skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Taking complex things and making them simple is not the mark of a "super programmer". Or, at least, it's not enough. A highly skilled programmer needs to be able to deeply understand multiple layers of abstraction at the same time. He or she needs to be able to know what an abstraction layer promises, and what its performance characteristics are --- and also be able to grok the layers above and below that abstraction layer to a similar deep level.

I call it "abstraction surfing", and it's not something that all people can do well. I believe having this skill tends to correlate very well with high productivity programmers --- and it's not a skill that all people have.
Also, the advantage of not having to keep your password database secret is negated by problem of keeping your salt file secret.
I like the consistency/tradition, it's like the Hello World! of images.
Pixar open sources production animation code, patents
> I don't understand how your comment is a refutation of the assertion that C will teach you more about the machine than other languages.

It completely hides some of the most important aspects of any modern hardware from you. The only thing it really exposes you to is manual memory management, and even then the view of memory C gives you is grossly simplified compared to how memory actually works on any modern hardware.

> Which language would you recommend using if you want to learn more about the machine?

Pick a machine and learn that machine's assembly language.
$5 a month is $60 a year, which is a price increase.
From my experience with super programmers:

The super programmer converts complex ideas into code coherent to the normal programmer.

The super programmer makes difficult decisions where the normal programmer sees only one option.
Young people are already dying in large numbers in some African countries.
Voice command for OSX
"One thing I have tried to do is not go crazy with third party OS tweaks. I’ve tried to keep things simple by only modifying a few key areas that were bugging me about iOS."

If only more people would understand this. A lot of people think jailbreaking your device leads to performance issues and instability. It does not. It's the software that you install on your phone afterwards that leads to these.

I also enjoy tweaks that add features in a way that seems native to the OS. Some (random) examples:

CyDelete, Zephyr, Curiosa, Safari Download Manager, Bolt, Bars, F.lux, ShowCase, iFile, MultiIconMover, Reveal.
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
GitHub buttons "down," error cites blocking framing for "security purposes"
Developer interest and public interest, unfortunately are usually in two different ballparks. I love tilling window managers, but my dear old mother probably wouldn't. Anyhow, my employer just bought passes for all senior and junior developers, so, through a bit of anecdotal evidence here, I bet quite a few developers are only attending through their employer.
Just as a heads up for fellow HNers using "GitHub buttons" on their project pages. Two of mine were affected (displaying many annoying alert popups). It seems GitHub has blocked framing of project pages (GitHub buttons operates as a render GitHub project page in an iframe).

For now, comment them out.
I can assure you that men with daughters understand the problem.

You can't really take reddit as a good sample of men in general. 56% of reddit is age 18-25, as compared to about 7% of the overall US population.

The reason this is a problem is that young adults are much more likely than average to exhibit poor judgment, inaccurate risk perception, perceived invulnerability and egocentrism. This has been shown in countless studies. Of course it is only true statistically, not necessarily of any particular individual.

So yes, reddit is full of hurtful crap, and it gets upvoted in the default subreddits. And you can legitimately take that as evidence that young men don't understand the problem.

But, eventually, they do grow up.
I think it would be almost impossible for their culture to change. One way might be for the first world to pay monthly stipends to families that have no more than 2 kids. Then taper it off over many decades.
> Android is the future of gaming

This is a pretty big statement. I don't see Android gaming taking any sizable chunk out of PlayStation/Xbox/Wii, or iOS gaming for that matter. I see Android gaming doing fine on Android and among smartphones in general.
> Is developing an app and getting it published to the App Store sufficient?

Not sufficient but it is pretty much necessary.
What happens when it hits a dead end? At least a helicopter can stop and return on exactly the track it came in on.

Presumably one of the reasons for the prebuilt map is so that it doesn't enter a dead end, which some parking garages have.
I work at Facebook and have been involved in the Hiphop for PHP project for the past few years.

We have our own VM written and it isn't based on the JVM.

Bytecode:
https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/blob/master/doc/bytec...

Code:
https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/tree/master/src/runti...
> Is basic human empathy such a bad reason to try and help?

If the help does more harm than good in the long run, then obviously yes. Whether a particular course of action does more harm than good is open to debate.
It's not just porting, but re-designing for gamepads, TV size and viewing distance, longer gaming sessions, etc.. Mobile touchscreen games are not going to translate without changes to gameplay and control schemes.

The best candidates for OUYA are games that have on-screen buttons (yuck!) and wireless gamepad support (who does that on a phone/tablet anyway?!). They will probably be easy. But who wants to play Fruit Ninja with a joystick? Or sit in front of their TV hitting only one button to play Jetpack Joyride?
I have a PhD and I worked for several by industry research labs. So when the OP mentions " he went “oh well, if you must make me code…” That pretty much made me go “no hire.” He clearly is being either dishonest or taking shortcuts, PhD's want to have a job that is interesting if it's to piss code all day I would have stopped at my Master degree. Pissing code, as much as many would like to think is not exactly challenging if you have a PhD (I'm not saying that having highly optimized, readable code isn't but having something that works is not that hard) so if the whole interview process is centered around how well you can write something in A/B/C/D language yes I understand the interviewee.

One funny thing: "Most places will actually pair you up with a mentor who is not your boss" this has to be a joke, I worked for HP-Labs and other big labs never ever had a mentor, usually if you have a issue you are pretty much welcome to discuss it with your colleague, have them review your proposed solution but boy you are on your own when it comes to do implement it.

Again the OP has no clue clue of what he is talking and it's sad because his research interests are security related:
"You are much more likely to land an interesting job at the coasts. West more than East."
I can prove easily that if you have a PhD in a security or somehow related (formal methods) you have more chances to land a job on the east coast: DARPA,IARPA, MITRE, DoD all these agencies are funding 80% of the security research of the country ! Easier if you are a citizen indeed, but I'm a foreigner on H1B and I still work on a DARPA funded project ...
One more joke:
"Most industrial positions will not care about your publications" seriously this guy is ridiculous or just unable to think outside his google circle, most labs are indeed more than interested in your publications because it means for them potential patent application, more contacts in conferences and the end goal a better reputation and more easier to build a consortium to respond to call for proposals or BAA(http://www.arl.army.mil/www/default.cfm?page=8). But coming from someone who has not many publication I understand, for information here is his publication list http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/h/...

Anyway I'll stop commenting the rest of his post, his post is not all bad but it's based on his personal experience and he does a generalization out of his limited experience.
One word - Mothra (http://godzilla.wikia.com/wiki/Mothra)
Along with Kernighan and Ritchie, I would also highly recommend getting a copy of 'C: A reference manual' by Harbison and Steele. That book explains a lot of stuff by topic and with descriptive examples. Especially beneficial for a quick reference.

Highly recommended.
I had the same thought, but that's not the case: https://alpha.app.net/dalton/post/32618
What makes Paris look like Paris?
Twapping?
It's not based on a general feeling. It's based on the fact that resources are limited. Any religion that successfully promotes "be fruitful and multiply" will certainly bump against that limit eventually. I can only suspect in any particular case because something else besides religion could be the main contributor to the bad things.
But C doesn't expose any of that in a meaningful, direct way.

You have to have a mental model of the cache and memory hierarchy in your head to write really efficient code in any language.
This is a side effect of the broken hiring process. Typically candidates are found by acronym matching. The folks who are below average (don't know what a closing brace is) will keep tweaking their CV/resume until they get called since it is pretty easy to guess what acronyms are being looked for.

When they don't succeed in getting hired they will keep repeating the process which means they will go through many interviews. A person on the other end of the bell curve is likely to interview a handful of times in their entire career so you are unlikely to ever see them.
I've seen approximately zero correlation between degree status and ability to write code. The best programmer I've ever worked with has a PhD... but so have at least two of the terrible ones.

I also submit that if programming is "not exactly challenging" then you are working on the wrong products and/or at the wrong level of abstraction.

There are legitimate reasons to prefer research, or management, or marketing, or sales over development, but lack of challenge is not one of them.
It is, though. Einstein wrote an entire book explaining the theory of general relativity to people who didn't even understand the math:

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Special-General-Theory-Vol/...

Most ideas can be broken down into simpler parts. For instance, multiplication used to be a university level subject, but most literate people can do multiplication up to any digit (given the time, of course).
The udacity class does an awesome job of teaching kalman filters, particle filters etc.

http://www.udacity.com/view#Course/cs373/CourseRev/apr2012/U...

In the course you go step by step implementing these things in python. The course far exceeded my expectaion from an online course.
Wrk - a command line interface to Trello
>> Street Fighter works on controllers, it doesn't work on touch screens.

I dunno about that. I've got SFIV Volt, SF II and King of Fighters on iOS, and they're not nearly as bad as I thought they would be. I normally use a fighting stick over a pad on consoles, but I definitely prefer the touchscreen over a game pad.

Sure you don't get the purist's 6 button controls, but then again, you don't on some of the other handheld versions either (SFA3 on Game Boy Color comes to mind).
Yeah, I really like the idea, but there's no way I'm going to run all that stuff at the command line every time I need to generate a password.

So, I wrote a gem:

http://github.com/jroes/passwordy
Dropmyemail to start backing up the Internet in Dallas
He specifically called out assembly as obviously better in this respect than C...
Just to note.

> He also found a matching specimen that had been sitting in the museum's collection, unclassified, for decades.
Alzheimer’s linked to buttered popcorn?
Sooooo basically:
* look at itunes top X lists
* post them on your website
* post to hacker news with a misleading title hoping to catch sales
The Unibody iPhone
I have been following yorAPI since beginning...its awesome..The command on the video (Create a foursquare like Back-end Infrastructure and API in 60 seconds or less in Youtube) are very simple and understandable so easy to catch by developers. Hope that more videos will publish in the future...:) and good luck !!!
It's definitely true that poor candidates are on the market much longer than excellent candidates so they are over represented in interviews. I don't think it follows that the hiring process is broken though. I think it's just evidence that hiring is hard. The very best candidates are essentially never on the "open market."
Famines in the modern age are rarely caused by anything other than war and bad local governance. If one approaches famine from the perspective that the issue is one of food shortage alone then they will be working on the wrong problem.
Marketing Is Dead
Because it would not catch mainstream people. No "cool" kid in the school would play unpopular games. And most popular games are AAA, yes there are quite a few indie gems - minecraft, angry birds, plants & zombies - but only few of them can keep them attached for many sequels.

Where Mario, Donkey Kong, Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto, Gran Turismo, and many others are games where kids expect them and know about them. These are AAA titles. This is what sells a console.
Is this cost offset in comparison to passwords actually being stored in a password manager? Do we know if all password managers are written in such a way that they generate independent salts per password?

What is the likelihood that you own or would have compromised 10 top domains? Not sure if that matters, just curious.

At the very least I'd personally prefer to use an open, understandable methodology to generate my passwords than some of the more popular options that are secured through obscurity.
NO, No. no. Diacetyl, a compound found in butter, MAY be linked to alzheimers, so IF it's true, ANY food with butter has this characteristic.

What you read is an idiotic staff news writer's spin. I mean, if they wrote "English muffins linked to Alzheimers", nobody would have read it.
I think it's "Windows 8 interface". Though I think I'd rather just keep calling it Metro. (Seriously, Microsoft should have told Metro AG to shove it.)
Production Node.js Secrets
http://learnyousomeerlang.com/

You can pick up the basic syntax in one full day easily (if you are an experienced developer and already understand functional programming) ... 3 or 4 days if you are new to functional coding or just very inexperienced.

It is a very brief / minimalist language from a syntax point of view. Then, it will take a week or two to get your head around OTP, which is the primary framework and has years (decades?) of mission critical work under its belt.

Then, at the end of your journey will be the really hard problems... dealing with massive netsplits at a cluster level, elections for new masters, and all the other hard problems that happen at the upper-tier of massive clusters.

If you are building an HTTP(S) app -- you can blessedly avoid a lot of these by avoiding a true massive cluster all together and using lots of individual "micro clusters"(note) balanced / routed by HTTP middle-ware.

Also, check out Cowboy [webserver] (https://github.com/extend/cowboy/), Agner [package manager] (http://erlagner.org/) and of course, the always awesome rebar [build tool] (https://github.com/basho/rebar/)

.. and I love lager [log tool, make those erlang logs less alien looking] (http://basho.com/blog/technical/2011/07/20/Introducing-Lager...)

(note) This is basically a strategy of using small clusters based on locations -- so if you are across lets say 3 locations, you would build 3 node clusters, 1 node per location and have them work as a unit localizing workloads and responding to requests, and then you allow your higher level middle-ware to deal with your many groups of "micro clusters". High reliability rather cheaply, but means you need your own system for pushing out updates.
I have Scott's book, and I've read his coverage of parsing, although it's been over a year since, and TBH I don't think it's very good. The whole book just tries to cover too much, and ends up doing a fair amount of hand waving.
>> Why might a motley collection of devices with disparate specs upend a highly focused and adaptable juggernaut

Isn't that what gaming PCs are?
I think the model could be verticalized and spun out as a semi-silo'd location for enthusiasts of [topic]
Must be FB dollars if they can't manage to keep the lights on with 15-20 mil
Jeff Dean is famously modest, and undoubtably would resist the label "super programmer" in the same way that Terry Tao resists the label "math prodigy".

That doesn't mean that the label does not fit.

And no, he doesn't work in a vacuum. On the other hand, I think that he deserves the praise that I just heaped on him.
I didn't know about the Web Store requirement. I am on Firefox and I have some prehistoric version of Chrome that I use for testing Chrome stuff.

If anyone is willing to repackage the extension and submit to the Chrome Store, it'd be much appreciated.
Motorola to Cut 20% of Work Force, Part of Sweeping Change
Thanks for the suggested apps. Reveal looks pretty neat and I'll definitely give it a go.
Refer to items 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
Yes, some people can have functional lives on heroin.

But almost none of them stop using, ever.
Right. It couldn't possibly be that 5000 people actually wanted to go.
Wow, just wow. While animation isn't my foray it sure looks like a lot of time and effort has gone into Subdiv only for them to give it away and let you use it for anything. Pixar are amazing and not to mention the end result of Subdiv is as equally as amazing.
I can sum up this article:

A PhD is roughly the same as a Masters for getting a job, except that you get paid a bit more if it's a big company with an HR department. You haven't really developed any skills that are useful, and now you are going to be paired up with some 25 year old that has 3 years of experience more than you do at 30. Well, you might be able to do well, or maybe not, some PhD's are great and some are suck, and the same is true for people without degrees. You have to prove you are valuable. This is all going to make you very depressed since you are facing 50 hour weeks doing work you don't really care about, instead of 9 hour weeks doing only what interests you in Academia, but you have to eat so you might as well get on with it.

Well, that's my summary :) (I'm a bit biased being a dropout)
Yes, for example. Take the area under a curve of a known equation.

What we do is divide it into an infinite number of rectangles we can add together and come up with a function for that. Rediculously easy in hind-sight but that's the basis of the integral. Of course using computers those which cannot be easily processed symbolically can be processed using Euler's Method, which gives you a close approximation.

Edit: Also I think that all the complexity of accounting systems came from small solutions to questions, such as tracking how different business partners are to be compensated in a Europe where nobody had the money stores to buy much without credit. See http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-software-architec... and I think that has a lot of lessons for programming today.
The submitted article contains a key fact, "The problem with this picture is that there are 10 PhD graduates for every tenure-track position. And, while I don’t have figures, the industrial labs don’t hire at a much faster rate either. And that left regular industry jobs as the only viable option for the vast majority of PhDs," which actually applies to a lot of academic major subjects.

The humanities are worse: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-kno... .
I think addiction has less to do with the 'drug' and more to do with the person. Be it heroin, pain killers, sex, gambling, smoking, or alcohol segments of society are able to use these in a way that does not interfere with their own life or those of people around them.

There are also people who use these as a means of escape or have limited coping resources. It is not that the cigarette is bad, or the pain killer is bad, or sex is bad.

In saying that, having a methadone dispensary four doors down from where I am sitting, I see first hand the obvious effects of drug addiction and how people struggle to escape it's grasp.
This is pretty cool. I haven't followed graphics tech in a while, but Subdivision Surfaces are one of the most important modeling primitives around. Back in the day when Catmull and Clark first developed them Pixar held a patent on them and it was pretty unclear how aggressive they'd be defending it - the controversial removal of Larry Gritz's BMRT didn't bode well. It's great to see them making steps towards an open model at last.
Collaborative imagining of the first 32 weeks of a global oil crisis
Just because you understand something deeply and possess the pedagogical skills to explain it to an elderly layperson doesn't mean it's suddenly easy after you've explained it, and doesn't mean it was easy to put in the hard work required get to that level of understanding. Breaking something complicated down and explaining it to a layperson is a different thing than actually doing the work yourself.

Are you suggesting that if one is able to explain a complicated problem to their grandmother, somehow the original problem was actually easy, or is made easy by this explanation? I haven't read Einstein's book on relativity linked in your sibling comment, but I don't think the existence of this book makes relativity an easy thing to have worked on.
I don't know much about CPU's and which ones are better than others. They all seem fast enough to run a text editor and a browser for my needs.

That being said — I seem to have no issues viewing a fully functional watch on an iPhone 4S. The areas I actually have trouble with seem to be the usual suspects — the code display doesn't translate to touch at all so I can't scroll vertically to see how this was done beyond what is shown as a "page" worth of code.

Call me impressed in general with the work that was done. Call me doubly impressed that it works on a computer that fits in my pocket and had a primary purpose at one time of making telephone calls.
I want to make sure I got you correctly. Are you saying that the technical (co-)founder of the startup you're interviewing for on average doesn't know how to spot a good programmer?
pretty epic pixar, thanks! good way to set an example for the rest for the fx community on sharing.

have to say im pretty impressed with the state of the code.

love it when i see ++index in for loops! props.
Here's direct link to github repo: https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/OpenSubdiv