skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am hopeless at math. This is something that I am ashamed of. But there are people who seem to be proud of their ignorance; they're shocked if you haven't read any Shakespeare but happily admit they can't do percentages.

Will those people be helped by the author's approach? I don't know, but I don't think so. These people will see a number and throw their hands up, saying "Oh maths! I can't do sudoku, how do you expect me to do this!". This attitude is not quite as prevalent in the UK as it used to be, but it's still there. See, for example, the number of esoteric arts programmes on BBC compared to the number of advanced science programmes. (I'm not aware of any science programming that would be beyond an enthusiastic 14 year old. I do know of hours of arts programming that is unashamedly elitist. Elitist is fine, but it'd be great for some balance.)

What is needed is better maths education. (I finished school many years ago; maybe things are different now.) Math is not blindly mashing numbers and symbols and hoping for the best. Maths includes a large element of careful thinking, exploring the problem, listing the known information, listing what you want to find.

New techniques for using math would help reduce the gender inequality in math results too.

Put the normal "more research needed" caveats around this, but: There's some suggestion that girls use inefficient techniques and "just struggle through", they manage to get correct results and so they don't get extra help. Boys tend to just stop when it gets too laborious, and thus they get taught new better techniques.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4587466.stm)
"for node in nodes" implies you are returning the node itself and not simply a counter. This would seem to fall more under his 1 word for loop variables idea.

* NB: I am not certain whether I agree with such rules or not, but that is another discussion point.
I don't think the author means to justify age discrimination so much as to use it to underscore a point, which is that programming knowledge is something that takes (on the order of) 5 years to acquire rather than 40 years to acquire. Whether this is true, I am not sure. I don't really have enough experience to justify making any claims like that.

I think what he's really saying, to make an analogy, is that a programmer is more like a black smith than like an alchemist. A blacksmith is concerned with his tools and his technique, an alchemist is on a search for truth (or permanence or glory). Now he's also saying that being a blacksmith sort of sucks: your tools get old, you are smelly, it probably hurts more to pound your anvil when you're 50 than when you're 22, etc. Whether you believe that depends on your taste, whether you care about creating a good product or embarking on a potentially (very likely) fruitless search for truth.

It's pretty obvious what hackernews prefers.
Well, encryption is certainly part of the story. DVB encryption uses messages called ECMs to distribute the key that is used from the receipt of the ECM through to the receipt of the next ECM. The time between two ECMs is called the crypto period and is generally in the order of a few seconds. The average wait time to get an ECM on changing channels is of course half a crypto period.

The other major source of delay is video compression, as defined by MPEG. MPEG uses bi-directional compression in the time domain, which means that frames are sent out of order, which in turn means that they have to be buffered. Furthermore, a complete frame, known as an I frame, is only sent every 10 or so frames (it depends on the profile of the transmission channel - is it lossy or not for example). As the P and B frames are basically diffs from the base I frame, you can't decode an image until you have received an I frame. This too introduces a delay of typically 0.25 seconds, and is the reason why even unencrypted digital is slower for changing channels than analog.
This is one of the stupidest articles I've ever read. Any half decent programmer, regardless of his experience level (just graduated from college to veteran 60 year old) can learn and be effective in programming a completely new language in one week (please note that when I say completely new I mean within the family of c-like languages). After one month, he'll have most of the libraries memorized.

This author seems to believe that experience in programming essentially boils down to experience in a language. That a 10 year veteran java programmer will have to start over from scratch if they switch to programming in c#. Totally untrue. Experience in programming makes you better at design, project planning, professional relationships, and project delivery. None of these have anything to do with what language you use.

Perhaps what he's trying to say is that if you are a terrible programmer with very low intelligence, your experience won't get you very far. And with that I agree. This author has done little but show he has low skill in the field, so it's unsurprising he finds his work to be below par.
Computer programming is a job that’s heavily dependent on temporary knowledge capital. It’s temporary because the powers that be keep changing the languages and tools that programmers need to do their jobs.

I could rephrase that to: "Computer programming is not a job where you can expect to do the same thing every day for your entire career. A successful computer programmer will be constantly learning new skills."

As someone who is terrified of rote, boring tasks, and who got into CS because I've always liked learning new challenging technical things, I think I chose the right career.
> almost nothing in Knuth is "out of date"

Actually, quite a lot of TAOCP are out of date. TAOCP's discussion of floating point arithmetic, while correct, predates IEEE 754 and not that useful now. TAOCP's analysis of algorithms, while correct, ignores locality of reference as it predates importance of CPU caches and branch predictors. TAOCP spends inordinate amount of pages on external sorting with tapes; while external sorting is still important, most of Knuth's specifics are not. I can go on and on...
Did this come off as pseudoscientific to anyone else? It seems to be inviting me to see that the procedure works by personal experience, not to question whether or not it works.

If it doesn't seem to work for me, I haven't practiced it enough. How long should I try? 10000 trials. Of course the game is already up before I begin.

Kind of ironic considering the subject matter.
Komodo relies on getting type info from JSDoc notation and Sublime Text barely does autocomplete at all. For instance type this into Sublime and you won't get a list of String methods when you type the last dot:

var x = "Hi!";

x.

I'm not sure how Komodo does with that one without any JSDoc notation. I'm know that there are editors that do a slightly better job (for instance, Visual Studio probably has the best Javascript autocomplete I've ever seen) but still, it really pales in comparison to how well it works with statically typed languages.
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I learned to program in dynamic languages (that's not quite true, my first couple of weeks programming were in Pascal), primarily javascript but also some ruby and PHP. I continued using mostly javascript for about 2 years, and I was strongly opposed to static typing (largely because of my exposure to Pascal, but also because I did a whole lot of crazy stuff in javascript that was completely dependent upon weak dynamic typing).

Then I learned Haskell, which I was more open to because I had heard I didn't need to write down any type information. With Haskell I learned that static typing was great because it created a documentation for your code that was self enforcing, and as Haskellers love saying, if the code typechecked, it probably works as expected.

Now I prefer working in a statically typed environment. But for none of the reasons presented in this article, which I think is just presenting information that those used to dynamic typing will turn their head at.
I don't get it, Pinterest is an enabler for photographers and artist. I never go to Flickr, could care less, but if I see something of interest on Pinterest (or any other sharing site), I would actually make the effort to go to Flickr and check it out. If I really like what I see from said artist/photographer, I would perhaps consider purchasing some of their work to display in my home. If not, by sharing what I saw, I potentially gave that artist a ton more eyeballs on their work, thus increasing their chances of people buying their artwork. The benefits far outweigh the disadvantages of sharing IMHO
CentOS 6.2 (the most recent version of a very popular server linux) is using 2.6.32

You can change initcwnd on CentOS 6.2 but not initrwnd. And it defaults to 3

People can check their server kernel version with

uname -a

Servers that appear to be at 20 or especially 40 might just be setting the buffers to match the maximum client side window (which is what Microsoft appears to do on their servers).
...what we'd really want to see is a large successful enterprise system built on Smalltalk to serve as an instructive example. To my knowledge no such system exists...

Does such a system exist to anybody's knowledge? I've heard that there's a good bit of Smalltalk on Wall Street, but companies don't like to advertise it because it's a competitive advantage.
Ask HN: How should developers talk to designers?
We've all seen clueless MBA's looking for developers to "just code my idea", and there's a lot of advice out there to help business people talk to technical people. As a technical person looking for a designer, how do I manage the problem?
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Stuff like this with PHP just reminds me how nice the module loading systems other languages use to handle this sort of thing.*

PHP - forgot something? Best re-compile so I can access the module's massive list of global functions.

Python, Ruby, Node, etc. - `import/include/require module`

* because Pear is basically a waste of time.
C# has supported dynamic typing since version 4.0.

At this point it doesn't make much sense to say that C# is strictly anything. It's perhaps the most obsessively multi-paradigm language out there.
> Don't start variables with o_, obj_, m_ etc. A variable does not need tags which states it is a variable.

I disagree on this one -- it's helpful to be able to quickly recognize whether a given variable in a method is a local variable or a member variable of the class.
C Programming Puzzlers
His example for the second point is horrible and contrived (not to mention stringly typed, which is an anti-pattern in every language). If anything, the "unhandled" should be assigned in and "else" block, not by implicit "fall-through". That would (probably, I don't know R) cause a failure for an undefined variable when trying to return it - which is exactly the same as having the compile complain about an undeclared variable.

In general, I just disagree. Strictly typed just isn't superior to dynamic typing at all. It's a different approach with its own pitfalls, and more than enough of them.
Because they're broadened their experience and knowledge with new languages and learning new things. My point isn't so much about learning the very latest thing so much as it is about learning in general. At the very least the people who spent the last 4-5 years learning new languages will have been exposed to different ways of doing things and different ways of looking at the common problems - something that someone who didn't learn anything except repeating their experience over and over wouldn't have learned.
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Sounds like a great opportunity for those qualified. They should film it as a reality series on the Science Channel -- "Real World" for aspiring astronauts.
It is my experience with large teams that just about every issue starts to appear frequently as the overall quality on large teams is harder to maintain than on small teams where coordination is easier and you can keep the skill level of the average developer higher.
Ugh, `dynamic` doesn't provide the benefits of a dynamically typed language by long, long way, and yes I've used it extensively. But thanks for the downvote all the same.

http://wekeroad.com/2010/08/09/csharps-new-clothes/

In case you plan on skimming that and missing the details the tl;dr is that Rob, pushes `dynamic` as far as he can and it still comes up far short of the extensibility and expressiveness of Ruby constructs.
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Sure, framing the question that way might garner a different result, as would framing it thus:

"Would you feel comfortable giving away information regarding your online activities in exchange for free web services like Google Search, Maps, and Gmail?"

Using the phrase "targeted advertising" is misleading. It's not that the advertising is targeted that people oppose, it's the insight into your online activities is exposed without you having any control over that information's use.
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You can slowly replace someone's brain, cell by cell, with electronic counterparts. He'll never know the difference.

And then we realize we're just machines, and become frustrated.
because you need discipline in any programming language regardless of your typing system?

programming requires discipline. using the discipline required to do X as reason to not do X isn't going to get you very far.
> you might find out that pure cold rationalism is not a silver bullet, and that in fact curiosity is a value to be placed above.

> After all, rationalism is not able to tell us why one should not pee every evening on one's neighbors fence, right?

On LessWrong they have an interesting description of rationality - http://lesswrong.com/lw/31/what_do_we_mean_by_rationality/.

By this definition (both about map/territory and 'winning'), if 'strange' ideas from 'strangers' seem to give good results, then it is rational to try and understand them. But in case of Feng Shui and artists, if reason for having a curved garden is to make archer's life difficult, then I want to believe it's because of archers, not because of ghosts. We don't need spiritual mnemonic nowdays anymore. And if one finds that peeing on one's neighbors fence is a good way towards achieving goals he value, then it might in fact be rational to do so. But in most of cases, rationality tells us that angry neighbors and loosing karma in society are Bad Things to have.
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I’ve always thought that DRM only remained unbroken so long as no hacker was interested in breaking it

This has always been true; why break the weak DRM on a low-quality 'Netflix' stream when you can do an HDTV rip or even a Blu-ray rip?

But the instant you create exclusive content that everyone wants on such a service, the DRM will be broken faster than you can say "DMCA".

The downside of this is it lets companies delude themselves (and others) into thinking that their DRM is "secure", when in reality it is simply that nobody cares about them.
>I wonder what people did before we had all the fancy names though.

They suffered, just like people with schizophrenia did back when we believed in visions and demonic possession.

>But psychology is not a science. It's extremely subjective.

This is about psychiatry, not psychology. Psychiatry is absolutely a science. (And so is psychology, albeit a tricky one.)
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Teller should make a show that shows all of his secrets.
Assumption: targeted advertising is more lucrative than indiscriminate advertising. (I'm not sure this is true, but it seems to be accepted common wisdom.)

If I were to run FB or Google, and discovered ads of any type were being blocked, I'd naturally try to change the minds of my users the old-fashioned way: money.

The problem is the entire "free through advertising" model. Once you set the price of something as "free" (ala Gmail/Google search) you have a tremendously hard time charging people for it. Sure you can provide "premium" features (ala the freemium model) but how can you do that with search?
You could try mocking out your idea using something like http://www.balsamiq.com/ or http://www.axure.com/ (I'm not trying to push any specific mocking software).

This allows you to describe how you want the system to behave without getting into the nitty gritty on how to make it look good: that is why these mocking systems look as pencil like as possible. Iterate with a designer a few times with these mockups.

I would also recommend showing the mockups to your stakeholders and/or customers and ask them what they think. Do they like the flow, etc.

Another advantage using mockups is that once you have your mockups finalized, you can start implementing the behavior of each mockup while the designer designs.

For this phase, I would recommend using Feature/Behavior Driven Development to drive the development of your code based on the mockups. Use Test Driven Development to fill out the units of your program.

Just a suggestion and I hope this helps.
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Now that Netflix has original exclusive content, can we look forward to someone hacking the Netflix stream?
Why?

To quote from the article,

> Below, I propose a process for how to "get curious." I think we are only just beginning to learn how to create curious people, so please don't take this method as Science or Gospel but instead as an attempt to Just Try It.

Nowhere is the author suggestng that this procedure has been scientificaly tested.

Also, the author raises two very important points that can be applied to other things in life:

1) to train a skill before it is needed, so that it's available when the time comes.

2) to train it enough many times for it to become a habit.
So, you don't believe that some magic involves some magical powers?
Got 5 minutes to review TV hackathon project?
Hacked this up over a few days. Supposed to be a fun way to launch a quick quiz on your TV. No design skills or coding required.. something your non-technical sister could figure out

Would love some feedback
Holy crap! I thought Requiem hadn't been updated in years!

Thanks for the links.

*edit

The onion site seems to have a heck of a time serving files. I've been trying for an hour and have yet to get a valid zip. Some kind soul is seeding out a torrent of all three archives (windows, mac, and source)

Try this:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:a8f71c6c1b773a2f43850e4dae9189165a7ba0aa&dn=requiem-3.3.4&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%2Fannounce
Thank you for the suggestion but I'm not looking "half-hazardously". I've already turned a few down that didn't fit my particular interests. I'm not looking to get an email that interests me and go, "great lets start coding"..

Nevertheless, thank you for the advice.
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Great, now I honestly feel safe about buying from the iBookstore!

This can only lead to an increase in sales.

Did they not learn anything from the music industry? Sales have only gone up since they scrapped DRM! (citation needed)
I don't know how many times I've hit this link from random googling.

Just like this sed one liners:
http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/unix/sed.html
I'm not sure I would call it cheating. When I think of cheating, I think of a restricted action that gives an unfair advantage over competitors, of which is incredibly difficult for competitors to duplicate. But implementing the same hack, in this case, is easy, fairly common, and it isn't stepping outside of any real boundaries so it's not like the playing field is uneven. It also works and works well to provide users (customers) with a better experience.
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Awesomesauce! Even w/o the interpreter, it's helpful for trying snippets on the go. I think if you need something more elaborate, just spend 5 seconds more and open your laptop.
Posterous's posting bookmarklet.

Meanwhile, j.mp (bitly) works just fine.
Thanks! Will definitely keep your suggestions in mind!
Get things Done even with FB and tweeting, amazing article
Gruber hasn't written any book. John Battelle has written a book on Google.

Also, I think it's extremely disingenuous to conflate Gruber's income from his blog with the income Batelle derives from being the founder of Federated Media Publishers. To say that Battelle has an agenda in supporting Google's practice is obvious.
Are you from Pak?
Shouldn't Pinterest just be enabling some simple tech that also scrapes the attribution on CC licensed photos?
Happened in the past and the past did ok.
Okay, enough with the "meetings are toxic" crap
Played around with this question for a while. It's tough to answer for a few reasons. Most importantly, it looks like -- for the majority of acquisitions -- the smaller studio is simply absorbed into the larger one. In other words, the studio 'disappears' after it is acquired. Only in a handful of cases did studios remain independent. For example, after a 1995 acquisition, "The Weinsteins operated Miramax with more creative and financial independence than any other division of Disney, until 2005 when they decided to leave the company and founded The Weinstein Company." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miramax_Films)

Beyond that, I only have data on about ~2,000 movies that had sufficient critical/user reviews to include in the analysis.

With those qualifiers aside, here are a few data points. The scores are listed as critic/user:

* Columbia Pictures, acquired by Sony in 1989. Before 84/79, after 54/62.
* Miramax Films, acquired by Disney in 1993. Before 89/87, after 76/74.
* New Line Cinema, acquired by Turner in 1993 then merged with Time Warner in 1996. Before 68/82, after 47/65.
* Paramount Pictures, acquired by Viacom in 1993. Before 80/78, after 64/62.

Just to call out a bias in the data, ratings for all movies decline over time (probably because every recent movie -- good or bad -- appears on RT). The average rating for movies released 1996 or earlier is 72/70, and after 57/64. Nevertheless, all of the above-mentioned studios (with the exception of Miramax) showed a meaningfully greater decline.
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Surprised that websites are barely picking up on this, since the solution has been out for roughly two weeks now. Requiem works great and it takes a matter of seconds to complete, regardless of whether you're removing DRM from a book or TV show.

Glad to see Brahms finally getting some much-deserved recognition.
Because the developer worked to make it and, and he doesn't feel that he did it for the lulz...

The real question is: why the sense of entitlement?