skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course I am describing a bad programmer. Your point is well taken, many programmers with CS degrees are terrible, many programmers without CS degrees are terrible, and there are some good among both.

There are of course many ways to be a bad programmer. "Look how smart I am" is one kind, but I don't worry nearly as much about them because I have found that far more often I am dealing with the "get it done" kind of bad programmer.
It's a great day in South Carolina... if you're a Nikki Haley staff member
Thanks for the criticism. While I definitely should have caught some of the errors, you obviously had no trouble understanding the meaning of the article, which in my opinion is why you were there in the first place reading. I'm not condoning bad grammar, but at the same time, I never called myself a professional writer.
Care to suggest some books for 1.?
But all these historical figures who are proven to be wrong or misguided won't be historical figures if you make them live forever... is this unequivocally positive? And if it isn't, how do we deal with it?

We already have political dissenters: how do you currently "deal with it"? Do you murder them? Do you selectively deny them life-saving medical treatment, so as to silence their views and improve society?

I have a modest proposal. Why not just let poor Neil Armstrong live, and merely censor his writings? The effects are the same, and there's less blood.
Ask HN: frameworks vs native apps
I been told by my boss to use a framework named Xamarin's MonoTouch (http://xamarin.com/), I don't want to use it, anyone has good reasons to not use it instead of native apps (that is licensed and on C# doesn't count) Edit: added framework name
Backbone has some of the clearest, most self-explanatory source of any project I've ever worked on. Also, at around 1500 lines of commented code it's a quick read that you can take in all at once (and again later). Also, make sure to read the source in the master branch as well as the annotated docs from the website to keep you informed on the upcoming changes.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't read tutorials, guides, and docs, but you should concentrate most of your effort on taking in the source.
They make/offer you the chance sign up to Google Plus in so many places it's infuriating.
On certain PowerBooks and the first generation Intel MBPs, yes, but they fixed those bugs with a firmware update aeons ago.
But how much of that revenue would they miss out on without patents, taking crosslicensing out of the picture? I suspect very little. People buy iphones for the whole product's look and feel, not for any specific feature.

It's a myth that software must be protected through patents. Copyright and trade dress law is sufficient.
Scientists Invent Particles To Replace Breathing
This is a really interesting way to think about computations. I mostly think of memoization for I/O things like database lookups, or long computations. I'd never thought of it in comparison to dynamic programming algorithms.
> then someone simply copies everything you have done

Copyright law prevents direct copying. If someone wanted to make an iphone clone without building on google's effort, they would have to spend hundreds of millions on software deelopment. There is no "simply" when it comes to copying technologies, unless the technology is truly trivial.
اضرار العادة السرية عند الرجال
There were a ton of huge inaccuracies in that AMA. Here's a few things that were pointed out to be wrong: http://es.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/xp6il/methusela1915_i...

I wouldn't rely on that for any real information.

EDIT: Not to mention the fact that the suit says "E Aldrin" on it. I have a hard time believing they swapped suits, too.
>These percentages have held up as I’ve spoken to people from many walks of life in libraries and bookstores; teenagers in high schools; physicians in medical centers; and investors and entrepreneurs at business conferences.

The percentages are the same for groups of teenagers, and for groups of physicians investors and entrepreneurs. There could be a jump at 60+, but based on his data there isn't a difference between teenagers and working adults.
Dropbox is testing two-factor authentication
> - People who are bothered by the slight inaccuracy that it isn't a picture taken of him.

Umm the fact that its a picture of some one else is way more than a "slight" inaccuracy.

you could probably replace photos of Stalin and Churchill and no one would care about that "slight inaccuracy" :)
My lack of a formal CS background is hurting me here. Could someone speak to the distinction between a tree and a DAG they make here?

I was under the impression that the terms were more or less synonymous.
Samsung didn't rip Apple off to trick people into thinking they had Apple products. What's the point of that? They want their products returned and customers angered? Apple had put more effort into designing their products so Samsung aped much of that in an attempt to replicate the aesthetics and appeal of Apple products.

Part of what's happening here is that people who don't deal with this stuff frequently (and don't have the background that we do) don't understand tech products. People go to WalMart and pick out the cheapest tablet and then will return it a few days later when they discover it is not an iPad.
I wonder when they will offer side by side compare with older revisions.
You are right though. Even though Touchwiz was an abomination compared to the smooth and slick iOS, Samsung's Galaxy S phone was a step ahead in every direction compared to the iPhone. At the time, it was the thinnest, lightest and the most powerful phone. Not the mention, the gorgeous display it had. Samsung innovated on every platform except the homescreen UI (sadly, many people don't see this).

But above all, their marketing and advertising strategy was unparalleled. I saw a Galaxy ad literally on every road, every TV show, every soccer match and what not! The success was not surprising given how much they effort they put.
MonoTouch is what you're referring to, and it has its pros and cons. Pros are, one app can be published on multiple platforms with little to no change.

Minuses, it's expensive and you have to wait for access to new features until they've been released by Xamarin.

Writing an app for iPhone using this is easily 2x faster than learning and then writing it in Objective C. It does generate a "native" app, for what it's worth.

Sounds like you just need to get past your dislike of C#, and your boss sounds like a pretty smart person ;-)

(disclosure : I'm not his boss)
Absolutely. Life expectancy at birth (in the U.S.) has increased by more than 20 years since 1900. Life expectancy at age 65 has still increased by ~10 years though:

http://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/as120/LifeTables_Body.html#wp1...
Lampreys deep-six their genomes during development
This is same as asking a teacher why he is teaching if he's so good at the subject.
Previous discussion (with link to actual journalism in comment) of another blogspam article about this subject that was flagged dead eventually:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4430865
The level of Apple fanboyism on Hacker News is really evident in comment threads like these.
How do you know an idea is worth implementing?
Ask HN: Why are Twitter bots tweeting my stuff?
I have a few online games, that have Tweet buttons on them. Lately I've been noticing tweets from these buttons from Twitter profiles that seem to be bots. They have no profile picture, typically no followers, and only 1-10 tweets. The tweets they have seem pretty random as well. Some examples:

https://twitter.com/hamim1922

https://twitter.com/Grsdixiewp

https://twitter.com/elbunny205

https://twitter.com/ClintonGoodhue

Some of those have only one tweet, which is the one from my buttons.

What is happening here? Do Twitter bots just search the net for Tweet buttons and tweet the message from them, to make themselves look more real?

I just think this can make me look bad, particularly fake profiles with a single tweet from my page, it looks very much like I'm building up a twitter botnet to promote my stuff, which I'm absolutely not doing.

Can I stop this somehow? Generate the tweet button dynamically or something?
What. Slight? What could be more inaccurate?
"Patents are okay when it's Apple getting them."
Samsung If you had invented iPhone, you would have invented iPhone
Humans Achieve Immortality as Holographic Avatars
Despite being someone with a formal CS background, I completely understand where you're coming from. I've worked on practical applications for the last 5 years with very little consideration for the details of algorithms or the underlying theories behind what I'm doing.

Despite my highly developed pragmatism, I still think understanding those theories at great depth makes me a better programmer.

It's almost subconscious, but knowing how the compiler works, how the processor runs the compiled code, and how everything works at the most basic level gives me a more complete idea of what I'm doing under the hood.

I guess you could say that it's like having a physics degree would make you a better car mechanic, when the reality is probably far from it. But then, I know lots of car mechanics who would benefit from knowing a little more about the theory of their work rather than just practical know-how. It's a fine balance.

Just to respond to your last point: I've been one of those people insisting on doing something the "right" way. I disagree that this is a bad thing, or a sign of inexperience or lack of understanding. Often when I have to argue hard for taking this "right" path, it's because of experience with doing it the other way, and a belief that one would only do it the "wrong" way because of inexperience. So in other words, I have exactly the opposite view on that entire subject.

Often the "right" way to do things takes a little more time, a little more work, but is usually more rock solid in the long term or easy to understand for other programmers. It's more deterministic and predictable, and usually more about good architecture than raw performance (or it should be).

In general you have good practical points that every programmer should be aware of. By no means should real programming be done in an academic and theoretical manner. But at the same time, theoretical CS is provably correct about a vast number of concepts (that is it's business after all), and by no means should they be ignored or looked down upon. The truth lies in a balance between practicality and theory here, and one should never take a side. Look at each situation with the perspective it demands and solve it using the wide variety of tools available to you, and be prepared to accept that a solution might be more theoretical or more practical than you're willing or able to understand.
Problem is that if all you do is expose the top project, and that takes time (for example, waiting for a long compile), you lose the ability to switch to another task.
A tree is a DAG that is connected: if a and b are nodes of a tree, there is a path between a and b. But in general a DAG doesn't have to be connected. So all trees are DAGs but not all DAGs are trees: some are forests i.e. unions of trees.
>and not creative image doctoring like pasting some space or removing a person USSR style.

I can't possibly be the only person confused by the author's visceral reaction to pasting in a block of black above a photo, or slightly offended by your comparing it to USSR-esque person removal.
Very unfortunate title imho, since minimising windows can be accomplished by far easier methods (the button in the menu or pressing command+M for instance).
I hope they realize this isn't going to make their password digests any harder to crack. Last I heard, the only measure they actually took was to add some salt to a single round of SHA-256.
Yeah, tell me about those genius ideas invented by Apple that only 10 Einsteins could have come up with. Rounded corners?
It's too fortunate for that that nobody patented their "innovative" stuff 50 years ago because it is totally ridiculous. Want some respect as a company? Do something like research.google.com instead of trying to screw people over with overpriced candies and screwing other companies when they put their hands in your honey jar.
You don't really believe the HTC Wizard was "perfectly fine" do you?

I went through so many Windows Mobile phones until I finally realized that the joke was on me. The user experience, the battery life, the apps, the bugs, the limitations imposed on operating system data and indeces, and the hardware were all horrific. I can't extract anything good from that experience, let alone say that any of those devices were "perfectly fine."
"on this planet." Maybe that would give people motivation to get off it. Regardless if you want to weigh counter-factual people against living people your moral system will have some curious implications which you might not like. If someone threatens to not have children if you don't give them your money are you going to take into account the non existent future lives snuffed out and give in?
مباراة ريال مدريد وخيتافي اليوم 26/8/2012 Real Madrid vs Getafe
Believing in Computer Science
It seems to me that many researchers who move into political and administrative roles are either bored with, or do not believe in, computer science as an academic discipline. Their own research area is, or maybe always was, boring, or has been obviated by technological developments or scientific advances. So they move into politics, perhaps carrying a sense that there is something wrong with the field that can only be corrected by radical surgery. They then demand that researchers do what they themselves never did in their own careers, kicking the ladder out from behind them.

Harper goes on to say that the above is a "somewhat contentious premise." I agree it's acrimonious; I'm not sure I agree with the acrimony.
Uniqlo's invasion of America
Make composed views, paginated collections, filtering forms, and the like. Although there are now opinionated plugins for these setups, I found that building them myself helped me develop a sense of how to structure views in order to avoid complexity and ambiguity.

The Backbone Docs and it's listed examples are really the best resource out there.
There's also a major fragmentation problem with Android: Evernote can look at the iPhone 4 sales figures and know that they'll have so many million potential users with the same hardware and OS; with Android they have to compare a ton of different models to see which ones have a usable camera and whether the vendor + carrier are holding up OS releases. If you want to prove an idea that's a lot of extra work.
Yeah, the only thing I would add is that "people living longer" historically hasn't been about prolonging life so much as preventing early death. Some people have always lived to be 80, 90, 100. What we've really accomplished is that more people live to be 80, 90, 100 than ever before. For me to live to be 80 or 90 probably just takes reasonably good luck and staying in the upper-middle-class, instead of a one-in-a-million kind of luck.

I am hopefully about the future, but I won't really be confident until I start seeing people live to be 120, 130, 140. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of time. The most optimistic test I can think of for an anti-aging drug is to take a large number of 80-year-olds, who are common enough you should be able to find a number of good, healthy, but old test subjects, and give them anti-aging treatments. If a large number of them live to be 120, I feel comfortable saying we're on track to beat death.

This experiment takes 40 years to run. Granted, you can do a lot of other work before it finishes, like examine tissue samples and various health metrics to show the treated 80-year-olds aren't aging like the control group. But for even a young'un like me to actually see 120-year-olds before I myself am 80, this experiment has to begin in the next 10 years, which I find terribly unlikely.

So while I'm going to cling to life as bitterly as I can as long as I can -- my own goal is to see the tricentennial, the dawn of the 22nd century, and maybe the transit of Venus, which I missed this year -- my personal immortality likely depends on not just discovering a safe way to halt aging and prolong life, but a way to reverse senescence and restore youth. I think it's possible, but forecasting it as happening before I die is a bit cliche in this domain.
Yes. I use the 'Atomic Web Browser' for that. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/atomic-web-browser/id34792941...
Memoization and dynamic programming come together in top down DP algorithms. These are also referred to as recursion with memoization. The recursive function often looks something like:

f(arguments) {
results = memoTable[arguments]

if(results) // use results
else
results = // expensive recursive call to f
memoTable[arguments] = results
}
why not your own VPS?
I think this neglects a performance consideration: dynamic programming is often simpler for a compiler to optimize, since it's generally a set of nested loops. Sometimes you can vectorize operations, but often you can just exploit locality to keep all the active set in l1 cache (not a compiler optimization per-se).

Memoization, however, is much more of a black-box. Very few compilers will handle the branching present in memoized function calls in the same way they'd handle a loop (which is also a branch, but a more predictable one).

That all being said, memoization is often simpler to reason about and great for infrequent computations.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11nogold5903.jpg
> E. Aldrin
Safari does not, but iCab mobile lets you change browser agents.
Yes, that's exactly what I had in mind!
... le fanboy has spoken
I also have anecdotal evidence of this, where Android is perceived as the better option because there are supposedly more free apps and paid apps are easily pirated.

Even the local carrier's sales representatives try to move customers away from iPhones and iPads towards Android devices because 'most apps are free and they're just the same as the ones on the iPad/iPhone'.
It seems to me that many researchers who move into political and administrative roles are either bored with, or do not believe in, computer science as an academic discipline. Their own research area is, or maybe always was, boring, or has been obviated by technological developments or scientific advances. So they move into politics, perhaps carrying a sense that there is something wrong with the field that can only be corrected by radical surgery. They then demand that researchers do what they themselves never did in their own careers, kicking the ladder out from behind them.

Harper goes on to say that the above is a "somewhat contentious premise." I agree it's acrimonious; I'm not sure I agree with the acrimony.
You'll need to get a visa. As with getting a job in the USA if you're a UK citizen, it isn't as simple as just applying for and getting a job.

Your degree won't qualify you as a highly skilled worker, so unless you have other connections you're probably in for a long hard slog getting a suitable visa.
"Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!" -Steve Jobs
The social element is absolutely essential to such simple games. If it weren't for the constant nagging of your friends there wouldn't be much fun they would practically not work.

If you feel the games exploit you (or the doctor invades your life) , then avoid them.
good stuff...it's pretty much the basis of the lean start-up model
What if I have two things to do. I am working on the first and most important one, but then there is a hold up. Perhaps I am waiting for someone to email me back.

Now I want to finish some other tasks while I wait but I can't check them off.

I don't think this is a good idea. I wouldn't use it.
But how can advertisers target their ads to your special interests if they don't know everything about you? Advertisers are just as essential to your well being as the doctor is, if not even more. </preemptive sarcasm>
I am almost done reading it. It is definitely a good read for someone who wants to go the freelancing way. However, I think it might be difficult to give a feedback without applying the concepts presented in the book. I could do it in a couple of months if I start freelancing, for now I am still hesitating and the book did not answer some of my incertitudes.

What I can say is that this book seem to give advice, the ones you read and think it is common sense are usually the best.
Quote from indiegogo:

8/25 - Update 4: Thank you!

I can't thank you enough. Not only have we found Ken a surgeon, but the surgeon has agreed to
do the surgery for a fraction of the original cost. We have raised $47,600 total now, enough
to cover the surgery, any and all pre and post op medical expenses, all medication Ken will
need for the foreseeable future, and there might even be some left over to go to Reglue.

I can't stress enough how thankful I am to everyone who has helped. The outpouring of support
is amazing. You are all wonderful people. :)

Thank you.
That is a real problem. My wife just bought me an iPad and ESPN does the same thing as well. I've considered installing a 3rd party browser because of this.
Why games work and the science of learning
well, monotouch is a really nice framework.
but, speaking about downsides, you'll need to spend time on writing custom objc bindings if you would want to use something that is not bound yet (e.g. custom library). and that can take quite some time.
other than that - it's quite the same as native (may be a tiny-tiny bit slower)
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out Book
Unofficial encyclopedia of the NES classic Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! to celebrate its 25th anniversary.
The wide use of the photo over the years is proof enough that it's a great photo. People love it. With all due respect to the copy editing topic of the linked column, people don't care in the slightest about journalistic rule lawyering regarding the criteria that should be used for selecting photographs for a news article. They care about accuracy, which evidently isn't the same thing.

If there are any worries about misunderstanding, make sure the photo's caption is clear. To someone who isn't part of the Church of Photojournalism, it honestly seems very simple.

If you are concerned with "depicting Neil Armstrong" above all else you're not going to want a photo with his visor down in any case. But that makes excluding this photo seem every bit as stubborn as excluding a photo of a Saturn V rocket or something.
I'm not sure if that is what you mean, but the whole list is visible. So you could see your next task and work on it in the meantime. If your highest priority task finishes, you could cross off both. But with more than a few hours of delay, it might be hard to remember what you already got done.

But this is a valid point, I'll have to think about.
Thank you!
Darpa Has Seen the Future of Computing ... And It's Analog
Yeah...that's one point.
Unless you directly designed the chip, you shouldn't be liable at all.

The liable one is the seller.
Most biologists do in fact take SENS seriously - you are very behind the times, and your characterization of the technologies involved is outright wrong.

See the SENS Foundation advisory board, for example, as a representative sample of influential figures in the life sciences:

http://sens.org/sens-research/advisory-board

Equally, see the proposed plan for moving thirteen mitochondrial genes into the cell nucleus: this has been achieved over the past five years for three of the thirteen, and last year someone came up with a generalizable method that should be applicable to all of them, rather than having to hack a separate methodology for each one.

http://sens.org/sens-research/research-themes/mitosens

Your comments show that you are unfamiliar with the research community and with the science in question.
Can somebody calculate the probability of assigning a jury foreman, on a very important case, whether a patent is crazy and then finding out he has a crazy patent himself? Life is full of coincidences hard to believe.