skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At first it was small steps — discussing programming instead of doing it, then discussing things for programmers, and then discussing other topics altogether.

This is the trap of "programmers' communities", including HN. For many years, I was a programmer by day and a civilian by night. There really wasn't much social life for programmers together. Then when I starting socializing with other programmers over beer, coffee, or on-line, my first thought was, "Finally! A group I belong in." My second thought was, "Be careful. Talking about work is not work. Have fun, but get back to work!"

...the only responsible way to live my life would be to do something that would only be done by someone who knew this thing...

That's the main reason I'm a programmer: What I write is needed and doesn't already exist. If it did, I'd probably be doing something else.

...it went amazingly well and I have since become convinced that I’m a pretty good programmer

Here's a dirty little elusive secret: It doesn't matter how good a programmer you are. All that really matters is whether or not what you build is good enough.

I don’t want to be a programmer. When I look at programming books, I am more tempted to mock them than to read them. When I go to programmer conferences, I’d rather skip out and talk politics than programming. And writing code, although it can be enjoyable, is hardly something I want to spend my life doing.

LookingAtProgrammingBooks != Programming

GoingToProgrammingConferences != Programming

WritingCode != Programming (well maybe a little)

My definition of Programming: "rejoicing in someone else's delivery of value with something I built for them". With a definition like that, I can't imagine doing anything else. I bet if we all focused on that, those many speed bumps wouldn't seem so high.

The writing is too important, the programming too unenjoyable.

You found your voice in prose, not syntax. Many spend their entire lives searching for their voice without ever finding it. Good for you.
Tl;dr: when a user chooses to delete a file on an SSD, it actually gets deleted. Outrage!
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This is almost never the case with Facebook. If you're successful and Facebook doesn't like what you're building then they shut you off without notice. No application depending on their API ever has any 'leverage'.
I'm not so sure about this being a good thing from the user's perspective. The fact that it's possible to recover deleted data from HDDs has saved people from grief over years of lost work. Not everyone is smart about backups.
Building virtual crime scenes in the ediscovery world
This will not end well.
Per the end of the article, you can't be sure it's gone forever: http://news.techworld.com/storage/3262210/ssd-drives-difficu...

If you're wiping the entire drive and the firmware isn't buggy, you should be ok - but being sure that single file(s) are actually deleted is not likely.
that gradient blue background is horrible. why don't you go back to ZURB and copy their wood floor motif? Also I know that font is sometimes one of those things that is a 'personal choice' but again, I personally hate the choice you've made.

I'm not trying to insult you, but if you're looking for a job, these are the types of criticisms that can help improve your chances.

Fluorescent-Light-blue with a text stroke on a gradient blue background, is again, horrible. Copy ZURBS.

Finally, again maybe it's my personal reaction... but "Digital Shadow" isn't really a wide-spread term yet is it? I had to google it to find out what the heck you were on about. Maybe I'm a bit of a rube but in terms of design KIS4S (keep it simple for stupid).

If I'm too stupid to know what Digital Shadow is, maybe call it "Portfolio" or "Find me on the Web"

I think the first comes off as a bit more professional, the second as more personable, both are preferable to pretentious. (No insult intended, but I think it might help).

Good luck with the job hunt.
Greetings, non-French comrade! Your quote is a bit off — it reads "the more it changes it, the more it the same". A better way to write it would be "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." :) [/language pedantic]
> "I fear, this decision deprives society of one great programmer in favor of one mediocre writer...And for that, I apologize."

Please, the world will not tumble, it wont even remember you (except those of us that loved using web.py :P). There are many others just like you, please get over yourself. This post was hard to read without context. It must have been intended for someone specifically who depended on him because if he is really talking to the world and apologizing to the world, man is that an ego. Narcissism much?
A fair reply, thanks. Maybe we're not so different as the initial disagreement would show.

The system is a two party stable oligarchy anyway.

I've been saying this forever. DEM and GOP are just two sides of the same coin, with barely a hair's breadth of difference between them.

If hard money is wrong, soft money should be too.

Logically that makes sense, but I'm arriving at a different solution than you. I think that the freedom of speech (together with some others, like self-defense, property rights, and freedom to engage in contracts) are paramount. Because our system is fundamentally designed to guarantee natural rights, but only incidentally democratic, when rights and voting are in tension, it should be the freedom of speech that wins over electoral procedures.
منتديات سنين نبضك
Apple’s customer unfriendly iPad2 sales plan
No, they're just collecting rent from them on ec2.
Whups, my very rusty French is showing. Thanks!
Guinness: Súper Barmen preparan más de 1.5 mil cócteles en una hora
Web developers, not really.
Being able to implement a working 2PC makes you a distributed systems programmer. It's not a piece of trivia.

It won't take you a month to learn these things, but with commit protocols in particular, you have to implement and test them to really grok them.
Tuong lai quan tri: Nhan vien sa thai sep
Có những công ty nơi nhân viên có quyền bầu Sếp, sa thải sếp và từ chối mọi yêu cầu từ sếp? Hay nhỉ? Chắc chỉ có ở trong chuyện cổ tích. Không. Điều ấy có trong cuốn "Tương lai của quản trị" của Gary Hamel, nhà tư tưởng quản trị kinh doanh số 1 thế giới hiện nay theo đánh giá của tờ Wall Street Journal.
The funny thing is that Microsoft's adCenter isn't on the list of approved providers, which is a little surprising given that Microsoft and Facebook already seem to have a decent relationship.
This is an incredibly important point. Perhaps more importantly, African American (or Black, at that time) community leader.

To the semi-OP: Don't look at what the government fails to explain and do their work for them. Don't take what they say and then look for the hidden context -- in their favor.

It's THEIR job to justify the suspicious-looking things they do, NOT ours. They answer to us.

If they only say he's a community leader, then ask yourself: "Why the hell are you monitoring community leaders? You gotta do better than that."

Because either A) There is a genuine reason and they're now foolishly refusing to say it, which is ludicrous at this point now that it's out in the open. Or the more likely B) It's a load of crap and they don't know what they're doing, they're wasting time, money and civil rights monitoring people who have done absolutely nothing wrong.
A Mathematician's Apology is a must read as a great insight into opportunity costs and life choices. I found it by accident but it left a deep groove in my psyche.

http://web.njit.edu/~akansu/PAPERS/GHHardy-AMathematiciansAp...
> "... upon request, the Advertising Provider agrees to provide Facebook the names of and contact information for any employees and/or contractors "

I didn't see anything prohibiting Facebook from selling that information to headhunters, er, recruiting firms.
Oh I definitely agree here. Great programmers only got good because they love to geek out about it. That's not something that can be trained. Given that the OP shouldn't feel bad for not wanting to program, he should spend his time following his passion!
So, in the end, the Archimedes really won ;-)

I remember an article on BYTE (badly missed) that pictured an Archimedes as capable of doing floating point math faster than a 386 with a 387 attached.

I always wanted one.
More on the effect of erasing SSDs: http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/flash/reliably-erasing....
Today is Defriend Day
Why groupon has nothing to do with group discounts...
[New Song] The Wanted - Gold Forever
I was slightly luckier. I had a clone with 16K of RAM and a calculator-style keyboard. Gladly, its BASIC (and, later, Microsoft's Applesoft) didn't mutilate me that much.
Advanced Features of Joye eGo Electronic Cigarette
It is hitting the client's pain point, though. There is a huge push in the industry to lower costs, and law firms are feeling, though resisting, this push.
"I know of one [...] . I think it is very likely that YC has a strong bias [...]" is an interesting way to construct an argument. :)
U.S. should provide airborne cell phone towers to help Libyan rebels
I know several of the firms quoted pretty well. I don't think they sponsored it, I think they just have very good PR departments.
"Forensic analysis" as it works today on magnetic hard drives works is heavily based on the principles under which these type of drives operate. They take advantage of the fact that deleting a file does not actually delete a file on disk, as it is more efficient to simply mark those areas as unused. They are taking advantage of an optimisation that has been done for decades.

SSDs are completely different. The optimisation no longer works, since flash memory has no overwrite operation, only a block-erase operation (which is a slow operation - and the erase blocks are relatively huge). In order to stay efficient, SSDs must perform background free space management, which includes erasing unused blocks in advance in order to be ready for new data.

This should be obvious to anyone who understands how flash memory works. SSD manufacturers have no option here. It's a fundamental side-effect of the technology.

"Forensic analysis" that depends on an optimisation performed on a system using a hard drive will no longer work with a different technology that cannot use that optimisation. They were exploiting something that is not necessarily going to be possible any more.

If they want a clean equivalent of a "write blocker", they are going to have to somehow disable the SSD's background management before powering up the drive. This might not help so much though if the background management has already erased unused blocks after the user deleted files.

I will accept though that this means that people working in the field will need to change their procedures.

Summary: forensic analysis only works because of an optimisation that systems using magnetic hard drives did but systems using SSDs can't. How is this surprising?
> was the precursor to the computer that completely revolutionised the UK's computing industry

I may be wrong, but I always had the impression that honor belonged to the Beeb, not the Spectrum.
I've found the response "The question assumes facts not in evidence" to be a fine answer to questions of that nature.
It's meant to be in the style of A Mathematician's Apology, which is an essay that explains the motivations of a mathematician.

> Narcissism much?

It's not narcissism at all. It's a frank look at a programmer struggling with his own understanding of his craft. Narcissism is something that is self-centered and smug -- this is none of those, and it's a frank look at his failings and his greatness.

> There are many others just like you, please get over yourself.

Of course there are! That's who he's writing it for, and there are many, many more who aren't like him and that's also who he's writing it for.

> This post was hard to read without context.

The context for this post is: The writer is a (great?) programmer and the reader possesses, or wants to possess, some understanding of human beings that is not derived from TV and comic books.
One of the things the article doesn't address is how do we determine the accuracy of these tools and processes?

Self-serving answer - http://integriography.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/building-virt...

It is a real problem and not one we're trying to create. There was a lot of discussion at Legal Tech this year about the need to determine the accuracy of ediscovery processes, and in particular, review processes.
What is the YC company building the "pokemon" social game?
The whole (rather breathless) point of the article is that SSDs erases the blocks quite rapidly. It isn't that the old blocks are still laying around but the researchers did not know how to access them, it is that (a) they are erased rapidly under normal conditions and (b) they are erased even when they researchers used a "write blocker" mechanism[1]. IOW, they (the article's author, anyway) were apparently surprised to find that the SDD garbage collected autonomously and regardless of the "write blocker" mechanism).

The (a) case is likely OSes using the "trim" command and the (b) cases are inherent in how SSD firmware works (by necessity). WRT the (b) case, SSDs have to garbage collect. Their write speed, and thus user satisfaction, is dependent on it keeping a large number of erased blocks ready to be written to.

[1] http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Write_Blockers - apparently simply a "man in the middle" hardware that filters out write commands, lets through read commands.

Obviously, there is no reasonable way for a SDD to even know that a "write blocker" is attached, so it is not surprising (to me) that the SDD garbage collects with it attached.
Facebook doesn't want to be a Microsoft partner, they want to be AOL, circa 1994. (ie, a walled garden)
For my little branch of this comment thread, can we leave aside the FBI's reason for planting a GPS monitor? Just assume the FBI had no reason whatsoever. That they did it randomly. I tend to agree that in this case, they didn't seem to have a good reason. But, then:

Exactly what is the damage this guy suffered? What's he suing over?

Why should it be unconstitutional for the FBI to use technology to do something they can clearly already do without technology? It is not a violation of your civil rights for an unmarked car to follow you around and watch you.

There clearly is a line here, so let me foreclose on that response right up front. Yes, it would be unconstitutional if the FBI tried to track all of us, by making coded GPS monitors mandatory on all cars.

But in this case, if they couldn't plant the monitor, they could just follow him. He'd have no case. It's almost exactly the same loss of privacy. So why it such a big deal in the GPS case?
"deprives society of one great programmer in favor of one mediocre writer"

I'd say since you care about writing you will eventually excel at it. Of course, society will be the ultimate judge. But you have passion for writing and that matters more than society's perception about what you should be doing.
It also means that the courts will need to accept that the image taken of an SSD will not match a second image. The courts, and the computer forensics community, had a hard time accepting collecting RAM but that's now a pretty standard part of the process. It will be easy to extend RAM analysis procedures to SSDs.
This is pretty brilliant. A simulator of this device would make a good tool teaching tool for helping people grok bayes' formula. Weekend project anyone?
Do you have any references for this? I am interested in reading more?
I'd argue that Google would be terribly afraid of a lawsuit that might establish that the search market is something those laws apply to.
Nope. I'm often on gmail and am looking at an email from a (non-technical) friend of mine, when a little text ad for a nice little 1U opteron machine shows up top. I click, because I'm interested.
I read over this twice and couldn't understand what is being said. Can someone explain what is being said here?
Aaron. I promise, it is all love with me and this comment. But, get over yourself. You are the 100 zillionth programmer to discover they are sick of programming and of the programming "scene". One programmer I knew became a roofer. Another became a trader. I know programmers who became doctors and lawyers. I haven't read Hardy, but you make him sound like a jerk.
Anyone in the UK using the Long Week to start a startup?
Pocodot.com pay army of outsourcers to create artificial buzz before launch
Facebook is going to destroy Google. Google is fighting too many battles; Facebook with the left hand, Apple with the right, Microsoft with its left leg.

Facebook only has one enemy, besides the Federal Government.
Google claims WebM is patent free.

MPEG-LA doesn't claim H.264 is patent free - they just offer a simplified way to license a large number of patents.

If it is FUD, perhaps you can offer an explanation rather than just deflection.
With all the contact information available if you really want to know something like this then why not fire off a mail. My perception is that the guys that get funded are usually just decent guys in the most part, sure they wouldn't mind if the information isn't too obtrusive.
I strongly suspect that, in the future, SSDs will have to respect a "cooperate with the police" signal in order to be sold in some places. As for drives that don't, experts can always disassemble the drive and read the memories directly. It's not like the flash memories inside them are special (albeit it's a matter of time - if not already - that smart memory controllers are built into the chips themselves).
I think we are behind schedule for Back to the Future 2's 2015 prediction of the abolition of all lawyers.
These tools serve 3 purposes:

1. To make theory more closely match practice that already works. This gives teachers something to teach.

2. To make someone who doesn't know what he's doing appear as if he did. This gives consulting firms profitability.

3. To help organize the System Development Life Cycle (waterfall process) of very large projects. This gives someone who knows what they're doing a few more tools in their toolbox.

My take? If you've really found good use for tools like these, then your project is probably too big. Break it down into smaller pieces, build a prototype for each piece, get feedback, and refine. It's not how quickly you appear to get started; it's how soon you deliver something of value.
That's pretty awesome. Now if only we could build a multivariate version that let you estimate covariance matrices also ...
What happens when a computer program runs?
> I know of one incredibly talented potential female founder who applied with a killer idea and was rejected.

I know of dozens of incredibly talented potential male founders who applied with killer ideas and were rejected. Seriously.

> I think it is very likely that YC has a strong bias towards men, which this data certainly supports.

Why do you think it's very likely? What data supports that. As one of the other commentators already pointed out, the percentage of YC founders that are women is about equal to the percentage that apply. Saying that the "data support" the argument that YC is biased when there is such an obvious alternative explanation (namely, that there are less female founders) is disingenuous.

> since YC is a for profit business they are making economically sound decisions.

Wait, what? Are you saying that since Silicon Valley (I'm guessing you mean investors in this context?) favors men, YC intentionally (and consciously) chooses to fund men in order to increase the chances that YC founders raise subsequent rounds of financing? That's crazy talk...

> saying any fault lies with women is really unfair.

I don't think anybody is "faulting" women. They are just stating the facts - there are less female engineers, and less female YC applicants.
Euler's Identity (and other maths) explained in 5 minutes
Runners get high like few people can: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com%2...

All on their own supply. ;)
I think you were consulting in fairly good shops, OR it is more a geographical thing, but man, that wasn't my experience. I was working in one of the better .net companies in toronto -- we were an MS gold partner, our CTO was an MVP and was frequently on the conference circuit, and we sponsored the local user group. I met and worked with a lot of great devs in the MS community, but frustration at that tunnel-vision thing was probably what ultimately got me to jump platforms

I sort of disagree on the DVCS point, just because the technology is so much better all around. If I start working on something, I make a branch for it. When I am done, I pull master, and rebase my topic branch back on top of the other work people have done. This allows for a few things.

1) If I get interrupted and need to work on something else, not only am I able to, but switching back to master, pulling, and branching again takes under 20 seconds and is 3 commands.

2) If someone else is working on the same part of the code base, I can pull their half done work from them directly if I need to, while keeping the mainline clean and in working order. Where I work we do pair programming, so this is really huge, any time we want to switch roles it is just a local commit and pull away.

3) no single point of failure. I don't know if this has happened to you before, but if your svn server gets corrupted, basically work completely stops until it is fixed. Reconstructing a recent version of your code base based on whats on dev machines is pretty much asking who was the last one to pull, because again, dev work doesn't mess with master since branching is so easy, so everyone should have a clean version of the mainline on their machines.

I think the advantages of DVCS are _way_ more obvious for open source projects, but you can see a lot of benefits using it pretty much anywhere.
Hardy was a whining, privileged bore. He had the time to do all that "maths" and watch all those cricket games because he didn't need to work for a living.
Business consultants need UML to communicate with Tech guys.
Simple Processing.js development in your browser
'Deleted data' = 'evidence'?

'Fascism' = 'Peace'?
Facebook screws over developers because they can. Expect more of it. From lots of other vendors.

The reason they screw developers and consumers over is because of the way we access the internet, using a browser, an URL, and a single-site "visit" metaphor. We are programmers, though. We are free to redefine how we access the internet any time we like. We have created our own prison.

We can do better than this.
You can cash out btc for US$ or other currencies pretty easily. See http://mtgox.com .
And is UML/CASE ever it?
It's left hand probably has more employees than facebook.
My recollection is that schools adopted the BBC, but consumers bought the Spectrum. Later on (as I recall) the C64 took an increasingly large share of the market.