skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not going to defend parfe but I will point out that just because you may not have been offered three different ways of learning a subject doesn't mean the school was only offering one and only one way of teaching it.

The original article is saying based on a simple test you can throw half of the students directly into a 'learn to program' class and the other group into something else (I wish they had explored that a bit more). At no point is the student offered a choice. From their perspective the school only has one track.

Now, your school may indeed have been terrible... but I think the point that parfe was trying to make (ineloquently) is: don't presume that your one experience makes you an expert in the system. You probably weren't even aware of things going on behind your back in your own school, much less all of the other schools in the 'education system'.

This is one of those things like graphic design.. Everyone has an opinion; some people have training. Those who work in the field might come resent those who have opinions without knowing about the training.
How Often Should I Charge My Gadget’s Battery to Prolong Its Lifespan?
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs of Software Development
The choice of A/B test is stored in a cookie.
I’m ok with that argument!
I just donated 200 bucks to the Against Malaria Foundation.

Your comment is the direct reason for this.
Why Gingrich's Space Plans Will Never Get off the Ground
That's vastly more interesting and impressive than a blog post about how much RAM some company bought, though. :)

You've got $12K? Good for you. Here's a cookie.

You've scaled out a system onto 64 nodes? That's something worth discussing on HN.
> the utopian-fairy-nerd standard.

And this is how we got on the mess we are, when regard for what's right takes a back seat to how much money one can make.

No. I won't play by these rules.
Oh, trust me, the upvote request and everything about this comment were filled with deeply engrained sarcasm.
Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts
Hacking Tutorials Website Launch - Make $100 After One Week! - Hacking 4 Noobs
Close, but no cigar: http://mee.la/28983
I passed the test. w00t!
You might be thinking of Microsoft, which dropped support for Itanium in 2010.
I agree with what both of you have said. It's possible that, in the not-too-distant future, "green programming" will become a new field. If you can design an architecture (both hardware and software) that demonstrably reduces power costs, that's a valuable skill.

And, I'd argue, on two fronts: lower costs for the company, plus good marketing. Every forward-thinking company (at least from what I've observed) are eager to brand themselves as "carbon neutral", "eco-friendly", etc.
What makes you think this is a DB - even as a beginner am I smart enough to recognise this isn't a database - look up sql server that's datatbase - you can get youtube viseos on the tutorials and also download sql server for free to use as a back end.
Ask HN: Does Facebook really fire the bottom 10% of developers after bootcamp?
I'd like to talk to someone if that has happened to them. I have an offer from them and I am contemplating the move. Thanks.
How many indy games target 4-10 year olds? Pricing doesn't matter as long as it is an affordable birthday present for grandma, grandpa, aunts, etc.
ASK HN - why do I have a star by my name - how do the points work - by each comment - I still have 1 point
From the linked Business Week article:

Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “Android captured a record 39 percent share of global tablet shipments in Q4 2011, rising from 29 percent a year earlier. Global Android tablet shipments tripled annually to 10.5 million units.”

And from the article:

Somebody is buying them.

No… not necessarily. And that won't stop some analyst from getting on the megaphone and try to make their case that their predictions are awesome and coming true. There are a lot of self-fulfilling prophecies in finance so they are paid to cheer-lead.

Repeat after me: Shipment != Sale

I think this is just the tablet manufacturers stuffing the retail channel.
Bill Gates' startup will do more about that problem than almost any other organization.
Firebug Gets Delayed Loading
ASK HN - why do I have a star by my name - how do the points work - by each comment - I still have 1 point
I'm still learning my way around - my attention was taken for a couple of hours by the acta protest commented on this site and on you tube - I noticed on you tube a video of someone hacking facebook - is there a point to that when people hear about it they will stop using it and it is one of the biggest sources of information spreading ?
The static fears came from the early unbuffered CMOS chips, which were insanely sensitive to it. Yes, in theory you can still wreck a chip that way, but for the most part it isn't going to happen unless you're in an environment that's unusually prone to static buildup.
> If you mean, specifically, that I didn't respond to what you wrote about Da Vinci's painting ability, well, you've said both that he was a good artist and that he was mediocre; and then repeated the performance again.

> I really don't care whether you appreciate his art or not. The rest of the world seems to have reached a consensus on that.

I'm sorry if what I said about his painting was confusing. I consider da Vinci to be a great painter when judging from the reputation that he has with people knowledgeable about art. His paintings are simply not to my personal taste, mostly due to the expressionless faces (now Caravaggio, he has some amazing paintings). Whether you agree or not, I think you'll agree that art is a subjective thing (unlike science/math/engineering). The world also seems to have reached consensus that da Vinci was an amazing all round genius. This is demonstrably wrong, drawing into question the judgement of the world (also note the general belief in the existence of a god, and that the world is flat).

> This really is covered in most undergraduate history and philosophy courses. If you want a discrete list of Da Vinci's major works and his claim to fame, well, Wikipedia is your friend.

The list of science and inventions you gave contains nothing of significance except in painting. Whenever it is even remotely about math/science/engineering, it's mostly about his job as an illustrator, plus a couple of bogus inventions that neither got built nor work (though I'm sure you can find something trivial that he drew that actually worked -- if you draw enough things one of them is bound to work).

> Da Vinci defines the term Renaissance Man. He had his nose into everything. He was prior to the likes of Galileo and Newton and a departure from Aristotle and Plato.

If your point is that he came before them, so he had the time against him, then I'll say again: it's about the delta not about the absolute achievement. Also note that there were lots of proper geniuses LONG before him, like Pythagoras (math; ~600BC), Eratosthenes (math, measured the diameter of the Earth; ~250BC -- what's truly astonishing is that humanity not only forgot the diameter of the Earth, it actually believed that the Earth is flat!) and Euclid (math, physics; ~300BC). On a related note: Aristotle is not in that list; his works on physics are basically bogus, why people ascribe some kind of physics genius to him in history lessons is again beyond me. For amazing engineering just look at the pyramids and the Roman empire.

Lets simplify this: name one important contribution to science, math or engineering.
This is essentially a quibble over semantics. It's like if I did something for somebody and he told me, "Wow, you're the best!" and I replied "Nah, Shaq is a much better basketball player than I am." Most likely he isn't praising my skill at dunking.

When you say "big," you appear to mean "severe and life-threatening". When he says it, he appears to mean something like "broad in scope, requiring an extremely complex solution."

Malaria prevention doesn't really fit the latter definition, though it does fit the unrelated definition you're using.
You can do cap tables and pretty advanced calculations with both Google Docs and Open Office. More than enough to do your accounting with, although I'd use an accounting app for that rather than a spreadsheet anyway.
I'd love to hear how Reddit is doing it wrong and can be improved. As far as I can tell, they want users to see the freshest content possible (latest comments, up/down vote counts, etc.). Is it really that easy?
In Nintendo's market cartridges are an advantage. Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt & Uncle want to give a tangible present, not a gift card or "points". It is not about the technology, it is about the experience. I'm a dad, Nintendo has nailed it.
Former Groupon sales reps countersue over tactics
The examples he gives are not truly big problems; they're medium-sized ones made artificially hard by regulations.

Dropbox is probably solving a bigger problem technically than any of the examples he gives.
Only people with a need it get access, eg doctors

It's not a huge deal over here but imagine trying to run for office with an abortion from your 20's in your medical history if the opposition knew about it

Or politicians 'requesting' donations from directors of big companies or else their socially embarrassing medical issues like HIV (one in 20 people in the USA!) or plastic surgery history get's 'anonymously leaked'

Medical records can actually be a pretty huge source of power and that's certainly one thing the government should have as little as absolutely required of. All I have is a couple of broken bones in mine but I'm sure there are good people who could be swayed by bad people with the wrong information in the wrong hands
i agree with you. the dmv is a big problem. world hunger is a really big problem.
Most Amazing High Definition Image of Earth - Blue Marble 2012
In Chrome I normally keep imo as a pinned tab. Gmail and Google Voice on occassion, but not very regularly. I don't keep those tabs open as much as I used to because I have a notifier and I like preserving the cpu cycles and ram.
What is the alternative to permitting HFT? If we ban direct communication between the algorithms and the exchanges, we will merely create a great deal of busywork for the thousands of people who will be hired to manually enter the orders produced by the algorithms. If we ban the use of algorithms altogether, we will be legislating inefficiency into the market, to the extent that there can be inefficiencies that are not worth the man-hours to manually discover. We may also have a hard time enforcing either of these approaches. I wonder how much it would cost us?
Epic fail. The author starts off with the moral premise that all lives are of equal monetary value. Moral laws != mathematical laws! We put #s on people all the time: net worth? Garbage in gives garbage out.
I would typically agree with you; but the thing that I have really enjoyed in the transition to iproute2 is that ip handles all of: link state, address configuration, arp, tunnels, routing, transformation and a few other obscure things. It brings these together into one tool and unifies the argument syntax for all of them, I find it much easier to play with the network stack using 'ip'.
Who doesn't have logos of random companies on their front page?

That doesn't always mean those companies actually use it. It just means someone with a @foocorp.com email address signed up.
Ask PG: please put a mark on the last clicked news.
It's painful to find it back to vote it up for example after having read it.
I completely disagree.

I firmly believe that either you are born with the ability to be a programmer or you're not. That's not saying that it's good or bad, but I believe a lot of it is just how your brain is configured. It's as innate as the ability to shoot baskets, or throw a football, or as innate as gaining energy when interacting with people (extrovert) vs losing energy when interacting with people (introvert).

Case in point: there are some people who are extremely smart, but don't have the ability to visualize things like a map in their head. I know someone who loves cars, has been into cars since he was a teenager, and loves driving. However, for the life of him, he can't read a map. He's not dumb at all, he's very intelligent and excellent with computers. But he has no ability to visualize things in his head and spin them around. So when he's given instructions on where to go, he needs landmarks, ie. "Turn left at the McDonald's and turn right when you get to the 4th traffic light." He can't process "Go north on Main Street, and then head East along Central Ave."

I believe programming is the same way. There's a type of inner mental gymnastics that you need to do in order to program well, because a lot of the things are very cerebral. Some people just can't do it. I'm not saying that they can't be taught how to program to an adequate level, but the fact that it so goes against the mesh of how their thought process works, it just won't be enjoyable to them. They will never be better than adequate.

Of course, most of us here probably can't picture that, so many of you might think I'm wrong. But put it in another perspective. We can all be taught to throw a football perfectly. But does that mean we'll be any good at it? Probably not. If we don't have the physical ability to throw a football more than 10-15 yards (like me), will it be fun for us? Probably not. But if you were a football player, hanging out with a bunch of other football players, you wouldn't understand why everyone can't throw a football more than 40 yards.

The same goes for Sales. I've come to learn from my friends who are salesmen that the sales cycle is largely algorithmic. So it can be taught. But getting out in front of customers every day, chit-chatting, engaging them, etc, is something that many of us simply aren't built to do. It takes a certain personality type to actually enjoy this. And there are plenty of them that do enjoy this and make vast sums of money. But if I were put in that position, I would hate every second, and would likely get fired.

So yes, programming can be taught, but I truly believe that there is an innate mental configuration that determines whether or not you can digest and learn the information and whether you'll be good at it, and more importantly whether or not you'll actually enjoy it.
Loyalty is a two way street. Many of us have 'preferred' clients who were there during the earlier days, but you need to remember that you were still working hard providing a service to them before and now. As a business, it's up to both sides to ensure and maintain a worthwhile business relationship, unless you're desperate for the money and are willing to compromise.

A few more points to consider:

* As others have mentioned, $25 is very low for consulting. Try shooting for at least hourly salary * 1.5.

* Think of what rate they would pay your replacement given today's market rates.

* You've likely grown in skill and experience from 4 years ago, so your rate should show it.

* There are other ways to show loyalty, such as market rate with 10% discount or providing a value added service.

* The nitpicking and increased expectations comes naturally when you're taken for granted. At this point there's very little you can do to win.

* Opportunity cost. The time you're investing doing work you feel is inadequate can be found looking for and doing better gigs.
I don't think it's true. With 5 programmers we were able to accomplish what 50 did at method integration. We created a better interfaced, more thought out integration. We just soft launched and here is a link to our YC post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3521108. Most startups don't have e know how but we are all pretty seasoned in creating businesses. I wouldn't really call it a startup but in a literal sense of course it is.
There is a difference between circumventing privacy laws and simply not operating in a country. While I would certainly not want a company attempting to get around laws, I see nothing wrong with a company not operating in a country because of those laws.
Actually it would never have occurred to me to directly compare Newton and Da Vinci's specific works. If you will look back to the dawn of the thread, I was comparing Da Vinci to Steve Jobs; specifically their achievement in changing the nature of human thought.

(Just for the record, I'd give Da Vinci the edge in that comparison...)

Jules wanted to know why people thought Da Vinci was so great and posited that he was a mediocre artist, and that his science/engineering were bogus. Of course, in the modern sense, Da Vinci wasn't a scientist, and a very different kind of engineer. Galileo, Newton, et al. gave those areas of thought their modern sense.

Kepler wasn't a scientist in the modern sense either, but he was essential for the later astronomers to do what they did. If he hadn't done what he did then someone else would have had to.

You can throw out the Greeks and a most of the Islamic theorists by the same logic as you throw out Da Vinci's achievements. Or for that matter, throw out Newton, as he's clearly been superseded.

What a bunch of amateurs!

I'm not talking about current practice and theory. And I'm not talking about a popularity contest as to who's your favorite intellectual superhero or a video game where players are leveling up to higher planes. I'm talking about the history of human thought and its milestones. People in the past thought very differently than they do today, and I don't just mean that they believed different things. Da Vinci's approach to visualization and observation were singular and in advance of his times.

He was a bellwether of things to come. And that's why people hold him in high regard.
Sorry about that! Now I feel quite silly...
Government may be incompetent, inefficient and slow, but at least they won't cut corners on security. For sharing tweets or something a startup can get the infrastructure done pretty quick, for something more serious (eg tax info) you really want a proper security team and proper insurance and legal advice.

VC's and advisors need to provide a platform to give startups those tools. For security using Google AppEngine or the Amazon cloud, combined with automated penetration testing tools, combined with some kind of cheap application security testing (does it exist yet?) might get enough of the way there, but would you really trust something so flimsy, run by two kids out of college who are working it out as they go, with your serious data?
Reddit could easily cut their spend on hosting by like 50-75% just by moving to a dedicated hosting provider. They'd also get bare metal speeds in the process.

Who knows why they've stuck with AWS, though. It's possible Amazon is giving them a discount so they can be used as an example.
ctrl + f > keyword
The author addresses that in the article:

"There’s a lot of talk of “channel-stuffing” which ignores a salient fact: electronics retailers aren’t in business for their health. Carrying inventory costs money, and non-performing product categories aren’t cut a lot of slack these days."

And it makes sense. While there is probably some degree of channel stuffing going on, retail stores are not going to keep buying tablets that aren't selling at all because they'll just lose money.
The profitability of unsound lending is mainly an artifact of fairly recent policy. Historically, if you were to give out loans that you knew could not be paid, you would lose money. That does not seem to be the case any more.

If you were at a casino and wanted to make money, you might go count cards at blackjack or try to beat the other gamblers at poker. But, if you knew that the casino would fully reimburse you any losses, you would probably just sit down at a roulette table and bet the house on double zero. This may or may not be an evil thing to do, but certainly it is a rational thing to do. If millions of Americans are harmed as a result of your policy of consistently betting the house on double zero, perhaps they should take it up with the casino who encourages this behavior by consistently compensating you for your losses using money taken from the pockets of millions of Americans.
Try taking the square root of it
We did fix it but I forget how. I know we switched to a log format for vote files. But I'm not sure if that was the fix for this problem or something we did later to improve efficiency.
I'm sure you can get away with not using Excel if you have some sort of religious prohibition against it, but if you're a pragmatic person who uses the right tool for the job, is it really that bad that it turns out to be Excel? I mean, it runs on a Mac.
I agree, politics problems are not problems companies can solve at all.
XSRF: https://github.com/evanlong/security/blob/master/web/csrf/fr...
I don't know the definite answer; but I'd say Durham / RTP, NC belongs in the discussion as well.
First for something as simple as laplace equation solver numpy vectorized loop is 35ms per loop vs 6.3ms for C.

Isn't numexpr a good solution for that problem? numexpr is much much simpler than PyPy, so if it can reduce the performance overhead of complex vector operations with loop fusion, that seems a huge win.
There's one important difference: Google was valued around $20 Billion when it went public, and it is now worth $187B. How much market cap growth can Facebook possibly attain over the coming years? They're going to have to start monetizing their users or that hefty stock price is going to erode over time.
Yeah, that's kind of what I do. I run Mint or Ubunutu, then run lightweight distros via VirtualBox(Lubuntu, Crunchbang, etc.)
I'm not sure that "crisis of confidence" is the right turn of phrase in a situation in which there was a real lack of ability to pay. If there is a "crisis of confidence" and an institution's balance sheet is actually as it says it is, it can wait until people start behaving rationally. If there is a "crisis of being materially insolvent," and its own solvency is dependent on the solvency of counterparties who are materially insolvent, then it is not a victim of a lack of confidence as much as a victim of its own lack of diligence. Perhaps if the institution is sufficiently sophisticated then we should consider the possibility that it knew that its counterparties could not pay and lied about that knowledge.
We just got a new system like that for Levion. It was fun initially when you have no customers but when accounts are being made non stop it gets impossible to work. It did give our employees energy initially until they made us turn it off.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3521108