skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Overcoming an Inferiority Complex
Dear HN,

I’ve hit a bit of a brick wall in life recently and for the first time in my relatively short life (24) I’ve been diagnosed with depression. This has spurned me into doing a bit of self reflection and soul searching.

I’m a hacker at heart. I love to code and have done since my early teens. By the time I left high school to start university I had already taught myself C++, written games and worked during holidays as a developer for a small local company. I guess that lead to an anti-climax when I went to study Comp. Sci. at university. I attended a reasonably good university by UK standards, top 20 for engineering in the UK. But throughout my time there I always felt like I was missing out, I pretty much walked through the course. Don’t get me wrong I worked hard, real hard but I was never mentally challenged. I would deliberately over-engineer assignments to challenge myself. I was the go to guy for classmates when they were stuck with assignments. I left said university 2 years ago with a 1st class honours degree and average class score of > 80%.

After graduating I took a job working at a large financial organisation in the UK. My day-to-day work is focused on patching and extending a large CRUD application. For the first year I was on a roll, I quickly learnt the twisted innards of the codebase, patched and extended the life out of it and was rewarded with a promotion within 18 months. But it brings me no joy.

I guess where I’m going with this is that I’ve always achieved. I’ve always achieved everything I can within my circumstance. But I’m never satisfied. I always compare my achievements to those of others and dismiss what I have done. This has lead to a feeling of worthlessness and inferiority. Applying this to my current situation I feel stuck. I’m in a secure, well paid job but with little opportunity to learn or develop. I live in a pretty small UK city where all the local software jobs are maintenance of legacy apps. I read HN daily and aspire to be a part of the startup culture and learn by immersion. Yet the more I read the more I read the less confident I becomes in my own ability. I don’t know ROR, I haven’t learnt Haskell and my algorithms skills are rusty at best. How would I ever be good enough to work with these guys?

HN how can I address my thought process and gain more confidence in my ability? Has anybody else overcome anything similar and how did you achieve it?
I wonder if it would be possible to create a QR code that only differs for very few black squares, and tell people to blacken said squares depending on their reply. It could be a see-through card - the first page shows the QR code, with holes where the answer dots go. The second page only shows the answer dots to blacken out.

Would at least be geeky fun.
What, specifically, would you like to see changed?

It is evolving: Coffeescript, node, npm, and V8 are four examples. It can feel good to code in JS, just like it can in Python or Ruby (or Scheme :-) ).
Very in-depth write up of how browsers interpret Javascript and how your coding style affects performance. Some useful tips at the end, although one shouldn't be taking these tips to heart and optimising prematurely. A bad algorithm can make all this fine-tuning moot.
GLES is even cruftier than OpenGL, because they removed a bunch of functionality but didn't simplify the API. So you have all sorts of parameters and options that literally have no purpose. The documentation frequently says things like "The blah parameter controls yada yada. It's value must be zero." That's gotta be mighty confusing for a web developer doing 3D graphics for the first time.

The design of OpenGL is optimized for stateful, fixed pipeline, immediate mode drawing, an extinct paradigm that is unsupported in GLES and WebGL. The modern paradigm of shaders and GPU objects is radically different and demands an API tailored for it.

The continuity of OpenGL has been justified by its established ecosystem. Game developers prefered one patched up API to a new API for every generation of graphics hardware. But now hardware architecture has more or less stabilized and it's the developers that are new. Let's give them a fresh start instead of a badly mutilated API that, frankly, I think most of them will find impenetrable.
How do you physically transfer bitcoins?

>If there is some way clearing houses can prove they own a certain quantity of bitcoins

The network knows exactly to what address (hash) each bitcoin belongs to. You just need to publish the addresses you own and prove you actually own them (by signing something with each of the addresses' private key).
Why is JS not "reliable"? Any language can be a JS alternative. Do you mean you want an alternative language that runs natively in browsers?
I am interested. My portfolio is at madebyargon.com

My email is inlith@gmail.com
Thank you. That's very kind of you.

The most dire time was right after raldi left, when I had just two tech people, a programmer and a sysadmin.
Chrome at 20% market share, IE9 less than IE7
Does anyone know how to rectify this if you're using the Rails 3 respond_with pattern?
How much did you try to use Haskell before declaring it "unusable"?

Haskell is very different from other languages, which means your expertise in other languages doesn't translate. That makes it harder to start off, almost like learning programming from scratch. But if you encounter this and decide it is "unusable" then you are describing your own lack of expertise in the language as an objective property of the language itself.

Haskell has interesting advantages and disadvantages. It is already used successfully in many contexts. It is a joy to program in, and it's one of the languages where successful compilation actually means a whole lot (bugs that go through the compilation process uncaught are an order of magnitude more rare than in other compiled languages).

It has some useful tools not found elsewhere (hoogle type search, djinn, pl/unpl).

It performs extremely well and manages to be more expressive/concise than Python while still far exceeding it in performance.

It's a pretty impressive piece of design.
DoE OIG released a statement saying that they were investigating a criminal fraud case, not unpaid student loans.
I interviewed at Amazon once. They gave me three phone screens but I didn't get invited for the 1:1. I greatly respected the interview and it was my first wake up call that I had lost some of my technical edge as a manager.

At Google, at the same time, I almost got a job offer. I got all the way through the interview (phone-screen, all-day in-person interview) and then they said they didn't know what to do with me could I come back in 6 month and make a presentation on a business idea. I took them up on it 6 months later but they passed on my business idea (2004, a rich text wiki).
I haven't verified the results of this particular paper, but there is a broad class of potential problems along these lines with quantum cryptography. Here's a short piece I wrote about these problems in 2004: http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/whats-wrong-with-those-quantu...

The short summary is that side channel attacks are a real problem with quantum cryptography, potentially moreso than with conventional crypto. The reason is that only a limited number of people have the resources to seriously test (and thus improve) real-world implementations of quantum cryptosystems systems. I.e., quantum crypto greatly raises the bar to do white hat hacking.
Right now I'm going to enjoy the nice summer weather and take care of some things that I've been neglecting for a while.

Then we'll see where the wind takes me. :) The last paragraph of the blog post has details.
Define Your Own "Change the World"
You make it sound like a bad thing...But yes thats exactly what we have :-). Except with us there are no fees: no deposit fees, no withdraw fees, no fees to tip. If you can get over the fact that it is bitcoin based, its probably the cheapest way to reward someone online. This would not be possible without bitcoin. In fact we built the system to use USD and EUR initially but eventually realized that financial/legal costs were making the project totally unviable. Changing to bitcoin allowed us to continue and play with this idea of the 'Online street performer' and develop it somewhat.

I think what we do shows that there are some positive applications for bitcoin and it does open opportunities for online business. Unfortunately most of the press dwells on 'bitcoin for drugs' stories, why cant they to story about Youtipit!

... probably because there are far more people interested in buying drugs than tipping online :-0
As Lulzsec so clumsily illustrated, you can't know because most vulnerabilities are silently patched, or undiscovered (but still in use without the site's knowledge.) Any such index would more likely penalize the most honest than the most vulnerable.
Oh duh, I'm dumb.
Thank you very much. Your kind words are appreciated.
"At the time that I wrote this book I knew about 20 programming languages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on how weird they were."

He's saying the entire range is a day to a week. The ones that are isomorphic would take a day or two, I agree.

But he's saying the ones that are not isomorphic also take just up to a week, and according to other discussions with him, it's not because he's already an expert in those other types of languages.
Does the "made in North America" thing really adds any value to that item?
Everything up to the bacon sounded good. :) I think you sent me an email, I'll hit you up there.
It is deadly easy to be built, especially based upon text messaging.

MVP would be: You register the event (name, date/time and final confirmation deadline), upload/insert the names and phone numbers of invited guests, the service generates a set of links - one for each guest - which you should put on invitations, so once they click their RSVP will be logged. On the final confirmation day the service will text the remaining guests with a remainder.

That's it. Working solution is doable in 5-10 hrs of coding including integration with sms gateway.

But here a more difficult question comes: would you pay for such service? Hmmm?
I lot of rules are related to avoid gaming the system (and have severe consequences on breaking them). I wonder if its possible to validate the input for these rules programatically?
Wireless Router Signal Strength Stats - Super User
And the award for most pompous, unnecessary, and conceited response goes to... cheez!
"alternative language that runs natively in browsers"

That's already been done: http://code.google.com/chrome/nativeclient/
Take a look at Agda (http://wiki.portal.chalmers.se/agda/pmwiki.php) and tell me if you could "learn it in a week".
Well there's always been interesting talk about getting LLVM to run in browsers, which would be wicked cool, and open up a lot of different programming languages.

That said, JavaScript really is an awesome language to use, if you can get over the syntax. So i really can't see how JS would be unsuitable for future use, especially in light of the changes that have happened and continue to come down the pipeline in newer versions of JS.

Coffeescript is a fantastic view of the power and capabilities of JavaScript packaged in a way that is considerably more elegant to look at and use on a daily basis. Check out the talk that Brendan Eich and Jeremy Ashkenas did at JSConf (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2662846 ).

Javascript really is going to be a development powerhouse for the foreseeable future. And i'm actually happy about that.
Or the digital way: on the Commodore 64 disk drive (the 1541), you'd flip a bit of a certain memory-mapped location to switch the LED on or off. Doing this a variable amount of times per second would result in a smoothly fading led. Not sure if anyone ever made a sinusoidal fade, but there were demo's with the LED following the beat of the music.
Some effort is being made to bring other languages to the web. Emscripten is a backend for LLVM to produce javascript code (should work with any LLVM frontend). NACL (native client) is a project by google to allow code to be compile for a more secure subset of x86 and to run on a browser safely. I'm not sure on the stability or use of either. GWT (google web toolkit) is a project that compiles java to javascript. This one should be fairly stable and seems to be well supported.
It would be the first part, but I don't know if it is technically possible yet.
Why would they give the money directly to the student instead of the educational institution?
While server-side JS such as Node.js might be a fad, client-side JS is firmly entrenched. Given the speed at which the browser developers and standards groups agree on implementing new standards (read: slow), client-side Javascript is here to stay.

However, CoffeeScript provides an interesting look into the future of Javascript. I also see a similar thing happening with CSS and Less, where people are no longer waiting for browsers to support features developers want.

And lastly, I personally really enjoy coding in Javascript. The ugliest part about it is the DOM and Jquery successfully hides that. I think part of the reason Node.js is so popular because of the strength and programmer joy of the language.
I think texting or a phone call is a better solution. Also, I think the technology behind it is more important than getting people to pay for an entirely new service. This can be sold to current card companies who could integrate this into their products.
I'm sure it helps to have the right parents too. When I was in elementary school, I showed great curiosity for how our old Macintosh worked, but the internet wasn't around, there were no relevant books in the public library, and my parents didn't know jack-shit about computers.

My point is, with the right upbringing, we would all be like this. I'd like to learn more about this kids childhood. I wonder if, like me, he also went to run-down public high school and had technologically illiterate parents. If that the case, I'd be super impressed. Until then, I'm just mildly impressed and slightly jealous.
HN doesn't let you downvote articles.

However, they can be flagged, if you feel they are inappropriate for HN.
Nitpick: "Lingua franca", not "lingua de franca"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca

Also: no, probably not. We're still dealing with browsers that are 10 years old, so even if you were to release a browser, with, say, Tcl as the default language, it'd be years before it was something you could count on being everywhere.

See: positive network externalities, and "lock in".
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Augmented reality and books, together at last?
Well, I'm assuming "Western World" to include all of the Americas, though I admit that term is highly ambiguous.
Must be nice to have an oscilliscope.
Google Tests a New Interface
Craigslist North Carolina provides info about the city
Craigslist North Carolina provides is a website that provides info about the city of North carolina. This site provides high quality classified ads that are helpful for the people of the city to get info. Info provided here is based upon original material and help the local community to remain aware about their area.
Misleading headline, as no actual bitcoins were stolen from this exploit according to the owner of MtGox.
Hackers steal quantum code
Nook Dethrones Kindle according to Consumer Reports
Hackers break into Sega password database
Earbits is the only one of these music services where I've actually learned about new bands. Nice work on the fundraising!
You still need to pay rent and eat. Pretty integral parts of any good education, I'd wager.
Dear sudhirc. Please read my comments. I am constantly mentioning "primary school education".

I don't give a damn about careers, I don't give a damn about degrees; because by the time people are in (senior)high school, they are smart to use the 3 pound coconut God put on their shoulders and figure things out for themselves.

All I care about primary school education. And children NEED hand holding and general direction providing at such a nascent level which can only be provided by a trained teacher within a pedagogically sound system and can never be achieved by any level of technologically marvelous device of any sorts. Period.

That is why when I have children they are not going to school until they are at least 10 years old. :P

PS: I don't care what Bill Gates says. Since when is he an authority on education? What are his credentials/contributions in the field?
So much competition in tablets and e-readers is good news for consumers no matter how you look at it.
This is a good sign for us Chrome developers. I've been seeing increased purchases of my app recent even to be quite frank, it's pretty rough around the edges. When the Web Store was released to the stable branch I saw a huge spike in page views and then it quickly trailed off. My page views haven't gone up but purchases have; I'm guessing it's new users.

I'm hopefully that the Chromebooks will be successful because my particular app is designed for Chrome OS (it uses the "panel" mode which launches the app in a little window in the bottom of the screen. In desktop Chrome it launches as a new window which isn't as good of an experience). This news is still good; shows that even if Chromebooks are not successful Chrome proper is.
IANAL either, but I'm not so sure if it's wrong. The fact that the market is "unregulated" in the sense that it doesn't have special regulations written about it the way that regular financial markets do doesn't mean that no laws apply.

On the other hand, is it even possible to prove (or even provide evidence) that someone stole your bitcoins?
No? It's only important because everyone has a javascript interpreter. The point will become moot as Javascript interpreters get good enough to allow us to run with languages that compile down to Javascript and enable more optimizations like typed arrays.
How would they know? (Serious question)
Microsoft *previews* Windows 8 – Part 2 now available
Thank you. That's not quite an intuitive association, but my era of tagging is over.
No, but it’s good marketing. Nothing wrong with that.

Funny story: At the end of the 19th century Great Britain pushed for all products to be branded with their country of origin, not to market their products better but for protectionism – to make it easier for customers to recognize real or perceived knock-offs.

That works if those other countries really make inferior products but it backfires when other countries make products of equal or better quality. “Made in Germany” (for example) then becomes a mark of quality, not inferiority.
"The problem isn't Linux. The problem is GNOME, and to a lesser extent, KDE."

For those of you who feel a little adventuresome, may I recommend trying a minimalistic, tiling window manager?

I use i3: http://i3wm.org

It's very stable, very simple to use and configure, and doesn't have the bloat of KDE/GNOME.

Some other popular minimalistic window managers:

awesome - http://awesome.naquadah.org

xmonad - http://xmonad.org

wmii - http://www.suckless.org/wmii
Sleeping patterns
That's just false, though.

If you only measure the computational power of programming languages, then it is mostly equivalent (though there are some languages which are not Turing-complete, because they have proofs of termination).

If you also measure other properties, like what kinds of guarantees your language gives you, then they differ even more.
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Sheitan: On Christmas Eve in Styxx Club in Paris, the troublemaker Bart and his friends from the foam, Thailand and Ladj, Yasmine waiter and the customer know the day before
Wake your dad with a text
And without proper stack traces.

Don't get me wrong, I love coffescript, but it clearly is a hack.

The internet landscape would look very different if browsers had a standardized bytecode interpreter.
Are you comparing Gnu Emacs on Linux and XEmacs on Windows? I found Gnu Emacs so ugly and alien on Windows and XEmacs so lacking in extension support that I gave up on both. Also, it's annoying to switch back and forth between Gnu Emacs and XEmacs. Therefore, my IDE on Windows is Putty. I log into a Linux box and connect to one of my long-running Screen sessions so I can use a decent Emacs :-)
No one language can meet every need. Even if it has been done, Javascript is a terrible language to write an MP3 decoder in, relative to more suitable languages. So if we're continuing to expand what the browser can do, shouldn't we expand what languages we can express them in? Why do we have to write our WebGL programs in Javascript? Javascript isn't a terribly great bytecode language, either, unless you're basically just writing a thin skin over Javascript.

The logical conclusion of this line of argument is pretty much NaCL: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ Is that the anwser? Is there some intermediate where Javascript isn't the only choice for everything but we don't go to the other extreme?

Beats me, but we'll all find out together. But my main point is that it definitely is not the case that Javascript is just the answer to everything and the situation is just peachy keen as it is. It isn't the answer to everything. No one language is. Either we get something else into the client, or we face some combination of wasted effort jamming programs into a language that doesn't really want them and applications simply never written because they don't work well with Javascript's abstractions. Maybe that's OK too, maybe we want a distinction between "native" and "web" app.
What do you think it might turn out to be unsuitable for?

Just like some languages have tools to translate them to C, there's no reason why you wouldn't use a tool to compile from a language more appropriate to your task, into javascript.
I do not know why I should install OS X on non-Apple hardware, besides maybe safe some money. But with Linux it is already a pain to buy some basic multi-purpose printer/scanner. I went through this last time and believe me, the cost of the time that I spent on choosing the right printer that will work with Linux was higher than the printer itself. And in the end the printer still was not supported out of the box and I had to download some packages from the constructors web-site. In the end it works now - but my wife would never be able to make it work.
But what about your party then? You would have to buy these special cards to invite your friends, and with generic solution you can put these invite links on your custom made postcards, in your e-mails, etc.

On the other hand I'm just curious how many wedding parties are now organized using Facebook's Events feature ;) (interesting to note: FB Events do not remind to confirm your attendance as well)
What's your app? I'll buy it :D
I think Wi-fi mesh networks are the only way we can have close to fully decentralized Internet. Ideally the new "Internet" would work completely P2P from one user to the next, either from router to router or from mobile phone to mobile phone. But the technology will probably not be very practical this decade, but I could see it catching on in "niche" markets, like in oppressed countries, and then grow organically from there.