skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mental work isn't like physical work. Throwing more hours at it doesn't mean you'll get an increase, at least not for long.
Because it doesn't have a 200 mile range going up a mountain.
The Flavored Vodka Trend Needs to Stop Now
OS X Lion: Replacing the “Show/Hide” Button in Finder
KG-195 Mic Ways Problem Solution
As a German, I consider this a desperate attempt to dilute the efforts of the opposition to organize nationwide rallies on saturday. The move just seems too perfectly timed... (Edit: the keyword here is 'for now')
Are Successful People Nice? - Art Markman
It looks like opening multiple Adwords accounts is what cost you your accounts.
Care to post a few examples?
Yes, why wouldn't you? It's just a question of scale.
My preferred method is to find the equivalent of K&R for that language, read it, and then start trying to program, supplemented with internet searches if I run into something that it turns out I didn't understand, or to find neat libraries.

Unfortunately, few books approach K&R's quality. I don't like books that are written under the assumption that I will be sitting at a computer as I read them, and expect me to be typing in code and running it for everything they cover.

If I can't find a satisfactory book, I'll cobble together something from what I can find on Safari Library, free online books, and assorted internet searching.

A while back I tried an interesting experiment. I needed to learn some Lua, because I wanted to write some add-ons for an MMORPG I was playing (Warhammer Online). Lua has pretty good documentation, but I had recently read that famous article on digital natives vs. digital immigrants, whose theses was that digital natives (people who grew up in the digital world) have a fundamentally different understanding of technology than those of us who grew up in the pre-digital age and immigrants to the digital world. The natives are multitasking do-ers, who want to learn things as they need them. They aren't, supposedly, like the immigrants, who think the way to learn things is to read a book, then start doing.

I decided to take a more native approach with Lua to see how that worked out. So, instead of reading the Lua documentation, I downloaded and looked at a few Warhammer Online add-ons to see how they were structured and get a feel for what Lua code looks like. I looked at the Wikipedia article on Lua to get an idea of what kind of things the language had.

Then I started coding. Whenever I wanted to do something that I knew the language could do, but didn't know how, I Googles. So, for example, the first time I wanted to initialize an array with literal constants, I'd Google for that.

This actually worked. I don't know if my Lua code is any good, but comparing to what I see on other people's add-ons, it seems in the same league at least. I would not put "Lua programmer" on my resume just yet--I'll wait until I actually read a complete manual before doing that. I did a similar experiment with JavaScript, with similar results.

I'm not convinced, though, that the "native" approach is actually good. Yes, I got satisfactory results, but I think much of that has to do with the fact that I've been a professional programmer for 30 years. That has given me good filters for recognizing bad code, so when I'd Google for how to do something and get back and answer that turned out to not be a good way to do whatever it was, I'd sense that and keep looking. Someone with just a couple years or less experience would probably have incorporated a lot more things from the bad examples on the net.
There are many examples in the open source world.

In music, why not bieber, rebecca black, and soulja boy?

Would DHH count?

Does Amanda Hocking count? (http://www.npr.org/2012/01/08/144804084/a-self-published-aut...)

That's just after a few minutes of thinking. I believe I could come up with several more pretty easily.
Maybe. But by "real history" I'm referring to the stuff that historians produce, not popular history/myth.
Bits of it are easy to kill (at country level at least).
My firewall blocked your slides because all the requests were sent with null content-type headers.
Installing Project Fedena, Nginx, MySQL, Mongrel on CentOS 6
SQL Paging queries using SQL "window functions"
"True autonomy is going to require the answering of plenty of technical and ethical questions."

Precisely my point. Thanks. We all know flight autonomy is already here. Has been for ages.

The aerial refuelling is a neat trick which I'm not convinced will be able to be taken for granted yet -- I can see this won't become fully autonomous for a while. That procedure would have to be completely predictable and reliable -- at least as reliable as a human-managed manoeuvre and that isn't without risk.
World Press Photo winner 2011
There seems to be this recurring theme in tech media that "gee, wiz! anybody can be 'coder'!". I call bullshit - this article smells like a PR gimmick. While I have no doubt that she picked up the rudiments of programming within this time, I think it's fairly clear that she had "spilled the beans" in order to take this project to the extent that it is available today.
I'm actually not a fan of the Flipboard interface. I use Pulse and LOVE it - Great example of functional design.
how fast is your internet? not nearly this fast
Well said. I've also struggled a bit since a lot of my talents are in design. I am one of those "designgeneers" that you sometimes hear about. The downside to being a hybrid coder/designer is that you never really have a deep understanding of stuff like memory and architecture.

So you eventually have to come to the realization that there isn't anything wrong with that, per se. I design great experiences and then I code them. That's where I fill the void.

Luckily, I'm not involved in your banking or any other mission critical applications. For Ruby on Rails/PHP/Python, my knowledge suffices and I can be proficient enough to deliver a great app, or web experience.

Would I ever use an algorithm? This is where I feel like it's important to be a strong programmer as well. Maybe I should be using an algorithm, instead of 40 lines of code that dance around the same conclusion? Maybe. I have no idea because I don't even know where to start.
Don't let yourselves be fooled - not only in Germany is it a common method by the government to undermine protests, to call them successful, sit out the fallout, then try again when public attention is focused on other events (like, a football cup or olympic games). I hope noone will withdraw their call for protest tomorrow.

As Germany is one of the most infuencial countries in the EU, we should also show solidarity to the people in other countries and help overturn this treaty entirely.
I've used jungledisk for a long time and felt they've really squandered a great opportunity (or maybe getting acquired by rackspace _was_ the opportunity in the first place).

I agree the jungledisk UX could be better, but the idea was good: run an service on the user PC that works with s3 and behaves like a hard-drive and make the user pay amazon directly for the storage and bandwidth "a-la carte." There really isn't a need for servers, why not just s3 buckets + the user machines?

I am surprised there aren't opensource solutions that just take s3 keys and make a virtual drive. Or are there?
What Founders Obsess Over (Part 1)
Pinterest is Virtual Buying | Bombtune
A lot of those links are broken and/or seem to link to services that are only in business to help sell software.

I was thinking of a system that generates license keys, allows software to check in to verify those license keys, notify customers when license keys are expiring, etc. It doesn't seem like those companies offer services like that.

Perhaps I am trying to solve a problem that does not exist.
Looks & feels great! But have some complaints:
- I may not be affiliated with a company. That is not critical but annoying
- Tasks screen should open a new task when I click at the bottom of the tasks. It somehow is more intuitive than clicking upper right corner.
- Also Tasks should not ask me about details when I am creating them. From the meetings I've seen they are usually created in brainstorming sessions which leaves no room for detailing. Get the task, ask for details later.
It sounds to me like lots of Dropbox customers opened a single Adwords account each to run Dropbox ads, and Google mistakenly concluded that they were all the same person.
I like the Agenda view. It gives the current or next event at the top and all upcoming stuff below in chronological order.
Not exactly. If you read his post closely, he claims to have only had a single account. It's Google which is claiming that he "maintains multiple AdWords accounts simultaneously serving ads for similar or related keywords and/or businesses."
I start by trying to build a program I already know how to make. Something simple like a number-guessing game.

If I like the first couple of experiences I'll pick up a reference manual and try something a little harder.
Yes it is, that is because Apple wanted the largest target audience possible by making it "easy to use" Try to give your Grandmother some new interface without skeumorphism and see how well it works out. They use it because it removes barriers for the less technologically inclined.
Cisco 2011 Annual Security Report
10 tips on writing well from mad man, David Ogilvy
Dad Shoots Daughter’s Laptop Over Facebook Post [video]
Murder is criminal, patents are civil. They are completely different, and they absolutely should be.
Do you have more resources on that? Occasionally I think about the problem of censorship and free speech and wonder how to enable occupied people to report their plight. So far I could not think of a solution, because I assumed any kind of broadcasting would make the broadcaster an easy target. So what you say interests me (to be fair I am not building anything at the moment, and I am not a hardware person - yet).
If.

That is why I asked the question.
Yeah thats a nice xmldict you wrote there, except it doesnt do anything good at all. Try to parse this with it, <html>hello</lol>world</html>. So much for your A* search and algorithmic knowledge.

I am no good with algorithms but would know to stop at such an idea as to make my own xmldict parser in that way. I would instead learn about parsing and the algorithms for successful parsing, instead of a half-assed approach.
That reminds me of the classic and occasionally useful multiplication algorithm.

mult(x,y):
int total = 0;
do
{
if (x & 1) total += y; // if x's last bit is true add y
x = x >> 1; //binary shift right 1 to divide x by 2.
y = y << 1; //binary shift left 1 to multiply y by 2.
}while (x > 0);
return total;

which I tend to use as an intro to algorithms because it's useful and short. But, just complex enough to think about.
> Nowhere does he seem to cotton to the nature of Anonymous

By “cotton” did you mean “caught on”?
Ron Rivest's Internet-Draft on S-Expressions (1997)
I'm not praising their behavior, but can understand them doing this. In this day and age, it's almost impossible to grow an online service without doing something somewhat shady (ie AirBnb getting users from Craigslist). Of course you can cross the line.

I somehow doubt this is going to cost them anything substantial though. The tech audience will know about it but the casual users will be ignorant, and just shrug it off. Pinterest's core audience are not techies.
How to Structure Your Startup to Avoid Double Taxation
Some of my readings, but I definitely recommend to find some which are matching with your own interests better:

M-Tree: http://www.vldb.org/conf/1997/P426.PDF

Periphrase Extraction: http://asv.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/publication/file/91/hol...

Semantic Matching: http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/OK/Publications/Algorithms%20and%...
TL;DR: By deleting the Wallet application data from Android prefs you can assign a new PIN and access the Wallet (e.g. on a stolen phone).

This looks like a typical authentication-done-wrong problem on Google's side here... Not sure if it really qualifies for the name "hack" though.
Good idea. I tried them on Twitter but they seem a bit busy to respond right now :) Will see if I can get through to them.
What I don't understand about this argument, every time I see it, is how do you think Trent Reznor, Louis CK, Radiohead, etc. got to the point where they could trade on their good name?

Do you think Louis CK was just sitting on his ass and then, BLAMMO! FAME!: he was a superstar comedian?

No, something tells me all these examples are of people who worked their ass off under the traditional system, to a point where they can now buck that system.

So what will be the answer under this new "non-traditional" system? Same as it ever was: work your ass off.

Or more to the point. How do you crowdsource if you don't have the name recognition and track-record to trade on? You better be one hell of a salesman.
I have similar feelings of inadequacy/anxiety. To fight this, I occasionally work through some Project Euler problems, and while they're great, I'd like a resource that contextualizes those types of problems within a theory or mental model.

Can people recommend resources to help? Ideally these would be resources that focus on learning algorithms (or data structures), not teaching you how to program.

One person already recommended "Python Algorithms: Mastering Basic Algorithms in the Python Language", which looks good. "Data Structures and Algorithms Made Easy" also looks good but has mixed reviews.

Are there other books? (Ideally not dry textbooks.)
Free/inexpensive open courses, e.g., through MIT or Stanford?
On my home network I block a lot of former USSR countries, China and Turkey. It cuts down on a lot of things from spam to bots to javascript on compromised sites. I like it as a first defense at home. I don't know that I would be so heavy handed at a place I work, but it would probably depend on the type of business.

Of course I use pf on OpenBSD so my rules are a lot cleaner.
I only had one adwords account.
Scheme R7RS will be dedicated to John McCarthy
All these encapsulated algorithms are really useful, until you need something slightly different and hit all kinds of leaky abstractions. Declarative languages are especially bad at this, since you have to sacrifice a chicken and wait for the right phase of the moon to get the automatic optimizer to produce the code that you actually indent to run.
Upvoted for actually citing and expressing some knowledge about Zen philosophy, unlike many of the mentions used everywhere that attempt to cheapen it.
I learned this rhyme from my parents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_days_hath_September

It works pretty well (I just remember the first two lines). I hope it saves you some time!
K&R?
Why not? It works for science and math classes.
Anonymous is a childish sudo-terrorist group that has thrown multiple digital temper-tantrums because they haven't gotten their way.

Even if I support their views, I would never want to be associated with them.
Type This Into Google for a Valentine’s Day Surprise
What a famous record exec taught me about limits (and meeting Fred Wilson)
U.S. Wants You to Test Terrorist Tracking With Social Media Game [video]
Alternatively, you could have hired a guy from Asia on oDesk for $3/$4 to get 40 people to signup for Dropbox with your referral link. Much more cost effective.
4 Simple Principles Of Getting To Completion
Color.

Ha ha ha, I slay myself.

But in seriousness, I threw my money into the ring because I have really craved a solid adventure game. I know these guys will take a solid crack at it, and at the very least, I will get to watch the game development process unfold on a very personal and intimate level.

$15 seems like a low price to watch an adventure game's development process, AND get the end result.
I signed up for a pinterest account and didn't even realize that I didn't have to use facebook. So I signed in with facebook, thinking that it was just going to basically use it as a login portal, and maybe to import interests. Instead it auto-followed every one of my facebook friends who have a pinterest account (and sent them an email to that effect).

Within about 10 minutes, I had turned off the link to facebook, and then I discovered that there is no intuitive way to see everyone that it set you to follow. (Go to the settings page and see if you can figure it out)

I have no idea why it's so popular, especially with such a shitty interface and poor communication and similarities to every other social bookmarking app that's ever been created. But I guess you could say the same thing about myspace and social networking.
I've set 4 weeks as default in Google Calendar, so reading this article was baffling at first. Curious that 4 weeks doesn't show up for everyone. It is infinitely more useful than the month view.
To me a "good programmer" isn't someone who can recide sorting algorithms or the like. A good programmer is someone who can properly identify the right tools for the job and adequitely apply them to the given scenario.

A good programmer knows why one algorithm of a certain classification is right for the job. He/she may not be able to memorize it to put it down but they know why one would need to apply it and can then consult notes/google for its implementation.

Patterns are a good example of this. If someone can conceptualize the problem they're facing clearly enough to know that they need a facade that signals a good programmer. The guy down the hall who memorized how to build a facade pattern but can't identify when its actually needed isn't necessarily a good programmer (but not necessarily bad either).

Algorithms are tools. You don't drive a screw with a hammer in the same way you don't use certain algorithms for the task you have in front of you. You need to know what kind of screw driver is required to be a good programmer.

I could rant on and on about metaphors and the like but the point is pretty cut and dry. Who cares if you can't slap out algorithms on a whim (well, interviewers care I guess) what matters is that you know when you need to apply a depth first vs. a breadth first search.
5 Essential Spreadsheets for Social Media Analytics
Show HN: My weekend project, FFUNR
Video of Several NYC Tech Incubators
Its worth noting that those standards evolved when patents were subject to much more intense review by the patent office, and it was (procedurally) easier for the patent office to just reject an application.

One of the easiest potential fixes to the US patent system would just remove the no longer warranted presumption of validity from patents.
But DPI is used in Iran and just using different ports does _not_ help
When starting with Vim I completely changed all of the software that I interact with. That means: mutt for email, vimperator, vimprobable or vim plugin for chrome, mocp with vim keybindings, newsbeuter and dwm with simple keybindings.

After getting comfortable with this setup, I find it is now a pain to drop down to use the arrow keys. This type of setup really helped me 'convert' to a vi way of thinking. I am still learning, but am liking the minimal setup.
FBI Investigated Steve Jobs When First Bush Administration Wanted to Hire Him
Best to do nothing then, and be one of those who stood aside.
In defence of the poster, I think it depends on how much experience you have solving a certain class of problems, and perhaps more importantly, how you were taught.

I don't recall having studying the A* algorithm before, so I first looked it up on Wikipedia for a few minutes, and then came back to the comments. It's worth me saying that 30 seconds of reading your comment and linked gist did more to aid my comprehension than a few minutes looking through the Wikipedia article.

This is the case because you described the algorithm in terms of building blocks I was already familiar with. It's a depth-first search with a weighted queue; as you say, pretty obvious! But it wasn't immediately obvious from the Wikipedia article, because Wikipedia articles are designed to impart information, not necessarily to teach.

If the poster was taught by a professor who was teaching more like the Wikipedia article (and I've known a lot of lecturers who do this!), I can understand the confusion.
As a liberal, I'd like to thank you for invoking conservatism in defense of fascism. It's very satisfying for me.
Red Flags To Avoid When Talking About Competitors
Ask HN: What "big" sites don't officially support IE7 now?
I am trying to compile a list of some "bigger" (more popular on the web) sites that no longer support IE7 or possible if they no longer even support IE8 (which I don't think I have seen but I'm not sure). I know have seen more in the news recently about IE7 but I couldn't remember which ones specifically. Thanks for any help.
If it genuinely interests you there's nothing stopping you.

Just don't feel like you have to because of what others think.

Algorithms are neat and very fun once you understand them... but I think critical thinking is far more useful. If you spend time just studying algorithms you might end up just memorizing them by rote and learn nothing. However if you develop critical thinking you will be more apt to be able to develop algorithms on your own.

One of my favourite exercises is to ask, "Yes, but how?" While reading through an interesting program I will see a function that perhaps I understand conceptually by the way it is named (ie: (search a list-of-things)). The trick is to not be satisfied and let your curiosity track down that function definition and figure out how it works. See if you can formulate in your mind why it works once you know the how of it. Then see if you can find some literature on the method used -- many algorithms have been discovered and documented by several generations of grad students by now.

Or you can take a more formal approach and start with the maths.

Just enjoy it. That's the important part.
Walt Disney Mind Map from 1957
I had the exact same email. Never used adwords before and only had the one account. Adwords support were unable to provide me with a straight answer as to why I was banned and just kept linking me to the terms of service.
No, I don't think that magazines count as retro design. The problem isn't that print magazines still exist; the problem would be if the online subscription was designed to look like a print magazine (static pages sizes, separate pages that had to be turned, no links, etc).
Sadly, not true. Leutheuser-Schnarrenberger has explicitly spoken in favor of ACTA just a few days ago.

See this German link:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bundesregierung-sieht...
Where is the link to the required changes? Binaries = scary. Also, an SSL link doesn't seem useful?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language
> if you are a programmer, your thought process should be molded in a way you start finding these things obvious

> had I not known about parsers, the solution would have come naturally to me

Your use of "obvious" and "come naturally" fit together, and match the template of someone who is naturally more inclined to understand this stuff than the OP might be, or (for that matter) I might be.

But rather than abandon algos as irrelevant, the OP should put more effort in.
>If you compliment a woman based on (a) getting married and (b) physical attractiveness, you are slightly re-inforcing that meme. You are also signaling that you might be the sort of person who thinks the above, or that you support the above attitudes.

What utter rubbish. So getting married isn't something compliment worthy? A compliment based on physical attractiveness is always sexist?

Absurd.
Darpa AlphaDog Robot Steps Lively With 400 Lbs on its Back [video]
> The downside to being a hybrid coder/designer is that you never really have a deep understanding of stuff like memory and architecture

Not until you bother to understand them.