skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is true, However at some point I want to move my career in a different direction and most of what I learn on the job is industry specific and the industry itself is not something that hugely interests me (although I have not decided for sure what I want to do). So I am trying to learn as much fundamental stuff as possible.

The issue is deciding how much one should know about something before you confidently put it on your resume.

For example I would say that I am an OK Java programmer but I avoid using enterprise frameworks which are commonly used in many companies so there are many parts of the language which I am not familiar with simply because I have never had cause to use them, for example I do almost all of my persistence using a database and ORM so I almost never have to use Java's concurrency locking features in the wild as I do all my locking in the DB.

The same with functional programming, there is no reason to learn it for my job but I get a feeling it will become more important as time moves on so I should know something about it.

There is allot of stuff on HN with people saying that everyone should have implemented a toy compiler at somepoint and if you haven't then your not a serious programmer , or perhaps it is a Toy OS etc etc.
Thanks! Good to see its not just me and that its something that is actively being worked on.
I would also add:

Rework

It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be

Thank You Economy
(apologies for hijacking an unrelated thread, but I have no way of contacting you ...)

During our discussion of the redis/windows release, you mentioned your team is about to release some library code around new-years day. Has that release happened? If so, where can I find it?

Thanks in advnace

--beagle3
yes that's what i was getting at theorys all very well but you need to be able to apply this to real world which is what most employers of programmers want.

My first job after school (as a technical programmer) was at an Elite RnmD organistion (our boss was the mechanical engineers president at the time) and I remember I was told one way to think about it is that "engineers" are scientists with thumbs.
Nice illustration why ideas are worthless without actual viable implementation.
Five ways the digital camera changed us
Sorry for jumping on this late, it is not dead. http://projectfortress.java.net/
We Still can't figure out how to get Siri to open a webpage automtically.
Most developers are not writing code for other developers: they are writing for 'real people', because there are so many of them. I don't know what audience CodeMash has, but if it's like most developer gatherings, there will plenty of of developers from 'real' companies that are contributing to the lives of 'real people'.

For most applications you write it's necessary to be aware of the fact that people like yourself aren't the people mostly using the application.
I've heard the only thing you miss out on is the news. I'm tempted to go fully off cable now that I'm in a good groove with netflix/online choices.

A few dollars is always cheaper than my time. It's also far more convenient than tv, or having to go through the pain of finding and downloading, and waiting, and hoping it's of good quality. I'm willing to pay to avoid that headache.
Desktop keyboard with an "iPhone" button
That is to be expected when no new drugs are developed in half a century.

We really should focus more on doing what we did with smallpox -- destroy it outright, rather than merely give it a bloody nose or two.
"Over 1000 users!" :)
Why don't we just replace elected officials with the website? Then people could vote for issues rather than officials who we don't care about anyway.
I have a very comfy and full-featured home-office set-up, but still try to get out at least once a week to (ostensibly) work among other hackers.

There are some business advantages to not being cloistered, not the least being people know you exist and may be available for whatever kind of work you do. And it's good to have be around smart geeks who can answer questions or give you a sanity check on ideas.

But the big gain for me is the serendipity. I don't expect to be dreaming up amazing creative thoughts in any sort of communal or committee activity, but the exposure to semi-random ideas and events is important to my own thinking.

Left alone (or alone with the Internet) people may tend to only read what they're familiar with, or approve of, or in some way filter out the things that might challenge their beliefs and expectations. That's fairly natural, but it's bad. You need to take deliberate steps to overcome that.

If you pick your groups well it can help free you from the prison of self-reinforcing thinking.
What's the point of asking about this if you are not even mentioning the names of your apps? That would have been Marketing Step 0 ...
Chelsea vs Sunderland live streaming online watch
Chelsea vs Sunderland
Home - Away
Match schedule:
English premier league
Date: Saturday, January 14, 2012
TIME : 15:00 GMT
LOCATION: Stamford Bridge
enjoy English premier league Chelsea vs Sunderland live streaming and
also watch English premier league full season live streaming online.
Bill Gates Gives Away More Money Than The Entire US Foreign Aid Budget
@qrush is a far, far better programmer than I. Still, "let's find out how many todo items this is going to affect first" seems like a fairly logical checkpoint on a large production system.
"According to our studies, either you're fired, or it's raining."
How much money do you need to be rich?
Eh, we can't make major changes to government without a lot of red tape. We can, however, match the existing interface.

This is classic hacking of legacy code.
Ask HN: Historically Important Code Snippets?
Hey HN,

I've been teaching an artist friend of mine how to code. She's been loving it and recently has started to incorporate programming concepts into her other art. She's planning on doing a series of paintings that incorporate code snippets.

Here's an early example: http://i.imgur.com/itPcm.jpg

I showed her Quake III's Fast InvSqrt() (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overview_of_the_code). Do you have any other other interesting, important, historically significant, or just plain quirky code snippets?
Its does for a lot of jobs I am afraid and places like Google do seem to like elite universities.

Also Ox-bridge along with Bath, Imperial and Queens (British telecoms Belfast engineering Center used to get the pick of those) do have a rep as being the best universities for CS.

Eatons where the thickos go :-) Years ago when Mum had had a stiff Gin she commented if we had stayed in Birmingham she would have tried to get my grandfather to pull strings to get me into King Edwards (Tolkien's Old school) which along with The Oratory (Tony Blairs school) are considered the top 2 schools.
Build your own PCR machine
Show HN: MeNomNom.com; a food, drink, and event directory for a college town.
This comment reads like outsourced blogspam. A string of English words with little substance.

> if anyone can take on the VISA/MC world it's Dwolla

Why's that? Why Dwolla and not the other dozens of payment services that have come and gone the past dozen years?
Collaboratism ... the new ism of our modern age.
So, a couple of friends and I just launched the new site, I would love to get your opinions on it.
Does not exist. It seems to be primarily about trying to define programming as an upscale profession like engineering - "programmers" might be replaceable cogs, but "software engineers" are a little harder to shove around.

Even worse, you have "computer engineering", which is a real engineering discipline (at least when focussed on hardware) and then you have the disaster that is the CS/programming community's attempts to ape standard engineering practices when the blueprint and finished product are the exact same thing.
AnyFu looks like a GREAT site. I've wanted access to subject area experts in the past for specific issues, but didn't want the delay involved with finding a long-term freelancer on oDesk or eLance. Plus, the quality is often sub-par. Best of luck to you. I signed up, and am excited to hear more.....
In my experience current Python culture takes documentation very seriously. Popular projects like Django, SQLAlchemy, South, Pyramid, Fabric have extensive narrative documentation (in the form of an overview, a tutorial, a thematic guide, and finally a reference section). In contrast, I was pretty frustrated using Capistrano and finding third-party documentation scattered across blog posts and wikis.

This excellent culture is enabled by Sphinx, which makes it easy to publish documentation as static html content (and pdf and epub). Hosting on python.org and readthedocs.org makes it even easier to put great documentation online, and it is one of the best ways to brand a project as something people can build on.
Good news for marathoners
I've found Bootstrap to be best employed as a basic framework for what I would call working applications where the user is required to perform many repetitive tasks on the application throughout their work day. It lends itself very well for dashboards, admin consoles, backoffice and reporting tools, etc. And Twitter, of course. I would use the most very basic scaffolding (containers, rows and spans) for a marketing site, but it's also extremely helpful for producing working wireframes.

To whit, over the past two weeks I completely redid a support application using Bootstrap and my output CSS totals ~250 lines, whereas before it was somewhere around ~2600 when it was all said and done. My current .js file has two functions in it. I think we've found a winner here.

Another benefit is that a developer not well-versed in the front-end is easily able to build a basic, functioning front-end to an app with small learning curve, and I'm going to assume that they'll be able to work on an app that already has it. Or so I hope, because after twelve years, I'm a little sick and tired of writing said code.
You know, it would seem that that sector gets a whole lot of coverage while much more egregious and dangerous threats to liberty are happening.

It's unfortunate, because such things make great smokescreens while at the same time being so polarizing (wrongfully so) that they blot out more other grave matters and attract crazies that impede genuine progress in gender policy.

EDIT: fixed some bad grammar.
about the same number of calories, (224 calories in a donut, 207 in a bagel) but those calories come from sugar and fat in the donut (4 times the sugar and 12 times the amount of fat).

Sources:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+a+donut
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+a+bagel
I don't get it. What does this tool accomplish that isn't accomplished by putting the collected color definitions in a second style sheet and "cascading" it with the standard bootstrap.css? (I'm really asking not being sarcastic.)
Great example of constraints driving minimalism through necessity, therefore keeping the focus on what really matters
this bill is not a Bill, it's a patch - collection of changes to other bills.
I think that's because university teaches abstractions and pretty much nothing else.
A project that is done in the average CS class will be presented as a way to teach a design pattern rather than teaching how to solve a problem.

Also the marking scheme will tend to favour a broken solution that is an attempt at an elegant abstraction rather than a more basic abstraction that is well tested and works.

There is a certain danger in being educated, for example a self educated programmer might have a problem and just implement a O(n^2) solution and move on whereas a college educated programmer might spend excessive time trying to work out a way to do it in O(log N).
Employees in the UK have a portion of their wages/backpay protected from an employer going bankrupt[0]: redundancy pay, 8 weeks wages, 6 weeks pay in lieu of holiday, and up to 12 weeks for long service, at a maximum of £400 a week, minus tax.

In addition, directors of a company which continues to trade once it becomes insolvent become personally, unlimitedly liable for the debt incurred while continuing to trade[1].

[0] http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/Pay/DG_1002...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_while_insolvent
I think that when you use a magnet link it either includes the tracker (which is the part of BitTorrent that tracks the seeds) in the text of the link or uses a more sophisticated technology called a Distributed Hash Table.
Q&A: HuffPost CTO on scaling to 1.7b pageviews and how open-source tools won
You're right, thanks for the correction, I did not realize FSMs couldn't do that.
I think getting $20 for a bluray is still more appealing to distributors than getting a small slice of $5/mo for Hulu.
Ten game developers to chase on Twitter
Well, one sign is that the exit price was about a third of the money they raised.
Ask HN: fast growing profitable small startups
I'm trying to make a list of fast-growing, profitable startups. The "hiring" posts are often helpful.

Pointers?
I want to look back and say “I worked harder than I had to. I gave up time with my kids

Then you gave up the greatest influence you could have.

The author fails to note the "butterfly effect" where a small but worthwhile improvement in a development tool could be the key to doing something "really important" ... and raising a child to not just do a single limited task but to engage in a lifetime of helping others - even if by "just" writing marginally improved development tools - can in turn have a huge impact.

As others note, the author's sort of guilt-trip opining serves to tear down people who are doing good for the world. The luxury of early cell phones has translated into a race to bringing cheap ubiquitous computing to the world, what was then multimilliondollar building-filling supercomputers to everyone's pockets, $25 Raspberry Pis to any student who wants one, and the laudable OLPC practically becoming a moot point thanks to wireless low-power computing proliferation.

And among other unexpected consequences to my "extremely privileged life", I'm able to acquire cubic yards of artisan bread and distribute it weekly to the underprivileged/poor/needy - in no small part thanks to me having time to spare, and to include my kids in so they will grow up caring for those not so blessed.

"Strange how much human progress and achievement comes from contemplation of the irrelevant." - Scott Kim
Ask HN: Payment plans for age-restricted content
A certain caveat of Stripe is that you cannot use it for age restricted content -- i.e., anything that requires your users to be above a certain age. Does anyone know of any convenient payment providers that do not have this constraint? Thanks
(It's worth nothing this is not for online pornography)
I am not implying that one language is more productive than another, just that it might be more productive for that team with their codebase.
Any large company can use that excuse though, they still benefit greatly from the activity. It's pretty rare you see a big company not try an shift the blame to contractors or a small international office. If you can't have effective oversight over all your operations then maybe the company is to big.
DNS provision pulled from SOPA, victory for opponents
Commented for bookmarking in case I miss your emails -- good luck!
Yeah, also I would guess that these guys are dutch and the old lulzsec was british right?
The author needs to read "I, Pencil" http://www.fee.org/library/books/i-pencil-2/
That's a good point - if it were purely contractors, they'd probably say something like "some of our contractors were over-zealous; they are being dealt with". It's hard to come up with a plausible reason they'd protect contractors so strongly, since Google's reputation wouldn't really be under fire to the same degree as if an employee had done so / been told to do so.
I think Diaspora has value to "real people". Decentralizing control and reducing commercialization of users and content in social networking could be seen as a moral good.
How was your experience all-in-all?
It's odd how completely opposite I understand that same sentence. I understand that sentence to be the same as:

"Her story is sure to be a compelling one and a great example of the extreme barriers the right mindset can overcome. In this case, an exceptional person managed to overcome even the apparently insurmountable barrier to get out of their dire situation."
I think what really happened is that Urban Airship discovered the SimpleGeo service was really crappy and decided it needed to shut it down as soon as possible to avoir eternel peril...

SimpleGeo has rewritten its platform several times (project GISele, then project Penelope), it was done by people who thought they knew how to do geosearch, but they really had no idea, for example they never offered polygon search, they also only offered tag search a few weeks prior to being acquired, and it was done by a girl who left the company like a week after her feature went live.

This company was probably a scam from day one, it only got money because its founders were reknown.
Data Journalism Developer Studio 2012 Version 2.2.1 Released
Learn from http://diveintopython3.ep.io/ which is fresher. You may end up using Python2 due to library availability, but the differences aren't enormous.
FiSync for one.
> Google was basically phishing by pretending that they were partnered with Mocality.

It's a bit disingenuous to equate some Google employees from doing this with Google as a company doing it. I could be very wrong here (and would be extraordinarily disappointed in the company if so), but I doubt this was a corporate-sanctioned activity.
I'm interested in rtm's pseudonym: John McArtyem, specifically the 'Artyem' part. This is actually a Russian name (I know because it's also my name). I wonder why rtm chose it. Maybe because attempting to pronounce 'rtm' can lead to 'Artyem'? Sounds like the rest of the pseudonym could have been influenced by John McCarthy.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artyom
Its clever marketing and they're scrappy competitors to respond in 24 hours to the news and turn it to their advantage.
Those who give up general purpose computing in exchange for convenience deserve neither.

Wait, didn't Mark Twain write that?
I think this is a great idea, and I've wanted this to apply to DC laws for a long time.
> is still more appealing

Sure and I'm sure getting $80 per blu-ray is even more exciting for them, doesn't mean it is going to happen.
would love to be included. Would be cool also if you could allow users just plug in any palette from www.colourlovers.com or patterns from subtlepatterns.com which would add quick/mass customization of a site and really simple/sweet A/B testing.
True, and I personally find the default setting ok using Unity 2d (desktop with blacklisted graphics card) and Unity (netbook). However this same logic means that the Launcher position could be made optional without detriment.

12.04 is currently in an 'interesting' state, so I'm waiting for the repositories to update before exploring Unity 5 on the netbook.
Expressing delimited continuation operators in terms of each other.
Get happiness from the people you find who support you with your passion.
The crux of the argument (and most of the book for that matter) is that you want to avoid mutability whenever possible. Adding setters for every field by default means mutability is the default mode for your application. Adding getters for every field by default means you lose any advantages of encapsulation.
At one time, Java Beans were a heavily marketed pattern by Sun. Joshua Bloch came along and said "hey, this is a bad pattern" (and maybe others, but he's the one I always think of).
If you use google voice, press '4' while in the call and it will record it.
Internet ID required by Dept. of Commerce
The Department of Commerce reportedly is preparing to require all Americans to obtain an Internet ID. Eventually, it would be a crime to have a web site, publish remarks, or even send emails without one.
1. Yes
2. See http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/originality-re...
3. If it can only be written one way then it's not copyrightable ianal.
4. Canonical and others require that you fax/email a signed document to them e.g. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/oca-486395.html
There's nothing like that sinking feeling you get when you do a DELETE FROM and forget the WHERE.
The importance of app ID in your native app strategy
Favorite quote is from the pricing page, http://ycombinator.com/viaweb/pric.html:

"The public should always be wondering how
it is possible to give so much for the money."
— Henry Ford

I also find it fascinating how so many YC companies have a very similar footprint of pricing, features, and basic pages right there on the homepage. It sounds obvious that, yeah, you should be telling your potential customers what your prices are, but this is not always shown so readily.
Random link on the topic:

http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/02/airbnb-admits-gaming-craig...
The difference here is that smallpox is a virus that was eradicated with a vaccine. Antibiotics against bacteria are another matter. Vaccines allow your body to use its full nuclear arsenal. Antibiotics on the other hand are single points of failure that nature can route around.
It has nothing to do with you screwing up. Of course every individual person makes mistakes pretty much constantly, which is why there is a whole team developing an application, and why there is pair programming, and why there are code reviews, and why there are tests. As a customer of Basecamp, it doesn't worry me that you made that mistake - totally easy mistake to make - but that nobody else noticed it and no automated tests caught it. It seems to me that 37signals may have gone too far the opposite way in their rejection of process and stifling rules.
Ah. Then it all makes sense.
Give away FREE services + Team up with Appsumo = 4000% Increase
I really hope that it does, and that the media actually cover it. I would like to imagine that if staff from all the major NYC tech startups came down it would at least warrant one article...
I've been idly thinking about making a website that does precisely this. It would take a wide variety of expertise and a LOT of manpower to pull off, though. It would be great to tie this to politicians' voting records as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duffs_device
> I think that's because university teaches abstractions and pretty much nothing else.

Maybe my CS degree was unique (I don't think it was), but at the 400 level we had specialization choices including security, graphics, web development, databases, operating systems, embedded, software engineering, etc.

> A project that is done in the average CS class will be presented as a way to teach a design pattern rather than teaching how to solve a problem.

Design patterns != algorithms. My professors actually spent precious little time teaching me how to program, most of that was self-taught. What they taught me to do was how to solve problems, and that education has been very useful.

If your CS professors are spending most of their time teaching you design patterns, you should ask for a refund. The only CS class that taught me design patterns was my 400-level software engineering course.