skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really see programming as an art first and then a science, just like music.

Art comes from creating something new and stepping outside the box while science is about explaining some existing thing and defining the box to put it in. By studying music history we can see that new styles, harmonies and figures almost always came before the theory that explained them. This is much like new languages, frameworks or patterns coming out and then papers being written about them.

During the middle ages you would hear almost only intervals of an octave or a fifth. Then with classical music came the third and the sixth intervals and the second and seventh intervals only made it a few centuries later. Music as a theory evolved over thousands of years. Only recently did it explode with jazz trying to find every single way to bend that theory.

The brain cannot easily play with a concept it has no single-word name associated to. Right now CS is full of concepts described by mini-phrases and no clear hierarchy for all of these concepts. Music theory by contrast can be entirely described starting from the major chord. Every single concept (as far as I know) has it's proper place in a tree structure with the major chord as its root element.

It's ironic how programmers dread spaghetti code yet ended up with a spaghetti computer science. It might also not help that the industry is plagued with code smells.

In the end, by comparing harmonies to data structures, melodies to code flows and multiple voices to concurrency, I believe its mostly all the same to the brain. A musical score is nothing more than source code for the human brain to read and interpret.
There are documented cases of electronic devices causing interference with onboard electronics. From Boeing:

A passenger's palmtop computer was reported to cause
the airplane to initiate a shallow bank turn. One minute
after turning the PED off, the airplane returned to "on
course." When the unit was brought to the flight deck,
the flight crew noticed a strong correlation by turning
the unit back on and watching the anomaly return, then
turning the unit off and watching the anomaly stop.

Link: http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_10/interf...

I don't understand why Apple or Google don't pay Boeing the cost to test their phones on planes. It would be a great selling point.
Look, there is something wrong about this.

This story has 97 point at time of my writing, 44 comments. It's top story. Learning C with gdb story has 297 points, 80 comments and it's on third row.
I'm really confused by "50% of the average." Wouldn't the average be 100% of the average? I read "50% of the average" as paying someone half of what they are worth.
Install something like http://osticket.com on a small VPS and use gmail as the mail server, so you have a backup. You'll get a similar experience to a paid app. Upgrade to zendesk or something once you get a lot more users and you need to be able to track requests, or fork osticket and add your own tracking.
New Java Zero-Day Exploit Released
Chinese casual dating app momo raises $40m series B
The YubiKey NEO: World’s first NFC enabled one-time password token.
Sounds really interesting, would you mind sending me an email? Im organizing the SF QS group and it'd be great to have you come and demo if you're local, and even if not we're looking for a tool to help us perform group QS tracking. My email is sina dot khanifar at gmail.
I appreciate these attempts to give non-Haskellers a chance to learn Monads but, personally, I never really grokked them until I got into Haskell. In Haskell, Monads are defined in terms of types, thus languages without type systems like Haskell's make the concept both more difficult to understand and less (immediately) useful. Having been through many of these tutorials myself, I think the best way to get into Monads (as well as many other useful constructs like Functors, Monoids and Monad Transformers) is to roll up your sleeves and learn Haskell (Learn You A Haskell is a great and relatively quick read). As a bonus, you'll also learn one of the most elegant programming languages around.

This comment isn't intended as a knock against the article. I think there's a lot of merit in using monadic constructs in languages that aren't Haskell, I just think Haskell's type system makes understanding the concept easier.
Ranking is designed to protect and benefit the people assigning the numbers. The numbers are meaningless and should be called political ranking. Its ok to work at one of these places short term if you need the cash, but have a plan to move on soon.
Firing all of your people because your executive team failed, then those same executives saying they're looking to hire great people, presumably means that you're implying those you just fired weren't great. Not sure great people are going to want to work with that executive team, or am I missing something?
A commenter in another thread on CTF recommended io.smashthestack.org. It's very well done - I only got through a half-dozen levels or so before my attention wandered but I really enjoyed it.
And the failures much more spectacular and costly
What does slavery have to do with this? There's ample discussions over the past 10 years over why many people disagree with the approach the GPL takes as being too restrictive and freedom-restricting, and not actually in the spirit of "open". I don't have to even argue that, it's been done before ad nauseum. Of course many support the GPL and it's approach. The point on GPL is that "freedom is a feature", it's all in the eye of the beholder of what's more important - free to use & redistribute, or free to use but only redistribute under certain circumstances. The choice has massive implications for people using that software - I've seen many a review of weeding all GPLv3 or AGPL dependencies out of a product for this very reason.

The original point is that Cory seems to think that protecting user's freedoms first requires securing device owner's freedoms, though the two come into conflict regularly, and he doesn't have clear answers of how to resolve that. I'm suggesting that he's not looking at ownership broadly enough.
Snarky, not even close to relevant to the article and adds nothing to the conversation. I sure am glad this is the top post.
Use of __builtin_trap() (GCC) or raise(SIGTRAP) would be a lot more portable.
Can Indoor Tanning Prevent Breast Cancer and Autism?
Apple didn't invent multi-touch finger recognition via capacitive display. You could literally take the same software written for a display/camera system and use it on a capacitive display. It would have been written before Apple filed for the patent. Apple doesn't have an invention here.
Nothing too new in the post, perhaps a little bit more jaded than how it is often explained.

The part I found most interesting was your opinion on the different roles at Microsoft (quoted below). As someone with some experience in the PM role, I found it especially interesting. I find the opinion you have described spectacularly oversimplified, specifically in that the goal is just to write software (something only developers are needed), instead of writing the /right/ software, and at the right time. It is interesting to examine the different roles and how they interact, i.e. how devs often think of PMs as meetings and overheads, whilst PMs sometimes think of devs simply as resources. Tests, of course, are often left out in their own world, just hacking on whatever, and fixing the builds :-)

---------
Did you notice I said “software developer” above? This advice is really targeted at people who are good at and love actually writing software. It somewhat applies to program managers, product managers, and so forth, but hey, we work in the SOFTWARE industry. The only clear-cut jobs are for those who actually write the shit. Everyone else just helps.
Stack-ranking is this idea that emerges when a bunch of bored, overpaid and underemployed people of marginal intellect (that's being generous) watch a terrorist attack on TV and decide, "It be funna' do that to, hurr hurr, a comph-uh-ny!". The caretaker who wipes the shit off their mirrors every morning reminds them that they have executive positions and can actually act out their childish fantasies, so they do.
Agreed. As is so often the case, "unique" is utterly misused here. That being said, having used Go, I really do enjoy the composition-at-core design.
An apple isn't the best analogy since the apple market is competitive. The market for "Principles of Economics: Global Financial Crisis Edition, 6th Edition" (or any other book or ebook) is a government-granted monopoly, so the two situations aren't completely comparable

This is my own personal belief, but my main objection to ebook pricing is the apparent price collusion that is going on in the publishing market (here's a link to a news story about one DOJ case: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0412/75028.html). This isn't the first time that a format change prompted increased prices: when the CD was introduced, music labels charged much higher prices for CDs than prior formats -- notably, all of the labels also seemed to converge on a single, higher price. Arguably, the higher price was justifed due to better audio fidelity; maybe the same could be said for ebooks' features vs dead tree books. For at least a decade $20 CDs were the norm despite much lower music prices in the cassette era and much lower prices now. Check out Knopper's 'Appetite for Self-Destruction' or Kernfeld's 'Pop Song Piracy' if you're interested in the music industry specifically.

To cut it short: in a government-granted monopolized market, it seems a bit fishy when the entire market lurches in the (same) higher priced direction simultaneously.
It's not based solely on points, it's based on points and time.
Hey I know this is late but I just got an email back from "O'Keeffe, Hope loke@loc.gov" that just says it's based on a commercial system that is "out of support" and not available.
Other than the cost of two additional drivers, that is?

I can't speak for the situation in Germany, but in several cities of the United States (I live in one of them), the salaries of bus drivers are ASTOUNDING, and their total compensation packages are a big part of the expense of providing public transportation. So, yes, if you think public transportation provides important externalities to a whole community, and you also are not interested in trying to hire new bus drivers who will work for less than the current contract rate negotiated with the bus driver union, then what you try to do is find a way for one bus driver to serve more riders.
Very interesting! But I'd say this is too dangerous because of the misleading conclusions that it'd "make" you realize.

Relying on what is printed out of printing a pointer value (which is not what the author is doing) is also misleading. Concluding stuff like "the size of an int is 4" or "size of double is 8" is also misleading. Again, it's not the conclusions the author is realizing, but for someone doing exploratory programming, it may be the case since the point of exploratory programming is learning by seeing how the system responds to the things you're doing.

And maybe I am wrong, but even the author got mislead by it.

"I'm going to ignore why 2147483648 == -2147483648; the point is that even arithmetic can be tricky in C, and gdb understands C arithmetic."

That's actually the result of undefined behavior, and not so much a result or "how C integer arithmetic works".

I really liked the idea. I just think it may be misleading if the tool you're using is GDB.

It'd be interesting a tool which allowed that sort of exploratory programming, but taking into consideration undefined behavior, unspecified things and implementation defined behavior.
I know this is late but I just got an email back from "O'Keeffe, Hope loke@loc.gov" that says it's based on a "commercial system" that is "out of support" and not available.
I don't believe brands are a method to 'outsource' thinking. I don't think it has anything to do with thinking.

Think of it more as a way of identifying with something, and letting others make assumptions about who you are based on what you identify with.

I'm not mathematically inclined, but let's take deep technology as an example, as hopefully we have that as a common thread here on hn.

Note: These are all going to be stereotypes, that goes with branding.

Some people identify themselves as iOS developers. They write Objective-C, and will tell you how it is the best platform with users spending the most dollars, etc. etc. They'll tell you they'd never program for Android because javas is too verbose, the platform is fragmented, etc.etc.

An android dev will tell you that they love open-source (a stretch, but just go with it for now). They believe they are serving the largest market, they have the freedom to build the apps as they like and can do things that can't be done on the competitors platforms.

Then you've got the web people. Maybe a Ruby on Rails dev, they'll talk about the speed of quick iteration cycles, simple MVC code, write-once-run-anywhere (stretch your imagination just a bit).

If we look at these as brands, you start to get a picture of what each of these people might be like outside of just this mode of thinking. You have a stereotype of what that person is, what they believe, how they would behave.

This is essentially what the brand is doing for the person.

If I were identified with Ferrari as a brand, you'd have a very different image of me, and me of myself, than if I identified with Smart cars, or Tesla.

Somebody who shops at safeway identifies with food in a different way than somebody identifies with Trader Joe's, Whole Foods or your local farmers market.

It's basically a short-cut for somebody to label themselves, or project to others what they stand for.
Any site which confuses encryption and hashing is useless.

Here's how to safely store and validate user passwords:

1. Set up a separate, hardened machine. It should be running one server, the password service. The machine should have the standard security precautions (secure rack, secure case, encrypted storage, maybe a TPM for the storage key, etc).

2. The service should have RPCs to create, change, validate, and reset passwords. Your web frontend should implement password management using the password service. RPCs should be secured with a standard protocol such as TLS.

3. Policies such as minimum strength or maximum attempts per minute should be implemented in the password service.

There are commercial products which implement all of the above. They are not cheap, but if you can afford to give every engineer a laptop, then you can afford to keep your users passwords safe.

Even if you don't have enough for an off-the-shelf password storage machine, then implementing the above yourself will at least be more secure than storing the passwords in some table in your database.
I don't expect this topic to go very far, but for the record every time I read it I can't help but think it says Dr. Chronic. It's not Jay and Silent Bob (at least not the Dr. part) but I swear I've seen it in a movie or something. (googling just gives me a head shop in Amsterdam)
They should allow you to do regular certified training to show that you know the safety procedures rather than trying to force people to watch videos again and again.
Not sure it's quite the same. My understanding is that `ipython --pdb` would run the entire program in debugging mode, causing a dramatic slow-down in performance of the app. The approach taken by pry-rescue in contrast is to check for exceptions in a bounded portion of code (as many bounded portions as you want), so the slow-down is constrained to hot spots. This potentially makes pry-rescue OK for production use, something perhaps not suitable for ipython --pdb afaict.
It's not just Canada ... it's most of the world. I live in Thailand, and can't use most of these services. Only saving factor is that I'm American, and have a US bank and address, so I can use some US services that way (iTunes, Amazon Payments, etc.)
Oh I'm skeptical all right...but not because it's 'party pooping' opposition, but because the article infers from a study which shows a correlation between continual sustained use of marijuana and a decrease in I.Q. to the rather illegitimately drawn conclusion that smoking marijuana prior to the age of 18 causes you to get stupider as you age.

I have primarily two objections.

First, the article fails to rule out:

- The possibility that people who start smoking pot prior to the age of eighteen and continue to smoke are just generally likely to be the type of person who might get stupider with age anyway.

Second the argument fails to consider:

- That an alternative explanation could explain the facts of the study equally well: namely, that it's not the age at which one begins to smoke which causes this IQ decrease but rather that it is the sustained use of marijuana which is actually damaging.
There's still time (I think) and it's surprisingly easy once you realize what you're supposed to do!
This is not even about entrepreneurship

At some level consider it is? (1) symbolic the evolution of strategy; or (2) its part of a larger narrative on openess vs trusworthiness; or even (3) its might ve PR issue.ETC.

Also, its always interesting to look back and put this in context: like this http://dashes.com/anil/2009/12/the-twitter-api-is-finished.h...
Apple Jury Foreman: Here's How We Reached a Verdict (video, flash)
Seems like a carefully orchestrated, point by point attempted rebuttal of all the criticisms thrown at Jury(Biased, incompetent, foreman has a patent so is evil, Foreman's patent is worthless )/Judge(Biased)/California(Apple's home state)/USA(Samsung is Korean) for the verdict in favor of Apple.
Thank you. I know how could it be calculated. Well I did not look into the code but I deducted it. But I was just trying to make a point in the context.
Sam€.
信長の野望 RMT
At GE, it is looked upon as a success.

Um, no. The back-story you're missing is that, up until about 1980, it wasn't uncommon for people to stay at one company for 20+ years, even after they'd essentially ruined their reputations and were regarded as failures, because it was so disastrous and rare for people to actually get fired. So for companies to have 10 or 20% that was obvious deadwood was not rare. By "deadwood" I don't mean people who tried hard but took a long time to onboard or who worked on unlucky projects and could be rehabilitated, but I mean people who showed up at 11, left at 4, and might do no real work other than showing up for a couple meetings per week and making it obvious through inane comments that they didn't understand what was going on.

The first year of rank-and-yank, few objected to most of the firings because the people let go were the obvious nonparticipants, and it was better to get rid of them than lose the whole company. By the second year, it was more tense. By the third and fourth years, it was an outright morale-killer. It turns out that the percentage of people in a company who deserve to be fired isn't a constant.
Sure. You are right about it. But is it that important?
Craigslist testing its own version of PadMapper
Lame :-(

I was actually using this on some sites.
> There are two meaningful controls ...

No, I meant real, scientific controls. A study with real experimental and control groups would have groups that the researchers told that they would smoke, or not smoke, pot. That would make the study prospective, not retrospective as in this study.

If a study must monitor behavior that the subjects choose for themselves, the study loses all value, because the result can never be more than an uncontrolled correlation between A (IQ) and B (the choice to smoke pot) and any number of possible correlated factors (C) like socioeconomic, genetic, and other uncontrolled issues.

This is one of the common threads that run through most of these studies, which is why I linked the article -- it's typical of studies that I've been reading for about 35 years, and all of which suffer from the same systematic flaws.

Obviously a real, disciplined study of this topic would assign behaviors in a double-blind study. But such a study would clearly be unethical, which is why it has never been conducted.

> So, what factors could cause the study to show the correlation but not be a direct causation?

The fact that the subjects make their own decisions, the fact that there is no control group as that term is understood.

> It would have to be a confounding factor that both makes people want to smoke and something that causes them to get stupider over time that isn't the marijuana.

Yes, and until we think of a way to study this topic scientifically and without violating ethical guidelines, we will never know. It could be socioeconomic, genetic, peer pressure (smart people are geeks, don't you know that?) or some other factor.

> But I think the simplest explanation is a causation ...

That isn't an explanation unless we study it scientifically, this study doesn't do that.

This is what I find troubling about psychology studies, studies that involve monitoring behaviors but with no meaningful controls -- people don't seem to understand that it isn't science.

> ... there is other evidence that marijuana affects the brains of adolescents.

Yes - and all such studies have the property this study has -- no scientific controls.

This is in no way meant to condone drug use. All I am saying is public policy is being shaped by something other than science.
And Now Google Sues Apple
That makes her family extremely well off. (Unless maybe you're in an area with super high living expenses and Harvard doesn't adjust for that?)
I don't really have the experience to comment on this issue, but I did try looking at another monad tutorial in Clojure several months ago. I think I kind of got the idea behind monads, but I always thought so what. I have no experience with Haskell. I supposed that may be the reason.
Stack ranking and vicious careerism can demolish a company independent of anything else. Look at what is happening to Google, with its calibration score nonsense and the draconian transfer policy. Same story, 7 years back in time.

"Vision" is one thing but a lot of people have vision (or think they do). Very few people have that rare combination of interpersonal empathy and competency around complexity that enable them to reliably make good decisions as executives of large companies. (Worse yet, over 90 percent of the people given those positions get them as favors and utterly lack both skill sets.)
True, I meant a facebook competitor. The success of App.net is a good sign that the damage to trust wasn't wider.
Either Gates foresaw the iPhone or... knew about the Simon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon

Oddly enough, I find the folders reminiscent of Xerox's Star.
yeah i agree it is a confusing (and redundant thing to say), but i'm fairly positive (from context) that what he meant was '50th percentile of salaries for that position' or 'the average salary for that position'.
Probably because you said nerd. Makes guys feel bad and all. And maybe because people here think the via is great for advertising their awesome super one of a kind twitter apps!

I personally don't like the idea of via on any service. Unless it is an automated message then in that case it should be flagged as a computer generated message.
Here's the ticket tracking the tax implications of Gittip:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/96

TL;DR: It's too early to tell. We've started contacting tax professionals and don't have good answers at this point.
There have been several articles posted here at HN that complain (rightly, IMNSHO) about stack ranking and the inner turmoil it engenders. (For example, why share a shortcut or automation if using it when others do not makes you appear superior?)

I'm curious, does MSFT still enforce the stacks? The OP made it sound like the scale was independent of one's relative rank.