skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Obviously garbage collection would be even worse than the introduction of threading concepts into C++.

Unavoidable, all-the-time, no-manual-option-available garbage collection would be a terrible idea, because that goes against the point of C++ as a high-level language that still allows low-level access. Similarly, introducing fully automatic, unavoidable parallelism implemented One True Way a la Fortress into C++ would be a bad idea.

But nobody complains about the fact that C++ gives you the option to use auto pointers, or that it will call destructors on object members for you so you don't have to think about the internals when you delete a complex object. It's nice to have the option to let the language do a lot of stuff for you in a standard way so that you don't have to think about it.

I don't see how this is any different. It would be nice to have a standard implementation that makes a lot of parallelism decisions for you, so that you don't have to think about it in situations where it's not really relevant. Having that available will not prevent you from rolling your own and making your own implementation decisions appropriate to the circumstances when it is relevant. So how can that possibly be a bad thing, any more than C++'s memory management facilities are?
linus is a misanthropic blowhard. as a role model, regardless of whether he signed up for it, he should be embarrassed at his behavior
Thank you, definitely feel a lot more relieved after reading this. Actually, this is pretty much what my plan was while I was convincing myself that I should leave my job, and it made enough sense to do so at the time. As for the money, it was a combination of living like I had no money, having a really good CPA to manage my funds (and getting lucky after the 2008 crash), and receiving a large amount of company stock options that fortunately did very well over time. I also was fortunate enough to have my college paid for, and so I have never been in a debt situation. Also, the company I worked for matched 10% into a 401k, and I converted the mutual fund stock into company stock, and just got lucky that we did well. On top of it all, I was paid well for what I was doing. Counting all the benefits, it wasn't uncommon for someone to gross 200k+ in a low profile leadership position. Thanks again, this is all great advice.
Do you want to be a developer at the south pole?
Woz doesn't have broadband at home because he lives in the wrong part of town
People can always install untrusted applications written in C. Why should the fact that your application is written in HTML+JavaScript make any difference? If it's just another native application; the implementation is unimportant to the end user.

Now, security is important, and it would be nice if all applications could be verified as to security. But they aren't. So while it would be good to figure out how to properly sandbox desktop HTML+JavaScript applications, I don't see as how failure in that regard should retard their adoption anymore than it retards the adoption of native applications written in C.
Lets Create Responsive Web Page
Insultron: Automated classy insults using Twilio
Anyone know if how many years of usage it would take to gain back the cost of the $1000 panel kit?
I think I got the first two parts, I'm just confused as heck by the last one.
My latest creation: Insultron insults people for you, and he does it with style. Just text any phone number to him at (910) 225-5771. Or simply call (910) 225-5771 to sample some classy insults yourself.

Built with Twilio!
The Round Table: a Thought Experiment for Idea Evaluation
Wish Google had mostly used Linux on desktops; would be a strong motivator for the rest of the world to get better hardware certifying for Linux.
Siri Turns Against Her Creator, Calls Nokia Lumia 900 “Best Smartphone Ever”
I would recommend some kind of "zen" type of meditation as well. It doesn't have to be the religious type (i.e. the lowercase Z suffices) but learning to stop thinking and accept the present moment for what it is without preconcieved notions can be incredibly useful for spotting assumptions when one is thinking and, consequently, for improving the quality of ones thoughts. It also helps with planning for the future and analyzing the past. Bad assumptions seem to be at the root of most stupidity and zen style meditation is excellent for learning to cope with them.
I see a danger here. It isn't with this child and his problems, but with the continued progress of the media and other political groups in co-opting psychological diagnoses for their own ends. The terms "psychopath" and "sociopath" are already bywords for "doesn't share my politics or worldview". You can see this clearly in the article and the comments. The article mentions "financiers and business people", and the first comment covers explicitly naming the opposing political party. In fact, how many articles from the last few years manage to bring up the subject without casually slipping in a reference to businessmen? I am guessing not many.

The problem is made worse by the highly subjective nature of psychiatry. When practiced in good faith, it seems to be beneficial for some people. Of course, as a science, it is particularly soft. It has a long history of shifting its positions, and a long history of debunked and discredited bodies of theory. (Why do we continue to teach Freud and Jung in college English departments?) Psychology is the sort of thing that works only when you can trust the person employing it, and sometimes not even then.

I am not a psychologist, I am more of a computer scientist. Using leeway in statistics and figures, I can show you any result I want to. For instance, I could present a compelling argument that Facebook will expand extraordinarily over the next decade. I could also present an argument damning the possibility of Facebook expanding at all. Don't you think that, with a few weeks of study, I could apply any subset of mental disorders from the DSM-IV to any person I wished?

Would you trust a court-ordered psychologist to make an accurate appraisal of your psyche? I don't know that such an appraisal is even possible. And I am worried about the increasing confidence in these sorts of appraisals. It sounds like, very soon, anyone interested in furthering American business aims will be suspect for mental disorders. The pretext is already here in America's paper of record. How long before this movement grows to having real influence in our judicial system?

When Tom Cruise begins to sound more sane than the psychology he criticizes, you know something is wrong.
Just recently, in fact a new method came along: those raymarchers that many modern 4k intros are, are essentially a single pixel shader. The C code draws a single quad that fills the screen two-dimensionally, and calls the shader. The shader computes a colour for each pixel for each frame, on the GPU, using relatively simple math to describe the scene (geometric shapes, like intersections of spheres and cubes, for instance. or fractals, like in the OP).

This means that instead of learning sizecoding, the opengl/d3d pipeline, mesh uploading, textures, getting along with the video bus speed, index buffers, geometry shaders, and so on, and so on, you can just learn GLSL and how a raymarcher works. Much like 20 years ago, getting something on screen quickly became easy again. It's not as easy as Processing, but it's not too far off either.

For example, check out this video[1] about the Russian demogroup Quite (who made the amazing 4k intro "cdak"[2]. The video briefly shows (scroll to 20 minutes) how unc starts with the shader instead of with the C code, using vvvv[3], a tool for live prototyping realtime graphics. They only turn the non-shader parts of the vvvv "code" (block diagrams and envelopes) into C code when the intro starts looking like it's going to be releaseable. With such an approach, you get motivated real fast; focus on getting something on screen, worry about getting into a demoparty compo later.

Or just don't worry about the C version at all, and make something cool that you'll never be able to pull off with any animation studio, and put it on vimeo :-)

Oh, also check out this Pouet thread [4] about how Quite made "cdak" (but first see the intro!). It's one of those things that make you even more amazed when you get it.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuoRpEMfEHY

[2] http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55758 | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCh3Q08HMfs

[3] http://vvvv.org/

[4] http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=7909&page=1&x=2...
Arduino-powered heatseeking dart turret
Learn several very different programming languages. Make sure to include at least lisp, c, a scripting language (eg perl or php,) a parallel language (eg erlang or mozart-oz), something funky (prolog's nice this time of year,) and sql. These will give you a set of semi-compatible worldviews that'll let you start doing a better job of choosing tools than blub. If you dig in hard, you can do a pretty decent job of learning the wheel ruts of each of those in two months.

Spend the following year crapping out weekend projects to learn fast. Use that time to see what reaches customers, to see what breaks under load, et cetera.

After that you'll be in a much better position to take on founding.
Number theory is a good source of unsolved problems that don’t require much background to understand. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_ma...
Facebook's $1 billion purchase of Instagram under investigation by the FTC
I think it's largely a feeling of "what will they remove next"?

Say an engineer is a a daily user of ten particular GNOME 2 features. GNOME 3 removes four of them, and hides three more. At that point, the engineer is wondering what will happen to the rest when GNOME 3.3 comes out.

In contrast, environments which are explicitly intended to be customised very rarely disable or remove features. Someone who's been using the same configuration for ten years can know that if it works in release N, it'll probably work (maybe with a few minor tweaks) in release N+1.

It's worth noting that XMonad has many more features than Metacity; it's not bare-bones by any means. Converting to it isn't like converting to a minimalist WM.
It's possible to reject stupid questions in a way that is diplomatic and non-douchy.

Absolutely, and that's how professionals deal with other professionals. The comment that I responded to demonstrated significant attitude about what they called stupid questions (which are the Fermi problems).

An interview is not a skill discovery session -- ideally your resume and online presence (e.g. github projects) has demonstrated that, along with, if necessary, a practical test. An interview is getting to know how you think, how you communicate, how you deal with people, how you approach problems, etc. It is astonishing how many people don't understand this, and thus don't understand questions that aren't an autism-level focus on a person's specific skill gamut.

Can you tell me what you believe your biggest weakness is?
Sure, there must be something wrong with their brains. Never blame the parents, after all, they did everything by the book.

There exist theories about why people suppress their emotions. I recommend reading some Alice Miller.

Funny, I suppose as long as the diagnosis is "Depression" or something, the reaction is probably "oh noes, what have we done, what can we do", but I suspect for psychopathy it might be "a heck, but at least he'll become a badass boss and make millions on Wall Street".

Didn't read the story to the end, but where there even acts of "liking" by the mum? Not just "don't bounce the ball", "stop it" or "share your toys, honeys"?
https://github.com/pirtlj

pirtlj "I did not realizes that Linus' shit does not stink."
torvalds "you are a moron"

Seems fair to me.
Yes, it's irrational, but usually if you ask someone to really unpack why they fear X, they can explain an exact scenario. Often just the process of explaining it oneself helps you get over the fear.

Children certainly fear negative judgement. Think how many times they hear the word "no" and get a nasty look from their parents.
First photos of Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs
Cyber Attacks on gas pipeline linked to China
I didn't mean to address particular annoyance at the poster. If annoyance is merited (I'm no longer sure, but based just on the concept/precept of having a "unique" or canonical-shared identifier for content, I'm troubled), then it would be at Blogspot for creating this circumstance.
Another option in your situation would be to become an angel investor.

(cf Venkatesh Rao's answer to this question: http://www.quora.com/Startups/I-want-to-start-a-tech-startup...

"Find a couple of other older people with some experience and their own warchests, form an angel group. 200k will allow you to participate in like 4-5 good ideas within a year, and as an investor with good partners, you'll learn far faster than on the founder side. Founding is for people with no money, or people who've done it before. Money can buy you into the game in smarter ways. In particular it gives you the luxury of portfolio diversification which most founders lack.")

If you want to succeed in the startup game, a portfolio approach is best. That's possible for investors and employees (who can try several jobs until they find one that takes off), but not for founders, most of whom will spend years on a venture that likely doesn't go very far. So angel investing might be a better route.

Of course, that depends on how much you want to be playing the game yourself as a founder or just taking on an advisory role.

Heck, if you really want to ramp up your coding skills, I wouldn't mind tutoring you for a reasonable fee. Let me know if you're interested (email in my profile).
I've experienced this in my own 7-year practice as CTO of an agile rails consulting shop, growing from 2 to 20 people while working with dozens of clients ranging from government agencies to VC-funded startups and self-funded single founders. Some of these projects have been extremely successful, while others have resulted in high-quality software which never saw the light of day or met real user needs. I would estimate the ratio of success to failure has been 1:5. It's deeply disheartening for me, and for the outstanding development teams I've built, to see work we have put months or years of effort into collapse due to lack of focus and clear, cohesive product management and vision.

The successful clients all had someone inhouse they could dedicate full-time to defining a well-structured backlog, grooming stories, balancing feedback from stakeholders, acceptance testing work, communicating with design and development, and generally acting as the unary executive voice of the product.

SomeONE. And the problem is that the role here calls for both executive, rather than committee, function and requires a broad generalist skillset. A good product owner needs to think analytically, write clearly, communicate firmly and negotiate competing needs and priorities. They need to be comfortable discussing technical details, even if they are not themselves technical. They need taste and understanding for user experience, even if they are not themselves a designer. They need delegation skills and a keen editorial instinct.

There are many more people with money to build software than with someone in-house with a matching set of aptitudes and is available to own a project.

Instead we get a group of department heads, with overfull schedules and competing needs. We get people who come to us with ideas for apps they are sure will make them wealthy. We create beautiful software for them, they "launch" in the App Store, and we never hear from them again. We get VPs of Product who spend more time in endless fundraising meetings than talking to their customers and development team.

The real surprise is that the success ratio has been this high.
Don't get it. How can you celebrate someone as the "youngest ever International Math Olympiad gold medalist" while simultaneously denying the importance of genius in math?

It sounds like you are under the impression that success in mathematical olympiads is connected with success in mathematical research. It’s actually relatively rare for IMO winners to go on to become successful researchers, because the skills involved, while not completely disjoint, are not exactly the same either.
Chapter 7 requires some math. that or just bruteforce the password :/
Adobe will issue security fixes for CS5 apps after all
This was fixed in Firefox 8, unless 3rd-party programs have gotten much more clever:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2011/08/11/strengthening-use...
I don't agree with this. He's not trying to become an all-star programmer, he just wants to learn how to build a prototype to get a startup off the ground. He should just jump right into what he will likely use. That's probably going to be Ruby on Rails or similar.
And yet, I've never met anyone who claimed to be one. I've never read an article entitled "Here are what my experiences are like, as a psychopath". There has never been a reddit "IAMA psychopath, AMA".

If it's that common surely there should be more first-person accounts of it? Or at least interviews with psychopaths?

I remain unconvinced that "psychopath" is actually a real thing, rather than a label we stick on people who are really just plain ol' jerks.
AppJS does not use http connections. It only simulates it. It uses a custom scheme (appjs://).Whenever a request with this scheme is made, AppJS routes it to your javascript code in node.js.
Validating Your Business Co-Founder
> The terms "psychopath" and "sociopath" are already bywords for "doesn't share my politics or worldview". You can see this clearly in the article and the comments. The article mentions "financiers and business people", and the first comment covers explicitly naming the opposing political party. In fact, how many articles from the last few years manage to bring up the subject without casually slipping in a reference to businessmen? I am guessing not many.

They've slipped in because that's where the research is pointing, after decades of anecdotes. One of the main instruments for diagnosing psychopathy is the HARE checklist, as in Robert D. Hare; guess what Hare's latest book is called? _Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work_. Yeah.

(I could finish by accusing you of baselessly accusing your opponents of twisting psychology to fit one's worldview, but I don't think most people would appreciate the irony.)
Often the Chinese state would fail to correct, or even tacitly endorse, falsehoods that made the western world look bad.

One other example: pre-Obama, the fact that the US had not had a black president was frequently brought up to prove that our society still embraced racism.
> They were at a trade deficit when they used the DM

Not in the last ... 30 years. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/balance-of-trade
Show HN: Web-based CoffeeScript REPL/console
Don't worry too much about the "brilliant people" that may or may not be competing with you. I've never heard of a startup failing because of competitors. At the beginning you aren't competing, you're trying to get traction. Only once you have a product, once you're making money, once you have customers can you have competitors. Most startups fail before this point.

The second part is the fact that you seem to think startups are full of brilliant people. Some tech-oriented ones might (ones that are working on something like building a new database) but most aren't. Most have pretty horrific code quality and manage just fine because your customers won't ever see the code and if they stumble across your source they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between good and bad code anyway so they don't care. At all. All they care about is whether you solve a problem they have and whether it's worth the cost (even free products have a cost: the customer's time).

Find a problem worth solving, solve it the best way you know how and put it out there. If it's a problem people have they will use it. If it's helpful they will continue using it and give you feedback on how to improve it. Listen to your customers and iterate.
QuickCheck in Python
> Though I'd love the idea of a methodology race, where the fittest win. Wonder if there ever is an organization open minded enough to try this...

Every organization does that, to a degree, unknowingly. I know a (secret, undisclosed) organization where we (er, they!) do Scrum but if you analyzed what the teams actually do you probably wouldn't guess they follow anything resembling a single recipe :)

Curiously it seems to support the thesis of the article. I believe that all of the teams have some sort of a backlog and focus on making it good. The difference is that while the author strikes "prioritized" we, the devs, are more focused on "well specified".
http://www.reddit.com/search?q=iama+psychopath
This is a really interesting method of funding a software project. It doesn't seem sustainable though. People might (maybe) be willing to fund a "Light Table 2.0" project but certainly nobody would care to fund an "ongoing maintenance and bugfixes for Light Table 1.0" project.

Perhaps the Kickstarter model could be adapted to fund maintenance and bugfixes too. Popular open source projects always have the problem that their bug trackers get spammed with passionate complaints from well-meaning but frustrated users. I'm imagining a public bug tracker where users can pay to raise the priority of their favorite bugs. Not necessarily a "bug bounty" system, but just a way of raising money for the project overall while simultaneously giving frustrated users a productive outlet and reducing spam.
When I was 5 years old and starting kindergarten, I met another boy the same age who I quickly decided would end up in jail as an adult. He certainly wasn't the only one who misbehaved frequently or did cruel things to other children, but I could tell he was different somehow. He never seemed to need to feel justified in his cruelty.

In 1998, at age 19, he took part in a murder. He was sentenced to 20 years with 5 suspended. I think he's out on parole now.
Siri says Nokia Lumia 900 the best smartphone ever | Apple - CNET News
Why learn programming yourself? You have enough funds to hire people to build the thing "the world wants or needs", Learning programming takes time and it takes even more time to be able to build great stuff.

You should start thinking like a programmer, find the shortest path to your goal, just by learning python and front end will not take you too far.

You can get into startups in many ways, knowing how to code or have a great idea is not enough, and these are easily available.

Maybe is better to find a small startup that tries to build what you are trying to achieve and invest into it so you can share the fun and learn everything you need along.

Find your greatest strengths and use them to build the startup you want, starting from scratch by learning programming will take too long and when something takes too long it can be frustrating.

Good luck.
More a surprise than offense.

If blogspot hadn't tried to localise me, I'd have submitted a .com link and HN would have spotted that this story is actually a dupe and we wouldn't be pondering this topic all over again .... :)
Tao mentions in the article that there may be applications in cryptography.
I don't think the EU will like this.

They seem to have a lot of sane opinions about such things at the moment.
Hm, so it was. Still, he didn't modify or add any kind of footnote or disclaimer or update when he posted it in 2006, which is suggestive. One indeed wonders if he is still keen on patents...
I am a tex.stackexchange.com regular and I really like the community. It is a small community but/therefore quite some people meet on a regular basis, the (local) TUG conferences. I agree very much with the "thank you sx" note.