skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm self-taught, starting with C on MS-DOS at age 9 (I'm now 32). I moved onto Visual Basic (ugh) at 12 because my C compiler wouldn't do windows programs, and later moved to Borland C++ on Windows. I did later do a BTEC course in computer studies, but that was just to hedge my bets.

I Switched to Linux in 1995/96, and have spent the last 15 years alternating between systems administration and development roles. I've worked for large online retailers, government departments, multinational manufacturers as well as smaller content portal websites, and I'm currently at a search startup in Cambridge, UK. I can program in C, Perl, and PHP, but the language I love most is Python. I also love relational databases (PostGreSQL in particular), and have quite a strong DBA-streak.

I've never really noticed much tension between the CS-taught and self-taught programmers that I've known. I've often considered that a team is stronger for having both types represented. The self-taught programmers, if they started early, often have an additional 5-6 years commercial experience over the degree-holders (for their age), but it all balances out in the end.

In terms of success, I'm gainfully employed, I'm well regarded by my peers (it's one of the things that motivates me), I can still learn things, I can still teach things and I'm not in management. Win.

I hope that's a useful response for someone!
Did anyone else find putting these two features next to each other unfortunate:

* Messaging built-in

Communication is an important part of the modern desktop, but it's a hassle when you have to switch windows to reply to a message.

* GNOME 3 is designed to reduce distraction and interruption and to put you in control.

Our new notifications system subtly presents messages and will save them until you are ready for them,...
This is a really cool concept - if only it didnt need extra hardware.

If the sensor was integrated into a laptop - that would be awesome.
Well, is there any other reason to use Winamp for Android? I don't consider the UI particularly appealing.
Their new site is gorgeous
Egypt, Vietnam, South America
Yeah I actually came back to the HN thread to find out what the purpose of the product was
That's exactly what I was looking for... I already found a route I had no idea existed right near my house. Thanks!
EC2 servers dont have any passwords at all by default. Not blank ones, but there are actually none set at all. They come primed with a keypair which you get when you create your account.

Considering we live in space year 3000 now, its a wonder that we still have passwords at all. Why can't we have 2 factor keypair authentication for everything? OpenID is thinking too small.
Is it just for them? It seems it's for businesses as well.

After looking at the website for a minute my opinion is that it looks really cool, though I'm not one hundred percent sure what it does. After writing the previous sentence I read the FAQ and now I'm a little more sure what it does, but definitely the explanation side of things needs a bit more work.

The big "click here for pricing" button comes way too soon. You need to explain your product before you hit me with the pricing. The "FAQ" and "About" links are way over there, where I'm not drawn to 'em.

I love the idea of the Abe for President campaign. And yet, it doesn't seem to be fully functional. Perhaps letting me see a fully-functional demo of the Abe for Pres campaign might help me to understand what's going on a bit better.

edit: In case the above came off too critical, though... I think you've done a really good job in identifying a real problem that folks with money will pay good money to have solved. The only problem is that spending a few minutes on your website doesn't yet communicate to me exactly how you're solving it. Tighten up the marketing message and you could really be onto something.
the human desire to explore and "be there" is very powerful and in most cases of pushing the envelop of exploration, wins out over logic.
Okay, having read that, I agree -- you absolutely don't have to worry about password theft. At least, not after the fact of a conversation having already happened.

However, what I was suggesting, is that instead of using a group password:

- create a random password for each user that is invited
- as part of the 'login' process (or room join process, depending on how your code is structured), check to make sure that token exists in the database
- as soon as somebody uses that random password, delete it (or mark it inactive)

This means that for each token, there can be exactly one login. That login should belong to who you sent the email to, and nobody else. It's just as anonymous as your method, and slightly (wee bit) more secure.

This also solves the problem of people sending the password to their friends, though obviously cannot plug the analog hole of allowing their friends to look at their screen.
The webfont used (Cantarell) does not look good in Windows. The texts are almost unreadable: http://op111.net/u/misc/20110407-win7-fx4-gnome.org.png — (It looks fine on Linux.)

Cantarell, by the way, is also the UI font of Gnome Shell. Not a bad UI font, I think, but it has a narrow glyph range (about 400) and only includes Latin.

Moving to the larger picture, my impression from the Gnome Shell desktop up to now is that it is an interesting experiment, trying to rethink as it does a lot of stuff that we have grown to take for granted in desktop environments. But it is not necessarily a good desktop experience. Up to now (I have used it for about 40 hours in total) I find it tiring and distracting, rather than distraction-free. Switching between app windows, e.g., is not a pleasant experience for me, with all the action I see on the screen and that I have to take myself each time I want to switch. (Alt-tabbing avoids all that, but I don’t always switch windows with Alt+Tab.) Another thing that does not help me, and that I find strange as an design decision, is the position of the clock right in the middle of the topbar. It causes me stress; I feel like time is hunting me.

In general, Gnome Shell seems to me to offer an experience more tuned to small rather than large screens. In a 2560*1600 screen, say, and if you prefer using the mouse rather than the keyboard, the distances you have to travel are ridiculous.

I expect the whole thing to improve in the next couple of years or so, but I am curious to see how much it can improve given its basic design principles.
Is this built on CiviCRM or is a custom platform?
Microsoft and Toyota Team Up to Bring the Internet to Your Car
It's built from the ground up, Ruby on Rails mostly.
And exactly what I WOULD expect on Fark.

The point of the matter being that this does nothing but invite politics onto HN which we all (and by all, I mean PG and many, many others) agree does not belong here.

Yes, it has to do with the erosion of our privacy. Yes, it's big serious business. Just as I wouldn't expect election coverage to be posted here, I don't expect this sort of thing either.

I flagged it, hopefully it dies. I'm guessing it won't.
DropZap 3 rejected again on appeal.  What should I do?
DropZap 3 was rejected because the DropZap games were considered similar. Apple suggested combining the DropZap games into one using In App Purchase.

I appealed the DropZap 3 rejection but was informed today that the appeal was denied.

Should I remove DropZap or DropZap 2 from the App Store to try to get DropZap 3 into the App Store as is? But what if I want to release an update for a removed app? How would users react to a removed app?

Here's the text of the appeal that was denied:

==

Please reconsider the rejection of DropZap 3. DropZap 3 has by far the coolest gameplay of the three IMO:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5qTrsxCHgI

It has been recommended that I combine DropZap, DropZap 2, and DropZap 3 into one app using the In App Purchase API.

But there are problems with this.

If I use the In App Purchase API in DropZap to provide DropZap 2 and DropZap 3 gameplay, what would happen to DropZap 2 which is already in the App Store? Whenever I would make updates relating to DropZap 2 gameplay, would I then update both DropZap and DropZap 2?

I don't want to increase the price of DropZap 2 or DropZap 3. If the way to purchase these is through DropZap, then the customer would pay for DropZap and then again for DropZap 2 or DropZap 3.

Also, DropZap provides two methods for global scores (my own + Game Center). DropZap 2 and DropZap 3 only provide Game Center. My custom method is laborious as it involves me manually checking submitted nicknames and I would rather not use it for DropZap 2 or 3 gameplay. Removing my custom method from DropZap is problematic since not everyone can use Game Center and so it would be like removing a major feature from DropZap.

Finally, DropZap provides three graphics styles, but I only want to use one for DropZap 2 and DropZap 3. Users may expect to be able to use all three when they purchase DropZap 2 or DropZap 3 gameplay.
Why are the videos on the site so small, make it big and show off what you have made!

You can see them here on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRHAio98n-g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRHAio98n-g&feature=relmf...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip9Bgjaspjs&feature=relmf...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lepXx1kDelo&feature=relmf...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSuRy7TRHPc&feature=relmf...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxOQj5eBRCY&feature=relat...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4fhsgZbgKk&feature=relat...
I agree that this doesn't come across so well with your current copy and examples. Some more realistic examples in your target markets might help to make this clearer.

Basically, the "Abe for President" line makes it seem very heavily targeted towards US citizens running for public office. I found it get past that initial impression.
This looks like a joke. Is this real?
Understood, but you either are targeting the civic leaders and candidates, or you aren't. Don't be shy to express it in your message.
Perhaps because these can go faster, or deep enough that they can't be detected nearly as easily?
I'd brand those as different companies with slightly different designs, built on the same platform to cater to the market. A politician is more likely to sign up to an awesome service for managing political campaigns, and an artist is much more likely to sign up for a service to handle her public image that setes out to help manage gallery showings (and not just "gatherings" or "political events").
Because NP problems have exponential time growth.

Example: a brute-force attack of an encryption algorithm that uses a 256-bit-key, would require trying out all possible keys, which is 2^256 ... which right now it would take far longer than the age of the universe to complete.

AND, most importantly, dividing that number by 10,000 (the number of computers in the article), or heck, let's be generous and say we have 1,000,000,000 computers ... would be absolutely meaningless.

It's simple really -- 2^256 / 1 billion computers =~ 2^226 -- and computing it still takes far longer than the age of our universe.

And lets say that with technology advances, you can have 70,000,000,000 computers (that's 70 billion computers, or a 700,000,000 % increase from the number in our article). Nevermind the energy required to power them or the storage capacity needed, or other such none-sense. So instead of 2^226, you now have 2^220 cycles to go through, an absolutely meaningless decrease, and still takes far longer than the age of our universe.

As a fun exercise, try figuring out how many computers would be required to bring that number down to ~ 2^200 -- that would still take far longer than the age of our universe to compute ;)
Twitter have specifically said that they don't want new twitter clients. However the already existing ones are mostly fine.
Interesting idea. How much manual legwork do you have to do when a new customer registers? Is there manual effort involved in setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts, mailing lists, etc.? I imagine many of the online services you use would prevent automatic creation of accounts somehow, like with a CAPTCHA or something.
Agree with @bauchidgw - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2417177 - there's a few missing...(camel-case URLs, capitalized URLs, folder re-ordering, rewritten/not redirected URLs, root vs index.xxx etc)
Also missing (considering this is meant to be the 'Ultimate Guide' is a comprehensive definition of duplicate content, consisting of "appreciably similar content between one uniquely accessible URI and another", along with canonicalization and more.

But a good start non-the-less for those who keep tripping up on this simple to fix issue.
One could use the webcam for this, although I'm not sure how that affects battery life. Also personally it would creep me out to have the cam enabled permanently.
You're oversimplifying.

I don't think anyone would argue that in the absence of copyright, nobody would make music any more. However, that doesn't tell us whether the same quantity and/or quality of music would be made, nor, ultimately, whether the same number of people would get as much enjoyment from listening to music as they do today.

No-one is forcing musicians to rely on copyright. If production costs are so low and giving away their work for free really generates increased overall income via secondary effects, then it is remarkable how little evidence there seems to be of professional musicians choosing that alternative strategy.
America's Next Top Model Season 16 Episode 7
He says he doesn't like bytecode for expressing programs, but he never mentioned what else would work better. I'm intrigued, does anyone know more?
Please take a look at the HN etiquette guidelines here:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Specifically the following paragraphs:
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation."

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. 'That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3.'"

If you've got some criticisms, how about stating them explicitly instead of so off-handedly insulting someone else's hard work?
Well, it seems kind of difficult, in fact I am surprised it works. As you go deeper and deeper the water gets denser and denser which means the buoyant force becomes greater, which means that you have to exert a greater force to keep going down. If you rely purely on wings to exert that force, you will have to move with a pretty high velocity in order to exert sufficient force. It seems much simpler to just take on ballast and rely on good old gravity to pull you down.

If this thing works at all, my guess is it will have to go pretty fast, which would make it kind of dangerous and kind of hard to do exploration with.
Competition doesn't matter, if your competitor...

...has a flawed vision. Then it is just market validation.

...has entrenched interests inside the company. Then it is subject to the innovator's dilemma. The bigger the company, the more likely they will drop the ball.

...is human (or Microsoft :-) ). Then they are prone to missteps.
Thanks for pointing out the HPC instances that Amazon has. A few commenters were saying that it's not really a supercomputer without a fast interconnect. Yes, they have that! You just pay more for those instances.

In my experience Amazon did a pretty good job setting things up. It's fun to play around with HPC instances, you can get some sweet performance.
Yes, the Android emulator is quite slow. I generally find it much better to test on an actual Android device. With the standard Eclipse-based tools, at least, the build + push to phone + launch cycle is fast enough to be quite usable for development. Note, running on an actual phone is still slow (though faster than the emulator) if you run from Eclipse in Debug mode, so for full performance make sure to run in non-debugging mode (use "Run", not "Debug", from Eclipse). Presumably the Mono tools have an equivalent distinction.
I recall EC2 going to complete crap during the holidays -- it is (or at least was) their spare christmas capacity.
> What you're really asking for is a system wherein the cooling of the fuel after fission has stopped (this is where the problems occurred at the Fukushima plants) is entirely passive.

This can be achieved by designing the safe core temperatures to be much higher, which makes cooling easier. The very interesting small molten salt breeder design FUJI MSR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuji_MSR is designed to survive complete external cooling loss by shutting down fission (either under control, or by the heat physically destroying the neutron mirrors required for it's operation), and then dealing with the decay heat by conductive transfer to the environment and simply letting the reactor heat up.

The fact that the core is molten in normal operation, under no pressure and entirely chemically inert even at elevated temperatures makes passive safety somewhat easier.
I feel your pain in just about every respect. Having personal projects can help. From what others have said having a solid non-programming hobby and getting back some balance is a key to maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Interesting and somewhat related blog article: http://heycarsten.com/employment-the-hard-parts/

Also, another article i found really interesting on the topic:
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/JoelChristiansen/20110110/6763/Pa...
Actually that isn't unique to the school you worked at, it's a philosophical feature of the education system. I wasn't allowed to use a computer until I was perhaps 11 years old, and then only sparingly. I don't think it affected my later abilities, and I was incredibly excited once I got the chance to code at home!

I think this came about partly as an extension of Steiner's views on television as something that stunts imagination and creativity. The first 7 years of the education have a very strong focus on mental imagery, and there is probably a belief that viewing concrete depictions of concepts on a computer is harmful.

I happen to believe that a computer can allow increased exploration of the imagination when used for creative tasks, but in the 90's schools were mostly using them for looking at Encarta and so on. That's exactly what Steiner schools want to avoid for their younger children.
I agree about the content. I even have the content available. Right now roads are rated on:

1) How much variation they have (i.e. twistyness)

2) Do they go past a body of water

3) Do they go through a state park

All of this data is available to show to the user, I just haven't added any UI elements to display them. It'll be particularly nice once I add more scoring criteria for roads (like elevation changes, view sheds (i.e. seeing a mountain range out in the distance), land coverage surrounding road, historical landmarks, drive past old awesome buildings, etc).

I don't know of any data source for pavement quality, outside of roads being marked as paved or unpaved :(
The OP does not precisely attribute "GDrive killer" to Drew, but simply puts the expression in quotes (of someone's - or of public chatter?):

>>Drew Houston stormed onto the scene with his "GDrive killer," which was, of course, Dropbox
No Follow-up Questions from YC Application. Bad Sign?
Saw that some applicants were asked to clarify some things. Is it generally a bad sign if I've heard nothing from the YC team?
The scientific article behind this is interesting; it is at http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.4853

Quick summary: the researchers in Seattle take the building's air filters once a day, compress them into a block, stick the block in a lead vault, and use a gamma-ray analyzer on it. They can detect radioactive particles from Japan, 7 days later (at very low levels). Based on the composition, they believe the particles are from radioactive steam, not burning fuel, which is kind of interesting. Because they are analyzing the filters, rather than the air directly, they are testing particles from 114,000 cubic meters of air at a time so they get very high sensitivity.
HTC Passes Nokia in Market Cap
Thank god for that :)
I agree. At large scales the speed of light becomes a limiting factor.
It seems to happen to Reddit everyday.
Am I missing something? If the performance scales linearly, they are at 1000 computers internally (1/10 * 10,000), and it was said to take 8 hours. That would only be 80 hours if they hadn't have used this service.

This makes me believe someone is lying about something in this article.
How about you make #3 an in-app purchase for #2? Not sure what the best way to do this is, but you could also drop the price of the app to zero and make game #2 an in-app purchase as well, but give it to all the people who already paid for the app for free.
Actually, that idea is employed by every single US Navy (and I assume their foreign counterpart) submarine. The bow & stern planes combined with forward motion do almost all of the up and down depth control after you are under water. The ballast tanks are only really for changing whether you are a surface ship or a submerged ship.

The main disadvantage of not having ballast tanks is that on the surface, you won't float that high (I assume you will be slightly positively buoyant, because requiring power to get back to the surface is crazy, and perfectly neutral buoyancy is nearly impossible to achieve). This doesn't matter for a little thing with a tender, but for anything on its own, I'd rather float a little higher. Also, you have to keep moving to keep lift up. That just doesn't make sense for a boat that you spend a lot of time stalking around with as much stealth as possible.

As for "the most dangerous thing an attack sub can do in combat is launch a torpedo", that's just not true. The majority of the missiles launched against Libya this month came from US subs (SSGN). And there are a lot of capabilities that are secret or borderline secret. Check out "Dark Waters" and "Blind Man's Bluff". Also http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/dds.htm
I think this is awesome and have been trying to convince a political party to use something like this.
Protip: chillax, dude.
We ask users for pavement quality when they create a route on ridewithgps, and allow people to search using it. ArcGIS allows searching for gravel/pavement, but nothing as fine grained as being properly banked, chipseal vs blacktop vs potholed etc etc
I'm a fan. Then again, i love gambling; then again, quite a few ppl do! :)

I could see this catching on, particularly, in sports circles. Old friends, current friends, etc...Watching sports, and the app being a way to legitimize the casual banter of "i bet...", while facilitating more of it.

I'd push it hard to sports forums/communities, and things like that.

Add in poker and gaming forums...Especially poker forums -- could see the app catching on like wildfire for the "high profile" pros who use Twitter, and the legions of their followers.

Totally in their wheelhouse every which way.

One thing I might add, off the top of my head, would be a way for people/observers...to wager on the wager, so to speak.
Seems like those guys knew nothing about HPCs. Why didn't they run LINPACK test? It's essential to measure any parallel computing system even of two cores. Also, any first grade CS student knows that the most significant part of an HPC is not the cores, but the network. You need to connect hosts using Infiniband or alike. Using regular ethernet is futile because of high latency, you will waste 90% of CPU cycles in data exchange/syncronization wait loops. I bet they could achieve a way better results on just 1/3 number of cores or even less.