skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How long did it take you to go from Zero to Hero in Objective-C?
I'm a web developer who has always worked with PHP, MySQL, CSS, JS (and libraries) and HTML. My employer wants to develop capabilities to put out some iOS apps, and I'm interested, too. I just started tearing through Apple's dev center, reading How-To's and whatnot. I have VERY limited experience with Java and C++.

How long did it take you? How motivated were you?
I didn't actually see any way for me as a developer to use your service. Signing up for the beta looked like a way for an employer to sign up.
The real lesson from the last article was "test everything." Likewise, the real lesson from this article is "iterate and improve."

I'm totally banking on MS Paint being the most significant variable. The professional-looking ads have a bunch of tiny text in a font/style with poor readability. MS Paint "text" is legible from orbit.
Sorry but I think you misunderstood me.

I am fully aware that your average GPU isn't optimal for this task, however I was imagining that there would still be value in shifting the world load off the primary CPUs.

My line of thinking is around being able to use a single GPU stream processor to emulate this CPU in the required performance (ie 10mhz). If you could essentially do that you could have hundreds of these processors emulated for the cost of managing the IO to them.

I am not expecting it to be "Magic Speed Juice", I am actually expecting to be getting 1-5% performance from what the GPU are capable of. However I would see this as a nett advantage if it took the workload off the CPU. Something like Knights Corner could easily do this (its basically a pentium 1 core).

The point I am making is that Notch's CPU is basically a home computer CPU from the 80s. They don't require that much functionality to emulate (as if a dozen emulators in a few hours wasn't a good enough indication) and since OpenCL is turing complete you can emulate anything (see running arm linux on an 8 bit processor), the question is if its efficient enough to be viable?

Can a 1ghz stream processor emulate a 10mhz single issue simple risc core? I have no idea, but I suspect its not the part we have seen so far that will be the determining factor, I believe it will instead be the IO devices that determine the requirements.
Real answer: work less.
No semicolons in javascript! This is subversive and should be suppressed.
I think the OP is dead on. The goal here is to encrypt your connection, not to bypass industry-standard security measures.

Once you install the cert (client-side) you are protected just as you would be with a publicly signed cert. If you are ever subjected to a Man-In-The-Middle attack or a spoofing attempt, the exact same flags would occur.

This is not a solution for eCommerce, or for your web-app's user sign-in page. This is for your admin panel and backend which only you (or your staff if you have one) will be using.

If you actually install the cert to your local certificate store (as opposed to just cancelling out of the alert) you should be solid.

Great post Josh.
I appreciate the gesture of expediting the appeal process from one of our members. The fact remains that I cannot participate in the AdSense conversion in May. When it comes to Google and money, I might as well be a pirate trespassing in royal seas, unless it is Wallet!

It motivates me to push my custom app that avoids some permissions breaking on Galaxy Notes and S2s, Thanks!
Mostly you're adding candidates who like programming.
Be Wary Of Geeks Bearing Gifts
I'm in the same position of antonse - can you spell it out a bit more? Suppose I'm a student studying course X at institution Y with course textbook Z - I sign up to Boundless, and what do I actually get? A summary of Z? Or something else?
About three days of watching the WWDC videos and Stanford Class videos.
I love that you are working on this. It's one problem that I really want fixed.

But, your description doesn't impress and convince me. I'd drop at least more than half of the document. I'd drop most of the description about the problems with current textbooks and all the vague sales pitches. I'd focus on why your solution is better.

As I am reading this, I got the impression that you don't have much except being free and online.

Where does the content come from? Are the authors a good reference? How do you plan on making money? With annoying ads?

And the lawsuit seems like a different document. Used for publicity?
...So, Chinese Pinterest?

As best I can tell
Had the same first impression, but compared to rolling your own solution it's still a very good ROI. And now I'm getting more and more servers and projects on it, because it's just so handy.

(Btw not connected in any way, jsut a very happy user that convinced enough companies to try them, that I think you would be a good match, too)
I haven't really resolved whether it's justifiable to discriminate in order to mitigate the effects of discrimination. But I don't understand why it's preferable to have the same motivation and the same end achieved by a different method. If discrimination is wrong, it seems equally bad to me to filter out "people with dreadlocks" with the goal of filtering out black people, rather than just "black people."

Unless you're suggesting they 'hide' the discrimination. In which case, I don't support that position at all. Not only does that prevent discussions like the one we're having right now, it also just seems pathetic to not stand for what you believe in.
From the article: "Your outstanding balance and Google’s share of the revenue will both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers.”

Unless Google never refunds to "the affected advertisers," there is no motive other than preferring algorithms to humans.
Feeds directly to your inbox, open source and free. (Alpha)
Reading the FBI CIO's resume (on LinkedIn) is like reading a list of old boy's club touchstones: IBM, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase. His degree? B.A. in Economics. His experience in software? He's an IT manager.

And they contracted the project to Lockheed Martin?

One thing I wonder more than anything else when I see projects like this is, in 25 years, when those in my generation are finding themselves in positions in government, what sorts of approaches are they going to take?

It seems like the greatest hurdle to cutting back on wasteful spending in government is to change the entire cultural approach of contracting jobs like this.
Yammer's $25K Yahoo bounty finds first takers
I dislike the story form too, and I can explain why. The style gives the impression that Reginald is claiming "this really happened, and those people used this technique, and they lived happily ever after – so if it worked for them, it will work for you; give this technique a try". But this tale never happened, so that implied argument is a lie. This story forces me to put on my "disbelieve, disbelieve, disbelieve" mental filters as I read, so I can remind myself that the story does not have the grounds in reality it claims, lest I believe it wrongly. This extra effort would not be necessary if Reginald just claimed what he claims straight out, and then perhaps described his grounds for belief in those claims. The unnecessary extra effort of skepticality is why I don't like the story form in this case.
Congratulations. Really impressive how solid you handled the Android onslaught.
my typical response to ads for rockstars is pointing out that rockstars tend to earn 10 to 100 times more than a great studio musician and generally have to be the prima donna all the time. Then I ask if forcing myself to be the center of attention is part of the job description, and just how much better the position pays compared to the typical valley salary.
It seems very common among books targeted at CEO-types ("Be The Hero" being the one I read lately). I don't know what it is about managers that means they like stories more than explication, but it seems to be common perception.
Consider the possibility that one of the things that encourages women to enter the field is the lack of women in the field.
About.me Releases Mobile Application
How did your wife find this out?
Right, and I said that's wrong. Or it's only speciously right: content providers are smaller and have less buffering capacity, so in the event that the cash flow to them is interrupted they will drop faster than the broker or advertiser. But all three parties have to be making money for the consumer to derive benefit from the system.
New book shows you how to make Lego guns
The article is almost completely useless.

It claims you shouldn't throw out resumes based on simple heuristics and stuff that only correlates with programming ability because there are so few people applying who are any good, but has exactly one sentence to say about how to then actually find those few people: "I grill them, hard, on actual programming and actual software development."

Right. Sure. Every single one of the 500 applicants. Good luck with that. Get back to me in 6 months.

It's nice in theory to be super-inclusive about everything except "actual programming", but almost completely divorced from reality.

It sounds like someone who, hearing about heuristic solutions to the traveling salesman problem responds that "I cannot possibly accept a solution that may not be 100% correct! It's the computer's job to give me a correct answer, and I'm damn well going to wait for it, no matter how long it takes! Exponential, schmexponential!"

Heuristics have their place. Something that strongly correlates with what you're looking for but is much easier to test for can be very, very useful.
rent with someone else?
That's not counting. That's estimating. I based my guess from the title of the post.
They actually have a page to report click fraud on your own account:

https://support.google.com/adsense/bin/request.py?&conta...
> Everyone has a favorite teacher, but no one has a favorite textbook

I disagree. I bet if you went over to Reddit and asked on /r/math or /r/physics, you'd find plenty of people who have a favorite textbook. For example, I'd say Apostol's "Calculus", volume 1, is a favorite textbook of mine. I've read it 3 or 4 times over the last 30 years. The Feynman Lectures on Physics are another favorite of mine.

> 4x more expensive/less accessible/same form factor

(that's from their infographic, comparing textbooks in the '60s to now. It was on three lines there, which I've marked with slashes to fit the quote on one line)

Based on inflation, they should be about 6x more expensive, so if that 4x figure is right textbook prices have improved since the '60s. However, I suspect that they are a little low in their estimate here. I think prices have gone up faster than inflation.

I don't see how text books have become less accessible since the '60s.

> There’s one other major concern: textbooks are just flat-out terrible products. They’re ineffective pedagogical tools: dense collections of long-form text that fail to engage students’ wide range of learning styles

This may be true for the less technical fields, but I have yet to see anything better for, say, a rigorous upper level math course.
tl;dr: My recent observation is that for US universities it is better to be jack of all trades but master of nothing than having some degree of (relative) expertise.

You do not declare it officially and yes you have the flexibility to change it but every application asks you what major you want to study.

Besides by nature if you are already decided and experienced on the subject it is ridiculous to me to consider another applicant. Let's consider two candidates:

1) Super social kid with strong grades in all subjects and a good debater and organized few charity projects (at least on the paper) but no real programming or above average math experience.

2) Kid with good social skills with top grades in mathematics, physics, chemistry, cs etc. but slightly lower secondary language or history grades. This kid also has a Github account with quite a few commits and is hacking for few years now.

Now my recent observation is that (and not only for CS but for all other subjects too) if these two candidates declare that they want to study CS, then the first one is preferred in US and definitely the second one in Britain.

Now I understand not declaring your major at the beginning and being undecided but how can one eliminates the ones who already demonstrate work and passion on their subject but accepts the ones who are undecided and have not done on any specific subject.

As a result, American universities basically depend on "luck". They think the kid might be good based on generic projects, charity work and conferences.

By the way this is not a personal issue. I am accepted to the school I wanted to be in at the beginning but this is an observation through my high school years for over 200-300 well suited candidates for top ranking universities.
That's correct. We're a tool for employers.

We're thinking about allowing some form of "self indexing" but we aren't there yet.
HN often has job postings for full time positions and internships. You can also visit startuply and startupers - good resources.
Incidentally, MoviePass is looking for interns in NYC to start in Customer Support.
Out walking today I saw a car with the bumper sticker UNIONS = JOBS. That view is, to put it gently, a little naïve—and it's a huge part of the problem.
Names aren't exactly unique.
There is pretty much no way 4 to 5 guys could rewrite "www" in another language in parallel to continuing development from a hundred developers, no matter how long they had. However, 4 to 5 guys could write HipHop.

What real-world problems do you see staring Facebook in the face in its continued usage of PHP? I'm no PHP fan, but many of the common PHP problems are avoided or mitigated in the code base.
Two years ago my AdWords account was permanently suspended.

I sell a fairly complicated (120k+ lines of code) .NET application (http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper) that manages the creation and hosting of websites by using the popular Apache, PHP, MySQL stack, and other apps. And I also provide support for it and the mentioned tech, the cost of which is included in the price of my software. And I've been doing this is some way or fashion since 2003.

For that, I was told, my site "had been flagged for unacceptable business practices", that is, as far as I could de-crypt the support conversation... Selling free items. A big WTF moment for me.

It's unlikely you can help me, but you can help others by white-listing the adwords/adsense customer service representatives’ email domains or IP blocks in Gmail... As both emails I received from them I found in my Gmail’s spam folder (pure luck on my part)!

I can’t think of how many people must get the silent treatment from Google due to this blunder.
I understand deadlines, and yes you may not be able to do more than explain to the user that there is a problem out of your control. But don't diss Airbrake because you don't have time to investigate and/or fix. They're not sayin' you have to fix it, they're just sayin'.
It’s not that Rails isn’t for beginners – it’s just that it’s not for the lazy.
Feel your pain. I had a nicely successful social media property built around Twitter. It had a very large semantic system as part of how it worked, but I had to write an extraordinarily elaborate language filter to span every common language in order to keep Google from slapping me for the smallest of inappropriate language violations. In the end, the site got blocked over the word "vagina" in dutch appearing one time on one page (out of millions of pages).

Google simply doesn't give a shit. When the government eventually busts their chops, there isn't going to be much sympathy to be found. Their attitude makes them seem like raging jerks.
That's a fair point for Amazon (see sellers complaing in this thread).

Then again, have you had more success interacting with Google when running ad campaigns?
When you have a surplus of people who can do the job, then you can afford to filter based on luck. In this case, limiting interviews to people like you who you will end up being social with, instead of people who can just do the work.

The problem, of course, is that the odds are good he's hiring people who are less skilled than some people he's filtered out. In a perfect market his product would get beaten by whoever hired those better candidates he ignored, but we live in an incredibly imperfect market and it probably won't make a difference.
do you need a special visa to attend if you are non-US resident?
Of course he says this, he's trying to peacock some power. I'm guessing the "negotiations" aren't going so well if he's broadcasting this, but one of the side-benefits to him and his talking like this would be to discourage activism. Once again, the AAs act undemocratically.

Update: original: http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/220181-d...
Yes, there is some selection bias both ways ;-)

To be fair, the reason you haven't seen anything better is because very few people are able to get traction in the face of deep, deep entrenchment. Have you watched Bret Victor's "Kill Math" video? Imagine if most technical courses had that kind of interactive material. But right now, they won't, because the barriers to entry are artificially high and incumbents aren't innovating.
In my early 20s I was somewhat like the OP - I would eat out for pretty much every meal. The trick to it was only eating twice a day, or once if you could manage it. The end result was actually fairly inexpensive depending upon where you were eating.

Of course, that was back when my body could handle this kind of abuse.
Men already get a disproportionate amount of support to help them get into Hacker School. We know this because the previous batch was predominantly men.

That should be self evident.

The only other possible explanation is that men are somehow inherently better suited for Hacker School, and I think we can all agree that that's sexist, and incorrect.

You might want to differentiate here on timescale: "Well, those men were systematically given their advantages a long time ago based on their gender, there are no time-proximal gender advantages." But it doesn't matter. There is no statute of limitations on sexism.

Plus, some of the gender-based advantages are proximal... like whether their marketing is written in a way that makes men want to apply, but women not want to... which was almost certainly the case, and I think still is.

So, given that there's already overwhelming, gender-based support for men, offering gender-based support for women seems like it's only leveling the playing field.
I know that you are asking why Python might be better for some uses, so pardon a little tangent:

About 7 years ago I tried really hard to get into Python because someone I know at Google really liked the language, and I needed to pick up a better scripting language (I dislike Perl). I used Python a lot for about a year, reading a few books, using it for a lot of small projects. Python was nice!

Then I started looking at Ruby, and for me it was programming language love at first sight. I can not justify my strong preference for Ruby on technical grounds, rather I simply prefer it. Ruby is no longer just a scripting language for me (although I write a lot of 20 line Ruby programs just to get stuff done).

So, I would argue that you should choose either Python or Ruby based on your personal gut feel, after spending time with both languages. The only exception to this advice is if you want to work for a company that prefers one over the other.
I just want to jump in here and say that we (Hatchlings) are also not asking for more leniency on fraud. We've been on the opposite side of the advertiser/publisher fence too and fraud on the campaigns we run is not acceptable.

It's not even necessarily false-positives that we're against either. Mistakes happen.

The real issue is that we've been doing everything possible for the last year to get this issue resolved and have been willfully ignored. We, a small 5 person startup, take care to provide personal support for our 3.5 million users (yes, even to the non-paying ones) and we don't think it's too much to ask for Google to do the same especially with an issue as big as this.

PS - the "spammy Facebook games companies" is a whole different issue. We try not to be spammy either and the FB platform is a similar situation where there are bad actors who tend to ruin it for everyone else.
CISPA is the merger of "too big too fail" tech companies and NSA
You should be fine assuming you can legally be in New York for the entirety of the batch (12 weeks). We've had several non-US citizens. We're not an official school, so we can't sponsor student visas.
Just to clarify... I love Airbrake. Apologies if it didn't come across as that way. I use it on every site and app we create.
I'd say it's what happens when business models are threatened. In terms of 'obvious' we & our team of lawyers strongly disagree.
An entrepreneur's letter from his future self
A basic Backbone.js & Node.js Todo app w/ BrowserID
That seems to be less a narrowing and more adding information to candidates about what the job actually will be. You've just added candidates who want to work for gaming and are able to do live video to the pool of people who can do live video and don't really care what kind of video it is.

Providing accurate information about the company allows job seekers to self-select, increasing the signal, and offering an interesting application is far more likely to attract top talent than advertising for code monkeys.
To me, writing a document without running it through a spell checker feels like checking in code without compiling it. I think I agree that it shouldn't automatically disqualify someone from a job, but it also feels like something you have to go out of your way not to do.
Unfortunately, the "comparative advantage" in this case results mostly of self-inflicted woulds on the part of USG. For a company with highly productive employees such as Google, the large fixed cost associated with labor-law compliance isn't that big a deal, but for low-wage jobs it can be comparable to the cash compensation. There's no shortage of low-cost laborers in the US; it's just that onerous regulations price them out of the market.
National Month of Pushing Spacebar
Is there some way of reporting the spammer to get his website de-indexed from Google?
From the mentions of EBS snapshots in the article, I'm going to guess they're all on Amazon EC2.
No excuse, simple theft. Google steals millions of dollars every year from AdSense 'partners' who have done absolutely nothing wrong. Google's AdSense forums are overflowing with stories where they've stolen from publishers over the slightest of infraction (and many cases in which absolutely nothing occurred).

Their method of AdSense theft is one of the greatest rackets in the history of the Internet.
> My project (http://www.thetaboard.com)

> Luckily my product is something HN readers might actually buy

You're right, the only problem is we have project management web app fatigue.

AKA, PMWAF. I am a dire sufferer of pimmwaff.

Help me by making certain that on the landing page, I see what's good or different about your product. Explain to me what makes it special.

At least make the demo do this, if not the frontpage copy.
From Zero to Machine Learning in Less than Seven Minutes
Ah interesting point. I came into my CS program the first year after most people considered the bubble burst in 2001, (also obviously when 9/11 happened). Only a few companies were "left alive" so to speak so maybe my year was the last year that they did this.
I'd love to get into it, and I can say we aren't rewriting their content.
I Drink for a Reason (conference booze issue)
are you guys sharding redis? or does it all fit in a single machine?