skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Old People"

I find an interesting contrast between his conclusion on Agile conferences versus my 42 year old self. He sees a lot of old people and concludes this must not be a good thing. I see a lot of "old" people and conclude my elders might have learned something over their careers which I might get a leg up on by listening to what they value.

I wonder how many lessons older programmers learned in the resource constrained 8-bit or mini-computer days could have help some of the youngster programming these smart phones?

// for a comedic take on youth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKUZ42T9diU
> You've limited your view to what you can learn from only your 5 senses and that nothing else exists.

Not quite. The most basic description of science is that it deals exclusively with testable ideas, ideas that can be compared to reality. And if reality disagrees, the idea is abandoned.

So it's not that "nothing else exists" but that untestable, unfalsifiable ideas aren't a matter of interest to a scientist.

> It is a thesis of mine and as of right now there is no disproof. [emphasis added]

There's another important distinction between science and non-science -- in science, an idea without supporting evidence is assumed to be false (the null hypothesis). To a non-scientist, ideas that haven't been disproven are assumed to be true (as in your example above). That's a big difference -- it's why nonscientists accept so many unsupported ideas.

Because of the null hypothesis, scientists are described as skeptical of ideas unaccompanied by evidence. This posture is sometimes looked on as a handicap -- until a jury is empaneled, at which point a variant form of the null hypothesis is explained to the jurors (innocent until proven guilty).

It all depends on how important the outcome is. If it's just a philosophical debate with no practical consequences, then believing anything does no harm. But when our lives or our health depend on the result, the null hypothesis has it all over the undisciplined approach.
sigh

A butterfly flaps its wings, xkcd puts up a comic on ratings, someone piggybacks on the comic, it makes the front page of HN, you wander by and mention criticker, a bunch of geeks pile onto the site to check it out... and it ends up crashy for a while.

Cool site, thanks for mentioning it. From what I saw before it went down (too many mysql connections?), it even looks like I can export my ratings.
'Tis true. Part of the reason we're stuck with so many people still using old versions of IE today is because, a decade ago, IE really was The Best Thing. There are neat, useful things from IE5 for which equivalents still aren't available in any other browser- like native HTML dialog boxes, or custom tags defined with DHTML Behaviors. When I first started writing desktop applications, they were HyperText Applications, also introduced with IE5.

I used to love developing for IE- even if it wasn't 'standard', it was better. And then Chrome came out, and IE started lagging behind. And we've moved on to new experimental features in new browsers with all their vendor prefixes and such.
At first I thought it was an attempt at humor, but it wasn't! It's funny how if you take the prejudice away it actually makes the opposite point he's trying to make, i.e.

"Do you notice how as people get more and more experience in the industry they start to gravitate more towards agile processes?"
Introducing Apache Apollo: Part I
Agile is the corporate gobbledygook for convoluted process and making sure people work day in and day out even though there is no long term goal. Suits them!
>> Just because you're not seeing younger people at agile related events, doesn't mean they're not using agile methods where they are 'doing' stuff.

I second this. If you're using conference attendance as a measure of the effectiveness of agile methods, you may have missed a point somewhere.
Perhaps it's better defined by what it's not.
A Beginner’s Guide to Big O Notation
Nowhere did he mention disabling iCloud, moving the directory back into place, and re-enabling it.

That might seem like the first step in solving this problem, and I wouldn't doubt that he did it if not for the instant jump to "restoring my iPad didn't help. everything is miserably broken so I called Apple."
Cost Comparison: Amazon Glacier vs S3
Relevant discussion on how not to calculate average rating without taking into consideration of sample size:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3792627
"Off-hand comments like this almost always come back and bite hard"

If he has influence over hiring / firing, the first age discrimination suit is going to be fun. Stupid blog or e-mail comments give lawyers way too much ammunition in hostile workplace claims.
Aside: I find it ridiculous that I can't read a blog post, a little bit of text and an image, without enabling javascript on two domains. I know that a bunch of you will think only masochists use NoScript, but the page is slow to appear and needlessly complicated. If there's anyone at Google who could help your company set a better example, please nudge the right people.
Well to be honest, there's a lot of people with CS degrees that don't know the fundamentals of basic CS either. I know, it sounds crazy, but you'll frequently run into people who graduate from reasonably top notch schools and have never heard of simple things like ternary search trees or suffix arrays, or even state machines.

In my experience I find that nearly all practicing programmers simply don't know a lot of important basics about building software or even how a computer works.
I think you're getting hung up on the low-level details and missing the big relational picture.

Timestamps are atomic units. If I add 60 minutes to 10:15 AM I don't want to see 10:75 AM, I want to see the 11:15. This is because the "components" of the timestamp are not independent values. Likewise, a string may be an array of characters, but a name is an atomic entity. It's meaningful to break a string into characters (low-level) but it's not meaningful to break a name into name-characters.

Now, if I had a reason to make a relationship between one entity and many characters, the correct way to model it in the relational database is to use a one-to-many with a character column. Using a string instead is not the right thing to do. Strings, for starters, have an ordering, and sets do not. Indexing that string column probably won't perform as well as indexing the separate table, because string indexes care about that order. It may perform worse, or model the situation worse, for a variety of reasons. In practice, I've never seen anyone make a relationship between a character and an entity.

The distinction between when I'd use a separate row for each character and when I'd use a string is exactly the distinction between when using an array is 1NF and when it isn't. I don't think the idea of avoiding repeating groups says anything concrete about data types. I'd be surprised if the theorists spent a great deal of time discussing the philosophical ramifications of strings being composed of characters or what each type means on-disk; at least 40% of every book by Joe Celko consists of admonishment to avoid worrying about the physical layout. I'm sorry if this comment isn't sufficiently formal for you, but it's the best you're going to get from me. Lord knows this won't be the first time database theory and practice have not matched up to everyone's satisfaction. Maybe next we can discuss implementing transitive closures in portable SQL?

Back to arrays, the basic loss of flexibility is portability. If you modeled it traditionally with tables, your result would be portable to any RDBMS, including whatever indexes and constraints you made. By modeling it with arrays, you're limiting yourself to Postgres, and you're probably forcing yourself to use check constraints to ensure uniqueness within each array (if you care). The second loss of flexibility is that generic database access libraries probably don't support arrays natively. Hibernate, for example, does not "do" arrays, so you'll either be bypassing it altogether or converting them to strings and parsing them on the way out. These are the reasons I have off the top of my head; I wouldn't be shocked if there were others.

I don't think I'm going to see a third option besides arrays and normalization, but in this case, it would almost always be fine for the developer to err on the side of normalization. Are there uses for them? Sure. Just not many.
This seems really, really poor to me. There's no motivation, no visualization, no explanation, just a bunch of apparently arbitrary definitions, with neither examples nor applications.

Do people find this useful?
I think that is the great thing about IDEs allowing plugins. There are many other nice LaTeX editors, but none that allow proper customization.
I was just making a statement based on the opinion I saw in the statement you made.

I'm going to assume that most of your friends are Christian, and in modern Christianity fighting for your God is done with non-violence. Also many Christians today consider fighting for your country the same as fighting for God.

I have to say that Science doesn't prove anything. They predict. I agree that religion should not try to prove anything about the realm of the physical.

To say that God created the universe is to say that you believe in intelligent design. Some creature who put it all together. The why and how does not matter to the religious. They adapt their view TO science because it is immaterial. Look at Genesis. Honestly 7 days?

Religion isn't about the facts, or about arguing that there is an either out in space. It is about saying, hey there is always going to be something we can't explain and beyond that is God.
True enough, but I figured filter was widely known and partition-by was perhaps a little esoteric. The syntactic argument would be exactly the same if you used an equivalent of partition-by in the other languages.
I wonder what kind of link he used? Can directories have hard links on HFS+?
And I still cannot think of anything useful to build with it outside of Games and Guess Who Walked In The Door!

Is it just me. I feel like Doctor McCoy - complaining bitterly about Teleporters. Its an incredible app, available for the price of a days' work and yet ...

And before anyone says Gesture-UI - please read Douglas Adams who knew it all first:

For years radios had been operated by means of pressing
buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became
more sophisticated the controls were made touch-
sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels with your
fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the
general direction of the components and hope. It saved a
lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that
you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep
listening to the same program.

Is anyone working on something amazing to make me more Scotty than McCoy ?
Beautiful/generational land razed for commercial purposes? Welcome to eastern Kentucky and mountain top removal.
I really did enjoy your rant. It's very cathartic to read; I imagine it was even more cathartic to write.
How Free Mobile is already driving data prices down in France
Facebook Officially Launches “Sponsored Results” Search Ads
See http://tromey.com/blog/?p=778 where he talks about some of the difficulties.

tldr; Theoretically it should just work. There are some tricky bits.
A Pretty Good Solution To The Problem Of E-Book Lending
Wonder if pascal will ever have a come back as a web or mobile platform language; compared to C; which it was neck to neck some time.
Looks like some guy trying to drum up traffic about something he knows nothing about, and can provide no information about.
The Ultimate Website Checklist (Free Learning Resource)
The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins is a great book. Interestingly, he makes a point that because genes are shuffled, it is possible for the descendants from a common ancestor not to have a single gene from him.
As Data Needs Grow, So Does Internal Server Storage Capacity.
"The characters or substrings that make up a string stand on their own. In fact, it's pretty hard to differentiate a string from an array of characters."

It's difficult to differentiate a number from an ordered n-tuple of bits, but that doesn't make storing the number 123 storing an array.

I took the parent post's point to be clear: it isn't whether you can look at something as, in some sense, an array, it's whether you treat it as an atomic value. That's generally what you do with numbers: you update the whole number, not the third bit. And it's likely what you do with strings---even if you just want to change one character, you update the whole string, not the third character.

Likewise, if you want to store a complex number as a 2-tuple, you could treat that as an atomic data type even though it consists of two elements by always operating on the pair*. That's the respect in which it "stands on its own"---you don't peer inside.
Where Do Twitter F-Bombs Come From? Heat Map Shows Rudest Places
The funny thing about new technologies is how people find new uses for them once they own them. Microwaves come to mind as an incredibly popular limited-scope device (all it does is reheat food) whose function just duplicates a more common kitchen appliance (oven/stove/range).

The big thing with 3d printing will be the little things: cups, forks, plates, bowls, battery covers, buttons, dice, car interior parts (dashboard panels, clips, knobs, dials, etc). Maybe it's not interesting if everything you own is new & you don't have kids, but these will come in very handy replacing lost and hard-to-find parts for fixing up old things.
PayPal Teams with Discover
If the numbers in the meters (current workload, amount of stress and chance of emailing back) are percentages and the colours are representative of the percentage, then the 13% chance of being emailed back should be coloured red and not green to indicate the low chance of being emailed back.
Let's then bring it back to where it should be.

This was a very ugly moment of what seems to be a very ugly story. We should learn from it and try to avoid situations like this in the future. I'm sorry things like this happened and that they continue happening all over the place with people less vocal and with blogs less popular than Zed.

Zed... After reading this a long time ago, I was afraid when you approached the Python community. I feared something like this would happen again and I expressed my concern publicly. I am happy you proved my fears unfounded.
Just because something is complex doesn't mean it is bad, but something being really really complex (or feature rich), doesn't mean it is good either.

Now I might be mistaken, but Scala is one of rare languages that actually has compiler commands that disable parts of it syntax (or there was a plan to do so). To me that yells - Too complex. I'm quite sure it is powerful. But it doesn't look like something I'd enjoy using.

My main gripes about Scala is that the trait system is way less elegant than the Smalltalk variant [1], there seems to be a hundred different ways to do a thing (as opposed to a more unified way of doing things) and the overall "automagical" implicit. Not to mention the overall verbosity and ways the different features mesh together.

[1]http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/courses/819/Scha03aTraits.pdf
This is kind of sad. I'd love to hear a counter argument. Can anyone provide one? I can't think of any faults with his argument.
That debit card is an actual CARD, that you go get, and it has a Mastercard logo on it (not that it matters which so much, but that is one of the payment networks like Visa, Discover, Amex)

The big thing is you can use your Paypal ACCOUNT! Not get a whole new card. Seems pretty massive increase in their reach
For hosted, an annual fee is appropriate here. A $25 annual fee is quite similar to a one-time fee of $25 because once it is paid, there is nothing to do but use it for an entire year. After a year, it's very obvious whether the app is worth another $25 or not. Either way the developer's compensation is nearly the same assuming many accounts share the low cost of the servers.
Nothing new, this idea has been around since the 60s, or was it 70s?
Thanks, I need to clarify that part.
Yes, I know.

Searching is how I move to where I want.

It's a lot less confusing to me than EasyMotion's logic, it's consistent whether the word I want to jump to is visible or not and it's a native feature.

Well, I was curious when it was released so I've used it for a couple of weeks and found it horrible and confusing. Obviously many people like it so let's say it's a matter of taste.
And, a reminder, the YouTube app is removed from iOS 6, so millions more users will be hitting mobile YouTube directly. Pick one of (a) Google encouraged Apple to pull the app or (b) is jumping on top of the removal to exploit it.
This is great and really intuitive but it seems to cut off just before getting to the "algebra" part. Any chance we'll see a sequel?
Throne of JS: Backbone.js
Besides brute force decryption, does anyone have some good examples of O(2^N) algorithms?

Also:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/software-progress-beats-moores-law
Algorithmic improvement account for more of the acceleration in computing power than physical factors, such as transistor density.
Well the stuff he has listed is extremely basic operations and there is really not much more to explain there. I already knew this but for somebody who has never seen this or touched math in a while may find it helpful...
some alternatives maybe found on http://www.cloudli.st/apps?t=monitoring%2Cweb+analytics%2Cin...
I'm not really following your argument. Why would Agile shut doors to future change? It seems like one of the core tenets of Agile is to embrace the concept of change and willfully eliminate legacy models as you are able.

I also think it's very naive to think of NoSQL as purely OODB 2.0. It is getting used for a lot of different things, that IMO are inappropriate for it. On the other hand, the movement is intended to solve a very different set of problems (DBs with various ACID levels depending upon scalability and durability requirements), from those solved by OODBs (API improvements that weren't), and traditional RDBMS systems.
We started working on teleportation but accidentally beamed a family of Ceti Eels into the lab. They infected the entire team.
Feynman diagram sculptures by Edward Tufte
+1 for Checkvist. This tool is so versatile it's unbelievable. I find myself using it for everything, from time tracking to note taking.
I don't think the relationship is that strong. Certainly there are people who feel that way, but there are also people who don't really care what the infrastructure is (C or Java) and just want a highly performant Emacs to work in.

I don't do any JDK-related work, but I'd try it and Clojure out just for fun. If things go well, I wouldn't hesitate to switch.
Enter DataGotham
True, but even Google.us, which abolutely is an American domain extension, is set to thai for me.
As someone who does hiring, this sort of thing is kind of neat, but mostly very annoying. I look at maybe a dozen resumes (there's someone else in front of me who looks at far more), and having to figure out the bizarre format of yours is a waste of my time. I would guess that this applies similarly for people hiring contractors.

The consistency of the boring resume format is a plus. If you want to distinguish yourself, I would suggest you work within that format: better typography, a nice header, a striking layout (that still follows the format.)
I am biased, but it is hard to take someone who is talking about stagnation seriously when his blog ends in aspx.
The big question for me is whether gestures began as a proto-language. Consider mimicry and the use of tools in social learning. That's animal cognition too.
I completely agree. And, who knows, maybe by being built in a more modern world, it will be easier to extend in ways that solve similar problems to LightTable.
Examples of Brilliant Mobile UX
How are you liking the Pomodoro technique? Do you find it breaks your train of thought when in programming/design work?
'Adaptive Radio': Set to Shake Up the Wireless Industry
> the majority of people will go for the middle one.

... of those who didn't leave because they didn't like any of them. And even that is not true. It's more of an urban legend popular between "UX designers." In reality, people will go with the cheapest option that fits their needs.
I think this is something that light table is in a better position to pull off. It's new, doesn't have to worry about compatibility, and the worst case is you have to configure it with javascript (if I recall correctly) and not a lisp.

Whether or not it can, or even wants to, live up to that, is another matter entirely. But it'd be great if it does.
> Science is constantly failing us.

This is a classic religious view of science. But science isn't a belief system or some kind of guarantee, it's simply a disciplined way to compare ideas to reality.

> The problem is that science was BUILT to fail.

That's true, but is is certainly not a problem. In science, ideas can only be falsified, never proven true once and for all, and that is by design. Every scientific theory awaits falsification through new evidence, and some resist falsification for very long periods. No scientific theory ever becomes true in a final sense.

That is what separates science and religion.

> Religion does adapt, and grow, and find failures.

This is false. Religion punishes dissent and doubt. Science encourages it. The most reliable way to earn a scientific reputation, a Nobel Prize, is to cast doubt on a theory and produce evidence to back up the doubt. In religion, that can only get you expelled or killed.

> How many scientific theories are proven not to be accurate models for the data? Is that not a failure?

No, that is a success, and an essential part of the scientific process. Falsifiability, the idea that any theory can be disproven by way of evidence, is the single most important thing to understand about science, and it's what separates scientific theories from all other kinds.

> There is a perception that science does not fail. It does, frequently.

The failure of a theory, by way of evidence, is a success for science.
»This is a hack around censorship laws in a few places«

Wow, I had no idea. I thought it was some obnoxius kind of load-balancing or something like that :)
I like the idea, but the app hasn't been updated in a year and a half (see also their "what's new" section - not a good sign for system health), and there are a lot of gaps in what I'd end up using such a site for. Would you happen to know any alternatives? They've always been hard to google for, in my experience :|
Yes. That is, in fact, how Time Machine backs up so quickly. But I believe there are no userspace utilities to create them (and major POSIX assumptions break down, so you need to be careful if you do it in your everyday data).
Notes on algebra
They address this in the article " The CouchSurfing website, as it currently exists, needs a lot of help. It’s unstable and not very easy to use.".

They start by explaining also that they raised money specifically to focus on rebuilding the website and improving the mobile experience. That won't happen overnight though.
AOL: still providing insanity after all these years
The resume should be a simple listing of your claimed skills and work history.

To really stand out write a cover letter that sells what you've done and makes the case for your benefit to the company.

If you want to go further, create a personal website and reference it from your resume/cover letter.

e.g. mine is http://stephenballnc.com