, business folks have almost no way of communicating with the engineers in any constructive way without something like this.
"Jeez. This guy really drives a lot, for a student."
14-year old child pornographers? Sexting lawsuits get serious
Getting my masters in computer science was the only time I ever used those tools (thankfully). It was somewhat helpful to learn a few of the UML diagrams as they are referenced in design pattern books, etc. - but I've never had a desire to create my own diagrams, let alone use a tool to create them for me.
Are you suggesting that we shouldn't have the right to decide what ads get shown on our own websites?
None of what I said was insulting or wrong.

Hardy didn't "work" for a living, to him mathematics was an obsessive hobby. He had a very strict routine; get up, walk, maths, watch cricket, tea, maths, eat, etc. He almost had the same daily routine as Kant, another bore, except the cricket.

Also, class has nothing to do with it. He was born into the imperial crown, and given his education, he was guaranteed a post in India or Africa and a "handsome life". The man was no Russel; he was an elitist who was indifferent to reaping the rewards of colonialism.

Knuth is very much a proletariat. No comparison.
> All we have is history to go on and the fact that new jobs have always replaced old ones.

I've always been a little skeptical of this. We all know that the official unemployment rate is a bit misleading as it only counts those actively looking for work, but I suspect historical comparisons show that it's even more misleading than we think.

Let's go back to the 1800s, when technology hadn't yet, according to the Luddite hypothesis, put tons of people out of work.

Back then, retirement didn't exist. So bam, now we've got one segment of the population who are employed. Schooling went to high school at most and higher education was only a tiny fraction of the population. So there's another large segment of the population employed, all those who would be stuck in school now. Basically everyone who is now in undergraduate or graduate school would have been out working a job.

And of course, child labor was legal, so that implies an awful lot of jobs there too. And what about all those people with Downs syndrome or other forms of retardation or mental illness? They were all down on the farm helping with the baling or something. (Just counting the kids in special ed, and not all the adults, there's like 6 million of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_education_in_the_United... )

Now surely some of all of that is necessary to keeping a modern economy running rather than an 1800s one. But how much of that is just killing time or keeping people out of the employment market? Thought experiment: if a fairy suddenly granted all the kids and students and retirees an education and credentials to match (all 20 or 50 million or whatever of them), how many years would it take the market to absorb them and match them up with jobs? Would it ever?
Sony can bitch all they want, it doesn't matter to Geohot until the government gets involved. Now we're playing for keeps. dreamhost isn't complying with Sony, they're complying with a US court order.
Is it permissible in American courts to require the prosecutor to unambiguously define "hacker" before answering?

If not, can you feign ignorance of the definition and explain that you are thus literally incapable of providing an honest & informed answer; and since you are under oath, require a definition before answering?
Interesting.
There was a paper recently that argues the opposite.

http://www.usenix.org/events/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf

What's the truth here? Are they arguing at different abstraction layers?
We sure did wreck that place up, didn't we.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." --William Shakespeare, Henry VI

Maybe this is coming true in an unexpected way.
Thomas, it's your point I'd like to hear from more hackers. I went through a similar period years ago, slowly discovering that I hated programming, and certainly had no idea it was ubiquitous. I had just started a new company and it was the worst possible time to learn it. Moreso, programming from boyhood (whizkid!) made it sewn up in my identity. Crisis!

Management was an escape for a while. And luckily it disappeared, like teenage allergies. Now I can't wait to hack in the mornings. But at the time, it was devastating.

On a related point, all the folks I know who exited programming for other careers, were lesser programmers. I certainly didn't want to make that self-discovery. :)
To me, being familiar enough with UML to sketch efficient and consistent diagrams on a whiteboard or whatever has justified the time spent learning it. I don't care about absolute correctness, but just having the reserve of ideas to draw from when you are trying to communicate a complex idea to a group of people has proven valuable to me throughout my professional career.
What are the technologies used by Y Combinator funded companies?
The more people use webkit based browsers and less of the others the better the world will be. I feel for the guys at Mozilla but I can not recommend Firefox to anyone, at least not on Macs. It is the slowest application I run. Application switching to or from Firefox is amazingly slow, as in I can count the finger of my hands as I am simply alt+tabbing to Firefox. In addition it eats memory and if you leave it open long enough it just starts bugging out in weird ways.
Given the included JAR files, I'd be interested to know if the author measured only his performance in coding Java against his students.

Although I usually code in a basic text editor, Java is one of those languages in which I personally found setting up and getting familiar with a good IDE makes a huge difference. Back at University, my pure CS professors initially discouraged us from using Eclipse, Netbeans, etc. They certainly didn't want to teach us how to use them.
It would have been a much better article if he did it with HTML 5 and Canvas.
Ok.

UML does NOT equal CASE. Yes, you can use MDA and other techniques to somehow convert UML and OCL into a quasi-CASE tool, and there are lots of folks excited about UML as part of a code-generation tier, but UML is a specification for drawing technical diagrams. That's it.

UML is also not a methodology. Yes, there are methodologies that rely on bits of UML but that's a one-way association. You can use UML all the time and never do a bit of any kind of methodology.

UML is also not for large projects. Yes, it helps to diagram things instead of writing them out, especially if you have 100 developers or more. But drawing things can help teams as small as two people. Heck, drawing things can help a sole developer.

You need to be clear about the question if you would like to get a meaningful answer. UML is for drawing pictures in a consistent way. So is the question "Do real developers draw pictures consistently?" Because in my teams, we use UML when we need to sketch out things so that everybody has some baseline to understand what's being drawn. It has nothing to do with generating code, completing a process, or being part of some huge team.

I liked this comment: If a diagram takes more than 5 minutes to sketch on the back of an envelope it is generally too complex

I might extend it to 15-20 minutes, but the gist here is correct, at least for small teams. Different story entirely with large teams, though. With a large team, having a visual roadmap of where things are and where things go is hell of a lot better than trying to type it up in a Word document or teach people by random story-telling. (It should still be pretty simple, though. The purpose is communication, not documentation or showing people how detailed you can make something)
I'd love to hear some more details about the design decisions you made and any performance tradeoffs you ran into.

Otherwise, it's a great start. Some things you might consider:

* Better explosions. You can get pretty good effects with expanding/contracting colored circles, or using an animated sprite. I'm not sure what would be more efficient in html5. For an example check out the explosions in http://mochiland.com/articles/flash-game-friday-death-vs-mon...

* Reduce the size of the player's collision box. Most 'bullet hell' shooters actually use a box much smaller than the player sprite to give the player a bit of leeway as they try to dodge bullets.

* There's a pretty big size mismatch between the player and the enemies, maybe even that out a bit? The small enemies are cool because you can have a lot in a wave, but as a player the small enemies felt frustratingly hard to hit sometimes.

* Bullet image sprites. Guessing there's a performance issue here but I thought I'd suggest it anyways just in case you haven't tried it. A nice bullet sprite will make enemy bullets easier to read and easier for the player to dodge.
Ask HN: which platform/framework should I begin game development on?
I have been a programmer for well over a decade, and have been working at a big company for the past 4 years, and am familiar with Java, C#, Javascript, HTML.

I would like to develop something on my own in my free time and I have a few ideas for some games that I would personally find fun to play. These games are 2D and can be extended to support multiplayer.

I have no piror game development experience, other than some copying BASIC code from some magazine in the early years.

For a start, I just want to have something working. Thinking ahead, it would be nice to have some revenue, and even have the games on multiple platforms without having to rewrite everything.

Should I use Java, Flash, HTML5, Javascript, iOS, XNA or some other game development frameworks or engines?
I agree it is a tough question.

But it is a different question than "how did we get here?" which is the question I answered.

If we don't know how we got here, or what the nature of the problem is, how can we ever expect to solve it?
Any time the news agency is Fox and the government agency is a public or social service, so, reasonably often.
4.0 seems a lot better to me.
This comment is neat because it displays a spectrum of reasonableness.

Graf 1: Ok, good point! He's suing to find something out, not because of real damages. Good for him.

Graf 2: Gettin' shaky. No-fly lists! Tapped phones! And... the FBI secretly controls college admissions?

Graf 3: Nazis.

Thank you! If this was tongue-in-cheek, well played.
Is programming speed something that a university lecturer really needs to dwell on like this? I would have thought speed is more a natural by-product of familiarity than something that can be actively taught. And even if it can be taught, is there merit in actively working on it rather than on, say, ensuring correctness?
I see an arbitrage opportunity! Create ad company, get into facebook list, backfill with Google ads.
If the meteorites were found on earth, couldn't the fossils stem from local bacteria? Maybe the meteorite hit earth a long time ago, long enough so fossils could form.
Firefox has been getting progressively more memory hungry, indeed. At the moment my Firefox is at 314 MB with very few addons and 4 tabs open (none of the tabs have flash or dynamic stuff going on). I've seen it reach half a gig of memory easily, too.

I've heard that Firefox 4.0 is better though; will half to give it a shot soon.
Threads, Events, and Objects (in Qt but more broadly applicable)
Mac App Store is just not going to work
Spray & pray product development a.k.a. “the pizza syndrome”
Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout
Stylus, the Revolutionary Successor to CSS
"rejoicing in someone else's delivery of value with something I built for them"

I think that's kind of a weird definition of programming. I don't know why it rubs me the wrong way. I find tremendous joy in writing and reading code which does something cool, even if those somethings don't provide value to the outside world.

Of course, programming means different things for different people, and there's nothing inherently wrong with your definition. I just think it's a bit broad and maybe misses the mark for a lot of people who really enjoy programming itself, rather than as a means to some end.
We don't have non-paying users. :-)
It costs US$300 000 a year to tail his car 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, using human investigators. That's a pretty substantial check on the FBI's surveillance ability, independent of any court. They probably wouldn't have done much surveillance of the guy without a little more review of his activities.

I'm guessing a satellite transponder with GPS costs about US$2000, and a cellular-network transponder with GPS might cost US$200. At that price, it may become necessary for courts to step in to provide a level of oversight that the simple costs of surveillance no longer do.
It is usually a pleasure to be able to do something well. But I have come to believe society is not "owed" one's (supposed) "best" talents. I have come to believe that the common social message that "if you are good at something, it is a Gift and you have an obligation to better society with your Gifts" is incredibly sick. I think it does enormous harm, to both individuals and society.
"Why should it be unconstitutional for the FBI to use technology to do something they can clearly already do without technology?"

I doubt he has a case, but following/watching is passive observation and the tracker manipulates private property, and I believe the latter is more severe. What if they installed a laser tripwire, without a warrant, across someone's property to measure when they come and go? If both endpoints are on public property, it seems reasonable. It's just a passive observation from public property. But installing it right on their doorstep? Inside the house's threshold? Or on every doorway in the house? In that progression, there's clearly a point where it is no longer constitutional without a warrant. Using an equivalence with the practical result - determining when people come and go - suggests it's OK to install a device on the doorstep, since no extra bits of information are gleaned as opposed to watching from the street. But actually entering property to make modifications is no longer passive, which is where I take issue. After all, I can't paint someone else's garage more tastefully, no matter how ugly it is! I believe the same threshold should apply to your personal car, even though I doubt it does.

If technology makes passive observation efficient, then that's great. But planting a tracking device on the car is no longer passive observation.