skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't know how many times I've watched eager hackers get lambasted for "reinventing the wheel,"

Depends on context.. If it's someone learning, or hacking on some personal project, go ahead! It's a great way to learn.

However, if we're talking about a programmer in a commercial company, it's a different story. Your purpose is not to produce the most amount of your own code, your task is to produce a service of some sort. Unless the software/service you're working on a is a database, I expect you would use an existing database (assuming you need one). If the code you're creating needs to manipulate dates, I expect you use an existing library for such things. It will be available, it will be tested, it will handle all edge cases. Why would it be acceptable to spend a lot of time on reinventing that particular wheel, fixing bugs as they arise, etc?
Sending this to the few of my friends who still think Net Neutrality is a bad idea. If blocked porn can't convince them, nothing will.
Are you the type of person who never expresses derision of something? Only using emotionally neutral words to describe anything?

"fuckwit" is defined as someone hopelessly lost, so much so they deserve a heaping helping of scorn for being so. The use of "fuckwit" added something for me. The people are very lost with respect to the thing we have called society, playing nice, and determining the importance of the piece they're commenting on. They deserve scorn for being that way. To express this another way (and to not accidentally evoke pity for them), you have to say "So clueless as to require scorn" or something equally awkward. Or someone could call the fuckwits a fuckwit and be done with it, getting across a precise shade of meaning.

From the Urban Dictionary:
fuckwit

A person who is not only lacking in clue but is apparently unable or unwilling to acquire clue even when handed it on a plate in generous portions.
Can you cite specific sources? I'd like to know specifically what you're referring to.
That's undoubtedly true, but I wonder if the GitHub guys had picked up Mercurial instead if it would have grown as fast.
Ii dunno.. Nvida GTx 280, Asus Gene II, i7 920, Corsair Ram Desktop. Before that, a standard IBM x41 tablet. I'm not going that extreme here in the hardware side
I don't think it's true in general that hackers (or geeks) "are jackasses to one another". Rather, it seems to depend a lot on the community. For example, I tend to work with Rails software, and the communities that I've encountered have (without exception!) been very friendly.

Though pessimism aside, I think the post is spot-on with its argument!
Absolutely unacceptable. I was planning on upgrading from free to 100GB literally today but this changes my mind.

How can I trust that Dropbox cares about the safety of my data when they make such amateur security mistakes in their mobile app?
> The iPad 2's early success is a warning sign of a global tablet bubble, where supply could outpace demand for tablets by about 36 percent, said J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz.

It's official: everything is a bubble now.
Well with what their living knowing that a nuclear reactor won't blow up is still good news. I really hope it doesn't get worst...
The most interesting thing is that 70% customers purchasing the iPad 2 are first-time iPad buyers.
I'm a PC. :(

Chrome is so decent at modifying CSS & previewing the changes, seems like there could be a (simple?) extension that would track changes you make and give you a shareable preview link. Right? Are there other complexities I'm missing?
#WINNING  SXSW and #LOSING in Japan
I think that the issue of open hostility in online communities stems from Anonymity more than anything else. Most people are very conciliatory face to face. Honestly, I'd prefer something between open hostility and straight up pacification. I definitely want constructive criticism, which is why I tend to like Hacker News. The comments that I have seen here tend to be more constructive than other places on the intertubes.
I'm colorblind, so maybe it's that, but
the latest color scheme & widgets are awful. Maybe it's an American thing.

Don't try to be clever with design, most everyone sucks at it. "borrow" concepts, colors, & looks from iOS if you have to.
I think there is a viral angle. There were a group of friends at college, all CS majors and we competed on our grades. We all wanted to one up each other.

I can see the ability to have a score board of some kind where you can share your grades with friends. This could help spread the word a bit.
Yes, however the criticism the author is complaining about it not any criticism at all, it's about the low order, non substantive, non-topical type.

Spolsky or PG wrote up a piece on this a bit back.
Why India Might Save the Planet
I just confirmed that it's a hoax with someone at a company that owns screens in Times Square.
Cool. I think meeting new people (not necessarily for dating) is one area that social networks still haven't perfected. I predict that interest-based social networks will gain popularity as people grow tired of their junk-ridden Facebook feeds and start to look for people they can communicate with about topics they care about, rather than topics that their friends care about.
Ehn. There's a reason he rhetorically asks whether we're back in high school - this isn't just geek behavior. I've experienced this attitude from plenty of people who aren't at all geeky, and I've encountered some very nice geeks.

Under certain sets of circumstances, people just tend to be dicks - and the internet contains many cases of those circumstances.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
1) You are doing browser level cache optimization and bike-shedding, I am looking at it from an ISP level. Once you have a big pipe and many users, things like this actually start to have a noticeable effect on bandwidth usage. Further, no matter what your use case, it has almost no bearing on the normal (statistically normal no digressions please) use case.

2) So I see what you are saying, but you are wrong -- the ETag still requires a lookup of "did content change since then, based on this tag". My system does not preclude a similar mapping of (tag value, last change) in the server.

3) Yeah, I know, my point is that a standardized hashing method for the ETag provides benefits on top of the ETag. Sometimes everyone playing nicely together actually works out better than lots of flexibility.
> bah e^(0.5τi)+1=0

nah e^(τi)=1
Whoa-- I think you're misreading the study. To quote:

"So were Groupon promotions profitable for our respondents? Yes, they were, for about two thirds (or 66%) of our respondents. However, a significant number in our study, 48(or 32%) reported their Groupon promotion was not profitable."

It's important to note that this is a SURVEY-- I'd wager most small businesses have no way of tracking the marketing impact of a Groupon (i.e. how many people come from 2nd visits or word of mouth from Grouponeers).

Interestingly-- the survey also asked how people of the merchants would use Groupon again and how many would recommend it to another merchant. 42% said they wouldn't use Groupon again-- so they definitely have some challenges.
Why does your app need access to my pictures and videos? That creeps me out.
Garbage collection back in the 90's. Java really ran with that one.
There are lots of examples for [2], but we should avoid listing them as they'll lead to arguments.

In fact, we should also avoid listings for [1] since that can lead to anger venting.
Amazon grabs exclusive on Angry Birds Rio for Android phones
Yes. At least, the kid part should happen in the next week or so.

I imagine you bring it up because losing your job is a much bigger deal when you have a family and expensive stuff. I'd counter that it's only a big deal if you're not certain that you can pick up a new job any time you want.

The best way to acquire that certainty is to spend the first several years of your career proving it to yourself.

- don't sweat your career, make a name for yourself

- find yourself on the market for whatever reason

- immediately get snapped up

- repeat

If you're provably good at what you do, jobs are plentiful. Enough so that losing one doesn't really do much aside from forcing you to grab a better one.
There are batteries, they ran the pumps for almost 8 hours. That was one of the backups.
Intel buys 4G LTE firm SySDSoft in Egypt
Heh, perhaps Sun's demise helped thin client in a way? ;-)
Too bad the site is currently too slow for me to close as "not a real question".
Condescending feedback says more about the speaker than the listener. It is almost invariably about their own insecurity. This is true is almost all fields of endeavor, not just programming.

Just a few examples of my own:

Insecure bridge player: The queen of spades was a stupid play. What's wrong with you?

Excellent bridge player: The queen of spades would have been a great play against a 4/2 split. But since you had a 3/3 split, what do you think would have happened if you had played the ace instead?

Insecure public speaker: You look like an idiot playing with your hands like that.

Excellent public speaker: You talked about a lot of cool things. I bet I would have been even more interested if I wasn't distracted so much by your hand gestures.

Insecure parent: If you can't keep that baby quiet, you should just stay at home!

Excellent parent: Here's something that has really worked well for me when my kids cried in public...

Insecure programmer: How lame. I can't believe you <insert almost anything you could have done>.

Excellent programmer: I see that works. I have found a few ways to make it work even better. Let me know what you think.
Ubuntu 4?

I'm also somewhat tired of upgrading every 6 months just so that I can have up-to-date applications; I may switch back to Debian proper.
How To Turn Off Your New Photo Viewer In Facebook
IPad 2&prime;s Smart Cover Teardown
No need to look so far. The area of a circle is πr^2.
π without 2 is used everywhere.
He also withheld information from the investigators. If you blow the whistle, you're expected to give everything up, not just the stuff that doesn't make you look bad. THAT'S why they nailed him to a cross; he tried to double-deal.
So you're saying we're in a bubble bubble?
I don't like this generalization. I've met all sorts of geeks, nerds and hackers. Some are horrible to each other, some are very nice. I can't see that it's helpful to accuse all of us of being bastards.

On the other hand, I have seen code that I found horribly upsetting and I'm sure I've expressed my opinion of it. I know that I have the patience of something with a very small amount of patience when I come across someone who just doesn't instantly get concepts (for this reason I cannot do family tech support) and I did make my college girlfriend (also doing computer science) cry once because I just rattled off an entire programming assignment without touching the computer (she switched courses).

So, it really depends. If it was someone junior to me I'd cut them a lot of slack, if it was someone I considered my intellectual peer they'd need to roll with the punches.
it's a random number generator! you shouldn't be relying on any particular property other than that it passes the statistical tests for randomness.
As of now, users do not have persistent identities. Depending on how Freeversation develops, we may eventually let users opt-in for such aliases.
If you make it all the way through, congrats! I apologize for the length of the post, but it was just dying to get out of me.
... without conditionals.

Cute puzzle, nice to see some inventive torturing of C, and various dialects that people believe are C.
calais:

http://blog.viewchange.org/2010/05/entity-extraction-content...

kea, libextract

http://www.nzdl.org/Kea/

http://www.gnu.org/software/libextractor/
A proof that the quicksort algorithm terminates on all inputs
Testing my new language... This might be the slowest quicksort implementation yet, but hey, I didn't claim the code was optimal.
it is driven by pure sine waves -- you can't have polyphony or voice spectra (easily...)
Agreed, we have this in our offices and it really sucks. We didn't have issues with the whitey boards arriving damaged, but they don't stick very well and tend to slowly peel off the walls. In addition, you can't really erase anything off of them without water or some sort of spray and a paper towel. Erasers don't do jack.
Good point. I actually added that in because I initially wanted to allow users to select which profile picture they wanted to use. But I decided to drop that feature for the MVP. I've updated the FB permission request.
>Spolsky or PG wrote up a piece on this a bit back.

I'd love to see it if you can remember the title...
You're right: it's a preference for "one obvious way", not saying that there's "only one way". My error for saying this the way that I did.

Ruby also has a bit of the "obvious way" (convention over configuration) stuff, but it's not as front-and-center as, say, the Zen of Python (where the obvious way stuff comes from, IIRC).

There's more in common than not in common between the two languages. I still prefer Ruby because it works the way my brain does (or, more accurately, there are choices made in Python design that do not work the way my brain does).
For Mark's sake I hope that is a misquote. It's a complete non-sequitor.
Well darn, that looks even nicer.
Much of this isn't "geekdom" it's the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory in action: http://www.crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/shitcoc...

I've been to many BarCamps, local Ruby on Rails and Web design meetups and people are incredibly giving of their time, knowledge and patience.

It is a profoundly different thing to meet someone in person, who is struggling with some technical issue, than to read about it (devoid of all context) on some wall of electronic text.
Getting the most out of Startup Weekend
He didn't say it was a 2005 version; it could have been a 2001 version for all we know.

Also, I owned and used a G4 PowerBook from 2002 til 2010, when I sold it to a friend, who is still using it. I bow to nobody in my respect for the longevity of Apple's laptops lately. Just saying, if he had it for 4-8 years and was touring with it, yeah, it's kinda not shocking that it might show its age a bit.

You think a low-end plastic Dell (which will be far slower than the Mac he'd get) will beat an Apple over 4+ years as a touring musician? I don't.

It'd be nice, as an aside, if there were more dates and details in this story. Wonder why he didn't include those.
It's funny, whenever an Internet2 headline surfaces it always brings to mind memories of i2hub. I wonder what percentage of Internet2 usages that accounted for while it was alive.
Testing my new language, see http://typesandotherdistractions.com
> "There should be a federated, distributed, open-source protocol that will replace Twitter and Facebook and let our data be free!"

> no average user wants that. Really, they don't. If you haven't seen Diaspora's Easy 25 Step Quick Start Guide, you should take a look. Is your mom going to do all that?

I really wish people would stop repeating this straw-man. XMPP is a federated, distributed system, and my mom can use it fine without setting up her own servers. Is it that hard to understand how the same thing would apply to status updates?
To be honest, I thought you were being sarcastic. OP was all about how people ought to be less harsh, less judgmental, more open-minded, kinder and more welcoming. 'Fuckwit' might as well be the poster child for the culture of unquestioning, caustic certitude of which he disapproves.
No no, tau is 2pi. So eat 2 pies.
Vociferous opposition is not the same as condescension, though.

There are some people who care deeply about a subject and just lack social tact. They'll jump on you for a variety of subjects, but they don't have ill intent.

Then there are the people who are dicks and want to crush people who they disagree with. It's the point at which one starts displaying schadenfreude and denigrating others that the line has been crossed.
No programmers have signed up yet. :/
You're right. Sometimes.

A hacker writing a quickie web server for the experience of doing so is laudable. This applies to lots of types of projects: toy OSes, social networking protocols, web frameworks, what have you. Exploration is fun, and key to the hacker spirit.

The difficulty comes from knowing the limitations of your skills. I got my web programming chops by reading a bunch of PHP tutorials back in 1998 and throwing together some dummy pages that could read/write to a mysql database. Not long after I built a website for a good friend's business that was riddled with SQL injection and XSS holes. Luckily, we never got exploited, and years later on a rainy Sunday night I revisited the code and patched it up. Had we been hit, I don't know how badly that would have affected the company.

The same goes for home-grown crypto: sure, you might be able to apply a function you wrote and get something that looks like cyphertext, and maybe it's a fun project to learn about crypto. But when you don't know any better, you think you've done it right and you might unintentionally swindle some folks into paying for completely insecure crypto.
ACDSee Pro – Bargain Photo Manager
ACDSee Pro is photography software for arranged files, corrected photos and more time behind the camera.
The question seems oddly charming to me because I might have asked the same question at the time.

You see, I had had a rough go of it up to that point. A bad situation had led me to drop out of high school and to enter the Army. My dad had promised a college education so the whole time in the Army, what kept me going was that as soon as my ETS date rolled around I was going back to school.

You see, I wanted to be a computer programmer.

But when I got out and asked about college, dad told me the day I raised my hand to join the Army that I had forfeited my college fund. That I was a man now and had to make my own way.

So at 21 I decided that come hell or high water I was going to be an awesome computer programmer and that no matter how long it took I was going to have a college degree.

In 1987 getting access to a computer though, was somewhat difficult for a long-haired high school dropout. But I managed by weaseling my way into a SysAdmin job - herding a pair of AT&T 3b2 machines. I had no idea what I was doing, having only read about Unix from library books. But I knew enough to get access to two multi-user Unix machines and an idtools diskette.

At that job I saved enough money to pay for a Computer Programming course at a now defunct school called Control Data Institute. The job placement office got me my first programming job in 1989 - hacking C for a consulting firm.

That btw, was the last time the Control Data Institute credential ever helped me to get a job.

And getting past HR without a college degree has always been a challenge. Without it, you are not "a member of the club".

But somehow I've slugged it out for a couple more decades. I haven't always been a programmer -- I've spent about half that time as a SysAdmin -- I've even spent some of it homeless.

But it turns out in retrospect that I have in fact spent most of my adult life doing what I wanted to do and it has so far been a messy, scruffy and somewhat scrappy success.

But a success nevertheless.

I don't think I'm an awesome programmer yet but I'm still working on it. I do know that I'm better than most but sadly it's just because I'm merely competent while most are incompetent. Stay in the business and you'll see what I mean.

And eventually I'll get that college degree too. Extra points to the universe if I get to do it as poetically as Woz did.

So now that I've rambled on and typed more than most will want to read, I finally come to an answer: the only way you can fail to succeed is to give up. So suck it up young man, and dig in for a long fight.

Illegitimi non carborundum :-)
Yes of course, but I am not responding to the article being discussed: I am responding to a comment suggesting that a local fitness service is successfully using Groupon to generate marginal sales. My comment absolutely does not suggest that Groupon tries to solve that problem :-)
e^(τi)-1=0. This is obviously better since it not only contains the fundamental constants e, tau, and the beautiful numbers 0 and 1, it also includes a minus sign, emphasizing the fact that we are working over a field with an additive inverse. ;)
One explanation on why Twitter wants to control the User Experience
"make it dead simple and consistent across all current and future consumption platforms to try to get widespread adoption"
Something like workrave(.org) might be useful. Works on windows too.
e^(iT)=1

http://vihart.com/blog/pi-is-still-wrong/
Remind HN: RTP Hackers & Founders this Friday at SplatSpace in Durham
Just a friendly reminder... RTP Hackers & Founders will be meeting this Friday in beautiful Durham, NC, at the SplatSpace hackerspace. See:

http://www.meetup.com/RTP-Hackers-Founders/events/16762340/

for full details and to RSVP.
Author again. It should be used exactly as SwellJoe Described. The hash of "My Awesome password for Facebook!!!" should only be used on facebook.com. "My Awesome password for Twitter!!!" and so on.

The benefit of SHA1_Pass is that you never store, synchronize or backup passwords ever again. It's free, completely open-source and anyone can implement it and other software can be used to generate the hashes. Some of the password storage managers are not that way.
Some background on the application http://www.bermi.org/announcing-colorapi-search-for-colors-i...
Booze Makes Comeback in Workplace, With Silicon Valley Twist
But in analogous equations (energy of motion .5mv^2, energy of spring, .5kx^2), there is a 1/2. Basically, anytime you integrate a linear equation, you get a factor of 1/2. Using pi as the circle constant hides this fact.

http://tauday.com/#sec:circular_area
Clickable link:

http://www.meetup.com/RTP-Hackers-Founders/events/16762340/

Also, for info about SplatSpace:

http://splatspace.org/
Anyone else find it humorous that the title says something does not scale and when you click its a 404?
Why is there no looting in Japan?
This is a short piece that asks a very interesting question. There are a few anecdotal statements about how other cultures have witnessed large levels of looting during catastrophes.
Found it: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Debian has "popularity-contest", which is an optional package that submits those statistics. The results can be viewed at http://popcon.debian.org/

Also installable in Ubuntu.
What would we think of an American who walked into an Egyptian coffeehouse or a Japanese board room and interpreted all the behavior he saw there as if he were seeing it in a church in Iowa? It's fine to demand that geeks develop some social sophistication, but it's also fine to expect that non-geeks will have enough social sophistication not to rush to judgment about behavior in an unfamiliar cultural context. Cultures vary from place to place, subgroup to subgroup, and there's no reason people shouldn't adapt to us if they want to join our subculture. That's the way it works.

As other people have pointed out, the argumentative, ruthless nature of computing culture has very adaptive aspects because it mirrors the persistent, ruthless, and logical nature of the computers we deal with. Once you're used to dealing with computers -- once you've learned that computers don't compromise, but it isn't personal -- you perceive computer geek behavior differently. The only reason to enter the subculture, except as a tourist, is to learn about computing, so it is reasonable to assume that anybody arguing about how to program a microcontroller either gets us or is in the process of getting us.

Obviously, different rules apply when geeks interact with non-geeks in other contexts. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in Xerox PARC, or less exalted forums for discussing computing, do as the computer geeks do.