skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tech? You don't even need to go to college to be a successful software engineer. No matter how smart you are, if you want to be a doctor you have to do undergrad, med school, residency. 36 hour shifts, 100+ hour weeks vs working at Google. With tech you can work from anywhere, you can choose your risk/reward exposure, and if 10 years in you decide you hate it, you don't have a mountain of debt.

In medicine's favor I will say that the median income is probably higher, the median social status is much higher, you have a much better chance of directly making a positive impact on many people's lives, and you work in a field with a more balanced gender ratio.
Stop this, please. You're slowly turning HN into Reddit. There has never been, and will never be, intelligent discussion arising from a poll. This is not insight; this is gossip.
I don't think I could disagree with this more.

You absolutely can't listen to what your mom says.

But you can absolutely validate your product with what your mom does.

Does she use it everyday? Does she complain about this feature or that feature? When you're standing behind her when she opens up the application, does she stare at it blankly for five minutes before clicking on something that crashes it? How many questions did she ask you about how to use it? How easy was it for her to learn to use?

All of this is infinitely valuable mom-feedback. Nobody embodies your userbase better than your mom, so you better be testing it on her.
Yes, not to mention the two stocks it failed on.
But the aim of Microsoft's messenger is not to prevent intellectual property theft.. especially when the users are under the impression that it is to facilitate private communications..
Plus, one looks rather moronic carrying his smartphone on top of a shoulder and walking n a funky style :P
Typically a company's stock has a primary listing on one exchange, but may trade secondary instruments on another exchange, usually in another country, in order to appeal to that country's investors. I'm not too knowledgeable about the details, but I believe the secondary listings are structured as a sort of indirect way of owning the equivalent of the primary listing. For companies with a primary listing on a non-U.S. stock exchange, for example, they may have a secondary listing on a U.S. stock exchange by wrapping their equity in an instrument called an American depositary receipt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_depositary_receipt).

How exactly these situations should be analyzed, and what their pros/cons are, seems to be an active area of research: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cross-listing
Seriously? No. Do this on Reddit.
No company should be allowed to hinder my free speech.

We've already established why your use of the words "free speech" is invalid, and rather than addressing that, you're just making arbitrary assertions (which, because they are arbitrary, should be ignored).

Until someone can prove a negative impact of piracy on the copyright holders

It's been proven, and is also quite obvious, but again, you're just going on emotion and arbitrary assertion.
Maybe that was unclear. Obviously all ICs are tested. But the integrated board requires an extra step that the packaged CPU does not.
That's a totally false dichotomy.

Not really, since you replied to:

Bad teachers teaching bad tests is worse than bad teachers left to their own devices.

Bad teachers don't teach. They don't convey knowledge.

That's a terrible attitude

No it isn't, it's reality. Kids are dumb. That's the point of growing up: you become inherently more intelligent and schooling gives you progressive knowledge which is (hopefully) just beyond your full grasp at any given time.

every child has an immense capacity for learning and complex thought

Do you actually know any children? They only have an immense capacity for complex thought if your expectations are low enough.

By the way, I love kids and enjoy interacting with them. But I don't for a second think they're precious, brilliant little snowflakes. They're still dumb. They may be smart among their peers, but they're still dumb on an absolute scale.
What are some tips for an automated code/build/check-in system for LARGE teams?
Several large projects have large code/build/check-in infrastructures.

For example

WebKit http://build.webkit.org/waterfall

Chromium http://build.chromium.org/p/chromium/waterfall

Firefox https://tbpl.mozilla.org/

These systems generally let you submit a patch from version control, review the patch with others and then finally submit the patch to a semi-automated system that applies the patch, builds, runs tests, and then commits the patch if there were no errors.

In an idea world the automated systems would take one patch at a time, build with that patch, run all the tests, if any of them failed reject the patch, then move on to the next patch.

Unfortunately it's never that simple. With 100s of programmers the patches come fast and furious. Faster than they can be built. A complete build cycle with all tests can take hours. Sharding (spliting the build and tests across multiple machines) helps but even that has its limits.

Some systems therefore start a build once the previous build has finished and take all patches that came in since the last build started which can be anywhere from 1 to 30 patches. They run the tests, if there are any failures the system shuts down and someone manually has to look at the last N patches and try to figure out which patch needs to be rejected.

So, what's your experience here? Remember this is specific to LARGE projects. Projects with 100s of programmers. Projects with tens of thousands of tests.

- Have you done anything special to speed things up?

- Have you tried auto-rejecting all patches when one is bad?

- Have you figured out a way to do one patch at a time and still keep up?

- Have you subdivided patches after a failure and still been able to keep up?

- Have you used any special build software that has special features that help this problem?

What are your best tips or practices?
NFC seems promising for temporary connections such as sharing vcards etc.
Paid mobile apps are widely released, and people I know make a living selling them. Is anyone who buys a mobile app a chump?

And what about the ACH information? If you came across that sort of data you would feel free to use it to transfer a few million bucks to your own account? It would be just as easy as copying a movie. So if the data is out there, you are arguing that it's OK to do that?
They are not equivalent. `sudo su` changes the values of USER, HOME, and SHELL to that of the root user. `sudo -s` only changes USER (it seems), but HOME is retained as the SUDO_USER's home directory.

Neither invocation changes the working directory, which is convenient.
java..java..java..too verbose!
In other words, it's only copy on write friendly if the objects have been moved to an area that isn't garbage collected by a copying collector...
Pardon my ignorance, but the last time I saw DOS was around the time I was six years old. Thank you for providing some insight on this subject. DOS text editors are before my time.
we wouldn't have Romeo & Juliet if not for the less copyright-crazy era that he lived in

Nonsense. It's still not possible to copyright the idea of a "love story involving two feuding families," or something. You can't copyright ideas.
I'm not convinced this is a global issue. Here in Israel, many local TV shows are freely available on the internet, including the ever-popular Eretz Nehederet.

Plenty of Israelis pirate content, but the local media industry seems to be doing fine. I can't recall any attempts to crack down on pirates, let alone attempts to pass draconian anti-piracy legislation.

This is all anecdotal. If someone knows where to find the data supporting or contradicting this, please post.
> Another myth is that design patterns were invented.

Patterns are detected - abstracted from what experienced people usually do in certain circumstances.
Bootstrap for Everyone
Good intent with the article. But the lead: "I threw up in my mouth a little bit"--comn man. Really?
> Paid mobile apps are widely released, and people I know make a living selling them. Is anyone who buys a mobile app a chump?

You used google and facebook as an example, they are clearly not releasing binaries but are in the service industry. Mobile applications (which I think are a transient phenomenon that will evaporate when mobile web applications will be more viable, the same happened with desktop software, with some notable exceptions) are already pirated wholesale (see http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20107572-94/how-piracy-ruin...) that doesn't make the writers of mobile software 'chumps', but it does mean that they will have to factor this in or they will likely be hurt.

> It would be just as easy as copying a movie, and the data is out there, so you are arguing that it's OK to do that?

No, obviously I'm not arguing that it is ok to do that.
That college reference is funny! I have almost the opposite problem. I can't stop editing and submitting every time I think of a change I want to include or something on our project evolves. I just want the deadline to come already! Good luck with your demo!
Apple almost always puts respect for the end user (the paying customer) as one of its highest priorities. Off the top of my head, some examples would be: not forcing users to enter license keys for software, dropping DRM from iTunes, blocking third-party cookies by default, and their refusal to allow the carriers to pollute the iPhone with their preloaded software.

Now I just wish they would make it easy for me to set DuckDuckGo as my default search engine in Safari.
Exactly. I'm starting a company soon, half of the software I plan to sell is software my mom asked for. I know the software I build is good because my mom likes it. However, the way my mom likes my software is she uses it to fix the problems she used to complain about. And if she sees something I need to add, she tells me.

I know what she thinks about the software is skewed because it was built by her son, but I also know she used to say, "I wish I could do this" and now she says "Hey I used your program again today, I'm so glad I don't have this problem anymore." The article is right that you can't use your mom for your typical survey, but she can have a more valuable place as a beta tester, someone you can actually watch use your program.

On the other hand the article does have a valid point. "My family says they like it" is not a confirmation your software is good. It reminds me of when I watched American Idol and the horrible singers would say "Well my family says I sing well."
> Of course other programming paradigms can develop other patterns

Of course, that's the point of patterns.
Isn't Apple TV one of the less successful Apple products? Some may even say a rare flop(by Apple standards).

The bar is very high for Apple products. The iPod killed the CD player. The iPhone revolutionized the phone market. But the Apple TV? It's yet to cause much disruption.
I was thinking RasberryPI duct-taped on a small keyboard (eg happyhacking) and some transreflexive display. Although I'm not sure if RPI would be exactly fitting for this kind of usage. Something which could drive the display directly would be more useful.
Great post, any posts on control theory coming?
See VETransfer.org
Thanks, looks good for a quick review.
More time, better application.
I'm not convinced this is a global issue.

I wouldn't be so sure.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-1735520...
Show HN: Tired of entering map directions on iPhone? I've streamlined it
Spinlister: Like RelayRides for bike lovers
I have met Shapiro and he is a very nice and smart guy, but I find it rather shocking that somebody could invest so much time and effort in designing new language before building a library to do something as fundamental as I/O.

Is interesting to contrast his approach building BitC to that of Ken Thompson and Rob Pike (both former colleagues of his at Bell Labs) building Go.

Go has been criticized for "not paying attention to PL research", which might be true, but is already extremely useful and even before its first 'stable' release people already have used to build large systems used in production.

I think what applies to building other kinds of software applies to designing programming languages too: you need something that you can start using to build real systems as soon as possible and then iterate from there based on your experience.

The problem with languages is that changing the language involves throwing away the code you wrote, which discourages one from building real systems with a language that is still changing.

That puts even more value in keeping languages simple. And tools like gofix are also quite nice to help with this.
Ah! bummer.

Since a long time I had an eye on the BitC project, the idea seemed very compelling. When Jonathan Shapiro quit Microsoft and resumed @ Coyotos I was really hopeful that the pace of the development will kick up a notch or two and we would have an usable BitC shortly.

Now it is clear that is not going to happen, but in the process if we have a better language its perhaps good (though honestly cant hide the disappointment that it is going to be a longer wait). For those who are interested in things similar follow the development of decac

http://code.google.com/p/decac/

It has been on HN a few times, and ATS. Snippets from

http://cs.likai.org/ats

ATS is a bit similar to and can be used like:

C, which offers you very fine control over memory
allocation as well as the management of other kind of
resources.

ML, except you have to annotate types for at least the
function arguments and return types

Dependent ML, using dependent types to help you reason
about data structure integrity, from something as
simple as requiring two lists to be zipped to have the
same length, to preserving tree-size invariant when
rotating AVL trees to the left or to the right in order
to guarantee well-balanced property of AVL trees.

...and it is mighty fast.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS_(programming_language)
Summary: Facebook wants to protect its users from employers demanding access to their accounts. The company has clarified, however, that it currently has no plans to sue such employers.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-no-plans-to-sue-...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3749693
http://www.luttie.com
This is big talk, but in the meantime I went to the gym the other day and checked out the movies for sale and bought a Blu-Ray of the Truman Show for $7.99.

I went home and played it, there were no annoying trailers or anything. Me, my son, and the reporter who's always writing about our coven in the newspaper all watched it and had a great time.

Hollywood offers consumers many chump choices (like bloated cable packages) but it also offers good value too.

Hollywood leads the world in producing compelling content and it's always been smart about turning it into money -- I'm sure things are going to change in the next 20 years, but odds are good that some fraction of Hollywood is going to stay on top.
The games' guts are all over the floor now.

edit: aaaand someone crashed the server :/
I can imagine a world where companies have Java legacy code but build new software in Scala to (1) ensure interoperability b/w legacy and new code on the JVM, and (2) give developers a language with more options (functional-style code, REPL)

A lot of companies in SF & NY (Yammer, Twitter, 4sq, for example) use Scala. These cities are pretty cutting-edge in language choice, and I'd imagine these practices will expand geographically as devs migrate to new places.

I'm interning at Knewton, and we have this posted up on our jobs page:

http://jobs.knewton.com/apply/xYwHXb/Software-Engineer-Scala...

and Twitter has this listing:

https://twitter.com/jobs/positions?jvi=ospeWfwL,Job

Good luck!
> iAds might matter, but it seems to be a flop and Apple isn't exactly heavily invested in it.

Even further, iMessage accounts are tied to existing Apple IDs, which in most cases are tied to the user's iPhone and iTunes Store account. If Apple wanted to profile users of their iMessage system, they don't need to scan private communications, they'll just recommend albums, books and movies based on previous purchase history. It's more relevant to their business domain than trying to gleam whether or not Alice and Bob are in a relationship and expecting a child soon.
I found it half funny that Python 3.3 reintroduced the unicode string literal for Django. The only way support will come is if user push their providers to get up to speed. It is such a pain that Python has become forked for all practical purposes.
mono works fine on nix systems (little bit of tweaking with grsec), a friend has developed a few programs that he has deployed to nix systems without any issues. Initially I was quite anti it, but what the heck, if it works it works.
If they don't find value in what I made, then it won't sell. And that's as it should be. Shrug. My first customer is me. I like it.

It's quite possible to make stuff different in a way no one likes. But you can and should make your stuff different in some way or other and then use this as a reason people might want to buy it.
A lot of love for C#. I would have assumed that there would be a lot of C# / .NET bashing.
It seems to me that it's pretty impossible to actually replace C (although I fully support the people trying to do so). All the things that "make C fast" are really ways of making the "underlying machine" fast through C, and trying to come up with new language constructs that facilitate these techniques seems like a losing game. Any new languages are going to have a hard time catching up to C when it comes to compiler optimizations and can never really catch up when it comes to ubiquity. (Would your 5-year-old compiler target dsPIC and have support for their IO ports and interrupts? clearly not)

So, what about a modern safe language that's meant to be used alongside C? For example, the language presents a modern approach to modules and imports, but a function 'bar' in a module 'foo' is compiled down to a straightforward foo___bar() in the generated C. The generated C has straightforward type declarations and readable code, with a minimum of macro abstractions. The source language emphasizes features that allow one to write concise reasonably performant code (H-M, local inference, sum types, some kind of object polymorphism). It has implicit GC, but mostly relies on linear references and stack allocation, falling back to real GC only for explicit unknown-life allocations (with swappable collectors for different runtime overhead). Do-everything capabilities like unsafe pointer arithmetic are completely left out, as the programmer can drop back to C in a neighboring file or inline. The per-project ratio of this new language to C would vary depending on the type of the project - something like a network server would use a minimum of C, perhaps just in cordoned-off performance critical code.

(I've been mulling on this idea for a few weeks. I ran across Felix the other day, and found myself nodding a lot, but the language seemed quite complicated and the array details in particular left me wondering if memory safety was even a design goal.)
I'm not sure I've seen anything like the phrase, "fact of reality that it is morally right" outside of a religious context.
I built this after getting tired at how many actions it takes to enter directions in Maps on iPhone. Often I just wanted to navigate from the current location to a common place (eg home, work). With Quickmaps, all I have to do is launch the app and with single gesture I'm done. Feedback is most welcome
Yes, the death throes of the American media industry are a global problem.

However, evidence is needed to prove that the global media industry is dying.
Well, that didn't take long. http://twitpic.com/90ru0i
A stock will have a single "primary" exchange. This is where the stock is "listed" (apple is listed at NASDAQ, for instance).

However a stock may be traded at multiple exchanges (BATS, NYSE, NASDAQ, DirectEdge, etc) as well as other market centers.

Hope that helps...
Attendance, graduation rates and teen pregnancy are meaningless. They are measures of hours of butt-seat contact, low graduation standards and horniness, respectively.

GPA is closer to a useful metric. GPA and college admittance are basically the same thing as standardized tests. Except that unlike standardized tests, you can't compare any set of grades to any other set of grades. How does that help?

Incidentally, do you realize your biggest criticism of standardized tests is that they are not standardized enough? I.e., there is too much geographic and spatial variation in them?
I agree with the sentiment here, but the bigger issue is most games may not have a cool unique new thing that is communicable to listeners. Considering most games take at least a year to create, they usually stumble upon at least a few innovative, but small, ideas. Looking back at a game like Halo, probably the coolest feature was the ability to only hold two weapons at a time, a nowadays popular design choice which radically alters gameplay balance. However if you had told me before release that was the "killer feature", I would have been bored and uninterested.
Quite easy to find online, but...

http://ycombinator.com/apply.html, point #1.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1804408
> He tolerates alternate viewpoints, but after a particularly bad flamefest he uses a plugin to ban linking to a hate speech

So he doesn't actually tolerate alternate viewpoints, the problem is in the framing. If the discussion board was supposed to facilitate discussion of opposing viewpoints (like IM network is supposed to facilitate private messaging) then it's not reasonable to ban one side's resources.
Its been there a long time, I think since PHP 5. (Certainly, it was old in 2008, when I was working on PHP).
Fascinating that so many people want to learn Haskell. Did not expect that.
I believe Jinja2 is also a lot quicker, but the Django developers want to catch up.. so that's something.
Forgot vs root.
By the way, I wish you the best for your game. How is it called? Can we test it somewhere? :)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-governmen...
The Media Industry: the death throes
redis also supports consistent hashing in many of its drivers (including the Ruby one). It also supports a nifty way to only use part of the key as the consistent hashing key so that you can ensure certain data is stored on the same server. For example, if you use the key "mydata-{123}" only the "123" part will be used by the consistent hashing algorithm. Of course, Riak is also a good example of consistent hashing.
I think jaquesm's point below about mobile apps is (accidentally) a great point.

People are happy to pay for media when it's easy to do so. Mobile apps are pirated only rarely because it's so easy to buy them. That's why they're growing like crazy.

Hollywood's mistake has been to make it so difficult to buy media. So few movies and shows are available for streaming, for example.

There's a great opportunity in helping shape the future of entertainment.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gruesomely-hard-platformer/id...

I can give out a few promo codes if people email me curi@curi.us

It's made with MacRuby.