skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
they are different - both perspectives are important to understand HN community. At what age or when did you start coding vs how long have you been coding ?
I understand the theory and I certainly agree resaving jpegs will reduce the error level. If you have an undoctored image to compare it to, you could probably use that to determine which parts have been changed. But given only an image that may or may not have been doctored the error level will vary so much with the image content that it won't be meaningful.
Sorry it's a very bad translation from French, it's Monday morning ...

I think something like "non-power-users", or "random/average user" would be a better term ?
I'm really interested to know what age that PG started programming. Some of the best known hackers started late. I know Julian Assange didn't have a computer before he was 14 but when you have a Commodore 64 you have to program.
There's an amazing talk given by Robert Sapolsky (Stanford Neurologist), discussing similar concepts. The talk has more to do with different behaviors that emerge between species and how the brain plays a role in that; rather than simply physical characteristics such as bleeding or movement.

I'd highly reccomend watching it if at all interested

http://youtu.be/YWZAL64E0DI
It's interesting that the article never mentions that to use that he had to find a power plug with a free ethernet plug next to it. That might not be trivial in all environments. It gets a lot more suspicious if he has to search for that for a long time in the bank. Also someone might question the why the ethernet cable is there at some point. Just saying the article makes it sound easier it actually is for a non technical person.
Well this makes me feel old. 30 years since I learned Basic and 6809 Assembler.
This is the code one never forgets. On which computer did you write this in? I remember to have started coding on a Tandy TR-80... how time flies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
Generally the bosses of the design firm are fine with responsive design. Good responsive designs take more effort. More effort == more billable hours. You also have the chance to up-sell existing clients. It's a win-win all round if you have the skills to do it.

The current problem is persuading the client that a responsive design is worthwhile. I still regularly encounter folk who don't understand the number of folk looking at the web using mobiles - let alone the necessity to design something to work on a variety of displays and contexts.

This is getting easier as more people interact with the web with more devices. Once folk actually use two different kinds of device to look at stuff online selling responsive solutions becomes much simpler. When it gets to three or four it sells itself.
Which Linux distro are you using?

And: Is it a real alternative to a Mac for a developer?
Wait, 'we bleed when we menstruate'. Other animals don't?
I was a MacOS user from 1992 (version 6.8!), and started using Windows along with it in 1995. In 2001 I have switched to Windows completely, and in 2009 I have started using desktop Linux (Ubuntu) in parallel with it, switching completely to it as my only desktop OS in December 2011. Wandering what will be next... :)
I too am 26 and I ticked 10+. I wrote what I consider to be my first real program -- a program with users -- in 2001.
I've always thought of Steve Jobs as the Batman of Apple. Intelligent, driven and abrasive.

All conjecture because I've never met the man :(
Cool. I wish I'd kept some of the ZX Spectrum programs I wrote. I tried a few times by using my hi-fi as the tape out. But then my mom would clean my room and reset it by accidentally knocking it over.

Almost as traumatic as when she dismantled my Lego Technic car with working gearbox to dust it.
mIRC scripting at the age of 12 in 1995.
6, 8, and 9-year programmers need not apply.
As someone who is currently trying to run all 450 miles of the London Underground for charity I think that the greatest challenge of running is mental and not physical. Whilst I take his point we are built better to run long distances - I would love for there to be some analysis on the mental side of running. An animal may not be able to run 26 miles for physical reasons but I firmly believe humans can only run 26 miles if they have cause. If they are inspired. If they are so inspired that giving up is not an option. There is not a hope in hell I could run the distances I am running without being massively inspired by the cause I am running for - that for me is what sets us apart.
Started when I was 11. C64 basic :)

Now I'm 31. So yeah, I've been doing this for 20 years.
In my experience I've found OSX somewhat better suited for development and Windows somewhat better suited for gaming but otherwise the main differentiator is hardware polish. The unibody Macbook Pros/Airs is just levels above anything I've experienced in the Windows world.
I Run all those on Windows without any problems.
Truthfully, I never had the interest to learn programming as a kid despite being offered lessons by family and friends. My first year of college I took a ton of random classes, but Intro to Programming was the only class that captured my attention. Thanks to the professor and really interesting assignments I gained an appreciation for programming, and I've been working towards a CS degree from then on. I started when I was 19.
Our experience must have been quite different, since I have finally ran away from Windows after four years of using Ubuntu in parallel. Windows 7 is nice, but I still find Ubuntu easier to use and much less resource intensive. True, I was also at first thrown away by Unity, but have adopted Gnome Shell and had no need to look back since. Each time I reboot in Windows I feel like in one of those nightmares when you're running the best you can, but are barely moving.
Can you elaborate on that? I have never ever noticed a difference between putty and iTerm.
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8 years... and it already feels like forever..
IMac Touch
I'm not sure that's actually the case, but if it were then deliberately using one that was locked down / charged for / oligopolistic would be a bad choice, not a neutral one.
How do you run Bash scripts on Windows?
Huh? Maybe you're thinking of PS2 days or earlier. I'm a PS3 developer and Sony's tools and developer support is better than Microsoft's or Nintendo's. Enough so that we have asked Microsoft if they could replicate some aspects of what Sony does for the next generation.
Almost the first sentence in the article set a bad tone:

Even nature’s best animal distance runners — such as horses and dogs — will run similar distances only if forced to do so

This sentence is meaningless. When does a dog do anything uncomfortable without coercion? It's not like a dog will voluntarily, say, go without food because it needs to lose weight. Similarly, humans don't spontaneously run marathons. There is a huge psychological build-up required, of which this article is a part. It's notable that most Kenyan marathon champions don't continue running once they retire. They get plenty of physical activity on the farm and don't have the Western obsession with endurance sports.

----

This article does not exist in a vacuum. There is a whole barefoot running / endurance running movement that is taking over conventional sports shoes at the moment. The general premise is:

- humans evolved to run without shoes, so you should (or better, with expensive shoes with minimal heals)

- humans evolved to run long distances, so you should

I don't disagree with the statements, but I think it's oversimplified. I say this as someone who wears Vivo Barefoot shoes. In particular, persistence hunting (the form of hunting that relied on long distance running) was not widely used outside of some specific niches (really hot places, for instance) and a lot of humans have adapted away from endurance activities (which is obvious is look at a Kenyan marathon runner next to a Scandinavian strong-man competitor).
Disappointed to see no clang results, especially as he discusses compilation speed.
The article fails to mention that the graphics quality of the games made for these consoles could be a lot more advanced than what's available for the PC then, because developers get to write games directly for that specific hardware. John Carmack has said that the DirectX/OpenGL layers can slow down performance by 4x-10x, for example.
I started programming on the BBC model B. You had to number each line by hand. The convention was to write the line numbers in steps of 10. Then as you went back and added lines, you'd run out of gaps to fit your lines in. Then you had to use the RENUMBER command and all the lines would be renumbered in steps of 10 again.

It was a great breakthrough to me when it was realized that line numbers could be derived from the text rather than assigned to the text. I suppose that was only possible when things like the GOTO statement didn't accept a line number.

I must have been about 11 when I started. Happy days!
This was exactly the example I was going to post. If Jim Carrey can pull an amazing dramatic performance out of nowhere, I don't see why Ashton can't.
Ah, 1969, FORTRAN II on an IBM 1620A. Then BASIC and FORTRAN on a PDP-10 in 1971. Happy times.

And get of my lawn!
I rather like Solaris. Use Linux at work, would love to have DTrace, ZFS, Zones.
Yes.

I use OS X for browsing the web, web-development, graphic design, video editing, and writing.

I use Windows 7 for music production and playing video games. At some point I want to start dabbling in game development, in which case I'll probably go with Windows for that, too.

I ssh into various Linux servers privately and at work. In my spare I sometimes play around with Linux distros on my desktop just to learn about the current state of affairs. I usually can't see any advantages in it over OS X other than the fact that's it's free software and that it runs on cheap hardware. I keep being curious though.

I don't use any virtual machines because I dislike the sluggishness and I don't really need them.

Sometimes I wish I could get by with only one OS without feeling crippled in some respect. My dream setup would probably be an OSS system that's great with multimedia stuff and has about a 99% adoption so hardware would be supported really well.

But that thought depresses me because it reminds me of the state reality is in, so I try not to have it.
33 years, first program I wrote was for a TI-57 programmable calculator.
Unfortunately, at least in my experience, most textbooks are rather unfriendly for self-teaching (including the ones very frequently recommended), especially in the more theoretical fields like algorithms, theory of computation etc. (no solutions to exercises, not enough worked out examples, general strong reliance on classroom usage), it takes a long time to find good ones and even then a very long time to get to a decent speed in a new field, surely much longer then when taking a course. Thus I would recommend relying more on some online courses at least initially:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... - Very good course covering the most crucial theoretical things every programmer should now

http://aduni.org/courses/ - Good discrete mathematics, algorithms, theory of computation courses (I recommend "taking" them in this order) without assuming any prerequisites

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... - More sophisticated "CS 101" kind of course

I think almost everyone with some programming experience should be able to work through them in the sequence listed in one year perhaps, at a satisfying level of detail. At the same time, many people programming professionally lack mastery of this basic material.
"we bleed when we menstruate" sounded way too weird. Maybe it still is valid if you set the emphasis on 'set apart from _most_' but it's nothing humans are unique in - according to a couple simple search terms.

(See 1 - if Wikipedia is to believe what we consider normal menstruation _is_ common mostly for humans and our close relatives in the animal kingdom, but also happens in simians and .. erm.. bats?)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstruation_%28mammal%29

2: https://myperiodblog.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/do-other-anima...
I used Linux for 6 years, but switched to OS X 2 years ago. It's much more comfortable, I have access to the command line tools and the UX is much better. I just get things done now and haven't to care why pulseaudio doesn't work anymore after an update etc.. I'm really satisfied with my MacBook and OS X Lion :)
Also, my grandmother has Lick as one of her two surnames, and I've met a family called Suck (although not pronounced as in English, but with a Swedish u-sound, similar to oo in book).
I don't feel like these are a major issues today, or that they have been for some time, but back in the day I know a lot of hatred toward Windows/Microsoft stemmed from Linux users feeling slighted by the lack of support from ISVs and hardware manufacturers, the relatively immature state of Wine, and above all Microsoft's constant FUD / aggressive (and often illegal[1]) politics / lawsuit threats / etc.

Throw debacles like Silverlight, OOXML, IE, and Vista into the mix, and it's not hard to justify a lot of the resentment toward the "Evil Empire" from back then.

Today (though Microsoft had to be dragged here kicking and screaming), Microsoft actively supports open source (CodePlex), open standards (ODF is officially supported by Office), and the open Web (they're clearly genuinely trying with IE9+); on top of that, they're rolling out some pretty solid products (Kinect, Win8, MSE, WP7, Azure/AppFabric, all the random stuff MS Research does, etc.). Mind you, I still wouldn't be caught dead using Windows or any other Microsoft product, but it's nice to such an influential tech company changing for the better.

[1] http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2007/08/ooxml_vo...
This is a strange question to ask. I have known _how to program_ since I was in the 7th grade when we were taught ahem gbasic back in 1996. I have learn't C in my undergrad, taught myself a bit of python during the same period. Upto this point programming was recreational trying to solve trivial problems (I learnt python primarily to solve project euler problems).

It wasn't until I started my masters, 5 years ago, that I did any serious projects and 2 years ago that I did professional work.

So when people ask how long have you been programming for, what is it they are looking for ?
After graduating from electrical engineering, I figured out that if I wanted to go into electronics, I would need to spend a lot of money on equipment just so I could practice at home, but I was broke. However, my computer at the time was pretty top notch (486DX 50MHz, 16 MB RAM). I felt that my computer was probably the same caliber as the ones that real programmers were using, so it made more sense to learn how to program.

I basically had no real experience programming until I graduated. I took 2 programming courses in undergrad, one being an assembly language course, and I did a summer internship where I did some Matlab scripting to print out graphs. My 4th year project was using a DSP chip to write an FFT in assembly. So while unemployed I taught myself C++ programming, as well as IT administration and networking. My first job was as an IT guy, but I spent every night after work programming, writing utilities and digital audio filtering utilities using FFTs. Within 2 years, I got a job programming after lying on my interview about my previous job experience and I've been programming ever since.
Started at age 7 on a C64. I learned binary before I could multiply because you needed to understand binary to create multi-colored sprites on the C64. I made a game where you drove a car and avoided things, then another where you drove a spaceship and avoided things, then another where you shot arrows at moving targets. That last game was the first one I wrote where the goal was to hit things, a major departure for me. Those were the days.

Despite the advances in tech, kids today who want to learn to program have it much harder.
VIC-20, MicroBee, ZX-81, C64, Amiga
Judge rejects copyright trolls' BitTorrent conspiracy theory
If the author is reading this, x264 now officially supports the Intel compiler, which should make it much easier to benchmark.

Additionally, x264 should probably categorized under "no significant floating point calculations".
Not sure why the downvotes.

I looked around a bit further and it's even clearer that sugar, sucrose, fructose, etc, by themselves are not poisons.
I remember the "Wow!", when I discovered the AUTO command!
Is it really that much? I guess abstraction comes at a big performance cost.
Agreed. That's why I use the cURL bindings combined with human_curl.
Say whaaat? OSX leading? (I too clicked it.) And more Linux than Windows? PG should show the traffic statistics to contrast that.
I still remember the first "programs" I wrote in qbasic. I spend days writing a simple tic-tac-toe game using if-statments only. Or computer art by drawing shapes, lines, dots and what not on the screen using different loops. Then I discovered I could make it bleep funny also, ending in whole light shows with simulated lazer beams under a nice beat of beeping.

Later I got more serious and wrote programs to do my math homework for me. I found that I learned more about the math I was learning by writing these programs than by actually doing the homework myself. That's been one of the reasons to get into education to pursue the idea of using programming as a learning tool (as pioneered by, among others, Seymour Papert [logo] and later Andrea diSessa [boxer]).

When I started studying computer science my programming "career" started in earnest. From doing some shady braininess when the internet was young to writing scientific prototypes.

Ever since I started programming it has been part of my daily life. I often find myself automatic tasks in my personal and professional life and I would like everyone to be able to do the same. Time and time again I have been confronted with people that do not (want to) understand computers or their place in our (future) society and keep on serving the machine instead of having their machine serve them.

All and all, I've been programming machines for over 20 years, ever since my early teens.
MinGW is awesome:

http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS

It's not Cygwin "MinGW, being Minimalist, does not, and never will, attempt to provide a POSIX runtime environment for POSIX application deployment on MS-Windows. If you want POSIX application deployment on this platform, please consider Cygwin instead."; there's no emulation layer at all.
I've seen this doc and this doesn't seem to include data such as user reviews of apps. Is there something that does?
I've just switched back to Windows and its the hardware I miss more than the software. I bought a fairly expensive Dell but it isn't a patch on the old Macbook Pro.
Go to any pro audio / music store. They should have a good range of Sennheisers, AKGs, Audio Technicas, etc. and shouldn't have a problem with letting you try them.
Yeah, I'd say the tortoises are the tortoises of the animal kingdom.
Writing a Node Module
An introduction to writing Node modules, using Github and Travis-Ci.
I did some BASIC when I was quite small, so around 30 years. Professionally, about 15 years.
"Persistence hunting" is a fantastic sales approach for startups (once of course you are good at qualifying and aiming the right prey for you). Because in startups: we have no big weapons (exotic seminar to invite prospects, big cars or offices to impress...), we are naked!

But if you are determined enough and get you and your team ready for a tough decisive journey, I guarantee, somebody, something, will get tired before you do, and you will win. Think if you are in a competitive sale. Your "incumbent" competitor thinks they closed it, they "arrived", because they nuked your pricing, your reputation, or they sent their big gun CEO in, and they are already celebrating the end of negotiations, but you keep on making the extra-mile (it really hurts (I do know that) to bite the bullet but keep at it). I have many instances to prove it worked for me (my 1st jobs) or the cos I worked for (Edit with specifics: Vivisimo US based startup, 3 Employees at that time in Europe won Enterprise deals against Autonomy (based in the UK) for Airbus, Organon (now Merck), against the French based Exalead for Danone; we did it again for WorldWide famous consultancy firm).

For our current startup (rejected by YC this nov11, huge blow, but we kept at it) we only got our 1st paying client last week. While we started running over 1.5 years ago... But hopefully will be profitable ramen before end of August... if I just apply what I have just been telling you of course... AirBnB story is huge inspiration for us - AutoMotivational post for the new starting week
In the UK, ESCOM, a major high street electronics retailer and wholesaler Makro both decided to default to OS/2 Warp. So my friends and I were all exposed to it.

But of course the technical superiority meant nothing when we had to wait 5 minutes for a boot, then use Windows 3.11 from within the OS. So needless to say we all turned our systems into dual-boot or wiped OS/2 altogether.
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I started with LOGO in 1989 and BASIC in 1992. So, 20-odd years or so. And still at it!

Though, I've got a lot less time to focus on it now, with all sorts of other worldly responsibilities.
I think I tried programming initially when I went with my father to a course in BASIC at his workplace. After that we hauled a 300 baud matrix printer-like terminal home, equipped with a couple of sucktion cups for attaching the phone's handset, and a roll of paper.

I distinctly remember that putting the handset in the sucktion cups quickly enough after dialing the number on the rotary phone was hard.

The first real programs was probably later when I bought my Commodore 64 - in 1984. Later I even got a Comal-80 cartridge. Much nicer than the builtin BASIC!

Here is a bar chart of the poll:

· http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/programming/data.png

(Updated hourly currently.)
I have suffered from bipolar disorder for more than 10 years. I have been hospitalized once for 2 weeks. I felt like a complete failure. But as time went on things got better. Here is some advice. Don't make any big decisions while you are are feeling like shit. Be patient, it will get better. As time goes on the guilt will disappear. Last but certainly not least, never ever go off your medication no matter how good you feel. Hang in there, you will be fine. :-)
10 y'old, with a C64 and using basic programming language
SYS 64738
TRS-80 Color Computer? That's what I learned 6809 assembly on around 1981, only to be startled how many little things were harder on the Commodore 64's 6502. The extra memory (64k after bank switching!) made up for it though.

I didn't have a multiprocessing platform until 1988 (4.3BSD at college). I wonder how much better I'd be now if I could have gotten my hands on OS-9 earlier.
I recently switch from Java to PHP development. And I totally agree with you about setting up tools right can save tons of time. But the reality is it is still painful.

My point here is not whether we need more tools for the hot swapping, but just have an interpretor for development processes. It will just make the development much easier.
> While some argue that this is the current situation, I want to point out that's a false dichotomy. Freedom and usability aren't orthogonal concepts like some make them out to be. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that we need to lock everything down to make it "usable".

Nobody is making this claim, so why are you trying to refute it?