skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have the opposite background, but similar anecdotes. Spent all of high school and college in various art or design-focused curriculum and degrees. Inevitably ended up taking a few dev courses, but was only marginally interested. My first job after college was as a web designer in a software shop where I quickly realized that "real-world" programming mixed aesthetics and creativity with logic and really hard problems, was immediately hooked and started absorbing everything (even SICP!) in my quest to become a better developer.

Like yours, my left-brain intuitively sees patterns and (un)readabilty in code, beauty in simplicity, and has empathy for users/novices. My right-brain solves the problems, connects the top to the bottom, and is cold-and-calculating about the inner-workings.

It's also my experience, that if you are design-forward people discount your programming skills (all the more reason to prove them wrong) and if you are development-forward people discount your creative side ("oh, I _totally_ trust your opinion, but just to be on the safe side....").

IMHO Diversity of skills gives you insight into your work and the world around you. Even if you are not a natural you still gain new perspective. Hell, even knowing that you aren't any good is half the battle! I am good at _executing_ other people's ideas, and intuitively knowing what looks good - but struggle coming up with an original _truly unique_ artwork from scratch. On the other hand, Give me an empty vim buffer...
The exit interview with Jon Rubinstein (HP)
Dude, I can make your system do an arbitrary port scan against any ip with only

http://www.ismyportopen.com/cgi/results.py?ip=[target ip]

You're gonna wanna fix that.
LLVM has been looked at, as both a backened for RPython as well as for the JIT, I've written down some of the reasons it's not appropriate for PyPy (particularly WRT the JIT) here: http://www.quora.com/LLVM/Is-LLVM-not-good-for-interpreted-l...
Push Git Repo Into Shared Hosting
numexpr is much simpler than pypy. I never said that it was much simpler than pypy's incomplete numpy support.
Or glibc, which dropped support a few weeks ago:
http://repo.or.cz/w/glibc.git/commit/d75a0a62b12c35ee85f786d...
Well, ok, let's talk about medical records. Not many people have the expertise/knowledge to tackle that issue (they can acquire it). They're not around doctors, and healthcare to experience the pain point and understanding the nuances of tackling that problem.

On the other hand, based on our daily interactions, we're more predisposed to making a better Javascript framework, developer tools, better ways of managing our social contacts, etc.
It kind of reminds me of an interview with Larry Stroman. He was a comic artist that I really liked on X-Factor and someone asked him how he approaches drawing a comic. He stated that he actually starts with the very last page and then goes back to the beginning to work his way there.
>I can only watch some DVDs I ripped myself on my iPad because I got the VLC app during its short airtime on the App Store. :(

DVD you rip can be played in the default app on iPad. No need for VLC.

There are plenty of App Store apps that allows AVI, MKV, and even .fla videos. I use Cinexplayer. Another iOS app was free this week that plays all kinds of media files.
>Yesterday my fiance wanted to watch a film on her ipod and had realised the process would involve converting files (size and movie type), getting it into itunes, and the 'syncing' which is a pain.

There are apps that allow you to stream from your computer and play video files besides h.264. You just can't torrent unless you jailbreak.

>(plus I really think Apple is earning bad rep over those patents lawsuits. Consumers do understand / appreciate choice, even Apple fanbois, and they view it as the evil act that it is even if they don't get all riled up over it)

I don't think consumers are aware of this at all. I don't think they aware either about the recent controversies with Google which carries far more significance for them.
You did a great job of making the How It Works section clear and appealing.

The one addition I would suggest for the Features page is what email address will your customers be able to use? Will it be their own or an @impressar.io address?
I have the original Transformer and love it. I don't ue it as often as I used to now that I also got an Android phone, but it is still very useful. The keyboard that prolongs the battery life, fast typing and even the trackpad are all useful. I am surprised that they don't sell more of them. It is wifi only but I am able to set up a wifi connection to my phone when I am on the road.
Ask HN: CTO vs VP Eng Startup Offers? 
I am wondering, as of recently, what are the typical packages given out for hands-on CTO and VP Eng positions at startups with the following specific criteria? I am expecting an offer soon and just wanted to cross check what's going on in the market. I know this comes up all the time, obviously, due to the subjectivity of the matter. However, the data is kind of all over the place. Luckily, I am in a position to walk if the terms are not up to snuff.

- startup is just getting off the ground with seed round of about 1M looking at an A round of about 5-10M.
- definite interest...techcrunch press/vc's knocking on the door/traction via paying users
- company size < 10
- i am engineer #1 taking over outsourced work
Twitter Streaming with EventMachine and DynamoDB
This is awesome. When blackberries were in use we were able to customize our ringtones, which created the same affect. We have downloaded iPhone apps and created additional email accounts to mimic the new sign up "gong."
I think the inspiration point is a great one, if difficult to quantify. The American space program fostered a scientific literacy and pop-culture faith in the pursuit of engineering for surmounting important problems. And despite being a national program in a Cold War context, the success of the Apollo missions was bigger in scope than the US - it was a victory for all humans. We'd do well to cultivate these attitudes again.
Jekyll Bootstrap: The Quickest Way to Blog with Jekyll
While NY has pretty decent public transit, the whole experience is still horrible and soul-sucking. Having a hard day at work is already tough, but add in a hour of pushing inside crowded subway trains, next to inconsiderate people who don't bother to make room and no wonder most people in NYC are stressed out.

So rather than address cost, I want to see an Uber bus that transports people from residential areas downtown to replace crowded subways. The grown up version of a school bus. Market it as a fun experience and alternative to crowded trains. I wouldn't mind paying a premium for it.
Vyprvpn
Here's yet another proof. This one uses probability theory.

Let's warm up with a probabilistic proof of

1 + p + p^2 + ... = 1/(1-p)

in the form

(1-p)(1 + p + p^2 + ...) = 1

This says that if you have a Bernoulli process with failure probability p and success probability 1-p, you will eventually succeed with probability 1. Indeed, (1-p) p^n is the probability that you will succeed after n failures.

To see this is true (it is certainly intuitively plausible), note that the probability of taking longer than n tries is p^n, which goes to zero as n goes to infinity.

We can apply the same kind of reasoning to

(1-p)^2 (1 + 2p + 3p^2 + ...) = 1

As before, we have a process with failure probability p and success probability p-1. However, rather than stopping after the first success, we will continue until we have two successes. Now take a look at the terms of the equation's left-hand side:

(1-p)^2 (n+1) p^n

This is the probability that we will have gotten 2 successes (and hence n failures) after n+2 steps. The second success must always be the final trial, so there are n+1 possible positions for the first success. That explains the factor of n+1.

With that understood, the equation simply says that we will eventually get 2 successes with probability 1. To see why, note that the probability of never getting any successes in n tries is p^n as before, which tends to zero. So we will eventually get at least one success with probability 1. But once we have that first success, getting the second success is just our first problem repeated, so we know that happens eventually with probability 1.

This proof technique generalizes easily. If we keep trying until we have 3 successes, we get a factor of C(n+2, 2) = (n+2)(n+1)/2 for the number of ways the first 2 successes can be placed before the third and final success when there are n failures and 3 successes. We show that a first success occurs eventually with probability 1 as before, which reduces the problem to getting two subsequent successes, a problem we already solved.

You can see this yields a proof by induction for this whole class of series identities, but it's not of those unenlightening proofs by induction that shows you something is true but does not tell you why.
How to Judge a New Venture in 15 Seconds
http://www.theonion.com/articles/google-responds-to-privacy-...
Google+ and the Post-Web Google
Who’s Hiring: Twitter
They are now nitpicking at a minimum of one hour billed for one-off projects

For no other reason that this, I would drop them. I do not like having to justify my time after the fact. They hired me because I am the expert, as such if it takes 5 hours to complete, they should have an issue with that up front not after the work has been preformed. If a client tries to negotiate hours after they have been performed, it is the last time I work for that client. The issue is, what if they have a huge emergency that required a good portion of hours, if they nit pick over a few, there is a good possibility in this situation, they will have buyers remorse after the crisis is over, potential stiffing you with a lot of hours, worse yet a lot of hours at a sub par bill rate. There is a high potential for you to get stuck holding the bag with a client like this.
U.S. Economy Picks Up Steam
I’ve experienced PG’s reality distortion field,
and his no-nonsense style of communication.

Are those at different times? Otherwise it seems sort of contradictory. I'm sure it makes sense from the right perspective, but I can't see it right now.
it works http://meeeu.github.com/
I come from a DOS / Windows background, but now use Cygwin as my primary interface on Windows, and also regularly use Nexenta (Debian-flavoured Solaris) and Linux. I find the Unix way more understandable, particularly when things break.

Only the most simple of Windows applications get away with putting everything into a single folder under $PROGRAM_FILES. More usually, lots of stuff is in $COMMON_FILES, and may or may not be shared. And these common files are tied in to the program files via a giant complicated global variable, the registry; the program looks up ProgIDs and CLSIDs to instantiate COM objects, so the registry becomes a very sensitive source of failure, particularly when you have different versions of $COMMON_FILES that break the various linkages.

Furthermore, these days Windows Installer is often used to manage the Windows equivalent of packages. These too are sensitive to corruption; if you end up missing the MSI files from c:\windows\installer for one reason or another, you can easily get into a situation where you can't even reinstall an application cleanly, because the installer notices that you already have it installed, and tries to uninstall it first, but fails (usually quietly, in the middle of the installation, where the progress bar goes into reverse and at the end you get a cryptic and unhelpful error message). To fix this, you must venture forth once more into the registry, find out the cryptic (hex) name for the relevant package, and surgically excise it. Not even the MSI/MSP/etc. files have meaningful names. It's tortuous.

All that said, I by far prefer working in Windows to any other OS. If it had a faster performing yet fully POSIX compliant layer as well integrated as Cygwin (i.e. not off in its own parallel little world like SFU/SUA), it would be even better.
Your response here makes it worse not better. You copied from them blatantly including linking to their assets and then your first lesson learnt is "add credits"... really?

You are still not planning on taking it down, just adding a credit to their site?

I personally would never use a service that has this level of integrity, I wouldn't trust any of my information with it.
The Airport Extreme has a special guest functionality and is pretty simple to set up. You may need to get a couple to support 100 simultaneous users though.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD031LL/A/AirPort-Extreme?...
Caustic is a pretty nifty app. I've only dabbled with it a bit, though. Was worth the couple of bucks I paid for it, anyway.
But your own example implies that you could've achieved the same results by simply using the "and" operator: ring AND mathematics. No reason to give up privacy.

I'm actually surprised that your friends didn't get the Wikipedia entry on "ring" among their top results. When I ran the search on both Google and Bing, it came up second.
So what, specifically, about space travel would cause us to make those discoveries about temperature regulation and ecosystem habitats? Unless there's something specifically about hard vacuum and freefall that makes it easier to study these topics, they could be more easily and far more cheaply studied on Earth.
Why did the Fedora team choose to move /bin -> /usr/bin etc instead of moving stuff out of usr into root (/usr/bin -> /bin)? What is the point of having a usr directory when there is no separation between stuff in usr and stuff in root?
Usually this question requires that operation be done in place. The trick is to reverse the string in place, then to reverse each word.
I see where you're coming from, but there are a number of things that would need to happen for this to work.

1) The Assad family would have to find the threat from NATO credible.
2) They would have to believe that there is no chance of defeating the rebels militarily and outlasting NATO bombardment.
3) The major power players in the Assad government would have to be willing to accept life in exile, with no opportunity for travel or engagement with the rest of the world. (Even Ben Ali, the dictator who left Tunisia semi-voluntarily, has an international warrant out for his arrest.)
4) Some country (presumably America) would have to be willing to either pay them a significant lump sum out of their own pocket or allow them to loot Syria before they leave.

You could pick any one of these apart.
Jason and Jake, the design of the site looks great.

While the homepage makes it clear that users still have full control of their data, I would also address why users can count on you to keep their data secure. Since financial information is sensitive, you want to eliminate any concerns potential users may have about putting it online.
Facebook and the Disappearing Valuation (A Fairy Tale)
In my experience, the people who "get" programming took it up as a kid. If your first program was written in CS 101, then you will not be a good programmer. I've yet to meet anyone who bucks this trend.
Lack of engagement is a huge problem, and a big obstacle for many entrepreneurs. It's easy to engage users to make them gamble in a casino, or buy junk food that tastes great. It's hard to make them use something that would benefit them, but bores the heck outta them.
And the exactly corresponding security problem: when a problem is found in a library, you'll have to update all your applications, not just the library, otherwise you'll have an insecure system.
The problem is that the worse is better school usually wins over the long run. Jamie Zawinski has a great essay on this [1].

Unix was a "worse is better" MULTICS. DOS was a "worse is better" CP/M. Windows was a "worse is better" MacOS. The advantage of simple implementations is that you can get them in front of users right now, and then iterate your implementation until you have something that's cheap and adequate. Not perfect. Not even great. But adequate. However, as the essay points out, cheap and adequate today beats pricey and perfect tomorrow every time.

[1]: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
I think of it like Sturgeon's Law applied to humans. Most humans just are not very good at most stuff.

Look at the percentage of programmers that are basically not any good at programming all and yet are able to continue being called programmers; if we apply standards of expectation uniformly, then you would expect to see even people in technical fields be able to be useless at math and have everyone basically just shrug and accept it.
Ghost in the Shellcode is also online this year
I'm not in a position to make any promises about future policy decisions. So I'm not not comfortable trying to speculate about future plans. I can say that I believe in the character of the current leadership, but beyond that...

As to whether it is done currently? The simple answer is I don't know. I haven't heard anything that would make me think it is, but I don't work close enough to those areas that I necessarily would.

I would be surprised if the things you list are combined in an meaningful way (obviously, if you use analytics, there is a link between your account and your analytics data, the same way there is if you use docs or picasa - but I'm pretty sure that's not what you're asking about :-) )
Your argument can be further extended as "what's the point of living when eventually everything will cease to exist anyway".

But ultimately, it's these small wins along the way that help push humanity forward. I'm not going to open the "what's the purpose of life" can of worms but to dismiss scientific research because of how long it will take is a defeatist attitude. You can not predict what fruits will a particular scientific research will be bring just as you cannot predict the future.
If everyone else was saying that you should use an army of autonomous quadcopters to deliver stuff, then it wold be worth pointing out that a simpler solution is available. 37S is challenging the cloud and scale-out cargo cults.
'My CS teacher also resolved many difficulties with the = sign by always reading code like "a = b" as "a gets b"'

This is one of the great things about Pascal. The := sign is used for assignment, and the equals sign alone is used for equality. It's very natural to call := 'gets' and keep a clear distinction between assertions and assignments.
Banking.js - The Missing API for Banks. Built with node.js
"do traditional desalination techniques require more energy than boiling the equivalent amount of water?"

No, far less, because the end product is condensed liquid water (not vapor). When* the desalination method is distillation (evaporating + re-condensing), the heat used to evaporate water is released again when the steam is condensed, and can be recovered and reused. E.g. [1]. The real-world figure wikipedia cites is about 90 MJ/m^3, compared to about 2,250 MJ/m^3 for boiling water at STP [2]. The theoretical limit from thermodynamics -- the minimum energy needed to separate salt and water -- is about 3 MJ/m^3 for seawater [3] (or [4-5]).

*(as opposed to methods like reverse osmosis [6], which is forcing water through a filter with atom-sized holes -- no boiling involved)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-stage_flash_distillation

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization#Other_...

[3] http://http://www.sandia.gov/water/docs/MillerSAND2003_0800....

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_change_of_solution

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis
"...creating a “Hello Guestbook” type of application in Java is a simple, 10-minute affair."

Lol, no..

10 is the time it takes to configure your develop environment before you even start. Java isnt dead. While this is true, it is also an incredibly unproductive language. There are tons of boilerplate code that needs to be generated.

But it another way, the JVM ecosystem is alive and thriving through varies other dynamic language built to run on JVM. But the language itself is on the decline.
Why not focus on things that are problems now?

Because those problems will never be solved entirely, no matter what we do?
That's ridiculous. When people use men in this context, they refer to humanity as a whole. Don't confuse your lack of English understanding as being PC.
reduce(lambda x,y:x+y, map(lambda x:x*x, range(1,6)))
>So it isn't pixie dust, it isn't innate ability, it isn't being smart. It is all fucking work.

No, it isn't. I knew a girl in high school who worked far harder than I ever did, and had far worse grades (particularly in math and science). She literally spent 2-3 hours every day doing homework and studying, while I spent 15-30 minutes. If you talked to her, she seemed perfectly normal, she just had tremendous difficulty with academic work. While hard work is important, natural gifts make a huge difference.
Ultima advertencia de Anonymous a el FBI - YouTube
I take "the right tool for the job" to be the one with the least number of features greater than what I need. Don't use Word where a text editor will do; don't use a database if you just need a K-V store; don't launch Photoshop if you're just going to crop something; etc. If I were to pick between "something that does [what you need]" and "something that does [what you need, plus a ton of other stuff]", the former would be much preferable—mainly because it gets out of the way and doesn't confuse the UI with all the possibilities I'm not doing. This is half of what companies pay to build CRUD apps for: to limit the ways in which people can interact with a database to only those that are useful for the company, so they can be more productive.
I work there. Haven't seen it happen.
I'm the maintainer of jekyll-bootstrap, nice to see this on HN!

My main focus is super-fast publishing (GitHub Pages) and technical blogging. I really could use some honest user feedback from technically-minded bloggers. What is most important to you? What features do you need to see?

I'm prioritizing API development. Simple and standardized api's put Open Source projects on the map imo. On that note I'm working on a theme and javascript api for JB.

Theme api allows designers to (easily) contribute great themes. This includes syntax highlighting (which is not themed yet =[)

Javascript plugin API will allow your blog to stretch its wings - arbitrary 3rd-party integration, optimizing content form (tabs, accordion, slides, etc) and..

I want to rollout a jekyll-blog network where users can log in, "follow", "like" etc just how tumblr, posterous, wordpress all have community integration.

Please let me know what is important to you. Thanks for your support!
Lean Startup Machine event: a little help?
Have you asked the developer?
What if curebit copied highrise's product - not the design mind you, but the core functionality of the product - and used a completely different, original design to dress up the product? Would you throw a similar tantrum?

This is something that's always perplexed me. Companies copy other companies' business models and compete for the same customers all the time, but that's considered fair game. But if a design is copied, shit hits the fan.

Frankly, I'd rather someone copy my design and go after a diff niche of customers than copy my product and come after my customers.

To the guys at Curebit - ignore this noise. The focus should be on creating an awesome product, getting paying customers and generating profits. You guys have an awesome product and deserve the funding. Congrats :)

P.S. You should remove the hotlinks tho. No need to use their bandwidth.
There is a joke in here somewhere about Chuck Norris and parsing the Linux kernel.
The Miracle of WD-40
Could A Change In Business Model Win Designers A Place In The C-Suite?