skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pinky: "Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?"

The Brain: "The same thing we do every night, Pinky—try to take over the world!"
In the beginning I too wanted to write that I don't agree with this split. Then I come to conclusion that he met far more programmers then I so he probably knows better.

Anyway I'm not sure were to put myself on this axis. My behavior changes depending on other variables(what consequences would bug have/how many times code is going to be executed etc).

FE: critical part of commercial software (like money calculation) would be written in a way that would try to make it obvious that there are no errors, in language with type checking with unit tests and if possible even with mathematical proof of correctness. With code review and QA thrown at it afterwards. To sum up very conservative(and costly) approach.

On the other hand my holiday photos got completely different treatment. Short python script, that would batch their HDR process in a way specific for their content and with a lot of dependencies to my current desktop setup, without any unit tests(script thrown up few temporary files making it easy for manual debug, had backup of my photos in case script ate them). The only conservative thing that I could think of in this setup was that I made it concurrent to use 4 cores because it was only one line change and 4time speed up in lengthy process was worth it.

Can someone suggest were on liberal-conservative axis am I?
More like A) We aren't getting the pictures from the best cameras yet and B) We didn't send the latest, greatest best cameras because we didn't want them to fail after 10 minutes use.

We send up camera's tested and hardened against temperature changes, dust, vibration, and radiation. Also cameras that require low power.

Furthermore, there is limited bandwidth. So we probably want to send back mediocre pictures most of the time and if we see something we really want in high quality we take a bunch of pictures of it and put them together.

As a final note, the quality of the sensor and lens probably matters a lot more than the number of mega pixels.
rsync to RAID 5 externals.

Crashplan running in background.

Google Drive for Docs and working files.

Github & other git services for projects.
I can't find anything that even remotely says "Web development requires static type checking".
Update: Google to pay $22.5M fine over privacy practices
Show HN: See Kickstarter successes and failures
A neat application, indeed - but there is definitely something to find flaw with: it is purported to provide the ability to route arbitrarily large pieces at a very low cost. However, a human operator is not like a gantry-style CNC router, they cannot simply "fly" over the work area. Typically, must operate the router in a "push and pull" fashion to maintain control. A human would become weary very quickly if you put them in a harness over a 50-ft piece of material and forced them to push and pull with their arms hanging below them. Finding motors with enough torque, but not so much to put the human in danger (you wouldn't want a software flaw to push the router in a dangerous direction without the operator being able to override it with their own physical strength) will limit what bits and materials the process can be used on. Granted, I'm fairly certain few are expecting to CNC route metallic materials by hand. =)

Overall a cool new application - I find the display on the screen one of the best features, and, in fact, I'd kill to have something like that -without- the motor correction. One could, with some work, replace the motors with encoders attached to spinning shafts, which were limited in which direction they could spin, and get rid of the tape - simply showing the user that they are following the pattern or not.
> We can go on and on about familiarity considerations, and planning considerations, and instrumentation considerations, and scientific concerns, etc. It all sounds like excuses after a bit.

It sounds like excuses? By what standard? That NASA operations don't move at the same speed as consumer technology? By what qualifications do you even have the balls to make a flippant comment like this?

> Further, let's say you are really not sure about that spanking new 20MP sensor, because it is new, you are not familiar with it, and it was not part of the plan drafted 10 years ago, why not add 1 extra camera with a 20MP sensor?

You don't even sound remotely technical when you blurt out some nonsense like this. Ever heard of the phrase: "Fast, good, cheap: pick two"? Well when you're sending shit to other planets it ain't gonna be fast and it ain't gonna be cheap, so it better damn well be good. And not good the way an iphone is good where it dazzles you and your hipster friends to wait in line so they can sell a hundred million of them. Good as in, you build one of them, you get one shot at it, and if you fuck up some small detail hundreds of millions of dollars and years of people lives are utterly wasted.
Are there any good ways to contribute bandwidth and storage to this without manually choosing and downloading a bunch of files? I would love to dedicate a few 100gb of storage to mirroring some of these files automatically (I have plenty of bandwidth to go with that too).
Is there currently any way to use Python in a Google Document spreadsheet?
The point is, a user has recourse in that event. Without those contract terms, they don't.
Obviously I was assuming same pixel size. Sorry if that wasn't clear. You're correct about the noise, of course. Pixel size is at least as important as the number of pixels. That's why a 4 megapixel cell phone sensor ($15) is vastly inferior in image quality to a 2 megapixel industrial sensor that's ten times larger in area ($200).

I have a 24 megapixel sensor lying on my desk. Its pixels are 6 micron wide, which is large (but not huge), and the thing is about 4 cm by 3 cm in size. I don't know much about cameras but I think that's about the biggest you can fit in a typical consumer camera body.
Here it is:
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/opentype/Default....
This doesn't actually seem to be all that new of an argument: the debate used to be about "craft" vs. "engineering" or between "software is math" and "software is mechanism".

For example of what's pretty close to a Yegge rant of the 1980's, see Edsger Dijkstra, "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science" [1]. It seems to be bemoaning similar debates in the software field, though from a very "conservative" perspective, since Dijkstra prefers that a formal proof should be required with every program, and one should completely avoid anthropomorphism in discussing software design.

Another thought that's crossed my mind: one of the reasons for the evolution of these approaches to politics and risk over the years has to do with the scale of impact. Liberally messing around with a social and economic systems can lead to widespread human disaster: China's Great Leap Forward comes to mind. How the software is used and how reliable it needs to be is an engineering tradeoff with regards to cost & time. This is often why you tend to see much more liberal approaches to software in smaller companies - the scale of impact is much smaller (in terms of customer base, and investment) when you cock up.

Now, it's clear that larger companies, particularly many IT shops, could learn a thing or two about being "progressive conservatives", as they've "conserved" for far too long and are caught in the trap of special interests (i.e. traditional vendors dependent on their cash). Fear of dynamic languages, open source, or cloud services, or non-waterfall development is mostly a reactionary ideology grounded with some kernels of truth - static typing DOES help codebases scale (but you shouldn't be proud of a large codebase), you can't just pick ANY open source library as some are DOA, or ANY cloud as some are unreliable, and tinkering with your delivery methodology can reduce your performance greatly due to confusion, plus there's plenty of cargo-cult agile consultants waiting to rope you in. So, you need to think these things through. But that's not an excuse for avoidance. Perhaps that means I'm a software moderate.

[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036...

(edit: typo)
Iran Plans To Stop Using The Internet By 2013
"The real claim is that college offers a significant advantage which it would be foolish to turn down."

That sure makes it sound like it's the only way.
Didn't know that a google document could connect to internet services, very nice.
Drupal’s increasing complexity is becoming a turnoff for developers
Mars Panorama (in colour)
I've edited the title - thanks.
I have a cheap box at a webhosting company with ssh access.

I use svn over ssh and check in all of my person stuff there.

This is really nice because I can share linux dotfiles, etc. between my work and home machines.
An Amazon-eBay throwdown is coming
* Crashplan, family plan that has unlimited backup for 5$/mnth

* Drobo FS for local backup, can go upto 5 HDDs as RAID.
You mean they implement their own event emitter following the EventTarget spec :)
I don't think Yegge is arguing anywhere that the language choice you make is tied into your overall corporate software "liberalness" or "conservativeness".

The "software liberal" companies he lists - Facebook and Amazon - both make heavy use of C++ (a "moderate-conservative" language to Yegge) and Amazon also uses Java heavily (another "moderate conservative" language.
Here's another awesome Google Doc in this area: A Google Spreadsheet that will harvest all tweets containing a given search string.

The code is interesting, and I had no idea Google Docs had the equivalent of CRON:

http://mashe.hawksey.info/2012/01/twitter-archive-tagsv3/
M-rge Is Offering $1 Million of Free Coworking Space and Classes for Hackers
up to 500 hackers/designers apply: http://m-rge.com
is there a way to check which of the 'successful' were actually built, not only backed?
Some people are extremely competent but are risk averse, so they don't take the risk that's necessary for success. Others are risk tolerant but are not very capable, so they are unlikely to succeed despite taking the risk. The trick is to be in both groups simultaneously. So if you know in your heart of hearts that you are competent, then it is worth taking the risk.
Is Microsoft Bottoming Out? - Part 1
Who is winning the mobile payments war?
> What about support for desktop? This is trickier since some desktop operating systems don’t include H.264, AAC or MP3 decoders

Does this mean Gonk (the B2G OS [0]) will include these decoders? How is this any different to desktop Firefox including them?

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/Architecture
Tips for Shining at Meetings and Networking Events
Using the same computer? Try clearing cookies.
I was confused about this too, but I think the idea is that it's easier to infer type information from the bitcode than from raw object code.
Awesome response / explanation. Thank you.
I know that there is some trouble with IE8. I am trying to fix it ASAP.
And many thanks for your feedback
I'm not Indian, but I do know Tamil, Bangla and Hindi, and love this country. I've been watching the rise of the middle class in India, and was devastated to see how the poor have become much much poorer (I'm thinking about Adivasis and migrant workers mostly), and how some north Indian families that were semi-middle class ten years ago, are poor now. The situation is really bad, IMO, and I hope there will be some improvement in the near future, perhaps after the imminent fall of the UPA2 government (though the alternatives seem just as bad...).
Mine is similar: Time Machine all the time, and a periodic drive image using Super Duper to one of two external (actually enclosure-less internal) drives, one of which is always offsite.
I think I draw the line at the company trying to control what you do when you aren't on the clock. Unless you're in some kind of job where PR is one of the main aspects (like a political spokesperson), I'm not sure it should be their business what you do on Saturday.
If you too find d3 very difficult, have a look here: nvd3 creates boilerplate examples for typical graphs. It's almost plug and play: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366018
Is usability breaking Linux adoption?
Over 400GB backup on external and crashplan, these include all my personal files and photos throughout my life.
Good point.

The US alternatives to college are terrible, particularly if you didn't have money/access. Trade schools are almost fraudulent (and not like Canada, which at least encourages vocations) and the whole entrepreneur out of high school mindset seems downright irresponsible (I would hope there's a better pipeline for ambitious world-changers than just going through the school of hard knocks).

And the worst part of the discussion is it's not even informed. Like, you will never see anyone in these threads recommend joining the military. I joined the military 2 years after college, but had I been informed of my opportunities earlier (say, in high school), I would have definitely joined the military right out of high school and then done college later, once I was ready for it and had GI Bill benefits to use.

All that said, college went okay for me. I don't really know of anyone in my circles that didn't get at least something productive out of going to college, based on where they are now, over a decade later.
I think it would really shine with IDE support. It probably wouldn't even be that hard to do (famous last words). I think I'll take a stab at it.

I like it as well, and have done similar things by creating input/output classes to use as "structs" when the list of parameters gets unweildy or when I want multiple returns.
Use a Python-to-JS compiler with Google Apps Script.
I completely agree with you but in my case it's that I carry an Android phone. There was a third-party web tie-in, called Spootnik (http://www.spootnik.net/), to Omnifocus that gets mentioned on their support forums.

I've recently considered Nozbe which aligns with my interest in virtually all platforms. It's a monthly fee so there's that to take into consideration. Also, I've heard their mobile app offerings need some help.

Has anyone else found other alternatives?
Reddit’s Thread On Farting Will Horrify And Delight You
Personally for longer page browsing I pivot my screen vertically, zoom and scroll to make content fit my screen. It may not be fastest way but gets job done. It works better on Google plus then on some other pages(were some toolbars obfuscates content on zoomed page, or which get to wide for screen). On non pivoted screen I usually have browser only on left halve on the screen and do it same way. There may be some plugin that would fit you more though.
doing a startup in Bay area with a family is not practical for a lot of people, especially given the current rental/living expenses.

That's still fear of failure, only in that case, the fear may be well founded. If they fail, they cannot feed their family, so they are afraid of failing and probably for good reason.
This is actually under debate. There is disagreement among neuroscientists whether intelligence is a result of brain modularity (specific regions of the brains optimized for certain tasks), or due to brain size alone. All that said, I'm skeptical of the singularity since it assumes that a recursive process can continually improve intelligence without significant diminishing returns. The problem with this thinking is that it fails to take into account evolution. All this research into AI is based on the assumption that "intelligence" should be like human intelligence. But human intelligence has had several billion years to evolve and is highly optimized for our environment (actually our environment from several tens of thousands of years ago when we were hunter gatherers). It seems naive to me to assume that we are not nearing a local optimum in what is possible with human intelligence. I don't believe a singularity is possible because by recursively improving "intelligence" you will near the local optimum of that form of intelligence but that does not mean you can continue improving that intelligence indefinitely.
Right now, it only tracks funding, not follow-through.
Personally, I think that everyone should have some form of programming chops. If only so people can program in the features that they want/need into the software they use.

That's why I think programmers as users (that can contribute back!) are so beneficial. Heck, they can even help the lead programmer debug by finding stack traces, culprit lines in code, working on things the author can't make time for, etc. etc.

You're right in that it's "potential" power, but I think it's just a matter of time of getting more people into the open-source and contributing mindset. I don't think enough of my coworkers or previous peers from uni respect the power of open-source. They just see open-source software as something... 'fixed'. It's either good, or not. They don't realize that they can easily change it with some determination.

On a sidenote, have you read about the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" [1], by Eric S. Raymond? I thought it was quite an eye-opener on the merits of open-source vs the closed-source alternative.

[1] http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/rt...
What difference would it make? To my understanding, Clang is fully compatible with gcc.
New one makes more sense and at least slightly clues you into what the product is.
- Dropbox for documents and archived log files.

- Photos and videos are backed up to a truecrypt drive manually using FreeFileSync twice a week or so.

- Backblaze running constantly.

- Pogoplug (+1 external drive attached) offsite at my parents house with archlinux installed. Eventually I'll attach another drive and have rsync mirroring them using a cron job.
> Given this, I'm not sure why singularity promoters give that much of a shit whether people believe it.

In my case that would be because the default scenario for a technological singularity is Eternal Doom. By default, if AI researchers do not pay extreme attention, the first smarter-than-human AI will have different goals than we do, and recognize us as a threat to those goals and eliminate us all. Or squash us like bugs without even paying much attention. Or use our constituent atoms to maximize its goals. Or keep us drugged and lobotomised in soft cages, so that we're safe and happy. Or something.

And of course, we won't be able to stop it, because it will outsmart us at every turn (we can do the same to chimps).

This is why this singularity thing is at least worth looking into. Being able to nuke away our civilization is bad enough, but this could be even worse. Or it could turn our world into a paradise.

And of course, with more believers, there will be more donors to the organizations working on this, more researchers working on it… So belief does count, to some extent. (On the other hand, becoming angry at non-believers like a crusader is unlikely to spur positive reactions. By cleaning up this image description, you actually helped our cause.)
The board should have been informed, but I see no compelling reason to assume they were.
As someone who has started a business in the finance space trying to leverage technology, I take some offense to this. My business partners and I have worked our asses off over the last several years to get to where we are today: billions of dollars in assets powered by our investment models. Trust me: asking someone to give you money to put in your strategies is not easy. Unlike the start-up space, there is no "minimum viable product," "traction" metric, or even "asset" that has some intrinsic value (like a unique algorithm or brand). You either have a track record, or you don't. New strategies don't, so it's all "trust." Sure, I can show a "back-test" or "stress-test" -- but everyone knows those are bullshit anyway.

You think you know stress? Imagine knowing that every day, your models are making investment decisions for billions of dollars. Sure, it's a drop in the overall pool of assets in markets, but it is enough to keep you up at night, worried about someone's retirement or someone's college fund. Drop a few more percentage points than the market? Goodbye hundreds of millions of dollars. Yep, that's going to happen at 50 when you start your "easy life" as a hedge-fund manager.

I'm not saying my stress is greater. I'm just trying to make the point that every business has its own share of problems, and to say that being a tech entrepreneur takes any more balls than being any other kind of entrepreneur is naive.

Can we please stop, as a community, with the "woe is us, the tech entrepreneur?" It's embarrassing. Starting a business is starting a business, no matter the industry. In fact, I'd argue that we live in a golden age for tech entrepreneurship that has never existed in another industry. Imagine trying to start a bio-tech business or a manufacturing business (well, arguably "outsourcing" could be the manufacturing entrepreneur's "scale"...). There are no "seed" rounds. The assets you have to raise are probably 100x what a tech entrepreneur has to initially raise. On top of trying to build a product, you probably have to manage building and factory development, understand legal regulations for your industry, and manage tons of labor.

We live in a time where you can roll the dice and start a business in the tech space with a handful of smart people, some elbow-grease and maybe $50k in a seed round. This is a golden era.

I respect the hell out of what you are doing -- starting a business is NOT easy -- but please don't say it takes any more balls than starting a business in any other industry. It doesn't.
more closely related to ctypes than swig.

swig requires glue code (.i files) to be written and generated, then compiled. ctypes can take a system native library (.so or .dll) and access it.

bitey, on the other hand, uses platform-neutral llvm bytecode. imagine ctypes but platform neutral. that's bitey.

pretty darned cool.
Coming back to Java after learning Objective-C made realize how named parameters are awesome
You sound almost sarcastic there, but I'm guessing you respond in earnest?
Time Machine via a drive hooked to an Airport Extreme along with Backblaze.
you meant "altavistable", right? :)
Using MISRA C and C++ for security and reliability. Part I
Good eyes! I completely missed that in the changelog. border-box: box-sizing really makes life easier when working with complex layouts. I'm always amused by the fact that old IE's much-berated interpretation of the box model is actually favourable!
The to scale version is better: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/nyunderground/docs/scale.h...
The ideas expressed in the article ring fairly true to me. I wouldn't have couched them in political terms, because as you point out there is too much emotion in that arena. I tend to think of it as Engineers vs Artists. On the one hand you have Linus' think it through, do it right. On the other hand you have PG's explore, discover, express yourself style. Each method is valid in different situations.
I felt very very similar to you.

My own dad died when I was 8, so while he was around for some of my life, I was still much too young to get the guidance that I wish I'd got. On the other hand, I'm not doing too bad now, but sometimes I wonder if maybe I would be doing better if I had someone like that helping me. Then again, I don't really know what kind of dad he would have been as I got older - and he certainly wasn't anything fancy like a financial adviser, so I don't know what kind of advice or guidance I would have had - but I like to think it would have been beneficial. Sigh.
And it would have been the 91st Congress, which as you can see, had a pretty-substantial Democratic majority:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/91st_United_States_Congress
Any idea why Redhat/Fedora are on a 3 year decline? Seems like Ubuntu is taking their market share (looking at yearly graph)