skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "what the fuck am I going to be when I'm 30".

I'm 30 now and I'm asking myself the same thing :) First of all, I think you need to take each step at a time, that's what I do, at least. Also, try having a not-job-related activity if you have the time, it can give you that extra feeling that a month-to-month paycheck or whatever cannot provide.

If it matters, I'm a CS college-dropout, I've been employed and able to support myself since 21, while all my friends only did that in their late 20s. So, on account of that, you're really way above the average in not relying on parents' supports, do not despair :)
+1

You are 20. Get a job (for the structure it forces you too, not because its "the thing to do"), attend parties, meet girls, do crazy shit like skydiving, diving, hiking, movie marathons, read books, go live in another country.

I am 28 (in 3 days) and about to be married and then looking at kids. In that time I have lived and studied overseas, traveled a bit, have 2 degrees, have had several full time jobs, dived, hiked and generally had a bloody good time. Guess what though? I didn't start doing ANY of that stuff till I hit 21.

I think the best advice I ever read was that object of life is not to arrive in a pristine body in the afterlife, rather it is to arrive skidding in a broadside totally used up and saying "Damn that was one hell of a ride."

Your life is yours go live it.
It should be common design sense to think about what the users wants to accomplish and how to help them achieve their goal faster. It would make a lot of interfaces much more pleasant to use.

It doesn't take a lot of time. The html for a simple comment form takes me more time to write than to think about what the user wants to do (tell me something). I would even go so far as to not ask for anything besides the email address for replies, and make that optional:

If you sign with your name, I can greet you. No matter what convention you use. If you don't that's fine, too. Want me to call you? Write it in your message.

Even if you didn't enter an email address, I still got whatever you had to say, and who knows - your suggestion could be the one thing I've been missing all along.
Interesting discussion about mailing lists vs forums on mercurial_general
One thing I may have missed from the documentation: is it possible to check post-conditions (side effects of the function and return value)?
Thank you for posting this. Puts into words what I and I expect others are feeling. Sad to think he is gone.
Depends on the context it's used in. Usually YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss of ISO 8601, explicitly extend it with the UTC timezone (with the + notation), sometimes that plus the local timezone in a separate column/field, sometimes a serialized version of a library representation of a date.
There's an interesting analogy in network protocols: OSI (the right thing) versus IP (worse is better).
That may be, but it doesn't affect how sound the banking system is.

You think this is enough nitpicking, or do you want to go on?
Haskell is much more "MIT approach" than "New Jersey approach". For a better example, consider how the quick & dirty hack that is Javascript is now far, for more commercially important than the entire FP language family combined (although, it's worth noting, somewhat inspired by FP).
The article is all about how Mozilla shouldn't be copying Chrome, did you read it?
I believe contact forms are terrible by design: websites want you to contact them only when you're desperate. Try contacting Paypal as an example.

OTOH, i seriously love the feedback form on Google+.
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Why everyone thinking about professional use cases? They did not use the term contest for nothing. For things like picking a name this could be great.
Yeah, Google's pretty much required to do this by US law though (the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) - I'll leave the "think of the children" jokes to other folks.
Hacker News, where the facts count for a downvote.
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Len is such a wonderful person, it's really hard to put into words how much he meant in my life.

He was so incredibly encouraging of taking big leaps and always striving to do courageous things, even if it meant taking on risk. You could always count on him for a totally unvarnished opinion of your code or project, which is both rare and incredibly cherished.

It was amazing to work on a project for two weeks and have him tell you in two minutes what was wrong with it, why, and a better way to do it. For a plebe like me, it meant the world for him to actually take the time and explain things to me.

On top of everything else, he really made a difference at a time when I was struggling with depression.

It just seems like there are not enough words to truly talk about the impact his life had on the world. His legacy is just tremendous.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the under 13 law (in US and some other places, or "policy" rather than law for Google internationally) is only without a guardian's permission, so if a letter was written on behalf of him, they would reactivate it?

Well, certainly that's the case with the law - as to Google policy, that's where you should correct me if I'm wrong.

Edit, on a side note, if the author is the poster here (or reads HN either way): I really like your writing. The story itself normally wouldn't make me care a huge amount (a short version is "a ten year old can't use a 13 and over service"), but I actually found myself really empathising and feeling upset on his behalf.
Nice, I've been missing this for a while to renew my family's netbooks.
Why is that parents can't give consent to their young (<13y/o) child using Google account?

Parent logs into his/her account, parent creates kid's account, parent states real age (10 years), parent expresses consent, child uses the new account. Is it that complex?
What happens if someone else lives in "B1 1BB"? It's not obvious that they can click and then edit the current single entry that it returns.
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I don't think what you are saying is the full story - demand hasn't recovered completely. For example, I believe real estate demand is very low (and real estate sales has major flow on effects)[1].

However, I do think there is a significant structural change that reflects a little of what you are saying. There is an interesting question on Quora somewhat related: http://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-US-economy-take-increasing... and my answer http://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-US-economy-take-increasing...

[1] This is from 2010, but I can't find anything more recent: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/24/us-home-sales...
What would Google gain from such practices? Why not just ask you your facebook/twitter username upfront? Propally only a small percentage of their user base is ever going to use prices.org anyway. I think the story here is that it is done by slide, which still acts like it's an independent company.
It's a sensational story about the required 13 years of age to use the services.
Machiavelli wrote about this 500 years ago (http://oll.libertyfund.org/simple.php?id=775#chapter_76114), and interestingly enough he could not find any definitive answer one way or the other, maybe these guys are smarter than him, I cannot tell:

> how manlius torquatus by harshness, and valerius corvinus by gentleness, acquired equal glory.

> I conclude, then, that the character and conduct of Valerius is advantageous in a prince, but pernicious in a citizen, not only as regards his country, but also in regard to himself; pernicious for the state, because they prepare the way for a tyranny; and for himself, because in rendering him suspect to his fellow-citizens, it constrains them to take precautions against him that will prove detrimental to him. And, on the other hand, I affirm that the severity of Manlius is dangerous to the interests of a prince, but favorable to a citizen, and above all to the country. And it seldom turns to his prejudice, unless the hatred which it excites should be embittered by the suspicions which his great reputation and other virtues may inspire; as we will show when speaking of Camillus in the next chapter.
I hope the googlers here will stop the "impending doom of deletion" or delay it, so he has enough time to sort this out.
Very neat concept. I found the recommendations quite accurate for me.

I second others in saying that you should try to integrate Amazon and iTunes affiliate links in there, to try and make some money. You deserve it.

Some suggestions:

* The text is a bit weird / difficult to read on my machine. (a 14" Windows 7 laptop, with resolution 1366x768, and running Mozilla Firefox 5.0). See screenshot here: http://imgur.com/5w6Ai

* Also, it would be nice if you could make the "Go Back" link a little more prominent.
Pdf.js reached its first milestone
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I don't think its a matter of sexism. Yes, it is a generalization, but most women DO NOT want to be programmers. SV is dominated by programmers, not men. It just so happens that most programmers are men. Everyone throws around the word "male-dominated" like it is a bad thing, but we have left the door open for women (in fact, whenever we see a women in tech we tend to encourage it).
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We're not talking about a mere monopoly, we're talking about exclusive API integrations in, hypothetically, an OS with majority market share. That's not something that has historically been tolerated well by courts.
Valuable lessons to teach about backups and maybe not putting data into the cloud that can be local.

My 2012 project is going to be to quit gmail somehow and get back to imap with local storage.

Why not buy the kid his own domain name and teach him how to set it up and use a local email program (Thunderbird?)
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Who gives their real DOB when registering for a website? I've been using January 1st, 1975 as my birthday ever since I started using the internet.
Set some goals: 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, 3 years, 5, 10, lifetime.

Sometimes goals don't go as expected, but they will guide you and give you direction.
A real-time vote: Google+ vs Facebook: Who will win?
The fewer form fields the better. Name, email address, message, and Fifth Element captcha are all I use on my personal website's contact form: http://davidhuerta.me/contact.php
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I was a lot like you at your age, I started my own computer games company without knowing how to program, learned it on the job. The company collapsed after a few years and I went to work for Apple... and so on... I now hold a computer science research position... and still don't have any degree other than a high school equivalence exam. It's all a matter of luck, enthusiasm and willingness to work hard.
Why is that parents can't give consent to their young (<13y/o) child using Google account?

Because then when <insert bad thing> happens on the internet, the service provider gets blamed, even if the parent obviously should have been watching their child.
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I dont believe this is from Google. Dishonest marketing from the real owner to post on HN that it is by Google...
What's the big deal? Google is required by law to do that. Enter a fake birth date.
I'm not convinced that ratings from TopCoder's algorithm competitions are an accurate predictor of a participant's programming ability, except perhaps at the extremely low end.

This was me nine years ago, fresh out of college with a B.Sc. in Computer Science from a small state university:

http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=27128...

A rating of 1529 or 1679 is "above average" (click the "Rating Distribution" button above the graph), but to be honest, I was a complete crap programmer at the time. I doubt I would have survived as a programmer (or even been considered for a programming position) at Google or similar back then. The same holds true now.

I hope that either the ratings distribution is artificially skewed towards the low end (maybe all the good programmers are too busy making lots of money to bother with TopCoder?) or the ratings really don't correspond with programming ability.
Adding my name isn't enough to make automated replies sound personal.
University / college is also about honing your ability to learn new stuff. Once you know that you can quickly pick up anything you have a desire to learn, it's pretty easy to get stuck into what you enjoy at that moment.

I believe most institutes allow you to change your course(s) and even transfer over to a different program altogether.
You could always create a second, unused Twitter account for signups to services that don't need Twitter tweet access otherwise.

I have my main account, and then a second one to sign up for these types of websites, services that want to auth with Twitter that might send tweets I don't want (and then I sign up again with my main account if it checks out just fine), contests, and similar. I'm not against Twitter login or contest use, as I can see that being helpful to lots of people as basically a much more accessible OpenID-like single signon experience. I just don't want to spam my followers nor do I want to associate my main Twitter account with that :)
Give me a Chromebook at that pricepoint an I'm in!
I like this project. I sometimes feel Chrome has a slight advantage because Google is also building really cool services, so they can get both sides in sync (e.g. returning WebP images in page previews, or encoding to WebM with Youtube).

By building things like Pdf.js and butter/popcorn.js and giving them away for other projects to use Mozilla gets to have the same impact and feedback loop, which helps to further their mission to improve the web.
Stop smoking weed. It might sound "uptight," but that is the first step you should take. I have done it myself, and I have seen it suck the ambition out of many of my friends. It is more harmful than you might initially think. I just was in bed in the hospital after surgery, and next to me was a chronic (weed) smoker (and occasionally cigarettes). He had to have his ribs pried apart and an operation done on his lungs because of the tar buildup. He had a 1.5 foot long scar on his back and was in immense pain -- not worth it. He was only 40 years old.

Exercise. It will reduce stress and increase your motivation to do well in other things.

Drink some caffeine - it will pump up your adrenaline, motivation, and wake you up -- and is not too harmful as far as drugs go.

Don't worry about school - you can get by without it. But you need to teach yourself - and the best way is to do that is...

Get passionate about something. If you are bored or without aim, you have too much free time on your hands. Build something. Build a game, an app, a website -- anything. Do whatever you have to do to pay your bills, but try to devote your free time to making something you are interested in.
For at least a year and half now we've been working with clients to eliminate their contact forms and give users an email address instead of a form.

From the perspective of the user this is preferable for a number of reasons. Drafts can be saved, the message goes in their sent items, their name is already set, their email address is correct but most of all because it allows the user to write in the context that their used to writing in.

Clients obvious concern is spam and it is a problem as can be deciding who gets the email ( support / customer service / accounts ) and we work these issues out on a case by case basis. There is no silver bullet.

My stance on the issue, is that the primary aim (I assume) of the contact form / page is to get people to contact whoever lies behind it, it seems quite absurd to make users jump through the hoops of a form in order to do so.
COPPA gives an (easy?) way out - the parents just have to fax in their consent for their underage son to use their service. There is no law stopping the kid, Google probably just doesn't want to be inundated with such requests.
Last I remember, they required the parent's permission in the form of a fax or some other annoying format, so many sites just didn't bother accepting permission and banned under-13 users.

This was 4-5 years ago, though. I pretty much got used to lying about my age everywhere (every PHPBB forum had the same age-confirmation form before the registration process, for example), and I guess this kid probably will too. It'll be annoying for him when he actually does turn 13 and has to figure out how to change his DOB on sites (a lot of which don't let you).
Can he not request his mail over POP3 or IMAP and store it locally? Or is his login terminally locked?

What an appalling user experience—and on so many levels. It should have at least warned him that by setting his age he was in violation of the TOS.
I think he learned a valuable lesson about how to use the Internet: lie about everything.
This precise issue in Unix/POSIX causes a huge headache. I wonder how many thousands or millions of "xread/xwrite" loops have been written in user code to retry failed read and write calls, and how many of those loops have bugs?

Look at gnulib to see how hard it is to get these loops right:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob;f=li...
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob;f=li...

In the case of a partial read/write followed by an error, I don't believe it is possible to recover at all using just POSIX-defined calls.
vsftpd does, most shared webhosts don't.
This book is actually very easy for me to read. This may explain why I never got along with my calculus teachers.
This one was a blast back in the day:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?langua...

No need to run the test case, you'd run into it soon enough on a 2.6 kernel on VMWare. ;)
In HTTP resources are the things identified by the URL, so if you change the query parameters you are addressing a different resource.
You shouldn't look to real estate to evaluate demand. The housing bubble is the primary cause of the crisis. By most estimates prices have to dip another 10% in order for the market to return to its historical trend (which is to grow at the rate of inflation). There is no demand now because everyone knows housing is overpriced. That's a good thing.
In the future, the world will use UTC and sunrise and sunset will happen at different times, relative to where you are.
Exactly. If it's an automated reply it's going to sound impersonal either way, and if it's not an automated reply... don't hire robots?

When the person who mails you is actually involved/interested, even a greetings-less mail won't sound impersonal. When the person who mails you is not a person, you probably won't get to make it personal. And in the worst case, you may land it right in the uncanny valley.
I really see very little room for confusion here.

I don't understand how you reach that conclusion. You might understand it, I don't see how you can say there is very little room for confusion.

Yes, if you know about declaration follows use, it makes sense.

Yes, if you "keep in mind that strings are char arrays and an array's name is actually a pointer" then it makes sense.

You can get by by knowing to avoid some constructs.

If you know how the c compiler works, pointers make sense.

If you know C then you know C.

But when you're new to the language, you don't know these things and that's what this part of the thread is discussing.

Another responder wrote:

The key is that * is part of the type of the
declaration, not of the variable; an int* is
not an int.

The grammar is structured as though it's not. Consider this:

int* c, d;

Since star is part of the type, if the language was designed well then both of them would be int pointers. But in that case, only c is. d is an int. Awful.
Well not really, because if you can verify the scripts that are loaded (and side-loading JavaScript would have to be a targeted attack that compromised either the server, or the Google API, or a malicious extension), then it guarantees end-to-end encryption for the user as opposed to having to send plaintext over the wire.

How exactly would you implement a browser based crypto solution?
I really want to love the MeeGo Netbook UX and ran it for a month on my Lenovo s10-3t but can't get over its filing-cabinet UI; I can't just get to an application outside of the 6 or so on the quick launch box. You have to click on a tab, then play category bingo to figure out or try to remember which category panel to expand and find it in--and only one can be expanded at a time.

Also, the glittery nonsense on the paint job is sort of horrible. I hate it on my Lenovo netbook too; This is supposed to be a Netbook, not a Twilight character.
You might be interested in "RESTful Web Services Cookbook", it covers some of the topics you discuss and is a very pragmatic book.
The most fun one I ever found was a situation where a daemon analyzing & forwarding traffic through a bridged interface would lock up & stop passing traffic when you popped backwards and forwards through time on the box.
Do you have any stats on whether this has led to more contact from users?

While I can see some of the advantages you listed for email addresses, the good thing about a contact form is that it's right there, ready to be filled in. An email link has to be clicked on, the email client might take some time to load, or not even be properly associated with mailto: links (eg. webmail clients)
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What should I do with my life?
Given the previous post on the same subject I was inspired to tell my story and ask HN community's introspection.

While I had very humble beginnings, in a poor but well educated family I managed to achieve pretty much everything I've set my mind to, including going trough school and university and being self sufficient (money-wise) since I was about 15.

After finishing university I worked on 3 continents with some very large manufacturing, engineering and construction companies, always overachieving (and being also a cheap worker since I come from a 2nd world country). I've got promoted quickly and very recently I have reached a senior management level in large company. Just to be clear my expertise is in IT infrastructure and telecom and I'm 29.

However, job satisfaction is low now because this company is a politicized beyond my liking and also I enjoy engineering a lot more than meetings and people-management.

How many of you have been in the same situation and what did you do? Did you stick with the cushy salary or did you spend your last penny on some startup idea? Did you wind back on your career and invest in your personal life (get married, have kids, all of which I haven't done yet) or did you decide to push further the corporate ladder? Or did you all try to "balance it out" and manage the routine?
My Beef With A Priori Knowledge in UI