skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know, in years and years and years of programming, of applications and web and back-end and front-end etc etc, I have never had a real-life use case for Big-O notation, except in interviews. Nor had a real-life use case for caring about sort algorithms. I mean, not once.

I'd say the true foundation needed is entirely different. Avoiding spaghetti code, good refactoring practices, understanding when more architecture is needed, avoiding premature optimization or over-architecture, concepts like technical debt, writing code designed to be readable, how to establish practices and standards and make sure they're communicated properly... These are the kinds of things that actually matter in most projects.

(Obviously, if you're writing video codecs or kernel code, it's a whole different story...)
Python uses Exceptions for unexceptional cases, yes, like loop termination. It's one of the only languages to do it.
I think they censored the video because US interest is involved. The more Islamic world engages this video as a rallying point, the greater the security threat to US. Free speech has its costs too.
is Germany becoming the Eastern District of Texas of Europe?
Are iPhone Average Sales Prices Increasing?
Anyone writing about things like NFC are missing the point. Consumers don't care about NFC, they care about convenience. Convenience is paying with your smartphone, and Apple has, apparently, figured out a way to make that happen.

You can't enumerate the experience of using an Apple product with a list of specifications any more than you could express the beauty of a sunset with an Excel spreadsheet. I'm not saying it's unquantifiable, but I am saying it's far more subtle than, "ZOMG the iPhone doesn't even have NFC or springy cameras!" These are implementation details, not features, and consumers don't care about implementation details, they care about a quality experience. Apple knows how to deliver a quality experience.

EDIT: Lest anyone think I am a breathless Apple fanboy, here's some data to back up my claim that Apple knows how to deliver a quality experience:

http://www.jdpower.com/content/press-release/upO8vjP/2012-u-...
It's certainly not obvious to a normal user, and that's fine. But if you even somewhat understand security this should not come as a surprise.
Show HN: Create Virtual Branch for your customers on Facebook
No idea whether that article is firmly tongue in cheek or not, but given that the majority of those phones either have bulges at certain points, or push outs where the camera is they're all a bit thicker than the spec sheets say.

Bit like a car manufacturer saying "Our car is <X> weight! (with no engine, transmission, gearbox, fueltank, seats, windows)", it's true, but it's not correct.
Do you shout "HELLO CUNTS!!!" every time you enter a building?

Why is that form of self-censorship acceptable to you?
Being able to run an app I want is a feature of my phone.

It's all subjective. Even if you have an objective, measurable difference (processor speed), that only matters if I value the difference (subjective) -- which I don't. The iPhone 4S is fast enough for me -- I can't make use of an improvement in speed.

I can make use of new iOS apps (and do on almost a daily basis). If there were apps I wanted that needed the iPhone 5 to run, that might persuade me. If a Samsung phone could run iOS apps, then I would choose based on price (probably).

If you don't agree, then of course, the iPhone isn't interesting. It's just a glass box with components without the apps. I wouldn't even have a smart phone at all without the App Store.
Watch Out For This Insidious Startup Project Malady
I believe the red areas are more or less "empty" space. The edges are bonds and the nodes would be the nucleus.
Keynote was originally designed for Jobs, and so i'd guess it got a disproportionate amount of attention from him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynote_(presentation_software)...

And, FWIW, I only occasionally need a spreadsheet at home and Numbers works perfectly for my limited requirements.
Tips for Successfully Launching a Project on HN
>Sometimes to the point where I don't consider myself a 'real' programmer and feel like a faker any time I'm talking with someone more skilled than myself.

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

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20060901/handson-leadership.html
How often do plane stowaways fall from the sky?
Have you worked through any code katas? I find that the end 'solutions' are generally elegant and working through the steps is a helpful way to get there. Obviously your own work will vary, and you'll never have someone else's solution to compare against, but many of the skills and methodologies should carry over.

I think the original ones are the best, but if you don't know PHP (I wouldn't say that I do), finding some in your language(s) of choice would be best.
What free speech? When has YouTube ever proposed not to censor videos on the basis of content?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
I did something similar for cheap (insecure) desktop streaming a few years ago.

Roughly, use scrot (or similar screen capturing command line tool) to take a screenshot of the desktop and then encode it into a gif frame. Repeat once per second. Boom, your desktop is now a gif.

The main problem with this approach is that transmitting stuff via gif (low-color bitmaps, remember) is painfully slow even with modern internet.

That said, could probably be very useful in some instances!
Out of Africa: Another Way to Think about Learning
That's different and you (should) know it.
Right on the homepage of handlebarsjs.com...

"It is also possible to precompile your templates. This will result in a smaller required runtime library and significant savings from not having to compile the template in the browser. This can be especially important when working with mobile devices."

But nobody reads documentation... ;-)
Wait, they're looking forward to "Native CoffeeScript support in browsers, so that during development, we can avoid the compilation to JavaScript altogether."?

Is there something I don't know about?
They have never been easy to use. You have to think in APPLE way, if you do that it probably makes sense.
http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/Disguised_Ads are by far the worst ones, pretending to be part of the navigation. Browsing without blocking them is like driving on a road with posters covering the traffic signs.
This doesn't sit well with me. Who is to say what's catastrophic and what's not? Should I use all libraries in fear because passing a nil pointer or an improperly formatted date may cause it to terminate the program with no recourse? Suddenly every library is a ticking time bomb with a scorched Earth policy for things it doesn't like. How am I to know what's going to cause my valuable program to simply die in the middle of the night? Look at the outdated/incomplete documentation? Pore over the complex code (if it's even available)? Now not only do I need to litter error value checks everywhere, but I also need to preemptively sanitize all input to any library calls I make and pray that I haven't missed something. This is simply trading one problem for another.
Can you give your definition for both these roles? I thought they are different jobs.
Because resumption wasn't actually necessary for such a context inquiry, they removed it and found a significant speed increase in that part of the system.

s/resumption/exceptions/ and you have a secret to performance in Java.

If this is the core reason for termination-only exceptions in C++, Stroustrup made a huge mistake: he presumed that the best exception handling for mature, stable code was the best exception handing for all code. But then he also threw in a lot of features that cripple the language from ever being able to create truly mature, stable code (see http://www.250bpm.com/blog:4). Now the most stable, mature libraries are written in C.

C++ exceptions are then unreachable code, and a properly optimized programmer will never use them.
Hm, I don't know. This video is clearly hate speech, and I'm not sure Google should be required to keep content online that has literally caused the deaths of several people.

A 'slippery slope' argument doesn't hold up for me in this particular case.

EDIT: alright, maybe not literally. But I maintain that the video is hate speech, and that a different standard on "censorship" should apply here.
How Color Photography Started: Cushman
Ah yes- Poulsbo!

I believe there is some rudimentary support for that in the kernel now, so Linux may work on it [just with no 3d acceleration] anyway.
Optimal, complex solution vs. simple, requirements-meeting solution
What are you hoping to accomplish? I've been working through python, and it seems like most ruby tutorials are geared toward web development, while python's tutorials are more varied. There are plenty of python webdev tutorials, especially for django, but there's also a bunch of statistical/scientific ones as well.

Not saying Ruby doesn't have all that stuff, though. One factor was how much of a pain it is to develop Ruby on Windows.
Summer - get information about people you read about across the web
Facebook Is Poised to Shake Up Advertising, Insider Says
Mechanizing business development with social media
GroupDocs provides a commercial online viewer and API's for supporting those formats as well as .pdf
You'd shout that if you hated the persons in that building, and you'd be the one affected in the end.

Youtube self-censoring "for the right reasons" now can easily lead to them censoring things in the future not only on the basis that it's "for the right reasons", but also because "we did it before, why not now?", which is among the worst excuses/reasons to do anything...

And Google will not not affected - it will be the thousands/millions of people who will not be able to watch the video (which will most likely be somewhat important - they wouldn't censor a cat playing with a tennis ball).
Exactly.

My university's CS department had just enough "time" to skim over the big topics (one database class, really??) while we ran around trying to please non-CS profs in classes that weren't really necessary for me (two chem classes and physics).

I'm all for general knowledge, but if I need to know anything about chemistry (which I haven't yet in my role as a web dev), then I can go learn it, or change my major and focus on it.
People have that impression - that Stroustrup "dumped everything into C++" - but it's demonstrably not true if you read D&E. Every new feature that made it into the language after the standardization point had a working implementation, and people had experience with that implementation. He goes over lots of rejected features.

Also consider what your statement implies: Stroustrup put too many features into C++ (bad), but he did not put feature X into C++ (also bad). You're faulting him for accepting too much, but at the same time, for not accepting one in particular. Although it should really be noted that post-standardization, what made it into C++ was a committee decision, not Stroustrup alone.
> Ellison declined to comment on the letter, saying it is a confidential Ad Board document—indeed, it is branded with a “CONFIDENTIAL” stamp.

Wow, I wonder why it is confidential. Isn't it a right to know what you're being accused of?

edit: I see, that's fair, as long as the accused get to see.
In my opinion, Google (as YouTube) is not obliged to show a video. The owners of the video still have the option to upload it elsewhere, or to host it themselves, or to distribute it via a torrent.
Okay, why do you use a hash table instead of a linked list when quick retrieval is more important than in-order traversals?

Now, it's pretty obvious when we're discussing something as simple as this, but this is the fundamental essence of Big O. Certainly, we don't need to calculate it on a daily basis, especially past the general case, but it also doesn't hurt to have common terminology when speaking about an edge case of an algorithm.

And just having a general feel of a graph of how quickly an O(n^2) algorithm can spiral out of control versus an O(log n) algorithm is useful. (That is, if you have a small amount of elements, it's not going to matter, but it will matter quickly as the number of elements grow.)
Thanks for these. The first one describes me in many ways.
Let's not start debating semantics on HN...
Or just cut to the chase and use multiple choice.
I would also recommend learning PowerShell. Your knowledge of bash will not help you through it, but it's easily as powerful as bash, and native to the Windows environment.
My understanding is that the mini-usb adapter exists solely to appease an EU standard. Apple didn't want to make this adapter, they only make them so they can comply with regulations when selling their phone.
An article I always refer to when talking to people, techies and non-techies alike, is http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/25/search-googles-castle-moat/.
Craigslist Hiring to Improve its UI/UX
Quora has found its niche among intellectuals who don't mind the stringent rules,

Try blowhards who like to hears themselves pontificate.
That's a straw man, because the grandparent probably does not feel inclined to shout that regardless, so no censorship is necessary. What's more, the troubling aspect here is that a third party is doing the censorship. IMHO they shouldn't legitimize the outrage over this video which is nothing more than amateurish satire.
You're right. You probably won't need to take any courses to learn all this stuff - this stuff can be easily accessed online. It's definitely crucial for all software developers to have this sort of CS background.
Was that the discussion site where they didn't sanitize embedded CSS..? So when you loaded the page, it kept changing style because every commenter had overridden styles?
The Microsoft Advantage
Some IBM group produced images of single and double bonds "pre-internet", or very early internet at the latest.

I remember thinking how the double bonds looked like the plastic plug-together model that I had for chemistry class.
Whether the hardware is right depends on the usage. In my case I've found the hardware terribly inadequate for what I need to do. I have an early 2011 MacBook pro, and it has proved to be incredibly frustrating for me as a general purpose computing platform. The main issue is lack of inputs, removal of inputs, and a lack of options for inputs.

Having only two USB2 ports, removal of ExpressCard34 slots used for third party hard drive adapters on the 15", and a thunderbolt port largely unusable by the cost conscious makes shuffling things quite painful.

Some usage paths lead backwards. For example, video editors using a MacBook pro 15 who used the ExpressCard34 for sata drives lost that capability with the upgrade. You had two ways to go, either downgrade to FireWire 800, which was still available, and if the reduction in transfer speed was acceptable, or try and find a thunderbolt setup that was both cost effective and mature. Good luck on that! If you went the FireWire path, the next model from 2012 left you needing a thunderbolt adapter, as the FireWire port was dropped.

They are quite well built, but they certainly have shortcomings.
I still don't get how it's parallelized, what's the reduce step? Is it averaging all the gradients from the maps? If so, that seems like what you were originally saying from your edit (and sounds like the functional equivalent of batch gradient descent).
The software patent solution has been right here all along
Show HN: Election Ticker
That 'literally' is much too strong. The video was used as a convenient excuse for an attack which was probably already being prepared. Cf. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/09/what-w...
True. And possibly undesirable depending on the sensitivity of the files.
Intel never said that the processor won't run Linux, but that they aren't going to support it.

Huge difference.

The reason they aren't going to support it is because Windows uses different system calls relating to shutting down cores on the processor in order to save battery life, and they designed the chip specifically for Windows.

If you used Linux with the processor, you'd get horrible battery life, and Intel understandably does not want the blame for that.
What Is Tag Management?
Trolling for dollars?
That's what I was telling you. A lot of people use MapReduce for simple search tasks, hence my remark.
That analogy is false because what YouTube is doing is blocking video clips that were posted by other people.

In your analogy, only you are censoring yourself. Nobody else is censoring you from shouting whatever you want to shout. It would be perfectly fine if individual users voluntarily chose not to upload certain clips.

An accurate rhetorical question would be: Do you shout "HELLO CUNTS!!!" every time you enter a building and before a single sound has emerged from your mouth someone gags you?
> If you do not wish to check the error code, you must be explicit.

Or you can ignore all the return values, like in your fmt.Println() example.

> I say "partial" because functions that only return 1 value can ignore the return implicitly:

fmt.Println() returns two values, one of which is of the error type. You can't ignore just one of those values, but you can ignore both of them.
Since errno is now thread local it's not the big deal it used to be, but it still contains no data, so returning objects is superior because it can provide error context and the error information can be chained together as flows up the stack. I was horrified at go's error handling policy until I learned multiple values could be returned from functions, that gets rid of the main problem with using error returns in C.
I sometimes feel the exact same way. I graduated with CS degree but have never used any of that knowledge until I got my current contracting gig - almost 11 years later.

During the first 10 years of my career, I used a language where I didn't have to "worry" about all of the kind of things I have to concern myself with now (using Java/MyBatis/Oracle).

I've always wondered what it was like using a "real" programming language and now I know - it can be tough but it's not terribly difficult. I love using the tools I've been reading so much about on various blogs and whatnot.
> What I really don't understand however, is why they decided to make a new proprietary format instead of using micro USB like everybody else.

What I don't understand is why you think Apple should be forced to implement a crappy standard instead of creating something that is so obviously much better.

That said, I'm hoping that Apple will release a plate-shaped adapter for existing 30 pin dock devices.
You can ignore errors in Go by assigning them to _. You can't if your return value is sometimes an Error.
Double-ended Queues for F#
If this becomes verified then it is very exciting - give me my hover board.

Even if it is entirely impractical in use, the thought that a room temperature superconductor may exist in one form or other is just more evidence that little stops the march of science :)
"This stuff is too complicated. There has to be a better way."

and to the comment on the blog saying how Apple is our "junk food."

Raspberry Pi might be the solution. It's literally a blank slate. Users, with some tech knowledge, have the ability to update and move stuff around without being dragged into an iCloud sort of mess. It's as clear as it gets IMO.
If it's straight-out political censorship, then they should rename it OurTube instead of YouTube.

I say "if" because I'm not familiar with the video. I've seen a lot of meta reports about it, but I haven't seen a summary of the video's content.
I had an inkling the headline might be sensational after RTFA. So it looks like this is just one more poorly-documented hoop for kernel devs to jump through?
Whenever I've restored from a backup, it's included all the device music, playlists, contacts, all apps, all app data, icon positions, etc. Basically everything, just the way I left it.

This has even held when restoring an old backup to a new phone the one time I upgraded and the one time I got a replacement device due a defect.

This has also been my experience with my iPads. The only time I had a problem with restore, was with my out-of-the-box 'new iPad' not restoring properly, which turned out to be due a failure of the unit. When that was replaced at the Apple store, the new device restored from the old backup flawlessly. Apps, music, movies, layouts - everything.

This is why I can't imagine what was going though the author's mind during the whole digression about his trouble with "Other" space in the article. Backing up is the default. Restoring is a straightforward process clearly marked and almost-uncomfortably up-front and accessible.

So why didn't he even try that before declaring all his wasted time Apple's fault?

A normal user would try the wipe-and-restore. Clearly, I'm not saying backup/restore never fails. But unless the author had it fail, it makes no logical sense to use his experience in paranoia as a 'point' about usability.
You're clouding the issue. "Free speech principles" as you describe them are not weakly protected elsewhere, they are not held. In particular, many -- most? -- enlightened Western democracies hold that hateful speech is not deserving of protection. Not because they're wishy-washy, but because they believe that's right.

You're being closed-minded if you're not willing to accept the possibility that they're right.
I guess it cuts down on scripts automatically opening and abusing accounts ?
Apple Sues Polish Grocery Store Over A.pl Name
Eventually in the future, people will come to realize the over-exaggeration of running out of ipv4 addresses. The unused blocks will come out of woodwork from everywhere. Well, I hope my opinion is wrong.
The concept of "should" is bizarre and irrelevant. The reality of the situation is that right now, you can.
Amazon to Begin Collecting Sales Tax from California Customers on Saturday
For me it's very common to defer error handling. For instance I'm logging most runtime errors and later I receive a nice report over email. I then click on the links provided and I get nice call-stack traces. I then go and fix those errors.

And while it would have been better to treat those errors in the first place, we do know that's not possible and trying to force the developers only leads to code such as ...

try {
...
} catch(Exception ex) {}

Checkout this piece on checked exception, also by a Google employee:

http://googletesting.blogspot.ro/2009/09/checked-exceptions-...
How easily people forget.

1. The App Store didn't show up until the 3G; whereas Java ME and Win Mobile apps had been around for years. You could install your own Java ME or Windows Mobile apps without going through the carrier; whereas Apple really does control the whole channel on iOS. That stated, smartphone apps prior to the iPhone 3G tended to miss the mark with respect to convenience, quality, and ubiquity.

2. The iPhone probably was the first phone with a decent browser. Their UX was quite good, and definitely took advantage of the recent evolution in the available hardware (e.g. large, capacitive multi-touch screens).

3. The iPhone didn't have GPS until the 3G. That and other missing features were major complaints about the first release.

4. The interface really wasn't smooth at all until probably the 3GS. The 3G and below were randomly jittery and jumpy, but that's understandable given the extent to which they were pushing the envelope on the hardware of the day.

5. Yes, the iPhone was the first mass-market phone with a UX that really took advantage of a large capacitive multi-touch screen. However, Apple certainly didn't create those screens, or produce the first devices to use them. They did, however, make the first broadly successful device built on that technology, employing a combination of solid design and very aggressive marketing. But it's misleading to claim that others in the industry weren't already moving in that direction as well.
Or you know, locked you out before you came into the building.