skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great point and can't be understated.

When you're in a meeting or conversing with someone who just knows things, the conversation moves so very much faster than if you have to guess or be vague due to a lack of knowledge.

I Google like crazy for answers about things, but I consider not knowing a failure on my part, and endeavor to learn the thing I had to google, so I don't have to "fail" again. I think everyone should think of this problem in a similar way, lest we fall into a habit of saying whatever we want and assuming we'll be corrected if we're wrong (or some other ill).
According to phkamp, iOS is a cathedral kind of project.

This is true. The OP has made several somewhat-arbitrary and vague assertions about what may or may not constitute a "Cathedral", on top of lambasting others for not agreeing with his definition ("Read Brooks Book")

Excerpts from the HN discussion :

"Windows and Office are actually not examples of cathedrals, because the architectural focus of Microsoft was not on software but on a near-monopoly market."
-phkamp

"...iOS is very much a Cathedral and has a designer and architect who cares and who is in control."
-phkamp

Does Apple not care about achieving market dominance? Did no version of Windows or Office have a lead architect who "cared"?

Frankly, the entire concept of a "Cathedral" - rigidly defined as it appears to be here - is a little nebulous and hand-wavy.
It amazes me that the initial bitcoin set up was basically a pyramid scheme and this doesn't seem to put anyone off.

Not to mention the fact that all that computing work is wasted doing nothing useful.

I'd much rather see grid computing networks offer signed certificates proving that you did a certain amount of work for them in place of money, but also allow you to swap them for cash.

That way, the computing power did something useful. Sure every grid computing network would be it's own 'central authority', but as long as they all adhere to a common api, I don't think that's a problem.
Very nice! is the datejs project still as dead as the website makes it appear?
Feynman makes a good point when he's describing why he isn't a genius.

Someone shows him a blueprint and he just happens to know X because (I can't remember, something he did last week) and that's such a little thing, but everyone is "wow!" and then someone else asks him a question and really, Y is the obvious answer because square root Z is (something something something) and everyone says "wow".

It ends up that Feynman worked on a lot of stuff, all the time, and remembered a lot of it.

I guess Feynman wouldn't have remembered his phone number unless it had some interesting characteristic.
An experience I had as a teenager really drove this lesson home for me, and is partly responsible for successes I’ve had since.

My Dad had copy of ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ by Betty Edwards lying around. I’d always been really bad at drawing - never progressed beyond the kids-drawing phase, got bad feedback on drawing at school, so stopped.

Anyway, Edwards’s theory is that ‘bad’ drawers don’t look at the thing itself and draw its shape, they translate reality into abstract concepts first and then draw what that concept visually looks like. So I’ll look at a face, then decide I’ll draw the ‘eye’ first, query my mind to see what an ‘eye’ looks like, then draw the generic 'eye' shape that everyone draws.

Whereas a skilled artist looks at the eye in front of them - which looks nothing like the standard symbol for ‘eye’ - and draws THAT.

Edwards has a bunch of exercises to prove this, and one of them triggered a massive epiphany for me.

She had a Picasso sketch in the book which was printed upside down on the page. Her instructions were to copy the drawing, keeping it upside down, and never naming the limb/whatever you’re drawing, and never turning your drawing right-side-up until it’s complete.

I was sceptical, but decided to test her theory. So I started copying this upside-down drawing, fully expecting it to turn out even worse than usual.

When I finished, I couldn't believe it. The drawing was AMAZING. It looked like someone else had done it. The figure I’d drawn looked alive.

I went on to learn to draw pretty well. So after that, my mind always looked back and thought - well, if I can learn to DRAW, and I was so BAD at drawing initially, I can pretty much learn to do anything.
VC-funded HTML 5 gaming platform Goko has a nightmare launch
Advice For Amateur iOS Developers
HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Metro App Building on Windows 8 Part 1
The Facebook Profit Machine is Ready for Takeoff
Or maybe, just maybe I don't write for the lowest common denominator, but for people who can think for themselves.
I'd like to see someone do this and handle times and timezones. What a pain that is.
If your site is mostly static and can use just S3 for hosting check out Cactus I made for easy building and deployment.

https://github.com/koenbok/Cactus
Most of this advice can already be seen in the "top" software employers, except this one:

> "Don't buy resume or credentials. Buy competence, track record, character and culture fit."

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and other "tier-1" companies are notorious for this. Early-stage Google was even notorious for being a strict Stanford-only shop.

And this is IMO a large part of the talent shortage - the shortage is real, but is not anywhere as acute as we've made it out to be, though I am a beneficiary of this, having gone to a reasonably prestigious school. Software engineering salaries are climbing through the roof while competent programmers get passed over all the time for not having the right credentials. Employers complain constantly about the difficulty of hiring, while giving only cursory glances (if that!) at resumes from non-top schools.

This annoys me to no end - many of the best coders I know never went to MIT, Stanford, CMU, or Berkeley, and many of them never got their "break" until much later. Eventually, after years of treading water, a name brand company will give them a shot, and once they've covered themselves in magical recognized-employer pixie dust, the offers start flying in.

It's all incredibly inefficient and awful.
Richard Stallman on RT: "We're heading for a total disaster"
No, I am implying that those things aren't part of the OS. You can tell, because they aren't part of the OS, they are installed with the 3rd party package management tools. In linux there is no base OS, everything is 3rd party packages. There is no difference between firefox and ls. In BSDs there is, ls is not 3rd party software packaged up to be installed, it is part of the OS, written by, maintained by, documented by the same people as the kernel, the standard library, etc.
Well, I take it back. This is great news.
Show HN: Ptrfy, simple textbook digitization
Field Marshal Moltke's four types of officers
Ask HN: Coffee Drinkers, How Do You Brew?
Not in love with my current coffee setup and looking to hear what other folks are doing with their coffee setups? Do you just drink whatever is around or do you heat your water to 175F using a fancy temp-controlled kettle and press it?
As soon as any airport is attacked like that imagine the new security fun we'll get.

Responses like car searches coming into the airport with guns pointed at you and other things that will make our current wait on getting to an airplane look like a distant dream. And picking people up at the airport will become more painful than a dentist visit.
And it would automatically do what I was about to suggest - highlight the selected range.
“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” —Plato, Phaedrus
Ok, pre-1990 person here, and the piece resonated quite strongly with me. But I note that there is a third axis which isn't well covered, which is 'volunteer' vs 'paid'.

It is important to note the distinction between FreeBSD's package system and say Debian apt. In FreeBSD I can make from source some package, and in Debian I can apt-get install a package, because the Debian packages are prebuilt it just comes over in several chunks and doesn't need to build. (yes you can pull prebuilt packages for FreeBSD too). But my point is that the packaging system of FreeBSD, as used, conflates building the packages and using the packages.

So if I write a perl script that goes through the source code and changes all the calls to fstat() to match your configuration then to build I need perl even though you do not need perl. (as an example). But to run I don't care if you have perl or not.

But lets get back to the volunteer/paid thing again. People who volunteer rarely volunteer to clean the shit out of the horse stalls, no they volunteer to ride in the races and build a new horse. So you end up with a lot of stuff around you don't want.

Sadly for operating systems, and the original rant is really operating systems, there really isn't a cathedral/bazaar model, its more of a democracy / feudalism kind of thing. Nobody 'owns' the final user experience for the OS in FreeBSD/Linux discussions.
Right... I was assuming in this case that the message size would be < 1 block considering it's just a database id. In that case you'd have to modify the IV to flip id bits.
If the US says "please arrest this man, and send him to us" and the New Zealand government says, "sure we'll do that." How does the arrest of the person by the NZ government become a "US operation?"

Are you claiming that the US led the assault and had full operational command? Are you claiming that the US made the decision for the NZ government? Are you claiming that money changed hands somewhere?

Do you have proof of anything beyond, "This is a shocking turn of events, and I don't like it?"

Here are a number of other posibilities:

1. The NZ authorities don't have a lot of experience with assaulting a multi-million dollar compound to make an arrest.

2. The NZ authorities saw this as an excuse to perform a paramilitary operation.

3. The NZ authorities saw this as an excuse to justify the budget for their 'toys.'

4. The NZ government did this favor expecting to be able to ask the US for a favor later.

...etc...
That depends on the pivot chosen. If your quicksort implementation actually hits n^2 behavior with sorted input, it's probably not the best implementation.

Any implementation can hit n^2 with random input. It's just highly unlikely.
I'm still so afraid the market will crash again, it still makes me hesitant to take bitcoin seriously.
I'm not in disagreement and don't want to split hairs, but for posterity:

xwindows before macos

Actually, no. MacOS predates X by a few months. X Window System was introduced on June 19th, 1984 [1], while MacOS was released with the Macintosh on January 24th, 1984 [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Introduction
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mac_OS
I did a quick Finnish translation as a lark, then found the BabylScript project and added their translations to the page.

The main difference between the approaches is that BabylScript does things in a more Right Way (they do punctuation, number parsing, localised object property names) whereas js-i18n only maps translated tokens to JavaScript tokens. Token mapping is easy to implement and has no effect on the generated code (though you need to watch out for namespace collisions, as different words in language X may map into one word in language Y). From reading the paper, the BabylScript project needs to do some runtime dispatching to handle translated property names.
I can see your point but I noticed a problem with this (at least with my friends circle).
The problem is that I find my friends (and girlfriend) will often come up with the wrong answer and use it as fact from that point on. Unless I make an effort to show them they are wrong it will become the truth and I will forever have to tell them they are wrong.

It is incredibly annoying when I hear them repeating the wrong information later on.
The Hartl tutorial is absolutely amazing. I still go back to it all the time. I was all Java before I picked up Rails and this book answered all of my questions.
"They expect to be listened to when they have an idea, even when they’re the youngest person in the room."

Speaking as a gen-y-er, I completely agree with this sentiment. From my experience working in offices, there are always two conflicting thoughts I consider when speaking up, however:

1. The established politics of the office and who you are "allowed" to speak to and what you're allowed to say, and

2. The reality of the actual task/goal you are trying to accomplish.

Even if your ideas are good and beneficial to the work at hand, sometimes #1 is more important than #2. If this is true then I will quit as soon as I am able.

It's generally true that I consider my elders peers, not authority figures, as the article states. This does not mean I don't have a lot to learn from them! In fact, I want to learn, teach me, guide me!

However, like anyone and everyone you run into in life, an elder in the workplace has to earn my trust and respect, they need to prove to me that they are worth learning from. Just because you are older than me does not mean your ideas are worth listening to. Sometimes having a higher rank does correlate to being someone worth listening to. Just as often I have found this to be not true.
> he called it 'Object-Oriented Databases'

IMHO I disagree that this phrase is relevant to NoSQL. The systems he refers to (I'm looking on page 37) are specifically object databases (OODBMS). While in the strict sense, an OODBMS doesn't use SQL and could be referred to as "no SQL", they are not what people are normally talking about when they talk about NoSQL. To be fair, I checked Wikipedia on NoSQL and they do list object databases underneath the taxonomy, however OODBMS conflicts with the Wikipedia description of NoSQL:

> In short, NoSQL database management systems are useful when working with a huge quantity of data and the data's nature does not require a relational model for the data structure. The data could be structured, but it is of minimal importance and what really matters is the ability to store and retrieve great quantities of data, and not the relationships between the elements

This refers to what we usually talk about as the main advantage of NoSQL databases which is that they are nearly or completely schemaless. The notion that fields can be added/removed and new kinds of structures and sub-structures can be added at will without any impact to existing data is pretty much one of the key advantages offered by NoSQL.

With an OODBMS, the situation is totally the opposite. The database is completely hardwired to the structure of your objects, as they are stored in some quasi- or actually-serialized format. In contrast to Wikipedia's phrase, in an OODBMS, the structure of the data and the relationships between the elements is of maximal importance. From Fowler:

> With an OO database you dont have to worry about mapping. You work with a large structure of interconnected objects.

You might call this NoSQL in the strictest sense, but in practice NoSQL strongly implies "nearly/completely schemaless".
With a "schemaless" database, you totally have to worry about mapping your objects, as an OO domain model looks nothing like the key/value cassandra/mongo-esque models we talk about in NoSQL. Schemaless systems certainly have existed for decades but that's IMHO not what Fowler refers to here.
Actually, the amusing thing is you're still reinforcing the cathedral metaphor. If the primary target of the cathedral was an event hall capable of housing a bunch of people it could have been built in a way more reasonable way. The point of cathedral is to be the biggest and most impressive kid on the block. Therefore I'd say that MS was designed in a cathedral way to achieve cathedral goal.
Resurrection: HP's new Mobility division to handle consumer tablets
"Also Sweden (like the United Kingdom) is bound by EU and ECHR law not to extradite in circumstances where there is any risk of the death penalty or torture. There would be no extradition in the United States in such circumstances."

Except that law has been violated before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Agiza_and_Muhammad_al-Ze...

Edit: In my opinion this article seems to clear up some myths spread by the Assange supporters while continuing to spread myths by the Assange opponents.
Yes, that's the same thing I was referring to. Talking shit (with no modifier) is, in my experience, an uncommon phrase to use in a sentence; the only time I can recall hearing it is when person1 is telling person2 that person3 was talking shit about them. In that situation, the "about you" part is implied, and you can leave it off. "Don't worry about it man, he's just talking shit." That implies person1 is saying person3 said something negative about person2.

Now, what I would be doing in a bar is "shooting the shit". This means you're just telling bullshit stories (wild, made up, inaccurate, designed purely for entertainment). I caught a 30" bluegill is bullshit, and I would only say that when I'm in a bar shooting the shit.
What is the advantage of a half width server?

I mean with all the connectors on it it isn't like you can put two of em into a 1U slot.
M$? Really? I thought HN and seasoned OSS developers were above this kind of petty name calling and sneering.
Breaking Crime News: A Serial Killer on the Loose in Toronto?
You never read ESR's essay/book, did you ?
In many companies -- in the U.S., at least -- salary has become de facto a commitment to a minimum of 40 hours/week. In my last corporate gig, I was expected to be "in the chair" at least 40 hours/week. (And there was a butt-ugly HR time tracking application for that.)

If I was short, it came out of vacation time (into which sick time was rolled in an "efficiency" measure), unless a manager chose to "look the other way" as a "perk". (Corporations are very good at using these non-expense "rewards" to tweak behavior.)

Salary, in corporate America, is no longer -- if it ever was -- a "two way street". The employee can be worked extra hours for the same pay but often faces a raft of problems if they try to take unaccounted time off during slack periods.

Higher end professionals may encounter more leniency; don't assume this applies to the masses.
Transport for London storing passwords in plaintext
I took a look at it and nope... I'm still going to have to build my own task list.

Not to take any wind out of your sails, but Task Lists are one of those seemingly low hanging fruit where there's a lot of space for opinion as to what the UI should be like.
I have not failed,i just found 10,000 ways that won`t work
Pagani has been putting out truly amazing cars. The Zonda F is nothing short of astounding; well designed, insanely well engineered, and it's simply beautiful. I can't wait to see the Huayra; one day I'll actually be able to afford one. Maybe.
> Yes, that's the same thing I was referring to. Talking shit (with no modifier) is, in my experience, an uncommon phrase to use in a sentence

No, no, no! In the UK it is not uncommon! People over here are talking shit all the time, often not about anyone.
Microwave water while grinding cofee, add both to french press, wait five minutes or so, press, pour, drink.
News Flash

You can learn without an education.
Caching HTTP POST Requests and Responses
A Step by Step Guide to Optimizing your Clients' Internal Linking Structure
I don't get it sometimes.

Are articles like this a result of a huge supply of terrible managers, or are they the result of managers with too much time to spend blogging about what should be painfully obvious.

I've never been in a work environment in which I haven't been treated like an adult, and that's all this article seems to be dictating.

So I guess my question is: Do we really need blog posts on how to treat employees like employees?
It's sad how more and more people ignore non-mouse-or-touch-oriented users in their UIs. What about damn old keyboard support? Even if I modify input, nothing changes in UI. I'm not even mentioning such things as being able to easily navigate through days and months using arrow keys...

Nice-looking UI -/-> Good UI

And even more:

Nice-looking UI -/-> Good UX
You know, first time I encountered the "M$" shorthand was in a TELEX (look it up if you don't know what that is) from Commodore Corporate about pricing of the the PC10 computer. I have used it ever since, based in part on what was not very diplomatically expressed in that missive about M$'s attitude to licensing.
Is this anything like what Plivo (another YC company) is doing? What are the differences, if any? Sorry if these are stupid questions, I know next to nothing about telephony or the market opportunities therof.
> there are very few technologies that can reliably detect things like people, while ignoring things like various animals (or heat from jet engines, etc.).

If a 100MM taxpayer funded system can't tell the difference between a jet engine heat output and a person's heat signature, then someone should be criminally liable for defrauding us.

And as far as differentiating a deer from a human, it should have detected the moving object, sent the images to a person sitting in front of a computer, and he/she could have classified the object.
Thanks for trying!

Now we just put the comment in the variable name. The compiler just checks the variable names all match up, but doesn't check whether their names make sense.

Perhaps the example chosen was too much of a toy to yield valuable insight?
At $30 a month, it offers less in terms of low priced options to get started compared with, say, these guys:

https://secure.grasshopper.com/

I have no idea about anything else though - I ended up not using Grasshopper because they rejected my credit card for whatever odd reason.

Edit - changed the wording to make it clearer what I mean about pricing tiers.
m4 allows you to redefine the delimiters (yes, it's that crazy). Autoconf uses square brackets.
@yesbabyyes you are right, I meant to say XPARC :)
Apple's Cap Reaches $621B, Now The Most Valuable Public Company Of All Time
Hi vkkan
Thanks for your constructive criticism & questions. They're always welcome.
My answers below:

1. SO data is available under the CC license. I don't expect this to change in the future. Regarding other data sources, I plan to use API or will need special agreements in hand with data providers.

2. You never know this until you try to sell. This is what I'm trying to figure out right now. If there's a good reason to believe that nobody wants to pay for this, I will proceed with plan "B" and will make the tool freely available and will need to find a different business model.

3. I would target the tool primarily at marketers, evangelists, companies building developer-focused products (books, courses, conferences, it vendors). I wasn't thinking about outsourcing shops to be honest.
Actually, we offer way more. You can compare what we offer - http://profig.com/virtual-phone-system - with what grasshopper offers.

Plus, we'll be launching our mobile apps soon, which are SIP clients, and that'll cut down the bill even further, up to half.