skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How are you on computing in general? Are you VERY knowledgeable about the operating system you use? What about other operating systems? Know anything about their inner workings?

If you plan to be a professional programmer a working knowledge of Linux can be very valuable...in some cases a necessity. Ditto for Windows.

In terms of your "hitting the wall" in programming, I'd say seriously consider contributing to an open source project.

This will allow you a good opportunity to both study a (possibly large) code-base, and write code as well. It will force you to become more familiar with some of the processes of software development. You might have to work with other people, use a bug tracker, learn an unfamiliar build system, use an unfamiliar revision control system, etc.

Start small. Pick project that is open about needing help. Learn about the project. Hang out in the IRC a bit, or message board. Ask some questions. Answer some questions. Help track down bugs. Eventually find a feature/bug you can implement/fix and do it.

From your description, it sounds like you're in a good place. You've been doing well, and now it's just a question of finding new ways to challenge yourself. There will be setbacks here and there, but as long as you keep plugging away at it you'll be fine.

One last piece of advice I would offer is to make sure you also take time to enjoy other things besides programming. You're young and you don't get those years back.
Indeed. Berkeley's nuclear engineering department has been running one of the better monitoring programs:

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/UCBAirSampling
Not looking good for the future of data.gov. I know funding was cut recently, but didn't realise until this article that funding was cut from $35m to $8m!
True story: We crawled them a while back (before they expanded their engineering team) and because of our distributed system, "alarms" were going off. Rather then take time to tell their system we were not a DDOS attack, they put us in robots.txt. I imagine their small team had other stuff to work on.
That's the Metro UI(the UI in Zune, WP7 and Win 8) at work. More details here if you want to go in-depth.

http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487

http://www.riagenic.com/archives/493
It's not like you have a fixed-rate mortgage on that apartment. You don't expect your landlord to let you rent at below-market rates do you?

I guess what I'm saying is if you want to lock in a low rent you need to negotiate for a longer lease.
I actually think Pandora is going to turn out to be a nice, profitable business. But the valuation they're getting in the market is not that of a "nice, profitable business". It's one of a MASSIVELY profitable business throwing off hundreds of millions in profits. So far they haven't thrown off anything.
Ask HN: What do you do to get into "work mode"?
For me, I'll turn my phone off, close my email, close the door on my office, and shut the lights off.

It's just me, some music (lately the Tron OST [the daft punk thing]), and a couple of VIM sessions.

The amount of quality work I've been able to get done in the last couple of weeks by employing this has been outstanding.

The next best thing is to stay really late, after everybody has left.

Something that I really struggle with at work is interruptions. People don't realize it, but stopping in to just say hi is very distracting. The threat of a manager stopping in to get a progress report on what I'm up to at that very moment can also be very distracting, which is why working after hours is so nice for me. (The threat of somebody stopping in is gone).

Howabout you, HN, what are you productivity hacks?

(And yes, I realize that I'm being a complete prima donna with this. The problem is that I've been given a couple of impossible deadlines in the last couple of weeks, and my boss has basically given me a "do whatever you need to to get it done" pass)
Unix could really do with a command that you can wrap around this type of call. Either a sanity check on the path part or a safe rm alternative that contains it. I would gladly give up full rm access to know that I can safely (or safer-ly) delete in scripts.

It could be something as simple as a file with paths on each line it - match one path or a path with a glob - and the script fails before destroying anything important.

Overriding it might involve adding a --override=/path/to/something but at least then it would be very explicit
How dare Linode insult you by giving you free service improvements for no reason. Damn them.
Capybara 1.0
The magic code from the linked post is sha1 for "usethesource\n", the one I gave is for the same string without the trailing "\n" (which is here probably due to a `echo usethesource | sha1sum` instead of `echo -n ...`).
I've started quoting arguments in shell scripts even when it's not technically necessary to avoid problems with spaces. I can't count how many scripts I've written/encountered that didn't work with a path containing a space (apparently much more common with OS X users than Linux users)

This wouldn't delete the correct directory, but at least it won't delete "/usr" either:

rm -rf "/usr /lib/nvidia-current/xorg/xorg"

There are lots of other pitfalls associated with not quoting things in shell scripts, like this common one:

if [ $foo -eq "bar" ];

will cause an error if $foo isn't set or is an empty string, while this will work correctly:

if [ "$foo" -eq "bar" ];

Bonus that your syntax highlighter can highlight the arguments. My rule is that flags aren't quoted, but paths and other parameters are.
Hello could someone help me with problem 2? I believe I am splitting the string correctly, 1 2 4 8 16 ... 512 = 1023 total chars/nodes, but when I add the integers of the last line (aka the leaves) I get the wrong result.

https://gist.github.com/1029356

Thanks.
A browser plugin with a JavaScript API

You sound like a web dev, which is fair enough, but isn't Microsoft busy (for varying values of busy) trying to promote native technologies and discourage the browser as a platform view for obvious business reasons?
It depends on how much you use it for. For typing, it's not so good. As a browser back button, it's comparable to mouse gestures in effort.
Absolutely not a disaster for Samsung.

Some sources say that Apple paid for the initial design of the A4 and Samsung also became interested, splitting the cost. [1]

They are still getting paid by Apple to manufacture Intrinsity's chips, and Apple is clearly worried that Samsung has been learning from that. [2]

Apple's acquisition of Intrinsity was expensive, and the rumor is that they will keep the design to themselves, not making any money off of licensing. [1]

Samsung's choice of chips for the Galaxy S II blow away the competition with performance, losing the Intrinsity design is clearly not a problem. [3]

Again, Apple is taking the expensive route with anti-competitive practices, whereas Samsung is learning from others and using its flexibility to overcome obstacles at lower cost.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/3665/apples-intrinsity-acquisi...

[2] http://www.macstories.net/news/apple-to-outsource-a4-and-a5-...

[3] http://pocketnow.com/android/samsung-galaxy-s-ii-scores-an-i...
Climate change has been settled in a scientific matter. The scientists unanimously think it's happening.

The problem is that science doesn't matter in politics. A majority could vote that the laws of thermodynamics don't hold, if they wanted to.
Ah.

Perl 6 has been making strides lately. There's a bit of a refactor in the wings which should make it much more processor and memory efficient.

If it had the performance (and a package in Debian sources), I would be using it in production right now. Between grammars and the (clean!) syntax support for high order programming, it solves a lot of my headaches.
They were super helpful with an iptables question I had (I locked myself out of the server as well as took down several services I had running). I honestly expected them to say "you signed up for a VPS you should know this... it's not covered by our support."
SQL is desperately in need of some updates.

For starters, DELETE FROM should never be allowed without a WHERE clause. DBs should simply define that as malformed sql.
The older EOPLs are much longer then the newer ones. I've found that the 1st edition requires less sophistication than the 3rd and spends more time explaining things. You might want to take a look at it.

There's also "design concepts in programming languages".
"What I need is a User's Magazine." [1983]
Ah. It seems I have just described 'safe-rm'.

Great minds etc
:)
Caffeine: "improves our willpower for some things, such as concentrating on a boring and detailed task, but it has no effect or actually impairs our willpower for other things, such as being polite under trying circumstances."

Sounds good enough to me and probably most coders... I can continue to stick to my 5-8-mugs-a-day habit of 13 years then. My willpower hasn't suffered much I think, although it's hard to tell without some experimental withdrawal period.
I do agree with you, but my reaction is that what I do on my own time is my business and has absolutely no bearing on anything else, and that asking about it is borderline invasion of privacy.

Maybe I work on stuff I don't want to talk about all night long, or maybe I don't work on anything at all when I get home because what I'm doing at work fulfills me. Either way, it should have no bearing on an interview.
I used to be on it all the time because everyone was on, but as my friends got older, their companies blocked use of it at work, the people left just blab about how awesome their significant others are, hawk their business products & nightclub parties, or post baby pics all day.

The people really care about are on now for a few hours/minutes from 6 to 11:45 (if that) so my usage has cut down as well ... once in the morning, at lunch and at night.

I use twitter a lot more now as a result. I guess facebook has a new challenge, keeping older folks engaged and selling facebook to younger kids who are growing up on twitter instead of facebook as the dominant social media scene.
I know some very good developers who didn't do anything in their spare time. One of them was co-inventor of gif format, another was a core contributor to cygwin gdb and so on. But that was all before their day job. When they started their day jobs, that's all they did.

Would you discard them as "not so good" because they don't do anything in their spare time and they concentrate on task on hand? Some people have more demanding jobs and/or prefer to work on their day job in their spare time - not because someone is putting a gun on their head, but because they like doing what they do.

Why would they bother with side projects when they already have real life projects? Impressing the interviewer isn't on their agenda and all other aspects viz. gratification, joy of creation are the same.
Ctrl and fn are in reversed positions relative to most machines I use, so I find myself hitting the wrong buttons semi-frequently if I'm not paying attention.

Despite having paid a high premium on this thing, it still can't multitask in chrome like my Sony Vaio, which I paid only a little more for.

Automatic switching of the display doesn't occur when I plug something into the display port, I have to toggle it manually usually.

The standard HD is still 5400rpm!
If your livelihood depended on .NET before Win8, there's a good chance you'll want to stick with .NET on the web services side after Win8. I highly doubt MS is telling everyone to switch to Ruby or NodejS on the back end. .NET will still live on.
VPS.NET was the worst VPS service I've ever tried. By far. It's hard to convey how bad and unreliable they were. Friends who tried VPS.NET had nothing but headaches as well, so it wasn't just me.
Organizing lists of related searches
Microsoft considers WebGL potentially harmful:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/srd/archive/2011/06/16/webgl-cons...

It goes without saying MS has its own agenda regarding web technologies, but the risks are there.
I think there is a difference between hiring students and hiring professionals. From my experience (currently in school), my peers that have side projects (including myself) enjoy programming for the challenges and would be, IMHO, better employees. The students that don't have side projects tend to be in school to JUST GET A JOB. They don't experiment with code and generally don't have a passion for it.

In the end, I think the author is correct when it comes to students (however, the author doesn't address the difference between students and pros)... Maybe not such a good idea for the in-the-field professional.
I use blogger, have done since it was the first blogging service. (www.alexmacgregor.com)

There might be valid reasons to switch for sure but I like it's uptime, it uses static html and how I can login with my Google account.
It costs more but it's important to remember that compared to ebs the performance are way better(1).

(1) check every benchmark performed on both platforms
You can't accidentally write a TRUNCATE statement though.
A decade ago, I worked on a DNA sequencer / aligner product. This produced easily 1GB+ raw data files, and they typically exploded by a factor of ten by the time you performed a bunch of cleaning, smoothing, filtering, etc on them. For several reasons, not least of which was a 4GB file size limit in fat32, this software had to use a directory as a pseudo file.

I was working on some file saving logic. A customer had a problem where they'd overlaid a new logical file on top of an old logical file. Where these actual files, this would just have overwritten the old file, but since these were directories, we got a mishmash of pieces of two different logical files overlaid in the same directory, and of course our software got confused as hell. So, I wrote code that, in case you saved a new file as an extent filename (really directory name), would perform the equivalent of

rm -rf $dirname; mkdir $dirname;

You can see where this is going... Some grad student didn't understand this, and named a pseudo file as the root directory of a tree of research. Two years of research vanished into the ether, despite a dialog box that had red text in it. That sucked.
HTC Sensation 4G INdia launch
Smartphones makers HTC has launched the multimedia phone called HTC Sensation with a price tag of Rs 32700 attached to it.
The HTC Sensation is the first smartphone which features a HTC watch an application and services that puts the entire library of latest moveis and TV shows before your screen
Have you looked at Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation [1] by Krishnamurthi? It doesn't address your concern about parsing---it's explicitly excluded from the book---but I found it to be a reasonable follow-on to SICP and a relatively enjoyable read to boot.

[1] http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/
Doesn't work when you're writing a stored proc.
While they, along with the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and a few other magazines are better than average, they still don't question things in the way I'd like. There's still plenty things that seem to be unspeakable in their journalism.
At least a PC can be got for $300 to $500, unlike a Mac starting at $699.
First time ever: scientists see jets as black hole swallows a star
You don't need to separate into "good" and "bad" but I think it'd be easy to get bipartisan support for a bill that opened up a large amount of visas to immigrants with masters and doctorates or entrepreneurs with existing funding. The fight over the other kind of immigration is likely to be a lot more vitriolic.
One of them was co-inventor of gif format, another was a cygwin to contributor to cygwin gdb and so on. But that was all before their day job.

Would you discard them as "not so good" because they don't do anything in their spare time?

-----------------------------------

No, because their prior accomplishments speak for themselves.

You need to stop looking at it as some yardstick to get over and understand that it is simply an informal measure of a developer's passion and drive, just because you don't do it doesn't mean "you suck. NO HIRE!"
Kinect SDK released
Remember that apple R&D, that found that mousing was quicker than keyboarding (because its low cognitive load doesn't interrupt your train of thought - it just seems quicker because you have amnesia when immersed in working out the right keys... [not applicable to expert fingers])?

Perhaps touching the screen instead of acquiring the mouse would be quicker and even lower cognitive load. This wouldn't be for every interaction, but as an adjunct to the keyboard - as the mouse is.

Not sure if true though - my mouse is at the same elevation as the keyboard, whereas the screen requires raising a hand about a foot. The cognitive load is lower though - people often instinctively touch the screen (if they haven't been screen-trained), especially when looking at someone else's screen. Perhaps that's a key? Collaborative use: a mouse is per person, but several can look and touch a screen.
They still manage to out-do themselves daily, yesterday for example they had "planned maintenance" that took out all customers in one location, the problem is they didn't email any customers before hand all they did was post on their status blog (status.vps.net, which is pretty well hidden already) ... but it gets worse, they DIDN'T post on their status blog until AFTER everything went down, then they altered the date to say it was posted BEFORE the outage. So not only are they negligent, they try and cover it up...

How they're still in business is beyond me. Edit: Here is what they posted as an explanation http://i.imgur.com/OgCzx.png
I used Keymap4Macbook for a while, but found it easier to do the remapping in Emacs (with (setq mac-function-modifier 'control)) and use Emacs's eshell mode rather than a terminal emulator to run interactive shells. The only time I use the control key outside of Emacs and interactive shells is to control-click when I cannot right-click (because, e.g., I am using the Macbook's internal trackpad) and in that situation I found it simple enough to train my muscle memory to hit the second-to-leftmost modifier key rather than the rightmost modifier key. In contrast, retraining my muscles to use anything but the rightmost modifier key to "set the control bit" in Emacs would have taken a lot of time and attention.

(On OS X, control-click does the same thing as right-click, namely pop up a contextual menu, and you can only right-click if you have a non-Apple pointing device.)
I collect them.

You can really only know who is right after the fact, before that its all 'my model is more accurate than your model' bullshit.

I always feel like the 'rational' view point is that the climate will change for any number of reasons, some we control and some we don't. We should be prepared.

But folks who have bought into the Global Warming religion (which is to say they stepped away from the science and turned it into a political crusade) if this Solar event causes severe freezing across the northern hemisphere for decades it won't be the political zealots who get hung, it will be innocent bystander scientists, and science in general.
I am. And Microsoft also recently announced that Windows 8 UI's are HTML5/JS, and yet here they go and release a brand new Silverlight/C# API. This is one very confused company.
Cool survey. I can't help but feel like pie charts are a terrible choice for portraying the information, because they imply that a respondent falls into one (and only one) category, and that all the slices add up to 100%. But I have a sneaking suspicion at least some of the people who have used 1.9.2 have also used 1.8.7 at some point. It'd be much more useful to hear the 90% of rubyists have tried 1.8.7, 85% have tried 1.9.2, etc.

Still, interesting data. I have learned that I am apparently a completely typical ruby user.
The URL as a User Interface (with good & bad examples)
Taking screenshots of websites in PHP
Chromebook really wants you to use the cloud (video)
The pie charts don't really make any sense. For example, a single project can use Cucumber, Capybara, and RSpec, or none of them, or any combination. But in the article and its graphs they are presented as mutually exclusive options.

Separating the results into exclusive types (testing framework, browser integration framework, assertion macros, etc) would make a lot more sense. Or asking what tool is being used for a particular task (unit testing, integration testing, mocking/stubbing, assertion macros, etc).
Advice From An Old Programmer
It's hard to fight back against a project that hasn't been released, nor talked about until yesterday.
Exactly. This isn't representative of 'the github community', it's more like 'the subsection of the reddit/hn/etc communities that feel the need to post funny pictures using their github accounts to do it'
There's also a language/tool called Monkey Coder which attempts something along these lines; though it's more aimed at creating apps for the different kind of platforms (iphone, android, html5, mac/pc/linux app, etc). I haven't played with it yet, so can't comment, but if you're interested, check it out here:
http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/
Still would be nicer to have one key.

I've gotten used to the swiping on the trackpad for the most part, but I miss the keys :)
That's going a bit far.

It's all well and good to come up with a model for what the climate should do based on basic physics. The main trouble with climate prediction is that we don't have enough data points to check whether the models are really correct.

I do physical modelling for a living, but I know not to trust a fitted-but-untested model any further than I can comfortably spit a rat.
How often are they doing this? 29 days is a little short notice for me to make it...am I going to have to wait a year for it to come around again?
I just run this one liner as an hourly cron job, Tumblr doesn't seem to mind. It gets all my images and other Tumblr hosted media, too.

httrack "http://myhost.tumblr.com" -O "/path/to/tumblr_backup" "+*.media.tumblr.com/*" "+*.myhost.tumblr.com/*" -N100 -I0 -c2 -%c2 --update

(You'll end up with index-2.html as your top level index so you may want to make a symlink to index.html -- add this line to the above shell script:

ln -s /path/to/tumblr_backup/index-2.html /path/to/tumblr_backup/index.html

...OR make an alias along the same lines in your webserver conf. This is an artifact of telling httrack to exactly mirror the tumblr paths and telling it not to build a generic httrack index file of its own.)
Nice little utility.

If interested, you should add these easing formulas:

https://gist.github.com/983364
my reaction is that what I do on my own time is my business and has absolutely no bearing on anything else, and that asking about it is borderline invasion of privacy

-------------------------

I'm not seeing the invasion of privacy ... its a relevant question that is strictly limited to your development/engineering experience ... what you learn on side projects has bearing on your knowledge as a developer, if you don't want to reveal that, great, but most people that do have side projects have no reservations talking about it when prompted (unless its top secret or illegal)>

I'm sure a good interviewer can find a way establish your proficiency based on your work experience etc

Maybe I work on stuff I don't want to talk about all night long, or maybe I don't work on anything at all when I get home because what I'm doing at work fulfills me

----------------------------------------

Great. Doesn't change the fact that its enough of a trend among good developers to be used in an interview, to help you zero in on the really good guys.
Kinect is ahead on touchless movement and position, but is far behind on "click".
I see; thank you.
Why are bigger linodes relatively more expensive?
Microsoft refuses to endorse WebGL, labels it ‘harmful’
Hurtigruten: 5 day TV marathon in the midnight sun (LIVE)