skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know what works well? Just write some code. I use the metaphor "paint every day" which I took from a HN comment years ago, but how does an artist get good at painting? You paint every day.

How do you get stuff done? Code every day. Fix a small problem, big problem, whatever. Just take steps forward every day.

It's how I got http://reme.me off the ground. I do something every day. In a couple short months I built the API, site, iPhone, and Android apps all by myself. I only get an hour or two a day maybe to get stuff done, so I just try and do something.

Lately I've been giving myself a list of tasks and either a week or two deadline to hit a "release", but really, that doesn't get stuff done. Just coding something each day does.

Paint every day.
"Is Hacker News crowded out by kids these days?"

I don't think Autodesk's plans are self-evident enough for this sort of thing.
Yay, pointer grabs in user-supplied code! What could possibly go wrong?

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=x11+mouse+grabs+proble...

For those not familiar with the problems: pointer grabs are notorious for being a pain to deal with. They have many strange corner cases and security problems. They also have weird interaction issues with things like modal windows, popups, screensavers and the like.
Sometimes its hard to truly agree or disagree without knowing the thought process that went into forming the opinion. I can have a gut reaction, but oftentimes those are wrong. There's plenty of evidence that Metro has been designed, and not only designed but designed well. I could link to you some sources on this, but I find clicking through the sources on the Wikipedia page [1] to be sufficient.

I'm not saying your opinion is wrong, invalid, or wild (my previous post was referring to the general importance of backing up your opinions). I honestly wasn't commenting on your specific opinion (because I haven't read it except excerpts in these comments). But those who say Metro is a design failure really seem to be running against the grain on that one. In many cases, the author's backlash against Metro was more of a thinly-veiled attack on Microsoft than an attack on Metro. If someone is saying that Metro is undesigned and made simply because Microsoft is out of ideas, that kind of lumps that author into that category for me.

I will admit I have no idea who you are/what you are. Your domain is blocked by my corporate proxy for being a spam URL.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_%28design_language%29#Re...
One thing I've noticed in most of the online classes is a tendency among a vocal subgroup to talk about how easy the material is, even when it's not.

It's just alpha nerding, same as any other venue. And if it's really that easy, then as you say, why not impress us with how you've gone beyond it. Anyone who can type can say it's easy. Show us something.
No room for humour in such a serious world...
That doesn't make sense to me, I mean they can sell usb wifi dongles for less than $10, presumably profitably, so I would presume they could add wifi to the RP board for pretty cheap. What am I missing?
Encryption and anonymity is going to be THE issue of the next 20 years.
It would take quite a bit of writing to do all of that. And there are some significant subtleties in terms of the differences between seemingly similar licenses.

What I'd recommend, is that you read the book Open Source Licensing[1] and / or the book Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing[2]. Both are freely available online.

[1]: http://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm

[2]: http://oreilly.com/openbook/osfreesoft/book/index.html
Your idea isn't unique, there's probably 100 other people with exact same idea. No good dev or vc will ever sign an NDA unless money is being exchanged.
Retire Rich and Retire Happy
Boxed in, wanting out
My problem with upvoting is that I have read the underlying paper, and I'm not impressed at all. This paper takes a hugely nurturist approach, and at parts verges on dishonesty.

I consider myself - if not an expert, at least very well informed - on the topic of dual n-back and I was flabbergasted when I read pg11 of the PDF. There is not a single mention of the many failures to replicate, methodological critiques, or skeptical meta-analyses about n-back. Some of that can be explained by the January 2012 date, but only a very some of it because a lot of that long predates 2012 or 2011, and it can't be explained by the people involved being ignorant because they thank Jaeggi, Duckworth, Jonides, and Sternberg - who certainly would know!

Someone reading this paper would come away with a very different understanding and expectation for dual n-back training than someone reading my http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ . So all I can think is, "if this is how Nisbett et al act on the one section where I know almost as much as them, how are they misleading me in all the other sections?"
What does ECHELON and military drones have to do with civil liability?

The root comment in this thread suggests that Microsoft might be centralizing Skype so that it can scrape trade secrets out of phone calls. That sentiment is based on a preposterous misapprehension about how international law works.
Just saw Savages (by Oliver Stone). The War on Some Drugs passed the point of believability probably during the Reagan era and is now just another war on Other People. I wish someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Richard Branson would just spend a few million dollars to end it, at least for the benign drugs like marijuana that are provably less destructive than alcohol or tobacco.

As a side note, I wonder how things like Silk Road will affect it, once enforcement isn't really feasible anymore.
Is there a valid technical reason to use braces?

IMO, the Javascript spec is kinda dumb for being so permissive, but it is covered in the spec, so it's legit to do it either way.

Whether that's a good thing or not.
Good catch! Thanks a lot.
Poor isn't a culture.
The thing I learned about learning math is that you have to do a lot of problems. That's it. That's the trick.

Also, It's helpful to read a lot of different explanations/developments of a concept until I find one that makes sense.
What if? - answering your hypothetical questions with physics, every tuesday
Slashdot Founder CmdrTaco doing AMA on Reddit
First and foremost thanks for the feedback. We are working on a mobile app, and I do agree that it is a bit hard to find who is close to you via web. I thought it would be a great start to start web-based, gain a bit of interest, build API for our mobile app
As money is becoming completely digital and completely tracked, digital anonymous money will also be on the rise, be that Bitcoin or something else.
You should consider switching to a better host. There is no excuse for this:

wget -4 output: http://scrp.at/bAD

wget -6 output: http://scrp.at/bAE

As an IPv6 advocate on the side, I'm disappointed by this.
Financial Models Do Suck, But We All Still Need Them
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4252955

Added in edit after tokenadult made his reply:

I see that this is, as tokenadult says, a professional reporter writing about the incident. It is, perhaps, of some interest that this story should be taken up by the mainstream press, but it does add very little to the original story. The following is new:

... a McDonald's media representatives sent a
statement by email saying, in part:

"We take the claims and feedback of our customers
very seriously. We are in the process of gathering
information about this situation, and we ask for
patience until all of the facts are known."

It would be especially useful if the media harass McDonald's until a proper response is finally given.

So that's new, and my bare reference to the original blog post perhaps should have said that. Interestingly, I was prevented from saying that quickly because I was IP banned, and it's only that my modem rebooted and changed my dynamic IP address that I can write this. So I will respect the intent of the IP ban and go "off-line" for a time.
Nice try. I have to sign up for Google+ to read on article about Google+? If this is the dodgy tactics used to drive up usage numbers then Google+ must not be offering any intrinsic value. As for now, LinkedIn is providing me greater value. Actual value, without gimmicks.
Scrolling is severely buggy in Chrome (20.0.1132.57 on OS X) and partially buggy in Firefox (13.0). I did some screen captures.

#1 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/bczmu8kjfhn6ymr/bug1.mov): Scrolling is actually faster in the upward direction than the downward direction. In this video, I continuously move my fingers on my trackpad up 1cm and down 2cm. You would expect the same movement to scroll equivalent distances, but it does not. In fact, you will see that sometimes it stutters or will not scroll at all. (There is nothing wrong with my trackpad, and the problem only affects your site.) This problem affects both Chrome and Firefox.

#2 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/x9zzd298v85atf9/bug2.mov): The viewport is often mysteriously constrained and refuses to scroll any further, even though there is more text. In this video, I opened a fresh window, immediately clicked on one of the chapters, and tried to scroll downards. You'll see me struggle for a bit, then scroll to the previous chapter and then back to the original chapter. Only after doing this am I able to scroll downwards. Seems to affect Chrome only.

Looks promising aside from these rather severe issues.
I think it's more about wanting to see her ideas put into action more than it is about position or power. Unfortunately she wasn't getting that at Google, but now she has (at least very close to) complete creative control at Yahoo!. I'm very interested to see what she will do at Yahoo!, especially considering what she did at Google.
The dreaded self-narrative, destroyer of ambition
Given the way Google has been using high-pressure onboarding through several of their existing customer bases, I'm not surprised. And "visitors" likely counts people who got linked to a single post.
The reading experience is a bit cumbersome on the iPad, in portrait mode. I'd kill the social sidebar if in iPad mode...I'm not likely to use the social bar when at my iPad, but I do judge the overall reading experience based on how effortless it is on the iPad, or any other tablet
The Final Chapter in the Backbone Application Walkthrough [Screencast]
Yes, but I know dozens of people on LinkedIn. I know one active Google+ user and he's a bit of a Google fanboy to begin with.

None of the non-techie people I know use Google+ or even mention it at all.
So basically 15 ppi, then - your comment reads as someone trying to exaggerate the difference - the T220 was 205 ppi, and some of Apple's Retina devices are 221 ppi, a grand difference of merely 7% - well, seven per cent and eleven years.
As anyone who's worked on anything for any period of time knows, "and then reality walked in."

We all want to believe that working on projects we love will keep us going nonstop for 18 hour days. Please, avoid the cognitive dissonance if you fail to live up to this unrealistic idealism, and give yourself just a modicum of slack. Don't burnout because of the unrealistic unbalanced life of the stereotypical startup guy you feel like you have to become.

If something's not working, catch yourself, correct, and move on. If it is working and you're working hard and moving forward despite your flawed humanity, then don't worry about it. No need to be overly critical or absolutist about it.
you are taking me wrong, what I meant was the title is misleading, that's it. I didn't intend to show off my knowledge or just to downplay others.
I am not sure what you mean by "this route". App Engine supplies multiple runtimes (Java, Python, Go). Heroku somewhat analogously supplies buildpacks for using different languages, but also allows custom buildpacks.

Understand that Heroku and App Engine are fundamentally different kinds of things.

The commonality is that they are both selling some kind of service to run code on, and they are both (in different ways) trying to make it easier than just administering everything at the low level of a VPS or dedicated server, while also giving you similar levels of isolation and capacity as you get outside the shared hosting world.

But other than that, they are aimed at quite different goals and the architectures (necessarily) vary accordingly.

App Engine imposes heavy constraints on your app architecture with a primary goal of making scaling easier from the outset. You are very much doing everything inside a framework provided by Google. They are trying to make sure your handlers do not run too long or do certain classes of insecure things. And the infrastructure of production is very much opaque to you. You can't just run any old combination of services, they provide you a set of very good and very transparent but proprietary APIs for things like memcache and datastore. You just use them and get billed by usage. While they offer multiple runtimes and some multi-runtime tricks are possible, they really aren't trying to cover the 'polyglot' use case or support every language under the sun. It has good technical merits but your app is almost completely married to Google. Running a low-traffic app is free but scaling can be a little costly compared to approaches where you are doing more yourself.

Heroku is not a platform in the same sense as App Engine. That could be good or bad depending on what you need. It provides high-level interfaces to reduce most users' deploy and management overhead. But like a VPS, it isn't trying to limit your flexibility or determine your architecture. It explicitly gives you control over your mix of services and your own languages and use different things together. However, in the course of simplifying it also does constrain and hide details. It just isn't a fundamentally different environment from normal Linux VPS, as App Engine is - it's only one which you manage at a higher level using Heroku's tools. You are left with less lockin than App Engine, but you are still dependent on Heroku insofar as it is supplying all your deploy/management scripting and stuff like that.

App Engine says something like "do it our way with our tools and you will be able to scale easily on high grade infrastructure" and Heroku says something more like "do what you could do on a VPS in a slightly different way, with slightly less choice of tools, and we can make it much easier. We can help you cross the scaling bridge later." So they are designed to meet different kinds of needs and have attracted somewhat different kinds of audiences.
Most of the fish oil/IQ links I know tend to either be poor quality studies, show no effect, or show a fade-out... For example,

> Supplementation of a mother’s diet during late pregnancy and 3 months postpartum with long-chained fatty acids has also been demonstrated to improve cognitive performance in human children (Helland et al. 2003). http://www.pediatricsdigest.mobi/content/111/1/e39.full

But to follow up: Helland et al 2008
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/122/2/e472.sho...

> CONCLUSION. This study suggests that maternal concentration of n-3 very-long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids during pregnancy might be of importance for later cognitive function, such as sequential processing, although we observed no significant effect of n-3 fatty acid intervention on global IQs. Neonatal fatty acid status had no influence on BMI at 7 years of age.

(One may not be surprised inasmuch as most efforts to boost IQ in kids
like the Abecedarian project show fadeout.)
Top Grossing Finance Mobile App Generates Barely $80,000 Annually
Yes, Colin, this is the first follow-up by professional journalists to the blog post that launched that busy previous HN thread.
That's a good point. I don't recall the last time I saw a non-techie even mention G+.
>I'm quite certain HN participant aren't all programmers or designers. They're not all guys, either.

Wishful thinking aside, I would guess that the percentage that are not:

"(programmers || designers) && guys"

is insignificant. Care to start a poll?
In-Demand Qualifications in Data Management Right Now
>Runic can, through the DCMA ensure that the content is either taken down, or they are put in touch with the party they assert are infringing. From there on out, it is the responsibility of the two parties to work out, as far as the DCMA is concerned.

That's exactly why they would make the DMCA complaint.
Wow. Lots of impressions here.

MySpace is so small now! And shrinking! Let us never forget that history.

Tumblr and pinterest are adding a lot fewer users than I thought.

Gosh just look at the page. Google+ looks very clean and beautiful compared to Facebook these days. I'm reminded of when everybody used to say "Facebook looks very clean and beautiful compared to MySpace these days".

Google has a big leg up here as Google+ ads can always be less intrusive and more relevant than Facebook ones. They can also afford to be cleaner by simply not making much (if any) money off of Google+ itself, just on the fact that it gets you into the google ecosystem.

One thing that really bothers me about new Google web properties is that Google made this browser, Google Chrome, with a search functionality that highlights the matched words in orange on the scrollbar. Then they went and broke this feature on every single scrollbar possible by using custom scrollbars on every Google web property except Google search itself. How silly!

---

Back to the topic at hand. I love the format of Google+ compared to Facebook. It sits between blog and social network, and long-form posts and answers seem much more natural and acceptable on G+ than on Facebook.

Think about it. Lots of people link to Google+ posts here. Nobody links to the equivalent Facebook thing, wall posts. (And extremely few people use Facebook "notes" which were an attempt to fill that gap and have falled by the wayside.) I think this is one of the most telling things of all.

I think Google+ has great opportunity for it to mature into more than just a social network, but a social network + blog for those who cant be bothered to make (and visit!) traditional blogs + interactive press release platform (important for both companies and users).

I don't know if G+ will "win" any long term battle, but I do hope that when social networks mature into more refined, less annoying versions of themselves, they will look more like G+ than like Facebook or MySpace. I think the trend is clear, anyway.
I liked the UI/UX. The typography is very nice.
I would make the right bar optional and add to it an option to write notes.

Thank you Michael, great work!
>I think it probably is slightly misogynistic. Not my personal intent, but inherited from history?

Do you _hate_ women? If not, then it's not misogynistic.

Enough already with the stupid guilt trips over everything and anything!
There is a difference between a closure and a lambda. PHP's create_function() implemented lambdas in PHP version 4.0.1 which was released in June 2000. 5.3 added closures.
... But far less valuable, so far.
This is hilarious: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=144793
Why social networks use their own URL shorteners
Yes, browsers should take responsibility for doing it without asking the web devs to handle it, with the possibility of messing it up.

Operating systems have spent years dealing with power saving policies and application requests for keeping the display/disk/music/connection on. After about 10 years we are now reaching a point where all this have acceptable defaults and decent GUIs to change the settings to suit one's needs. Now all this will have to be redone again inside the browser.

Shortly people will complain that the browser did not let the monitor sleep at the end of a video/movie. Or, in the future, that the browser did not prevent the computer from going to sleep while the music was playing AND that the browser let the computer to sleep while the music was playing.
Charge Your Smartphone In The Great Outdoors With…Fire?
Looks good. The "heart" on paragraphs is cool -- now just make it so you can sort by hearts for a quick view of highlights. You could then jump to a selected paragraph in the correct ordering, if you want to read more of the context.
You can't view the post? I can view it without signing in, using incognito mode. Regardless, the post is by Morten Myrstad, who works at Kontxt, not a Google employee.
It's been a long time since I looked at the Twitter API, but I remember some of their API responses being hilariously inefficient. I don't remember the specifics, but something like retrieving a user's tweets the JSON would include a user "object" with every tweet message. The response would be something like this:

[{user: {name: 'jlarocco', userid: 1, /* 50 other attributes */}, message: 'my first tweet', id: 1, time: 123456},
{user: {name: 'jlarocco', userid: 1, /* 50 other attributes */}, message: 'my second tweet', id: 2, time: 123498},
/* similar thing 18 more times */]

If the rest of their stuff is like that, a 4MB Javascript file doesn't surprise me at all.
User is probably referencing concepts wich are not "advanced" per si, they are simply recent implementations of type concepts, we should keep in mind that these tend to make for not so efficient languages and Haxe is pointed at the other side of that spectrum. User seems to be some sort of Java api aficionado so I wouldn't put much thought to what "advanced features" is a reference to, coming from that background.

User should read up on Haxe and may well leave attribution of novelty to correct adjectivation, reads less pedantic in many ways.
Link to game still works for me:

http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/armed-heroes-online-3d-mmorpg...
What's important to note here is that, assuming normal distribution, group differences can account for large differences in the number of individuals at the very top (and bottom). If a group A has a mean IQ of 100 and group B has a mean IQ of 110, group B will have four times more individuals with IQ over 130 than group A.
Ask HN: First coding apprentice. Any advice for me (and him)?
I work for a PHP powered finance company (I promise it's not as bad as it sounds) with a wide range of projects, from 8 year old crufty internal systems to fairly bleeding-edge and genuinely interesting projects.

A new chap started a week ago and I've been assigned to train and manage him. His programming chops extend about as far as basic use of arrays and objects in PHP, and a bit of MySQL/javascript. He's quite competent in frontend/design stuff though.

He's clearly very smart and a quick learner from what I've seen so far, so if I handle this right he should have a very successful career ahead of him. This is also his first full time job.

I personally wish I was given the following in my very early career:

* Encouragement of my progress; I nearly gave up early on because I thought I was really shit at programming

* Conversely, frankness in my weaknesses, and specifically being told how to improve, not just told I'm doing something wrong

* How to spot a resource I can trust (online resources that don't give outdated practices, books that don't leave gaping security issues)

* The reasons for doing things certain ways, instead of just cargo-cult shit (I got told "that's just how we do it" so much)

Here are some questions that will hopefully give you some ideas:

* What advice do you wish you were given when first learning to program?

* What advice do you wish you were given when you got your first job as a developer?

* What advice do you wish you were given when you got your first full-time job?

* Is there anything your first mentor(s) did that you wish they didn't?

* Is there anything your first mentor(s) did that helped you a lot?

* Have you tested any techniques with very green programmers that worked to help them learn much better (eg. pair programming)?