skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's my view on this:

1. There is a law of diminishing returns when it comes to effort spent vs reward. I think we can take that as axiomatic;

2. Different skills are naturally harder or easier for different people. Call this affinity;

3. Given the effort vs reward curve and the different affinity levels different people have you will find that with any given skill people will tend to plateau at a particular level.

This isn't simply a question of intelligence or innate ability. More than anything it comes down to motivation. Priorities vary. Perhaps someone is particularly keen on their social lives, families, hobbies or whatever and whatever skill from which they derive their livelihood just needs to be sufficiently good for them to get by.

For example, I was an OK chess player. Not great. Not even particularly good but I did reach a point where I recognized that if I wanted to get better it was going to be a serious amount of effort. Nowadays I tend to play Euro boardgames simply because they have a nice effort vs reward curve and aren't (potentially) demanding mistresses like, say, Chess, Go, etc;

4. The more time you spend in any particular field the more you will master it and begin to see problems with it; and

5. Certain environments will tend to make you more or less likely to succeed. For example, if you want to get better at pretty much anything, hang around with really good people who are really good at it.

Many people don't get that far because they either plateau or the effort vs reward curve gets too flat and they move onto other things.

So what I tend to think of as "super programmers" combine the traits of:

- some level of natural affinity;

- the dedication to stick with something; and

- they care enough not to simply to just enough to get by.

The last I think is particularly key. When I assess an engineer one of the things I'm looking for more than anything is that they care about their craft. They can assess what they see and what they do critically and recognize where it falls short, what works and what can be done better.

It's part of the reason I'm a strict pragmatist and prefer other engineers who are like-minded. Ideologues (IMHO) tend to have judgement clouded by dogma and preconceived notions.

Woody Allen famously said "80% of success is just showing up". If you care about your craft and keep plugging away at it good things will happen. Those programmers we tend to think of as "super" or "rock stars" I think tend to combine all these traits with the timing and luck of having that flash of insight at the right time and following through with it.

Like they say, good ideas are cheap. It's execution that matters.
>If heroin really is "so good," why does it have such a tiny
share of the illegal drug market? Marijuana is more than 45
times as popular.

One possible reason is that people are squeamish about needles and uncomfortable consuming drugs intravenously.
The C standard basically only guarantees that pointer arithmetic works when the pointers involved all point to the same array object (it also allows for a pointer just off the end of an array object). Other pointer arithmetic or comparison is undefined behavior and an implementation can do whatever it pleases.
Who would 3d print uniforms?
You already did a hack job comparing architectures (
kevingadd hits this point first, so I won't elaborate too much). It's unfortunate too--you probably could've made a strong case that, for example, the six hardware threads on the 360's Xenon may exceed the performance of the Cortex chipset in the Ouya.

As far as mapping issues, if you are referring to direct porting of mobile games, you may well be wrong again. If the game uses vector art, it seems reasonable that that will scale, and then all you worry about is the control scheme being tolerant enough to work. If you allow for any porting effort at all, I imagine that developers will have no trouble getting the touchpad to work well enough.

As far as your analysis about why people might not prefer this to the XBLA/XBLIG or similar venue--consider the issues involved in getting updates pushed out to Fez, and what happened there. Consider also the ease of developing with such cheap devkits (consider what it costs for developing on a PS3 or 360, in earnest!), and that Android devs can target a fixed hardware target and optimize for it. You can't put enough value on saying "Fuck it, we target 4.0 on Ouya, with this hardware, screw the rest."

The launch hardware count, additionally, may or may not be increased in supply depending on how their logistics pan out. I don't think you're even remotely fair in your criticism there.

Frankly, you seem to be full of shit. Enjoy your 15 minutes.
This is ridiculous considering millions of sites are powered by user content. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and even GOOGLE themselves have a very high number of copyright complaints and of course Google will make exceptions for them. Is it just me or is Google taking over the world?
This is fricking genius! Thanks for the link!
China Politics, Oil Needs Risk Conflict in S. China Sea
> One quality I find with above-average programmers is they type so much faster than the average programmers.

Correlation, causation, etc... I imagine that most above-average programmers have spent a lot of time programming, which does involve some typing. So they get relatively fast at it. But I would just caution against bringing up typing speed since it shouldn't be a goal in and of itself.

> They also have to be able to think quicker once the steps ahead of them are clear.

Not really sure how typing quickly helps you think quicker. I've seen programmers who appear to love banging their fingers against the keyboard but never stop to think, and suffer for it. (anecdata, etc)
Seeing as you can totally smoke heroine, I think it has less to do with the needles and more to do with the fact that it is one of the most addictive substances in the world and people regularly die from overdose.

Also, nearly all "normal" tasks can be done stoned on pot but you can hardly talk when you're on heroine.
The difference between the output of SHA512 and random data is negligible, provided that the master password is of non-negligible entropy. This is a necessary property of a secure hash function. HMAC or HKDF would probably be more appropriate here, but this usage is not inherently insecure.

I'd certainly love to see you try to recover the master password from only 10 hashes.
Perhaps even more promising is the effort they appear to be putting in to maintaining the open-sourced project.

Obviously Pixar is still using this library, and would love to get fixes and features to fold back into the upstream project, however they are also actively managing and responding to issues being raised. This speaks volumes to how serious they are about supporting this software in its open-source form. I hope this becomes another successful case study of how to do open source, and provides useful feedback and additions for Pixar.
Sorry for the late response, I missed your reply.

All of the fonts in that postscript file are bitmaps. Knuth started with metafont, but the file he distributed only contains bitmaps.

If you look inside the file, you'll find the comment "DVIPSBitmapFont". And if you convert it to PDF and zoom in, you'll see that the fonts are bitmaps. This is typical for TeX files generated by dvips prior to the widespread adoption of the Type1 equivalents for the computer modern fonts.

Fortunately, the file was generated by a recent version of dvips, so the "pkfix" script can be used to rewrite it with Type1 fonts substituted for the bitmapped fonts. I'd recommend doing this before converting it to PDF.

It's a bit harder to fix this after PDF conversion. A few years ago, I wrote some Java code to do it (inspired by "pkfix-helper"), but it worked off of font metric signatures so it's not very accurate for small font subsets (e.g. exponents). To fix this, I need to actually look at bitmaps (or ask the user), and I never got around to implementing that.

I suppose it's a minor issue, but it is a pet peeve of mine. I've come across a lot of papers on the net in PDF or PS format that look unnecessarily bad when viewed on a computer screen.
A couple comments:

1. Is chronic methadone usage really that bad? It's never great to be dependent on a substance to function, but if all it takes is a trip to the methadone clinic for your daily dose, but the rest of your life is relatively normal, is that so bad considering the alternative?

2. I've heard methadone withdrawal is much worse than withdrawal from heroin. Heroin WD symptoms are very intense, but last about a week. Methadone WD symptoms aren't that intense, but they last for months. It take an impressive amount of willpower to put up with being tired, weak and "sick" for months.
VirtualBox - The simplest way to experience a desktop ready FreeBSD
I don't need multiple stdouts, necessarily. I do need 2&>1 for the social web.
But simplification is the hard part... Being able to understand a solution and being able to come up with a solution are two very different things.
The reason it is annoying for people who are experienced is that generally they are looking for jobs where they get to work on difficult and interesting problems. Being asked such a simple question might indicate that you are interviewing for a position you won't want.

I'd personally be very tempted to answer the whiteboard question and immediately explain that I'm not interested in a job that consists only of writing trivial implementations and ask if they can give examples of real problems they face which are non-trivial.

I have actually had one interviewee ask me such a question, although not in response to a simple test or question of my own. This impressed me, although I get the impression that most interviewers would not appreciate this in a similar way to how they do not appreciate candidates that find their fizz-buzz test annoying.

An interview is not a one way test. It is a two way test where the employer can also fail.
Simple Hadoop Streaming Tutorial Using Python
Here's what I think.

Sometimes I am in superstar mode and more often I am not. When I am in superstar mode, I am able to latently process problems ahead of time and decompose them. That way when I get to the problems they all seem simple.

The rest of the time I have to run up against a problem first, let it sit and see if it decomposes for me, and if not come back and actively try to decompose it. Once I am actually ready to sit down and start coding, all the hard part is over. The question is how much of the hard part can be done latently before I get to it.
>These look like two industries that are ripe for disruption.

Please go on— how would one disrupt these industries?
That is pretty rad. Nice to see that support for Alembic is on the wish list. Hopefully some of the other studios will contribute back. I've been watching from the side lines hoping to see a robust framework / toolkit emerge in open source that deals with some of these lower-level issues. (Blender has pretty much nailed the high level tool kit).

If anyone is interested and didn't already know, ILM & Sony made a splash into open source last year with Alembic http://www.alembic.io/
Outdoor videogame
No, I said to refer to items 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Nowhere did I say that.

If you really want me to get concrete, here's the dirt on startups hiring troubles: they usually flub 4 and/or 5.

Programmers are wising up. Only a small subset of startups are worth their time, unless it's a lifestyle choice, so they're choosy. Even among the small subset of startups that are worthwhile, they're not necessarily adept at communicating what actually appeals to programmers.
I think the problem that a lot of people get into is that your ability to maintain moderate use is not static.

If your life is going well and your not under a lot of stress, I could see certain people who could use heroin recreationally. Now have those same people lose their job, get divorced or have a depressive episode and watch their drug use spiral out of control. I've seen it before.
This is true. For CS PhDs you should always look to see if they've done any large implementation work or if they've focused more on math. The former will generally have large amounts of source code available for inspection. The latter may or may not be good at programming.
It may be package specific. I think packages have to $ npm -force publish again to get working.
So this article suggests we're bringing manufacturing back to America, but it's pretty light on pointing out that none of these methods will create any of the types of jobs that the departure of manufacturing took away - which I suspect is one of the root causes of a lot of the issues with things made in China.
Of my two friends who started using heroin as teenagers, both destroyed their pancreas by their early thirties. As of now (age 37), one of them has died from an overdose. The other is intermittently homeless.
It's actually a pretty simple probabilistic algorithm. You can find a decent example here:

http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
Heroin is so awesome but so profoundly bad for your life. Please be careful with your opiates.
Crazy prediction- they announce Windows 9 here.

My thinking?

1) In order to compete with iOS, OSX and Android, Windows has to move to a yearly release schedule.

2) Rather than sell boxed copies of Windows for $119 every 3 years, why not sell an upgrade from the previous version for $40 every one year?

3) Only supporting upgrades from the previous version would push a steeper upgrade curve, which allows developers to target the newer features (as it is now, Windows developers have to wait eons to leverage new features).

4) Windows Phone team was able to do it. Normally I'd say that Microsoft is too slow to adapt, but the Windows Phone team was able to do it, so I won't count out the Windows 8 team.

So, why announce Windows 9 at Build?

The current $40 Win8 upgrade (from XP, Vista, Win7) expires January 31st. My guess is that Microsoft wants to get everyone on board to Windows 8 then do upgrades only from Win8 to Win9.

To do this, they need to announce Win 9 before the upgrade to Win 8 expires- tell everyone to upgrade ASAP or they'll have to pay full price for Win9.

It's just a hunch though. If not Build, then CES. But my understanding is that they're not participating in CES anymore.
Mitt Romney announces Paul Ryan as vice-presidential running mate
Addiction is a weird beast. As I understand it is has two parts:

1. Physiological dependence as evidenced by tolerance and withdrawal symptoms; and

2. Psychological addiction.

(2) can manifest itself in many ways that go well beyond drugs--gambling, adrenalin junkies, even Farmville.

The danger of some hard drugs is that they can, for some unfortunate segment of the population, be a potent mix of (1) and (2).

Further to (1) is that genes seem to play a role [1]. My personal view is that like many complex "traits", genetics will give certain people a predisposition to addiction.

The real danger of certain hard drugs (IMHO) is that you often don't you're predisposed to something until it's too late. It's almost certainly the exception rather than the norm but (I believe) you can get addicted to certain drugs very very quickly.

You may be able to use them just fine and not get addicted. Or you may not. Is it really worth the risk in case you turn into one of those people who spends the rest of their (much shortened) lives chasing that initial high?

[1]: http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/addiction/genetics/
I love this wish list item:
"John Lasseter loves looking at film assets in progress on an iPad. If anyone were to get this working on iOS he'd be looking at your code, and the apple geeks in all of us would smile."
Uuhhh...damn! I messed that up. corrected now! thanks!
ViralFever releases startup Internet marketing guide "Viral Theory 101"
Gameboy Color Emulator:  A brilliant use of HTML5
One of the most brilliant uses of HTML5 I've ever seen. The technique he used to build this is beyond my comprehension at this point, but I'd certainly love to dive into his code (which is available publicly on Github) and figure it all out!
it's not about a "new search startup"

this happened during the dot-com
Given the amount of debate around Metro, I don't think people I've discussed with will stop calling it that way.

(BTW isn't that 'Modern UI' lately?)
Never tried heroin, but I had to come off oxycodone cold turkey (from about 40mg a day). My pain doctor was trying to slowly bring my down from a peak in the hospital of 150mg of Demerol every 4 hours. It was going too slowly for my patience, so (out of the hospital) I just stopped. The withdrawal sucked--about 4 days of sweats, shaking, tachycardia, and a real hard time sleeping. I ended up using pot to help get me through it.

But ultimately, despite the physical dependance, it was easy to quit because I wanted to. Most people that fail to get off opiates fail because they don't entirely want to get off. They may think they want off, or think the need to get off, but at some level they still want the drug, and that is the essence of addiction.
> Asking someone experienced to write the "print a string in reverse" algorithm will naturally insult them.

Being insulted is the wrong reaction. Either you are a good coder, you will write it down on the board in one minute and we'll move on, or you are not a good coder, you have a crappy attitude and you are not getting an offer.
>I love tilling window managers, but my dear old mother probably wouldn't.

You'd be surprised. Sure they'd hate to use ratpoison but the concept holds ground. I've heard people ask if Win7 could do Aero Snap all the time automatically.
Manufacturing output in the United States generally increases over time, but output is generated through gains in productivity from automation (e.g. robots). Therefore, the absolute number of jobs in the manufacturing sector has been steadily declining as well and will continue to do so both here and in China.

http://mercatus.org/publication/us-manufacturing-output-vs-j...

In fact, Foxconn itself is rapidly increasing its robot workforce from 10,000 robots to a goal of 1 million robots by 2014.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-07/30/c_131...
Numerous third party studios were getting stuck into PlayStation game production, and a string of classic titles began to emerge.

This is the biggest reason Sony won. Its the oldest lesson in our business. You can have the greatest hardware in the world, the best operating system, the best API - the best platform - but if you don't have the great software that your users crave, its just ornamentation. Sony never had the best games, but they always had the biggest selection - something to satisfy whatever you were hungry for.

In Europe especially Sony displayed a masterly grasp of how to market a games machine to a more mature audience; the company knew that those gamers which had grown up with the 8-bit and 16-bit consoles were gradually reaching adulthood and would therefore require more “grown-up” gaming experiences.

This was the first time that I began to understand that hype and flash could woo consumers into a frenzy even if there was no substance. Tomb Raider was crap. You never had to spend 10 minutes lining up a jump in a Super Mario game. Resident Evil was garbage. No one ever picked up a controller to play Legend of Zelda and spent two hours learning how to walk. Metal Gear Solid was guilty of all the FMV tricks that Sony had accused Phillips of doing. You didn't get any of that in Goldeneye.

Winning isn't always about having the best product. Sometimes its about having the most product, or the flashiest product, or the cheapest product. There's no better lesson to prove that than the Sony Playstation
My initial reaction to this was, "Why would Pixar do this and remove such an advantage that they hold against Dreamworks and other animation companies?" And then it dawned on me, the animation is such a small piece of why we love their movies. We love them for their characters and their writing and their stories. The animation is the glue that ties it together so this is actually really rad. Now that people can use this to animate as well as Pixar, it's time for everyone to tell the best stories they can and capture the hearts of future generations, just like Pixar has.

Side question: If Jobs were still alive, do you think this would have happened?
My reality is bogus -- I'm in some kind of prison.

God says...
C:\Text\BIBLE.TXT

pect persons,
neither take a gift: for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise, and
pervert the words of the righteous.

16:20 That which is altogether just shalt thou follow, that thou
mayest live, and inherit the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

16:21 Thou shalt not plant thee a grove of any trees near unto the
altar of the LORD thy God, which thou shalt make thee.

16:22 Neither shalt thou set thee up any image; which the LORD thy God
hateth.

17:1 Thou shalt not sacrifice unto the
Maybe have it tweet out at intervals, and accept quotes via twitter.

RSS feed produces quotes at intervals as set within url.
OP was asking about correcting grammar, the link you provided although informative talks about implementing a spellcheck.
I bookmarked this website some months back and still visit it at least once a week http://www.quotegarden.com/effort.html
Does this work on child threads?
Fascinating. I wonder if this can be applied to sounds as well ? What makes it more interesting with sound is we can "time travel" so to speak, and sample across hundreds of years of music where as with imagery, you're just stuck with what Google streetview can show right now..
The junior developer who insists on not using an IDE working with Java is precisely the one who needs the most help.
did you even read the other comments?

"He was also drafted into the Wehrmacht to fight on the Eastern front" doesn't seem like he had a lot of choice there...
I can't see any good reason why someone would go to so much trouble to defend heroin, other than to assume that this is some kind of PR requested by establishment and/or intelligence groups which profit from heroin grown in places like Afghanistan (or, in the previous era, India).
Yes. Yes it did. I would easily pay $50 annually if I could get pure c.2010 Google with all the Boolean operators and none of the social bullshit. I deliberately stopped clicking on anything ad-related as soon as they screwed everything up after G+ launched (and stepped up my AdBlock+ filters), so I think they'd make more off of me by selling pure 'premium' search or something.
The resolution might not be beneficial for electronic displays, but the this technology can achieve a wider range of colors than any RGB display could possibly achieve. It's probably far less precise with current technology, but directly controlling the wavelength of the reflected light gives you access to more colors than just mixing 3 fixed wavelengths.
Wow!...perfectly described -- thats all i can say :)
I don't buy the argument that giving money keeps Africans from starving. 100 years ago the population of Sudan had 1,800,000 people, while according to a census some years ago they managed to multiply by 20. The population is estimated to be at more than 25 times what it had been 100 years ago, to be at 48,000,000. And yet there is hunger every year. Did the arable land multiply by 25?
Google has. Facebook had nothing to compromise. Microsoft... now you're trolling.

As for Twitter... they've done better than most, so far. But at some point, they'll have more pressure to show revenue. And then... how do they make money, again?