skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An initial reaction, just to the posted title:

I think the important part is to instill the value of integrity in your life. It may not always, initially seem the easy choice -- or the popular choice (another form of "easy").

But when you make the right choice, and it eventually pays off. When you see your parents and good friends do this. A lightbulb moment.

Those are the people who will drop their own affairs and swamp out your flooded basement. Drive your mother to the hospital and wait overnight, when you're out of town on business. Pay you because they said they would.

That sinks in deep.

So, don't start by thinking you are an island of virtue, seeking to influence others. Buy into the undercurrent, all around you. Learn to distinguish it, ride it, and reinforce it.

That's the power -- albeit at times a demanding one -- of integrity.

P.S. I'll add that that does not mean to not question "the rules" of society. Critical thinking and judgment are essential.
Going on a little (actually really long) tangent here about Apple and the general inscrutableness of their bug fixing ...

I have a late 2008 MBP from the first batch of unibodies and after having it for a few months I started getting this thing where the screen would blink. A lot other people did as well because by mid-2009 the relevant thread on their forum ran to over 75 pages so they had to be completely aware of it. People even put up youtube videos of it in action, which must have been a little tricky to catch because it was completely random.

In that thread on the forum some people told how they had managed to get their machines replaced. Sometimes the replaced machines had the defect as well. I never had any luck with my local support as they basically said they couldn't reproduce it so they couldn't replace it.

However, at one point a rookie tech left a support manual in pdf form on my machine after I had taken it in for servicing. There was a table in it which listed about a dozen different types of problems and the recommended approach for each. Which type of problem was the only one to have a blank cell where the solution should have been? Flickering or blinking displays.

So every time I had some other issue with my MBP, and I had several, I tried to get them to do something about the blinking problem. I finally got a second-tier support person (on the phone) to accept the issue. He said it had happened to his as well and replacing the Airport card (which happened to be the thing that had failed that particular time) had fixed it. This was about two months before the end of my three-year Apple Care period and he said that if that didn't fix it, he would try to get it replaced.

Well it didn't, to my utter lack of surprise, but I couldn't manage the hassle of giving up my machine yet again and, anyway, I was used to it so the warranty period expired.

About a month later Apple released a firmware update that fixed the blinking.

I know there are companies that might support their products after the warranty period and I know there are companies that stonewall but I thought this combination was pure Apple.

Completely ignore the problem for three years and then release an update after everyone is out of warranty anyway.
Google's Chrome Browser Is Coming For iOS, Says Macquarie - Business Insider
I think I just don't understand a growing population on HN. Since when is programming about building websites? Or desktop apps? Or making money? What happened to ars gratia artis?
Ask HN: Is there a community of Apps Beta Testers?
I'm a iOS/Android Apps Developer and I always have the problem of looking for Beta Testers for the App before it is release and/or before releasing an update. This presents the challenge of using TestFlight and explaining over and over how to register and register devices. Plus my friends/family are not always interested in the App that I'm developing or their feedback is kind of biased.

I'm wondering if there is an organized community of people willing to test new apps categorized by type of app, device (iOS, Android, Web, Facebook), interests (art, beer, travel, sports) or preferences (FB connect, twitter).

If there is not such, i'm thinking about building something.
>There is nothing wrong with Jeff's BASIC example, if that is where the mayor of NYC ends up.

Are you sure about it?

What if he suddenly starts thinking that he actually knows what goes into building software?

I have this horror scene in my mind where Bloombergs of this world are terrorizing their developers, with their "deep knowledge" of computers that they picked up by doing an online JavaScript course, I mean "code year".

Democratization of programming is a lofty ideal, but in the reality anybody who wants to learn to code will do so if he has a computer. This latest fad is nothing more than a trivialization of a complex skill and an attempt by some non-technical hipsters to be even more hip. If plumbing was cool we would see the same people vowing to learn how to plumb this year.
Study shows weak Google+ public activity, but what does it mean?
What's wrong with windows as of Windows 7?

If you are someone who invests in learning how to use your tools, nothing. Technically, I think they've done a great job in fixing the issues of Windows past.

It is still a system for experts though. Just the other day I used Windows (7) for the first time since Windows 2000 was all the rage and found it to be an incredibly confusing experience. I almost felt like I had never touched a computer before.

Since this article seems to be directed at consumers, most people there are not experts, and that is where Windows is failing.
> They will continue to have great profit margins as they bleed customers until they wind up with no business left.

That could be in the next 10 years or 100 years. Nobody knows and I don't think anybody can predict that will happen sooner than later.

Just like IBM: they're not visible to our generation of IT workers but they exist in other lucrative market, embedding themselves quietly and nicely.
As an alternative, see: Test-Driven JavaScript Development (the book) http://tddjs.com/
Why Android should switch to Go
Well, we do provide a level of free hosting - trying to keep it meaningful but it's certainly not unlimited. We will offer pricing plans for expansion and we also allow people to move off the platform (with their data) to another environment if they choose (see: rhc app snapshot).

We also wanted to make sure we open sourced the code itself. As you mentioned, that gives you some assurance outside of the service or any specific vendor.
When the headline is a question the answer is no. Works every time :)
Learn to code if you want to.
The 1962 Launch of the World's First Communications Satellite
I would venture to guess that there are at least a couple dozen skills which would do the average person more good than learning to code: playing a musical instrument, learning to do order-of-magnitude estimations, operate a few power tools, basic carpentry, basic calculus, et so many cetera.

Hell, just learning to spell better than the average HNer.
A simple way to make your user aware of incorrect input on Android
> People can visualize what nearly every other profession does day-to-day

No they don't. They know an architect draws pictures of buildings. An engineer draws pictures of a bridge and hammers away at a calculator (actually the first thing most people think of with engineer is probably either boats or trains or Star Trek). A banker sits and acts like a total dick. What architects, engineers and bankers really do is a complete mystery to people.

When someone asks what you do and they do not have any domain specific knowledge, you say you write applications, you're a programmer. That's all they want to know, they don't care what the details of what you write are. They don't want to know the differences between languages. They don't want to know what a structured grammar is and why you care about it. Those are details of your job, that's not what they were asking.

"I'm a system administrator. I keep computers working." That is the maximum extent people want to know about what I do. They're being polite in asking, they don't really want to know details. And at the end of the day they still think that all I do is sit on my ass and look at a computer screen. Just like the way they visualize a programmer, and a banker and a ...
> I don’t know much about the Ruby world, but I wonder whether the increasing popularity of Ruby for web development has created pressure for Ruby to compromise its original philosophy. And I wonder whether Ruby’s creator Yukihiro Matsumoto has “dictatorial” control over his language analogous to the control Guido van Rossum has over Python.

This is a some what irritating speculative musing, given the fact that it is a question that could easily be answered by talking to any number of Rubyists who are available and interested in answering such a question.

One of the major points of tension in the Ruby community is the extent to which the non-Japanese Ruby community has input and control over the destiny of Ruby as a language. Given a number of alternative implementations of Ruby (JRuby, Rubinius, MacRuby just to name the popular ones), alternative implementors have gone well out of their way to ensure conformance with the mainline Ruby implementation.

In fact they went so far out of their way to build a spec suite to characterize the behavior of Ruby the programming language from it's actual implementation. And on top of that there's even a new ISO spec for Ruby.

So, yeah. Matz does have control of Ruby, and Ruby does resemble Python in its voluntariness.
Free Browser Apps
> We think that the root server distribution should take regional Internet population size into consideration, so we hope the people in charge read this and act accordingly as the Internet continues to grow.

This is really the sum of their analysis? They "think"? The "people in charge"? No analysis of actual performance? No discussion of the fact that caching resolvers mean that most queries never hit the root servers? No discussion of the fact that this is just the distribution of sites that the 13 root server IP addresses map to via anycast, and that each site will have many actual physical machines behind that IP address?

How about doing some measurement to see if there is any problem? Some analysis that discusses what effects this might have? Some discussion of who those "people in charge" are, and what it's suggested that the should do?

This kind of drivel really makes me which that Hacker News had a downvote button for articles.
What if the two services have different features, even slightly? The protocols are instantly incompatible. The problem is that the feature set, and thus the protocol, is strongly tied to the provider, and decoupling the two doesn't make much sense.
would every fucking body stop linking to lighten up. it's just as condescending to link to it every fucking time.
"can you explain to me how Michael Bloomberg would be better at his day to day job of leading the largest city in the USA if he woke up one morning as a crack Java coder?"

I certainly can't, but the sample set of one doesn't make for a convincing body of evidence. Moreover he's chosen to cherry pick someone in a position as a figure head/leader who has to delegate nearly all of his work as a function of time constraints. Generally speaking, Michael Bloomberg shouldn't learn to code but it wouldn't hurt if one of his advisers did.

"You should be learning to write as little code as possible. Ideally none."

This conflates individual programming best practices with a desired limit on the total amount of software written across teams and programmers.

"It assumes that coding is the goal."

Wrong. Most proponents of software education want people to understand the domain enough to function and _maybe_ get things done.

I stopped reading at this point.
http://beagleboard.org/bone
Hmm, I think these were the videos I was watching a while back. I didn't end up finishing watching them because they were Java based... A JavaScript version should help expand that audience quite a bit.
Yeah, but SD cards also have horrible IO by today's standards and they're commonly used for little boards like this.

Up to 4x I/O channels running at 3MB/second for the mainframe would be considered pretty good for small (4 kiB to 16 kiB) file operations on almost all microSD cards today.

edit: typo
Will the Google Chrome Web browser come to Apple’s iPads and iPhones?
欧拉迪护眼一号怎么样陈皮5克去皮拨5克5克5 - 8八角香茅天竺葵柳条5克5克
He means the BeagleBone. It's an ARM-based single-board computer that fits in a mint tin.

http://beagleboard.org/bone
This is a pretty discouraging thread to read. The vast majority of posters seem to be of a CS (or related) background, extremely smart (academically, at least), and hold their college experience in low regard. Consensus seems to be that the core CS coursework was pretty easy, forced conformity, and didn't have much interesting material to spark learning or creativity.

How many of the people complaining of this branched out to other subjects? Learned about political philosophy, geology or maybe tried some creative writing? True, those courses are 'easier' so won't be more challenging to get your coveted "A", and yes they might not help you graduate as quickly as humanly possible to get out of school or help you make millions in the marketplace. But there is a reason they are there, and it's not so less intelligent people can also get a Stanford degree. They tackle other questions, other problems, other ways of thinking. You might do very well in those classes without tons of work, but they undoubtedly would have provided another avenue to learn and experience a lot of things you don't get from CS.

The discussions around tuition cost, learning in the real world where you can make $10K/month, how easy 'soft' courses are, the dismissive idea that college is partially about having fun, making friends, romantic relationships, etc. probably does a lot to explain why the majority of this thread didn't feel like Stanford offered much to them besides a piece of paper that society demands. There is so much you didn't bother to do because it didn't fit into your specific and very narrow idea: learn CS to make money. Of course I'm generalizing here, and I doubt anybody actually thought 'learn CS to make money', but it really doesn't sound like many people who have posted had a ton of experience in school to develop their self, rather than just their career.
Well, I'd argue that the protocol hasn't been designed correctly. Don't forget that every single website out there use HTTP as their main protocol, yet, they have very different feature sets, capabilities and even goals!
The problem is that they don't want you "changing the openid2.provider href in the HTML and I was done".

They want you to write your app so that all of your code is so hopelessly coupled to their service and API that it may as well just be an extension of it.

I had a similar revelation when I was writing an S3 backup system recently, I was writing hundreds of lines of Java that was catching exceptions that I hadn't even heard of while calling libraries in the namespace of a company that is known for selling books. What on earth was I doing?

So I wrote a 3 line bash script to rsync to a bunch of places and added it to crontab.
Now that means I can change backup providers whenever I want with a single code change.

As a separate point there is something to be said for stateful protocol (especially open ones) instead of stateless by design API stuff like REST.

I am considering the use of an IRC server as a backend for a messaging/logging system.

I like building systems that can be debugged with telnet.
What happened to Cisco? Aside from crazy acquisitions, and their long-time strategy of having employees leave, build a company, sell to Cisco for a high price, work for earn out, then do it again, and again, what did Cisco do to fall from where it was to where it is now?
I don't really like underscores either. Leading underscores to mark member variables? That looks weird. A trailing underscore? Ugh, even worse because you can't use code completion to find all the member variables.

With that said, who cares? Don't use them if you don't want to. It might be more inefficient, but typing speed has never been the thing that slows me down while I'm writing code.
Is there a similar guide for software developers? I'd pay for it
Credit to them at least the "No" is within the second paragraph as apposed to the end of the article which is normally the case
Aaron Sorkin Commencement Address (SUNY ESF)
Originally from ELER [1], I believe, but the shop is no longer in operation.

[1] http://geekz.co.uk/shop/
Free Zocial Button Set: Social CSS3 Buttons
I'm not looking for Jeff Atwood or Phil Libin's approval or permission and I don't think many folks reading HN are either. :) Although perhaps I am guilty of looking for validation on some sub conscious level, but who isn't? Ultimately I was just responding to the tone of the post - he makes many perfectly legitimate points. I just think he's missing the most important general one which is that it's not a bad thing for people to learn to program and become more technically/computationally literate.

Edit- tone isn't really the right word. It's the basic idea of the post that I dislike and not for reasons related to my own learning or business. I think it reflects a view of people, learning, etc, that's inconsistent with what's possible and all the opportunities that are open to everyone right now. I understand where you're coming about the sage advice, but think that's the risk/case with anything.
so anyone can make a joke about asian guys, you know because there are over a billion them in this world
LightSquared files for Chapter 11
I definitely wish I was writing something other than python. I did choose it, but it's not the language I want to be writing in. It's just the language that happens to have numpy, django, etc.

While writing it, I often wish it were statically typed with pattern matching. The write/test/type error or undefined variable cycle is very frustrating to me. The lack of pattern matching makes my code verbose and also makes it harder to spot edge cases I missed.

I also wish functional programming in it were as easy as in Javascript. I often find myself writing a bunch of front end code, finding it elegant, then thinking "damn, back to python to update the api". (This includes multiline lambdas.)

It's still my go-to language for most purposes, but I constantly feel that it could be a lot better. I'm looking forward to the day when javascript completely subsumes the niche python occupies.
Well, the author himself is pretty ambiguous.

While most of the article talks about code, the author mentions underscores being ambiguous in the context of underlined fonts. (I don't even think my text editor [for code] supports underlined fonts.)

He also mentions only using shift once or twice per sentence when writing prose.

So it would seem that the author is just hating on _ in all contexts. Which is kind of silly. (Though I'll admit, the point of it being improperly handled with underlined fonts is certainly a valid complaint.)
A cloud dedicated to PHP apps
Сreators of Girls Around Me app lose funding, believe they were blamed unfairly
Based on a past thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3531075) it sounds like Google discontinued Snippets, the tool that inspired this app. Was it the specific tool that was discontinued or the whole process around the tool? Why?
What's frightening about the nativity in Atwood's post is that his basic assumption is that the more people know the worse it is. This is in direct contradiction to the fact that generally speaking the more educated people are, the better and stronger our workforce, communities, nations, etc are.

Learning to code != becoming a professional programmer. I can't count the number of times I wished that a graphic designer I was working with had even the basic idea of how HTML works.

Non developers should learn at least a bit of appreciation and even a baseline knowledge of what we do if they work with us on a daily basis. Also, developers need to actually learn some basic design skills to enhance their communications as well.
I disagree tho that doesn't mean Quora won't be successful. It's just not realistic to think SV is representative of most populations. It's a very tech-heavy population which is not necessarily what the masses are looking for. Quora could be a dominant Q&A site for tech issues... and perhaps that's worth the big money (I just doubt it).
There's a difference though between taking opportunities to learn and going out of your way to learn something.

You don't mention anything about learning to speak Polish, though you certainly could learn if you wanted to.

I agree that you shouldn't pass up opportunities for learning, but you also can't learn everything. And there's opportunity cost involved in anything you decide to do with your time. For example, time spent dealing with dandelions could have been spent learning Polish if you had paid someone to take care of the dandelion problem.

I think almost anyone (myself most definitely included) can benefit from a renewed emphasis on learning, but you can't forget that while you can learn anything, you can't learn everything.
As a book collector, I prefer print books, but I think we will have a long term need for both until e-book readers are as good as print at the things print still wins on (speed, clarity, layout, sense of permanence).

I buy e-books but only for things that are disposable, fiction, immediate, that have flat 'boring' designs, or that I otherwise don't need to scan through. E-book layouts are usually hideous (PDFs of print copies are an exception) and readers like the Kindle are useless for reference or anything I need to flick through. My Kindle can pull off a whole page every two seconds. I can flick through about 20 pages a second looking for something in print.
Ebooks don't work well for signaling. How is everyone going to know how cool you are for reading whatever it is your reading unless they see it sticking out of your backpack?
Teens also have better eyesight. I used to read a lot of paper books when I was a kid. By the time I got to college, the only thing I read were textbooks, because I hated squinting at tiny print. Publishers have an incentive to be stingy with print size, since they can save money on paper. I’ve started reading more books again on my computer, because I can scale the font size to 24 and there’s a backlight.
And a million insecure developers all cried out in unison, "WE AGREE JEFF!"
Does Europe lack ambition? No, but some Europeans do
You're probably thinking of my Let's Play TDD [1] series. You're right--it's been enough of a success that I wanted to bring it to a more relevant platform. Also, I see a lot of people who don't do rigorous Javascript testing, even if they use TDD elsewhere. It seemed like there was an opportunity to help improve the state of the practice.

[1] http://jamesshore.com/Blog/Lets-Play/
Udcaity seems to have a course with deadlines and then then when that is completed the same course without deadlines.

You would just have to wait for the second run of any course to get the learn at your own pace track.
Yeah, defaults are always tough to choose and we tend to default to what is in RHEL. That said, Ruby comes up a lot and we are actively working on a slick 1.9.x experience out of the box. In the meantime (I know it's a hassle) but we've built the underlying foundation to let you do what you want. For example:

http://bit.ly/HHp9aR

Also... if you wouldn't mind helping vote it up, that would help:

https://openshift.redhat.com/community/content/support-for-r...
Also, it's easier to follow your values when you surround yourself with a community that believes in the same values. That's why Christians have church.

Surround yourself with SV snakes, and you'll rapidly find your principles eroding.