skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your latest work definitely looks like pro now. Take your time, keep it up and an year from now, you'll see what big progress you'll have made. With years of experience, the skill starts to increase rapidly, while in the beginning everything is so hard and slow. Persistence is the key to success.
I think you could set up a filter to directly archive all new email, and mark it with a specific tag.

Then, when you want to check your new email, search for that tag, and un-archive the messages you actually want in your inbox.
The danger is that once everyone knows this they will all mark their emails as urgent.
The difference between a compiler not optimizing (gcc -O0) and optimizing as good as possible (gcc -O3) can be an order of magnitude of performance. That does matter in many cases.

Of course, various programs (web apps) are IO-bound. And gcc -O0 should still outperform Python/Ruby/etc.
I would go farther in regard to the Computer Science point.

CS programs should be burnt to the ground. And in their place we should build up three separate things. First, software trade schools that are actually good (e.g. not ITT). Second, for reals software engineering majors at colleges, that are heavy on things like practical programming, tools (version control, issue tracking, automated build systems), refactoring, teach multiple languages (javascript, python, ruby, SQL, etc.), and only delve into theoretical underpinnings as warranted (compare electrical engineering vs. physics programs). Third, legitimate Computer Science programs that are contractually limited to about 5% of the current CS student capacity for at least the next two decades and which teach a very mathematics heavy and science focused CS program and have zero expectation that the graduates of the program will go on to write software in industry after graduation.
> I haven't used rpm for a while having left redhat for ubuntu years back so this may be out of date: but certainly at the the time rpm was famous for "dependency hell" and deservedly so ...

True, but since then yum has taken over from rpm, and yum automatically resolves dependency issues. Just saying.

All major distributions have tools that avoid dependency hell, in one way or another. The bad old days of rpm trying to sort things out on its own -- and failing -- are gone, and good riddance.

> On moving to apt I never looked back and would never use rpm again.

Yes, but it's important to point out that Red Hat / Fedora users don't use rpm any more either.
It was never about the packing format (dpkg, rpm) nor about the management system (apt, yum)... it was ALWAYS about the number of packages and how well integrated they were and still are. Debian based distros still have the upper hand here as everything belongs to the official distro and is packaged as part of the whole system. RPM based distros all seem to go for the idea of the smaller core set of packages with other repositories filling out other parts of the ecosystem. It just doesn't work as well.
Tend to think the issue here is that start-ups are putting funds into hiring random people because they think it will help them suck up to celebrities and pseudo-celebrity investors, instead of concentrating on building worthwhile products.

If someone turns up saying "I invested in dropbox, I know Justin Timberlake, I worked at Founders Fund." and you say "Ok then, welcome aboard" because of that, then you're a dickhead.
I got one of those from a friend doing research at University , her department always has a good stock of them.
Sony Files Patent To Make TV Ads Into Video Games
I just read the post that inspired this post: http://programmers.blogoverflow.com/2012/08/20-controversial.... While a lot of these opinions sound reasonable, I want to know if they're actually true. All of these statements are expert opinions, but it's unclear how many of them are backed by research. Without controlled studies, experts can easily believe incorrect things.

If you hold an opinion, look at the evidence backing it up. If it's not strong, reduce your confidence. Or even better: Gather evidence, then form your opinion. And remember: Anecdotes don't count. I wish more of my colleagues would do this, but it seems most of them haven't heard of very many software-related studies.

If you want to learn more, I recommend http://www.neverworkintheory.org/ as a starting point. After reading some papers, you'll be surprised how limited our evidence-based knowledge is. Looking at software engineering studies made me realize that I'm not allowed to poke fun at psychology anymore. Even that field is more evidence-based than ours.
Nice. Notice how it so neatly slices off exactly one demographic from here and transplants it over there, without anything that would distract them. It's focussed just on one topic: Software development stuff for Software Developers.

There are four main camps here at HN:

- "Software Entrepreneurs", building Big Important Startups or quaint little "lifestyle businesses" that let them drive their cute little "italian supercars" around their quaint little midwestern town.

- "Computer Programmers", talking about languages, deployment strategies, open source stuff and how to configure their dotfiles to automatically convert tabs to spaces.

- "Tech Gossip Afficianodos", excited about what Techcrunch has to say about who got funded, and taking sides in fights between giant corporations.

- And the guy who just wants to point out that pirating movies off the internet is technically just "copyright infringement" and therefore not bad at all (and really HBO's fault anyway.)

These guys grabbed just their team, and now they're free to talk shop without any of the myriad distractions they'd get trying to do it here.

It's a little selfish to note that I actually see this as a good thing for a slightly different reason: If Camp 2 leaves, that's more HackerNews for those of us in Camp 1, which is the reason I'm here. We'll still have to flag stuff from the other two distracting groups, but it just might make this place a little nicer as well. Everybody wins.
There are also a few scientists!
N.2 on your list does already exist in the real world, albeit as a graduate program. CMU offers Software Engineering (with very minimal CS involved) at both the main and SV campuses, perhaps even at others as well.
Sidepoint: Svbtle is taking over.
I'm not sure I understand your point - they're making it legally available via their website as soon as it's available world wide, they're just not putting it on TV until 6 days later. There's no need to avoid anything or pirate or whatever.

Even if that weren't the case, I don't know about the rest of the world but in the UK, at least since the Russell Davis reboot, Doctor Who is mass market.

Yes the people you're talking about exist, but they're not the majority, they're not even that big a minority (though they're very vocal). A network is always going to go where the money is and that's with the largest number of people.
Google Doc & Script for easy campaign & UTM param tracking
GIMP, tried out a lot of image editors and imho it goes like this: Photoshop > GIMP > Elements > Pixelmator. Pixelmator has a really nice UI, but it's lacking features left and right. Photoshop is still the nicest, especially for coders, who don't know what they are doing (real artist only need a canvas and a brush anyway).
1) Indirection. Pointers require thinking in a few steps. Indirection is hard. It is a vital skill in any kind of programming (or especially debugging), but it does not come naturally to people who've only ever had to deal with the concrete.

2) Early on, you learn that ints and chars and floats and some_structs are fundamentally different data types. Then suddenly you're told that int%s, char%s, float%s, some_struct%s, and even void%s are fundamentally the same. Huh?

3) The fact that C uses % both to create a pointer and to dereference. These are conflicting meanings, and the unrelatedness of those two concepts is not sufficiently explained.

EDIT: Silly HN parser. I now replaced asterisks with %s.
Getting a device with proper push email would have solved the issue of having to check email all the time. Having email on my phone with good gmail push notifications is the most liberating thing I've ever done, but that may be because of the type of work I have to do day to day.
> Computer science should only be offered as a minor. You can major in biology, minor in computer science. Major in art, minor in computer science. But you can't get a degree in CS.

The problem is not that Universities produce poor CS majors. They don't. The problem is that everyone else expects that a CS major is going to be a good commercial developer. Some are, but that's just the odds.

If you want to be a programmer, do an software ENGINEERING degree. It deals with the practical issues and you actually do lots of real, actual, programming. Or go to a media design school, where you do lots of actual web programming.

Expecting every CS major to be a great programmer, is like expecting every Physics major to be a good baseball player. Sure, (s)he knows the optimal angle to strike ball to achieve a home run, but actually doing so requires a whole of experience and real world context.

(PS. I have a physics degree, and I'm a software developer, not a baseball player. But that's because I programmed a lot for fun and profit before going to university, and CS seemed like a big backwards step. And physics is more fun.)
I think the real key here is focus ... Meandering on Twitter for your first hour isn't going to get you anywhere.
I think the problem here is that the only type of banning you have is hellbanning and slowbanning. It would have been clearer if you had just “normal-banned” jcs, so he got a message saying “you have been banned and can’t post anything”. That would have avoided the misunderstanding to some extent.

Hellbanning should be reserved for users you want to prevent from noticing that they’re banned, so they won’t create a new account. That would be users who you think hold no hope of salvation, not those who you are just giving a warning to.

Even better in this particular case would be yet another type of ban that informs the user “you have been temporarily suspended from posting; check your email for the reason”. That would let the user know that the ban is temporary so they don’t get upset that they were apparently permanently banned for one mistake.
What amazes me is that in 2012 we still haven't found a decent auto-moderation tagging system that would allow these demographics to emerge naturally and we have to hope for someone to leave.

I just want 2 moderation buttons : "insighful" (make this contribution more visible) and "relevant to my interests" (make the things this user tags as insightful or relevant more visible to me. May include a partial transitivity of the "relevant to my interests" operator)

Does such a system exist? Is it flawed.
Expose fraud isn't bullying. She's a grown woman who chose to risk her reputation by playing a con game. Most con artists get away with it: she didn't. Her being exposed will deter other would-be parasites. Good.
Also there's Paint.NET on PC. It's fast, not bloated with useless functions (yet), and freeware. I've switched to it from Photoshop a few months ago and never regret my decision.
Thanks for the explanation, makes sense. I see what you mean about the sporadic nature of the insertions!
i am able to access quora
Square Enix jumps into free online gaming
What about products that have no aspect of customer service, say canned tuna? The point is that there are classes of products with no meaningful level of customer service to the final consumer. Or, any consideration of service is trumped by lower cost. In both of these cases the market will not correct for overbearing management.
Leechblock got me out of the habit of spending too much time reading various blogs/sites. I set it to block a certain set of sites between 10-12,13-17 hours.

It's trivial to work around if you want to, but having the "blocked" page pop up is a good reminder that I didn't want to be wasting my time and should get back to work.
It's tempting to install such a system, but it would establish a strong tunnelblick for users. Also, what if I change my interests (interest reset button?)?

I could imagine an opt-out system, like "funding stories don't interest me at all", but then, Facebook's IPO would fall into that category and I followed it with interest.
http://homepages.tcp.co.uk/~nicholson/alice.html
This is a great article which I reread occasionally so I'm happy to see it posted to HN. That said, the one thing that always bothers me about is I don't really know the leadership credentials of the author. His blurb at the bottom says:

> "William Deresiewicz is an essayist and critic. His book, A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter, was published in April."

and Wikipedia doesn't offer much in addition.

The advice seems reasonable, but I'm not sure if it's actually true. Have any respected leaders agreed with it? I know this talk was given at West Point, so it seems like that's an affirmation of its value, but does that mean it was read ahead of time and that's why he was brought in? What does Deresiewicz know about leadership?
I've done something similar. I disabled Safari on my iPhone. I've also set forwards on important mail to my icloud account which has push on the iPhone. This way if I do receive an important email, I'll answer or call immediately. Freeing myself of apps and Safari has made me more productive but now I wonder why I even need a Smartphone. The only apps I use now are Notes, Mail, Maps and the Music player. I'll admit one part of the reason why I removed all these apps is depression. Productivity is not my primary reason, but it has had a great benefit.
"Being on the computer/internet: 8 mins, 24 secs". Doesn't the average american spend about 11 minutes on Facebook a day? I guess a lot of that is during work/commute time?
Note that both apt-get and aptitude, together with dpkg, are part of APT (advanced packaging tool), which is the suite of tools handling .deb packages.

While I'm at it, neither apt-get nor aptitude are simply front ends to dpkg - both have fairly complex (and different) policies for how to handle dependency conflicts, etc, while dpkg makes you do everything by yourself.

See http://superuser.com/questions/93437/aptitude-vs-apt-get-whi...
While I hope this doesn't split the HN community, I hope it also serves as a wake up call that HN needs to improve or it will die. Some parts of Lobsters are really really good for solving some of the problems that HN has:

- invite only to prevent spam and increase accountability

- tags are ideal for the problem where not everyone cares about everything - getting to be a major gripe you see a lot ("oh my god, do we have to have another discussion about X")

- HN needs significantly better transparency in bans, title rewrites, etc. I don't believe that PG has an agenda or needs to protect YC companies, but the issue comes up so much that it needs to be addressed

- reasons for downvotes are genius

- private messages are worthwhile IMO

- the domain indicator is actually useful (sick of seeing co.uk or github.com instead of myblog.github.com)

Other things HN needs:

- to work: the fact that "more" barely works is astonishing

- an API for all the apps that want to provide a better or different experience

- comment collapsing - an essential feature for actually reading past the first comment thread

- a meta site where we can actually discuss this stuff without violating guidelines (meta.stackoverflow.com is one of the most innovative and important community tools ever, IMO)

I've heard "there are no technical solutions to social problems" as reasons not to do a lot of these, but the same argument could apply to the downvote. HN needs to innovate to keep its community, and I hope it does.
I use K-9 Mail on my Android phone. It lets me set up per folder poll intervals and per folder push settings. Eg, I can have email from one folder pushed to my phone on delivery (using IMAP IDLE), another folder to be polled once every two hours, another daily, and the rest manually.

Your "smartphone" doesn't sound very smart.

[Edit] I use sieve filters on the server side to route email into various folders on delivery.

[Edit2] I just double checked, and the "per folder settings" are not quite as granular as I thought. You can only set up one poll interval and add that to a selection of folders, and then set other folders to push or nothing. You can't have multiple poll intervals. Eg, Could set two folders to push, three folders to poll hourly, and the rest to manual only polls.
I'm still fuzzy on the distinction you are trying to make between "writing algorithms" and "writing code". If someone told me they were "writing an algorithm", I'd understand it as them trying to come up with a new algorithm, either on paper or in code.

If you're given the outline for an algorithm, and asked to write code to implement it, is that writing algorithms or writing code?
This reminds me of a nice local quote regarding the conflict of getting stuff done vs. the acceleration of tech addictions to Facebook, WoW, etc.

We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to[0]

[0] http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
Braintree’s Payments Platform Launches Across Europe And Canada
The problem with software trade schools, even though you may not require a pure maths focus, I still expect people who program professionally to be good at maths. I would expect most programmers to analyse algorithms in a formal manner if they have to. And the people capable of doing maths at that level are not the people that traditionally go to trade schools.
Apples profit from App store sales are pretty minuscule when compared with the profit they generate by device sales:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apples-app-store-economics-ave...
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apples-gross...

$538 million from app sales vs ~$60 billion from iphone sales and another ~$10 billion from ipad sales. I think the motivation for the app store is pretty clear based on that.

I'm not sure what you are basing your claim that Twitter would collapse without developers on, they manage their own in house Twitter clients now. You'll find that most users outside our little YC echo chamber use a) twitter.com b) one of the official Twitter clients
You don't call it a union, silly. A union is for socialists.

You call it a Professional Association. The same way doctors and accountants do. It's essentially the same as a union, but it's for rich, conservative people.
I can agree with your point. Government perhaps is smarter and better equipped to deal with these types of issues than it was in the past when unions were necessary. The follow up question to this is: how did Government become smarter about labor issues? Was it unions that brought these issues to mainstream attention? If we do away unions, who could adequately fill this role? Unions are special because they have direct access to information that is generally lost to anyone outside of the company's walls. Any entity that filled the role of watchdog would need access to this information.
3) That make's sense. For example...

int *i;

means "When you dereference i, you get an int."
He recently gave a talk reflecting on matplotlib: "Lessons from middle age"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3lTby5RI54

Edit:
At the end, he discusses the challenge of client-side rendering to make visualizations like the New York Times.

d3.js comes to mind, a javascript library with a structured approach to scales, axes, projections, layouts and data-binding with SVG. The project has 12 years of work in it according to ohloh:

http://d3js.org/
http://www.ohloh.net/p/d3js

I wonder what middle age will look like for javascript communities.
You find it hard to believe because you are convinced it can't be done other wise. Once you see some one doing it you will believe otherwise.
At the core, dependencies are a good thing, although there's downsides to that as well.

I have no experience with desktop app stores, but you wouldn't get Gnome and similar large and complex software from one, would you?
Which makes your comparison pretty unfair.
Except when they are calculating dependencies

But I agree with the yum sentiment, it really looks bad when compared to other solutions that existed: urpmi, apt-rpm, etc
Anecdotally: OmniFocus, dictionaries, pzizz, Skype, all-in-one banking app, a decent camera. My iPad or an iPod touch would have all of those, but then I'd have to carry two devices (I'd need a dumbphone for occasional calls). No data plan, no notifications at all (except for some slow-moving badges), and I still love my iPhone.
I updated my profile. Many thanks. You are a scholar and a gentleman.
In what sense? You can use testflight[1] to bundle a version for specific users.

Naturally, you can't have it downloadable for the general public whilst it's under review but testflight is one of the more popular methods to share the app with clients/testers/team members etc.

[1] https://testflightapp.com/
My dad had his life threatened by union workers for working overtime on a job he was overseeing installation of (robotics engineer). They told him to stop working because he was making them look bad (he was working well into the night because he was away from home and had nothing better to do, plus that's just who he is).

He thought they were joking, ignored them. They came back with muscle and told him in no uncertain terms to put down his wrench or they would beat him.

This happened while he was working away from home when I was learning how to walk.

I run a business right now, and have run several others. I would rather shut the doors to my businesses than be strongarmed by union thugs. I know I'm not alone in this.

Ideologically, unionism isn't necessarily horrible. Practically, it involves all sorts of illegal activity that is forgiven because of labor relations. There are a ton of legal exemptions in place for unions in the US.

I don't know why I even got into this conversation, but I wanted to make it clear that there are plenty of business owners that would rather offer zero jobs and make less money themselves than offer a single job to a unionized worker.
this is me. HN /Reddit. i feel sad.
Hmm that sounds interesting, kinda what Notifo's usecase was meant to be (before they abandoned it).

I currently use SaneBox, to keep my inbox under control, and has been exceptionally well. Would it be compatible with Pigeonal?
I shall check it out JCR. Thanks!
You don't think it is brought up or you do think that it is approved of? (edit: I never indicated any level of agreement with YC using HN to unfairly promote YC companies, so if you are responding to that then maybe you meant to respond to my parent)
Comment on the wrong post?
Half a gigameter of biking navigation in 12 countries in Google Maps for Android
Could you possibly email me a screenshot of how this looks in your browser if you have a minute? email: info@chartburst.com
I think it's fair to say that hellbanning is done to improve the site, rather than for the nefarious purposes you're trying to ascribe for it. Clearly, there are problems with it's application and transparency, but that's not the same as suggesting there's some plot here.
I am puzzled - why do you want computer programmers to leave HN?
I simply disagree that because some people decided to misuse a term, it is now appropriate. I think the use of IPO as a verb was done to sound sophisticated (and legitimate) and exciting, without understanding what SOX compliance involves. It seems to me that the only reason one would say "IPO" as a verb rather than "go public" would be to demonstrate some familiarity with jargon and gain some credibility among amateurs.

I may be a bit off, or poor in my ability to communicate my point, but it it seems you are appealing to authority in your argument for the use of IPO as a verb.