skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another person thinking Apple invented app stores?
I'd like to agree but do you honestly believe someone like, say, Paris Hilton could become a good programmer? Because unless I'm mistaken, it seems you are arguing for that.

I believe sometimes, some people, just aren't suited for a particular craft. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's a good thing that everyone has skills and interests in different areas.

To be a good programmer, there are a lot of pre-requisites one needs to learn first - skills such as a passion for self-learning, ability to think logically, ability to receive feedback and improve on that, etc. If someone begins as a programmer without these pre-reqs they will have a very difficult time getting to the stage where they can be a good developer.

I recently worked with a junior programmer that just wouldn't listen. I would try to advise him but he would completely ignore it and just go back to copying and pasting code and hoping it would work. Even walking through code line-by-line it was clear he had trouble understanding simple assignments.

Now, maybe that is my fault as a mentor but, IMO, he needed to first learn how to listen and receive feedback before he could move on to the next step. Unfortunately, some people are just too stubborn and will not change. For those people, I don't see how they could become great programmers.
If you would do your job for free, you're an idiot and I don't want you on my team.

I've liked almost every job I've ever had, and loved some of them. I would never have done any of them for free.

Even when I was volunteering during high school, I got free food and discounts on parts.
Please don't make the mistake of assuming this discussion applies to you. The subject has nothing to do with honing one's programming skills. [Edit: oops, I confused this thread with another. Never mind, the real point follows.]

As for crises of confidence, what makes them tough is that they opportunistically seize on every item that floats through consciousness and turn it into some new weapon to batter you with. One thing I found helped is to give up on the idea of "talent" altogether and just focus on things that interest you and give you pleasure (edit: and best of all, have value to others) whether or not you have any talent at all.

Actually, someone who really lacked talent probably wouldn't feel the way you describe. They'd just drop out of the game and rationalize it as "that stuff sucks anyway". So you probably do have talent, but the state you're describing is not one that can accurately assess anything remotely related to the idea. In such a state, it can actually be creatively liberating to just redefine yourself as a fool and get on with it. It's like when you're sitting by a swimming pool enjoying the sun and someone starts splashing you with water. If you can't get them to stop, a good defense is to just jump in the pool.
There are a ton of things that are obvious once you think of them.
"You are the company that names your beta builds after candy, ice cream, and sugared cereals. Apple names their betas after things that will eat your things along with the tasty human wrapper that eats that crap. Do you honestly think anyone can take you seriously?"

Really? That's his biggest dig against Google is that they like to have fun with their beta names?
O visa - US Visa for Aliens of Extraordinary Ability
HP... Autonomy... really?
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Autonomy-Reviews-E11045.htm
Yes, the complete package is what they can offer big business. There are so many pieces to it now that they can turn it to a huge range of different uses.

The problem they have (well at least had when I was there a few years ago) is that nobody understands it all anymore. They've acquired so much technology and have such a high turn over rate of developers (barring a few extremely well rewarded key seniors) that its a constant uphill struggle to change anything or improve significantly, so developers have to just patch things up as best they can.

That burden will eventually catch up with them I would think, but I'm always surprised at how long a bad code-base can be kept alive.
Not to be a dick, but broken graphic links and "Untitled Document" and this test is to do what? Filter the herd?
New iPads don't show up for free in Windows Update.
Choose your own game to play 
Google certainly knows games have been one of the reasons for Facebook’s success. So, just to ensure that Google+ doesn’t fail in the social networking competition, it has come up with the next big thing, Google+ games. Though it was imminent that Google would come up with Google+ games as a reference to “Google+ games” that appeared in Google+ code in June.
The stock market hates HP's new strategy
White House Orders Federal Agencies To Start Snipping Their Budgets
Yeah, I was excited until I saw it was for Eclipse.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303726

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398989

(There may be more recent ones)

As for developers' conferences, you got to see yourself. Should corelate with the second poll though.
Lockheed Martin Tests Tiny Samarai UAV
Unclogging Chinese Traffic With A Bus System That Works
http://www.cultofmac.com/angry-engineers-hacked-the-ipad-2-t...
Why Klout's Online Reputation Sheds No Light On My World
If the height of your desk, chairs, tables, kitchen sink and cupboards are determined by anything other than the size of resp. your (or at least, 'an average') torso, calves, torso, legs and total body length, you live in a weird house. If you look long enough, you can find 'patterns' everywhere.
HP Killing Off TouchPad, Pre – Open Source It?
> it will kill you if you drink it raw

Sorry, but this is total nonsense. I knew many a chem student with access to pure ethanol (not to mention the wits to manufacture it). They are still with us (as are the photos)

So, pure alcohol/ethanol will not kill you faster than the equivalent liquor. You may, of course, wish for death ..
I have a hard time with the WebOS failed to get a foothold under two separate companies.

HP never really tried. $1.2B and then trashing it so quickly? That's not trying.

This was a perfect opportunity to take the time and do it right. A company that was/is good with hardware, now has a great mobile OS. It had some time to take the loss financially with success of other areas (laptops, enterprise software, etc).
Umm... that pours the whole theory of deliberate practice and (more importantly) rocky style style montages for programming down the toilet.
With or without competition, Apple has an incentive to give you a reason to buy a brand new iPad every year. Just look at the iPod.
I run a large Wed design & development related website. I can send you some decent converting traffic.

My contact information is in my profile.
Apple Again Cites Inaccurate Evidence in Samsung Patent Case
pigbucket summed it up elsewhere:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902523
New Visual Proportions for the iOS User Interface
Pair Programming at a Startup: time sink or saviour?
Haha! Never saw that site before, but man are those some upset employees!

It certainly is a hell of a place to work as a developer. I was almost grateful for it in a way, it was my first professional developer job (they tend to hire fresh meat). But it taught me a lot about what not to do, and was a proving ground for my ability to work under pressure.

I'd almost recommend doing a stint in a place like it, makes you appreciate all your jobs afterwards. :-)
Assuming that you're worried this "time off" won't look to good to future potential employers, I think you've got the wrong attitude. People will have different opinions on it, but my advice would be to create a business entity for these projects, then just list and talk about your employment/operation of a business like any other work experience. Don't frame it to potential employers or others as "taking time off"; you're not taking time off to screw around, you're going to be working. It's productive business time, tell it like it is. You don't have to call it a start up, but after the fact, if you'd like to get back into the BigCo world, say you spent a few years running your own development shop for the experience.

Along with setting up a business, make a website and run a blog with it. Highlight the products you release, and give anyone who searches your past a clear idea that you were being productive and successfully managing a small business. Keeping it looking respectable is all about how you frame it and portray it.
Gone in 60 Seconds: The Shortest-Lived Tech Products Ever
I love Central Computer! It has the selection of Fry's, but the employees actually speak english and the merchandise is well lit and organized... and for that you do pay quite a premium over Fry's, but it's worth it.
> just practice smiling at strangers

This is excellent advice. Actually, give anyone you interact with your dopiest, most shit-eating grin possible.

HOW YOU FEEL: Like a fucking idiot
HOW THEY FEEL: Wow, this guy really appreciates this interaction! What a big smile! : D

You get used to it. I have gone through this too. I used to never smile in photographs. Now, I give every photograph my "retarded person who has just learned he is going to mcdonalds" huge idiot grin. You know what? Now I look like everyone else who smiles in photographs
Linux at 20, some personal memories (by Lars Wirzenius)
Was tablet market competetive befor iPad showed up?
There are actually people that enjoy those jobs. There aren't enough of them to fill those jobs, though.

But then, I think most people wouldn't enjoy any job, no matter what it was...
I'm rooting for Augmented Reality eyeglasses and contact lenses.

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

=]
> Seriously 500MB is considered unlimited in the UK?

Until the advertising standards people get hold of it, I expect. Rather like "Up to 8Mb/s" broadband, it's just asking to be taken down, but it seems likely that carriers will continue to brand obviously limited packages as "unlimited" until they're forced to be more honest.
"The subject has nothing to do with honing one's programming skills. It has to do with a large segment of the population (one of the "humps" in "double hump") who can't grasp even the very first, simplest things about programming, like defining a function."

Sorry but I think you're mistaken, possibly due to the other link on the front page right now (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902903).

In this blogpost Jeff Atwood is specifically NOT talking about people who can't grasp the first thing about programming:

"We already know there's a vast divide between those who can program and those who cannot.

But the dirty little secret of the software development industry is that this is also true even for people who can program: there's a vast divide between good developers and mediocre developers. A mediocre developer can program his or her heart out for four years, but that won't magically transform them into a good developer. And the good developers always seem to have a natural knack for the stuff from the very beginning."
Oh. When I tried (admittedly a while ago) I couldn't get it working elsewhere and found a few others who had the same problem.
Judging by the text of the hint you gave us, I believe it's trying to make you type:

var six = numbers[2]

I am not sure where the hangup is, considering I just copy-pasted that from two parts of the hint. Have they described arrays to you yet? Perhaps the problem is that they insufficiently described what an array was and what it did? I have not tried to use the site, so I'm not sure.
10 bootstrapping / startup-life-hacks we’ve learned so far
Any other bootstrapping techniques that you would add?
Pacman in clojurescript
Infographic: Common reasons for almost getting fired
The mathematical strengths of bcrypt vs SHA-2 are totally irrelevant.

SHA-512 is plenty big enough to require age-of-the-universe-scale CPU-effort to crack. For what it was designed for. But it simply wasn't designed for storing short bits of text like passwords. Anyone using it for that is using it wrongly, and has built a system that is far, far more prone to cracking than the theoretical strength of SHA-512 suggests.

Once you go beyond even basically competent crypto, the only thing that matters is how fast you can try likely passwords.

For passwords, SHA-512 is no better than MD5, because though MD5 has theoretical issues, no sane person will ever do a math attack on MD5 to crack your password, when they can just try all combinations of likely passwords in a few seconds or minutes.

And SHA-512 is no better than MD5 if I can try passwords at the same rate. Because I'm going to guess your password in the same amount of time. Even if you had a SHA-65536. The only practical reason SHA-512 is better for passwords than MD5 is that it takes a good chunk longer to calculate (but not long enough!).

So it is the rate of hashing, not the 'power' of the algorithm you need to worry about. And that is why bcrypt is what you should use. It isn't that it is stronger crypto, strength is irrelevant: it is slower crypto. And that's what you need when you're handling passwords.

As for 'we have a secure db and rate limited login' - why not use plaintext passwords then? SHA based hashing is only a few days CPU more secure than plaintext for short passwords. In both cases you're banking on nobody having access to the database. If you can guarantee nobody has access to the database, and you're rate limiting your logins, then why not use plaintext? No. You use password hashing explicitly because you can't guarantee db security. So use the right tool for the job.

tl;dr - Use bcrypt, it is many orders of magnitude more secure than SHA-2-based approaches.
Oh, wow, I didn't realize it has been you doing all this serious cross referencing to previous discussions. THANK YOU. It has been a huge help to me in the past, especially when I land on Hacker News results from a Google search.
You must not issue redirects to AJAX requests anyway, because Firefox will reset every single header you set on the request (custom or not), which has very annoying side effects (content negotiation will be broken post-redirect, if you're trying to use a RESTful API with content dispatching for browsers and API clients you're hosed)
After WebOS, Who's Next To Fall?
Nimbus: An iOS framework whose growth is bounded by O(documentation).
Wouldn't "rough" equate to more leaves at more angles, which in a way confirms his hypothesis?
I think the two are not as mutually exclusive as you present it to be.

Consider something like language acquisition for example; if you had a 30 year old that already knew 3 languages they would almost certainly perform better on an exam to test potential to learn new languages than a 30 year old that knew one language.

If I am reading you correctly you are saying "that's not actually a legitimate potential predictor; it just indicates what experience you have, not a true measure of your capability going forward", but in reality if you have only learned one language by the time you are 30, you are at a point where your gene pool is not a great predictor. By the time you are 30, your lack of previous experience has actually had a physical effect on your brain that prevents you from being as good at language acquisition going forward.

It's not merely the fact that you have experience in a particular area that improves your direct ability to answer questions; lacking experience actually makes it more difficult to acquire the same levels of experience.

In other words, having experience makes you more able to gain experience; a test that measures your experience is a legitimate indicator of future learning potential. It's exactly along the line of colleges teaching you "how to learn" and any practical skills that you gain along the way are largely incidental.
I think it's a fair statement to prefer the OO paradigm, and indeed it is good for a whole load of things in programming. Nonetheless, adding lambdas to Java should give plenty of easy wins even if you prefer your code to be broadly OO.

Look through your for and foreach loops. I bet a lot of them would be neater, more readable, and better express intent as some combination of map and filter.

Count how many classes you have with only one method and no data in them. Would you really make separate classes for all of those if you had the option to pass them around as functions?

I would also like to see something like the yield and yield! (yield every item in this collection) keywords, because those can give readability improvements in a lot of places too, but one step at a time.
user:	dougwightman
created: 591 days ago

And this is your first comment, along with an awesome submission! Welcome to HN ;)
This guys has a major stick up his ass. His comment that Google fails in the tablet market because they have silly beta names is ridiculous. Google does not even manufacture the hardware and as such cannot guarantee the UX.

On top of that his suggestion is blatantly obvious - Apple dominates tablets. So if you want to make money its probably easier if you go for the lower lying fruit.

to paraphrase: steve jobs is so frickin' awesome its not even worth trying to compete with him. So go and find greener pastures.
Maybe I should pivot my personal blog/website...

=]
HP Stock Price Falls 23% to 6-Year Low
> * that wasn't putting down someone's submission or complaining about there being a similar article*

You're getting downvotes galore by the folks here, but on the off chance you're not a native English speaker or something, I don't read his comments that way at all. I actually checked through every one of your links posted above and I don't take his comments to be mean spirited at all. More like he's designated himself the friendly community cross referencer.

This one[1] in particular, is about as good of a comment as you can get. Cross referenced to other submissions, interesting links raised in the HN discussion, and a comment of his own.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2896827
NodeJS – The what, why, how and when
The Iron Law of Irrelevant Anecdotes
I'm the happy partner in this week of peer programming. Great post and great results
Awesome post! That's what it takes to be an entrepreneur!
Not supprising, as on the face of it, it looks like utter madness.
HP discontinues WebOS devices
I don't really know Java, so this is made up Java/C#/something, but compare these:

List<int> mapped = new List<int>();
for (int i = 0; i < list.count(); i++)
{
mapped[i] = list[i] + 1;
}

Or:

List<int> mapped = list.map((x) => x + 1);

Which do you think is more elegant and readable? For a slightly more extreme example, what if we want the numbers less than 100:

List<int>filtered = new List<int>();
for (int i = 0, j = 0; i < list.count(); i++)
{
if (list[i] < 100)
{
filtered[j] = list[i];
j++;
}
}

Or this:

List<int> filtered = list.filter((x) => x < 100);
It's funny - about a month ago there was a discussion here that you should be using the 303 redirect in response to a post.

The discussion was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2791663

In there, I commented (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2792357) that I would recommend against 303 because of possibly broken proxies and mainly because browser were already doing the right thing in response to a 302.

How wrong I was as we now have an instance where at least one browser is doing it the way the spec has probably intended for it to be handled.

I would assume they are still handling 302 in response to a POST like every other browser but for 303 they are doing it the way the spec was initially worded.

This is, IMHO, not an IE issue but an IE standards-compliancy-feature at least until somebody here tries whether it works as expected with a 303 status code. If it does and you want it to work differently with a 302 code, then it's probably your turn to get the spec fixed :-)
> his "Invention" site is mostly text but all in images... Not using text is probably the least usable thing you can do.

Well, if you consider the problems that full text search is now causing for his patent licensee, maybe it's intentional...
Share Rides to Burning Man
I think you're missing the point. My take on what he's saying is "If you had a billion dollars and money was absolutely no object would you still do your job". Hence the "remember when you were 12" line calling back to a time when money is not a primary concern.
What iPod evolution, adding a camera?

How about:
- increased codec support formats like flac?
- wireless sycning?
- syncing or streaming for unlimited music services like Spotify, Rdio, or Rhapsody?
- industry standard like micro-usb for charging and syncing?
- micro sd storage expansion?

I don't know how people see an innovative market for mp3 players.
It sounds neat, but makes a lot of assumptions...

1) Power. You have to have it.

2) Other people. Someone has to be in range of yourself to communicate with others. And a chain of people is needed to communicate long distances. And they need power.

3) Equipment. You don't just need a computer. You need a computer with WiFi. And decent range. Despite what they say about indoor range, my wireless in my apartment barely goes from 1 end of my 1-bedroom apartment to the other. It's sad.

4) Security. How is this protected against assholes? Seems to me that man-in-the-middle attacks are really easy with this. 1 random person could doom an entire area.
Source is at https://github.com/mjg123/pacman/tree/gh-pages

There was a warning that my late-2010 MacBook Air running Chrome was "too slow", but I still found it playable.
The implication of spamming a list of links over and over and over again (paired with the blatant admission in his profile that he mostly doesn't read HN anymore due the amount of dupes) is that Colin is dissatisfied and is trying to make a point which in doing so is only contributing more of what is evidently causing him distress (lack of richness in content); it can't be argued that bludgeoning posters and readers over the head with a wall of links is comparable to real discussion imo.

See why I'm having a problem with this?

I don't see it as a good thing. I see it as more shit to wade through in order to get to the content I'm after. Unfortunately, it's something I'm seeing more and more often, over the course of the past several weeks... Colin isn't the first person to do this and I believe the consensus before was that ultimately it's a disservice to the community, well intentioned or not. (RiderOfGiraffes had a script that did something similar I think?)

Edit: As I can't reply to you directly yet Scott, I'll add this here:

"It is not itself discussion, but it points readers to discussions."

You understand exactly how I feel! :) You're absolutely correct: it adds nothing to the discussion and is therefore misplaced in the comments.

Now if there were a way to add some kind of list of similar or duplicate articles to an article that was independent of the comment threads, I would definitely be in support of this! But as comments, they feel like more spam. :(
The OS is free, the hardware was never meant to be free. And importantly, Google do not own the companies that make them.
But according to the article (and it's also pasted [here](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2903166)), they've identified something independent of experience and preparation.
Well done. One suggestion is to use the Socratic Method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method) like "The Little Schemer". I would love to see "The Little Schemer" implemented on your site.
That's just pathetic.
Physicists Find Way to Stop Coffee Rings