skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We didn't get where we are today by being "lazy" as you put it.

The two are hardly correlated.

Have you ever worked with some of the Mac OS X code written by poorer teams? For instance, the security framework? The internals of that code is a disaster at best, and yet, the core OS enjoys tremendous success and market share.

> Thus developers can get on with their job and be more productive when they don't have to duplicate their efforts for dubious benefit.

How do you determine the invariants of your APIs when writing code against a module? I don't trust arguments that boil down to "we're much too important to waste our time documenting, code is perfectly expressive!"

It's not. You're just wasting your time somewhere else, in little tiny increments, every time you have to trace code a few steps down just to figure out what it probably is supposed to do.

Or, sometimes in BIG increments, when somebody new has to learn the code base.
I think it's important for stories like this to get out there to contrast with big successes like Super Meat Boy and Fez (which were featured in the awesome movie "Indie Game: The Movie").
Bloody hilarious
Feasible? Yes. I've cross-compiled GCC a few times in the past year or so.

But it sure as hell isn't pleasant. ;)
The "large 50lb box" he's referring to is your baggage, and the rates of $25/$50 (int'l) the fares most carriers charge.
I didn't mean to imply otherwise :) merely stating what it is he'd do.
There's been an ongoing semi-related discussion about whether conference parties should be treated as parties or as "work" events. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3841975
DefCon or 5 million college bars across the country?

You could have replaced those two terms and ended up with the same article. Perhaps the problem isn't just a nerd demographic issue.
>If I have to have a deep understanding of the JVM's implementation details to do anything non-trivial I may as well just stick with C.

The difference is that you have to have a deep understanding of the details to do even trivial things in C.

So, no, one might not "just as well" stick with C. Except if you want to manage memory manually all the time, and dangle pointers around...
Cryptocat Security Kerfuffle
"I'm just saying that men act like that because it works."

Interesting thought. I'm wondering if there has every been a study or even one of those TV shows to prove out that point.

It would seem to be fairly easy to setup with some "honeypots" and a group of males to see what happens with each behavior. Or simply a group of women with male actors playing the role of aggressive males.

Of course it all depends on the parties involved. But I know they've done similar non-scientific things even with hair color and found blond woman asking questions in central park in NYC get more attention than brunettes.
Well Prontotype isn't a product, it's a service -- we do the web development (rapidly) for clients.
I don't really understand why so many people seem to see an entitlement issue here (other than knowing from other contexts how many people really strongly dislike this woman, and so might be looking for ways to blame the situation on her).

YouTube is a free video hosting service whose use does not require you to sign up with or disclose your real identity. It is not "entitlement" to expect it to be what it is.
Since Thunderbolt is also some sort of PCIe port, couldn't you have the GPU be internal to the Cinema Display, and transmit only the GPU code over Thunderbolt? Or are significant parts of the screen drawn by the CPU directly these days?
New Personal Shopping App “Swirls” Together Mobile and In-Store Experience
NBC blew an Olympic opportunity to grow its Internet audience
It's an interaction, not a one-way thing. The only thing that I think makes a difference is consideration for the other person. Acting with no regard for them is jerky behavior. On the other hand just being willing to back off or even apologize if you've crossed the line can be an improvement.
It sounds like a major reason they've had such terrible conversion rates to the paid version is that nobody could figure out how to actually buy the game.

Remember: When people want to give you money, make it as easy as possible.

Hopefully they get some better conversion after their update:
"There was an update available for the game, and after applying it, an “unlock the full game” message was added under the main logo."
If anything, I'd say it'd work out better for your startup than not. See, the point is not to confuse dating with marriage, which can be quite the distraction. Marriage is after having found someone that supports your aspirations/startup (you would hope).

Your spouse will push you to new limits, much like your co-founders would, and will keep you grounded like Anand mentioned below. I think the best pair of co-founders is exactly that - one realist, one dreamer.
That's fair.

The title (and I did hesitate on using it) grabs attention -- enough for you to be reading the article.

I stuck with it largely because I think the decision to learn to program is a culmination of my journey over the past 23 years.

And, I have actually learned to program over the last 3 months. Maybe I should have stated that in the article. I'm currently doing freelance front-end development.
If the bike is damaged or stolen while under your care are you not liable for it?

Or do you use these bikes going between destinations which have these bike stations so you don't expose yourself to any risk of leaving unattended?
SMS Inbox Zero - get there with SendHub
One of the reasons it's such a strong deterrent is that it is so difficult to confront someone in your peer group for doing something wrong. Because of that, peer disapproval already is not working in this environment; peers simply aren't disapproving. Maybe the card system will get people motivated enough to start disapproving, but I doubt it.
FTA: The hardest part of engineering comes through execution - plotting an achievable path through a maze of code and possible deliverables while maintaining a deep understanding of the customer problem and constraints of the system.

This definition of 'execution' actually sounds a lot more like a definition of 'architecture' to me. In a software context, architecture means defining what to code, and just as importantly, what not to code. Many times what appears to be a failure in execution is actually a failure in architecture. So I can't agree that execution is the hardest part of engineering; it is the architect's job to make it the easiest part.
How well does Pyramid work with Python 3 (production ready)? And what are the pros and cons of Pyramid vs. Flask or some other lighter weight way to build web apps with Python 3?
Is there any strong argument against camel-casing, or is it just a stylistic preference? I traditionally like it as it's easier to pick out individual words, but I am open to any arguments one way or the other.
Converting the stage 1 bootstrapping compiler to C++ is a bad idea IMO. There any many embedded platforms without a C++ compiler (except perhaps downrev gcc).
It sounds like a lot of this stuff happens at bars during events, not at the events themselves.

How common is this behavior at bars in general, independent from a hacker con?

Also: some of the girls that I know who are hackers are offended at the idea of red/yellow cards. The implication there seems to be that they're helpless, and need somebody to swoop in and save them.

That, at least to some of my girl friends, is utter bullshit, and is blatantly sexist against women.

--

And to be completely honest, the red/yellow card thing has already become a flirtatious joke among people.
There might be a startup opportunity here.

How hard would it be to make an interface to FB / Twitter that lets a third party audit your tweets and posts before they're published?
We race them. But hey, each to his own.

There are quite a few cycle hire alleycats around the world. The London ones are fun.

One of my friends rode the Dunwich Dynamo on a cycle hire bike. 200km overnight on a bike that you couldn't service or fix a puncture on... pretty brave.
DefCon should follow the advice of the characters from Bizet's Carmen:

Quand il s'agit de tromperie,
de duperie,
de volerie,
il est toujours bon, sur ma foi,
d'avoir les femmes avec soi.
Et sans elles,
mes toutes belles,
on ne fait jamais rien de bien!

In its day, it was probably a bit of socially accepted misogyny, but I think we can re-contextualize it here. If one engaging in strip club antics has no women as friends or colleagues, one should ask if the bacchanal is just a form of overcompensation.

EDIT: That is overcompensation for a lonely sausage-fest life. This is why gay engineer's lives are better than yours:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1927#c...
preview-latex (bundled with AUCTeX these days) comes pretty close to this.
> "I had learned that, with half the time you get half the results so, for HireVoice, I was all-in, committed to success or, at least, piling up debts."

If you look at the author's LinkedIn, you'll see he started another consulting job after four months working on HireVoice full time. Is this because he realized the initial idea wasn't going to pay the bills?

I wonder if he would have been better off getting a full-time job first and iterating on this idea as a side project? It seems like someone who is fully employed would be more rigorous in choosing which idea to spend their precious spare time on.
It's almost as if when the girl is attracted to the guy, it's flirting, but when she isn't, it's creepy/sexual harassment.

I've heard this line many times, and it makes sense on the surface, but "flirting" isn't a singular act. Even if a girl isn't into a guy, a guy can introduce himself and start a conversation without coming off as creepy. If she's into him, then maybe things will progress to flirting, but if she's not, that's when the guy should get the signal to not be creepy and push something that is unwelcome.
Really..."damned if you do, damned if you don't"? There are easy ways to approach women without worrying if you've crossed the line on your initial remarks. While you might have to be a mind-reader, at times, to know if they like you, you certainly don't have to be psychic to know if your remarks are offensive or rude.
Show HN: Track your HN post
Google follows SOPA down the slippery slope of corporate censorship
I believe that AUCTeX [1] does essentially this in EMACS. It embeds a preview of each equation into the buffer, but I don't know whether it's smart enough to handle macros.

[1] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AUCTeX
Considering the sheer number of married or otherwise partnered non-aggressive men I know, you're full of shit.

If it worked, why did any of the women complain? Why didn't they swoon and drop their pants and beg to be taken on the spot? Because it doesn't work.
Docking stations in buildings, you mean like the Brompton Dock?

http://www.bromptondock.co.uk/

Then you get one of the best folding bikes, perfectly good for general use too.

They have plans for long-term hires too so you can use a bike daily and guarantee it is there for your commute. In the UK these Brompton Docks are mostly located at rail stations so that you have a bike waiting for you at the end.
It's even worse to start invading someone's personal space.

That said, not all women will automatically assume you are creepy just because they are not attracted to you.
I commented heavily in the original HN thread because of comments like this. You're not defending the behavior... you're just saying women are literally asking for it.

Theres this myth that men who are assholes succeed with women. I suppose they do technically succeed - in getting women with low self esteem to sleep with them through manipulation and "pickup artist" techniques. But how successful do you think they are at finding a truly fulfilling and meaningful relationships? How successful do you think they are with bright, intelligent, worthwhile women who have their act together. You really think those women are walking away from defcon wishing they met some guy who "negged" them, and physically forced himself on them?

As someone said already, theres a huge difference between being an aggressive asshole and being assertive. The asshole licks a random womans tattoo to start a conversation. The asshole grabs a womans crotch and hides in a crowd. The assertive guy decides to start a conversation with a woman he thinks is interesting, and if hes at all socially aware he knows when shes uninterested in continuing to talk and he moves on.

The line that shouldn't be crossed is being an asshole that sexually assaults women, its really not that blurry.
You would typically do point-to-point trips between stations. Bixi Toronto has something like $500-$1000 liability if stolen, as I recall (less if recovered later presumably... the bikes stand out so it'd be rather difficult to pawn).
Why would you want a dynamo if you could just have a battery powered led?
"And, I have actually learned to program over the last 3 months. Maybe I should have stated that in the article. I'm currently doing freelance front-end development."

Good deal! It shouldn't take too long until you start hating ruby, so I'd suggest checking out python and jsp to make you a more versatile webdev. I'm a PHP guy (spare the insults guys... seriously) for personal projects but roll with groovy, coldfusion, and ruby at work. Also start looking into DB's like postgres and mysql. If you're looking for corporate job security, it's .net and mssql pretty much all the way.
If a passenger is off loaded or doesn't show up at the gate their bags would typically be removed for security reasons. That doesn't mean bags can't travel unaccompanied - just that if a passenger voluntarily offloads themselves their bags can't stay on.
highly resource-constrained embedded processors

For me, that means code space and RAM measured in kilobytes, cycles in MHz. Most people don't realize that serializing data (most importantly, floating point numbers) to strings is a complicated and time-intensive matter. Even a limited printf implementation can easily cost you many kilobytes. Not to mention it introduces you to C's most special hell: variable length memory blocks containing strings.

The one thing that embedded gives you is a lot of control about your computing environment. Just sending around binary data is a very viable thing to do under these conditions. Not so for JSON; its single biggest selling point is that you can use it in every platform out there. Its the oldest tradeoff: giving up flexibility allows you to use more constrained processors (and save money).
I made the utility to help you track the rank of your hacker news post. Simply enter item id, or click "back" and select "History"->"View". Feedbacks are welcome.

Note: It only has two days of data, so older news won't work.
>I'm being pedantic, but wouldn't the Air be a more appropriate netbook comparison?

The Air predates the brief netbook craze. The netbook was supposed to be the cheap computer you can take everywhere. People were surfing the net from their couch, using it on long commutes, and bringing them everywhere. The iPad pretty much killed the nascent netbook market.

The Mac Air took a couple iterations to get popular, but it's now cannibalizing the college kid/small business person's laptop. The Air might be as light as a netbook, but it's not a cheap compromise, like the netbooks were.
Every single example in the article was out of line and simply never appropriate.

I'm willing to believe that maybe some of these men simply do not understand the difference between confidence and assertiveness and straight-up sexual harassment. If the guys are truly ignorant to the rudeness of their actions, the red/yellow/green card should have a very positive effect.
DEFCON: No better than college bars.
Having trouble downloading? Try using Internet Explorer and installing the download manager MS ask you to. The download isn't astoundingly fast, but I'm getting between 1.5 and 2MB/s here in Poland.

Generating keys took a couple of attempts and a minute or two, but no major hassles.
Change the game name, Change the action names, Change the colors (nothing else), Put the new thing on the appstore, Report results.
Mars Science Laboratory - Images
Face-tracked Pacman
Dual-link DVI is still one connector. Needing two separate ports to drive a monitor is pretty un-Apple.
1) Don't spend two years working on your iPad game before you ship it. Far too long a cycle.

2) As an indie dev, you're suppose to attack the easiest, lowest hanging fruit to build your income base. After you're past a point, you can take on ambitious long-term projects. Otherwise you are always depending on a "hit" title.
At first, 200,000 downloads sounded impressive, getting into the top apps lists is also impressive, but the problem is outlined in the second paragraph.

>>Gasketball was released for free, with a one-time in-app purchase that unlocks the rest of the game offered for $2.99. The conversion rate to the paid version of the game sits at 0.67%.

It seems like they should figure out why the conversion rate is low (e.g. perhaps the free version offers too much functionality for free, perhaps the free version quality is poor and users aren't motivated to pay more etc...)
Arg! "[0 ... 255] = &&l_bad" compiles as valid C, totally confused by this code. Is this some weird gcc specific extension? Hm, probably part of the C99 array extensions. Checking...

Answer: C99, borrowed from a GCC extension. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.1.2/gcc/Designated-Inits...
IIRC with 2008 R2, they didn't limit functionality if you didn't activate, they just took away the background and popped up a dialog when the system started. Activation was really only necessary to make sure you were licensed correctly (which isn't really relevent to TechNet/MSDN subscribers who could install as many copies as they want for evaluation/development purposes IIRC).

If they took the same lenient approach to activation (which probably isn't the case because it's a consumer OS), I could almost understand not giving license keys to technet subscribers, as their software is for planning/evaluation purposes only.
H.264 is already superior to VP8. I see no reason to suspect that this situation will change.

EDIT: I mean to say, H.264 implementations (particularly x264) are way, way, way out in front of VP8, so even as the H.264 standard is better, the actual facts on the ground are even more so. The only reason to use VP8 (and let me be clear: I think this is a perfectly legitimate reason) is political.
The line is going to vary depending on the personality of the person you're trying to flirt with and how attractive they find you. That's just the way it is. This is why you flirt in a civilized manner first, and look for signs that they are or are not interested. And if you're paying attention you ought to notice if you make them uncomfortable, and apologize.
Surprise What to expect from Windows 8
Mu. It's an applications language.
I just find it ugly.

I'll admit that's oldschool, and use lots of short variable names, often abbreviated. This tends to be less of a source of error than a typoInAnExtremlyLongAndVerboseVariableName.
Misuse of Patriot act Help save my friend from being wrongfully deported
Embedded machines these days often run at a gigahertz (or most of it), and have enough RAM to run Linux. Shuffling around strings is not a problem.
> There are plenty of senior level programmers that are quite deserving of the name who deliberately comment very lightly if at all.

Senior in name (and possibly years) only. I've spent enough years cleaning up messes to know that master programmers:

- Design carefully
- Comment liberally
- Test thoroughly

Thus they produce clean, well documented, understandable code. Skipping any part of that list is foisting delaying the cost for a much larger later reckoning of some poor future persons.

You might get away without commenting, but you're not doing anyone any favors. Skip all three and you're incurring significant technical debt.

I have no respect for programmers that think their sole job is to write code (no matter how "descriptive" it is).

> The most important case where there is no reasonable alternative is in descriptions of an API. The code that is there is how it happens to work right now. If you want to know what you can rely on to remain true in the future, read the documentation. Anything not documented is not part of the API, and you should be prepared to find it changed in the next release.

All functions are API. Some is mutable, because you can check and modify all callers. Some is immutable, because you can't.

It all needs to be documented, and the cost for not doing so can scale exponentially as a code base grows.
Science-fiction author (and SFWA president) John Scalzi covers this kind of thing pretty well in the context of sci-fi/comics/anime conventions (where creepy asshats are also an ongoing problem). Seems equally applicable here:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/08/09/an-incomplete-guide-to...
Functions - the Fundamental Unit of Code?
No, it's about booleans all right. Scrub through the lesson and you'll see how.
This smacked of RIAA logic. It doesn't matter what your conversion rate is when your game is free - non-converts don't cost you money.
The cards could be given for any non-appropriate behavior, not just sexual harassment of women. Keep in mind that there are also some sexist women that can't behave themselves.

EDIT: The cards don't seem to be gender specific, though it is implied that they will be mainly used by females.
> I imagined that whether or not all the bags (or even passengers) made it was of little concern to the pilots.

I'm imagining the pilot nonchalantly pulling away from the terminal while late passengers are spilling out of the terminal connector.
Should I be on Twitter? An Experiment – Part 1
No, he's just prolific.
Sounds like fun, but won't the quality be fairly bad?
Even better when handling files is to use the with statement.

with open(filename, 'r') as myfile:
data = myfile.read()
# do something with data

The nice thing about with is that it doubles as a try...except block and automatically closes the file for you.
'what's over the line in one circumstance could be interpreted as harmless flirting in another.'

Yes. You're allowed to greet your friends by hugging them if that's the kind of relationship you have with them. You are not allowed to greet a bank teller that way, or a canvasser, or most of the other people you encounter. The fact that what's appropriate in one situation is inappropriate in another situation is tangential, because...

"the guy must guess where that line is and that he'll be wrong sometimes."

is not really true. First of all, understanding how another human feels in a situation is not 'guessing.' As social animals, humans are excellent at reading cues from body language, facial expressions, etc. to understand how other humans feel.

Second, as a previous reply said, paying attention in your interactions with other humans is actually your responsibility. If you are the least bit perceptive, you are extremely unlikely to be wrong about 'where the line is.' And to go a little further in the you-really-shouldn't-feel-threatened-by-this vein, if you're one of the people who worries about crossing the line unintentionally, you've probably never been near it.
Wow, I honestly never thought I'd see the day.
I don't know american law, but to me that would be just as silly as suing the post office because someone sent you a postcard with the message "fuck you".

Anyway, if she sues, won't her name be on the public records of the case?

IMHO she should just host her videos elsewhere. I can't even begin to imagine how many similar cases of internet drama goes on over at youtube every single day.
Wherever that discussion shakes out, anybody who has ever been knows that DEFCON isn't exactly a conference.

Sure there are talks, but kids don't run away from home to attend Black Hat Briefings.
Actions in what regard?

Adrian Lamo's reputation has certainly taken a hit.