skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From experience, I can tell you each layer you ask the user to travel down eliminates 75-90% of the audience.
Not to take away from Bret's ideas, because they're great, but here are my responses.

1. I'd say that there's a significant difference between Bret and Linus. Specifically, when Linus believes that developers need better tools, we get git. When Bret believes developers need better tools, we get... blog posts and videos showing faked functionality. Now, that's not to say this won't change in the future. But, as of right now, Bret is starting to look like an "idea guy" in a world of "doers."

3. The reason I'm irked by this post is that I'm under the impression that Bret was specifically asked by Khan Academy to consult on the project (I'm under this impression because this is what I was told). He chose not to consult. So, all of these things he's pointing out now, he had the opportunity to affect them and change them before they were ever released to the public. He had the opportunity to completely revolutionize how new developers learn and he chose to turn away from it. If he's so passionate about the topic, why would he turn it down? Regardless of the reason, to me, it's a "speak now or forever hold your peace." He had the chance to speak, he chose not to, turning around after the fact and saying what it could have been is him doing too little too late.
I think context is the hardest part of teaching web-application development. You have so many moving pieces that need to be taught before someone can build something tangible that often-times people get stuck or discouraged before they hit this point in the learning process.
Why do systems need millions of lines of code?

If you can build a complete operating system + major programs in 20,000 lines of code, what system should need a million?

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2008004_steps08.pdf

(They're not quite down to 20,000 yet, but they're getting there)
It's not impossible to build attractive user interfaces with garbage collection, but it is significantly harder, both for users and developers of the system. Android system apps go to great effort to avoid using the GC during critical animations, while in iOS this is much easier. Implementing a good garbage collector is a lot of work, and it's very difficult to tune; even the JVM, which has had an enormous amount of man-hours put into it, struggles with GC pressure under some loads.

Additionally, the applications we want Rust to be suitable for aren't competing with GC'd languages. They are competing against applications written in C++, with manual memory management and no automatic storage reclamation. They will be put head-to-head in benchmarks with them. We don't take performance regressions, and relying on global GC would be a significant risk. The Javagator is, in fact, an excellent example here!

(As an aside, the pointer types are not all incompatible; all pointers can become &T, and the vast majority of functions take & pointers.)
> "I'm not a huge fan of some of the infinite scrolling things that are happening now. I think it's really annoying to want to read partway through, and then you navigate away, and can't get back."

Yep; could not agree more. One solution to this problem could be adding some pagination information to the window.location while you scroll, like the list item you're currently looking, but that creates a new problem: if you go Back that'll just bring you to the previous list item, instead of the previous webpage; not very predictable IMO.
Computers are programmable. Pianos, horses, fires are not. Some (lower level) tasks absolutely require the programmer to think like a machine. Most do not.

We have the power to make it easier for ourselves, and lower the barrier of entry for others. They might develop that sympathy you speak of later on, but there's no reason why that should be a prerequisite.
Earth Day responsible for a drop in global DDoS attacks
I don't think it's that simple. For example, currently Google Docs doesn't support merged cells in tables. If they add support for that in Google Docs, it means they would need to add support for it in all of the exporters as well.

So even though the format isn't changing, the subset of the format that Google works with is.
This has been an extremely widespread viewpoint and I think that it's a HUGE misconception. It's true that society is a machine and that there are certain costs to live in that machine. However, in most cases, I think that we are free to do as we please.
Sounds like this could be an interesting comment, but needs substance and a link or two, instead of sarcasm and malice. No one knows what you are talking about... I vaguely suspected you were referring to that one isolated incident long ago where a woman had her apartment trashed by some renters.
Starwoods is valued on the public stock market, not private investors.

It might not seem like it, but theres a difference.
Headphones made him more productive
I am a computer scientist that has performed research using Go because I love working with Go. I absolutely despise Java. So I'd say that your assessment is a bit off.

I also look forward to trying Rust as well. Having algebraic data types makes me giddy.
Read these rules for the Xanadu project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rule...

and to me, at least, it becomes very clear why the WWW won the race.
What's the margin of error on this survey? My guess is the one tenth of a point drop in satisfaction is inside it.

A more accurate title (for the original article) would be something like: "iOS 6 Does Not Show the Same Increase in Customer Satisfaction as Previous Releases". And even there, there could be multiple causes which might not have anything to do with how users see iOS 6 (bias in the users sampled, compression of responses as users get closer to the maximum satisfaction, etc.).
iOS app piracy soars
Yeah, it's not perfect, but their goal was obviously to get you to jump straight in to coding. No explanations, no videos, just "bam, you're coding." Could they do a better job? I'm sure they could, and I'm sure in the future they will. But couldn't every product?
Security Intelligence = Table Stakes
Only for reloading the config, not for upgrading the binary.
In my experience, a lot of interviewers ask some pretty esoteric computer science or language errata questions in order to hire someone who will write what are essentially CRUD wrappers with a pretty GUI.

Even if you scoff and rattle on about all the awesome hard problems you face, firstly, only a couple of people in any team actually need to solve those things, and secondly, you're probably lying and write everything on top of some already asymptotically slower abstraction already.

At one company, we churned through several dozen candidates for a position that was incredibly dull because they couldn't recursively divide and conquer a hypothetical infinite data set or use dynamic programming to optimally subdivide a two dimensional space. None of these things were relevant to the endless property plumbing we did all day. It just made us feel smart and distracted us from the dismal day-to-day that was wasting our advanced degrees.

The window dressing justification was that a smart person gets more done, 10x programmers and all that, but smart people also quit when they're bored, and smart people make boring jobs more complex than they need to be to stop from getting bored.

Anyways, after that debacle and now that I've moved to a smaller company, I started giving out a programming test that mimics what we do. If the candidate hands in something that is clean, complete, and doesn't have a dumb design, I'm totally for them.

So far it has still been difficult to find people, but the ones who pass seem a lot more capable than those we found using the pointless trivia method.
What if I don't want to live in this rat race anymore?

Pretty much everyone reading this will be dead in 80 years - surely you must have thought to yourself "there must be more to life than this..."?
It's explained in detail here: http://wiki.nginx.org/CommandLine#Upgrading_To_a_New_Binary_...

If you are compiling via source then you can also run "make upgrade" after "make install" and it will do it for you.
Inside Google's Internal Meme Generator
In some languages like perl, there's a named parameter form that's becoming more common. If I were to rewrite the example in perl, it would look like this:

ellipse(x=>60, y=>50, height=>50, width=>100);

Yes, it is more typing, but you don't need fancy auto-complete to give you hints when reading.

There's also nothing from stopping us from making a "training wheels" interface in javascript:

draw-ellipse({x:60, y:50, height:50, width:100});

function draw-ellipse(o) {
ellipse(o.x, o.y, o.height, o.width);
}
I'll take existential angst for $200, please.
The source is http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/7/3299784/nokia-lumia-920-pur...
Tell me something is challenging and I'm likely to do it. It wasn't actually that bad. I think signing up for a new gmail account is much worse.
The only way to keep someone is to be their best option. Pay more, offer more growth potential, offer a better work environment, offer a better vacation policy, offer better teammates.

No one leaves for a worse job unless it's a short term strategic transition towards a larger goal.
Bing Maps was the one of the first alternative maps I downloaded after the install of iOS 6. Unfortunately, the application is not ready for prime time -- the tiles are not retina, the UI is a mashup of formerly-known-as-Metro elements, and swoosh/zoom animations are overused, like a bad PowerPoint deck.

If Bing released it with retina tiles and a native iOS UI, I think they could win significant market share. It could create a halo product that might make me more inclined to use and think positively of other Bing services.
I showed this link to dad... Amazingly clear!
There's a lot more to life than this. Drop out and travel for a while, get therapy, take up art, You may not succeed with your first attempt.
Google street view... Under water. Wow
Looking to Meet Cool Young Coders in the Bay Area
It's time for me to meet some new people and make some new friends, and, although I am generalizing, I have noticed that technical people tend to be quite intelligent and have many insightful things to say, so I am reaching out to the HN community.

I am looking to meet a couple young coders/hackers/programmers (whatever you consider yourself) that I can hang out with. I am not looking to exploit people for their technical abilities, rather I want to be able to meet and hang out with friends who are technical. Although I enjoy the business/marketing side more, I can code front-end. Who knows, maybe we can collaborate on projects together as well.

Looking forward to meeting you all!
"recruiting is a balancing of fears"

"the other"

Pretty much spot on. There is no shortage of people who can do the jobs. That is certainly not the fear being balanced (=Joe Candidate can't do the job). Rather, the fear is that Joe Candidate is not "like me", and that he might change the culture. He is "the other".

But this is not as silly as it sounds. It makes a difference who you have to work with everyday. It's not just about work. In many cases, monkeys could do the work. (In other cases, only a very few people could do the work.) What it's about is being surrounded by "your kind of people". Work environment.

This doesn't just apply to startups.

So being a good recruiter is not just about finding qualified people, it's about understanding "cultural fit" and the particular pyschology (however irrational it may be) of your clients.
I also opt-out when I fly to the US (several times a year) but I get the impression that it's becoming more rare for people to do that. They used to sometimes treat you with a bit of contempt, and now it's more like "really?". I think a lot of the pressure has died down and the public has unfortunately learned to just live with it.
Google Celebrates 25 Billion Downloads With $0.25 Apps
On modern browsers, you can fix that by using HTML5's replaceState function.
Honestly forget Rentacoder you won't make any real money at it and the projects are all mostly junk software anyway. Also its hard to get started there without already having reputation. Much better to work on your own side project - either open source or your own business. Even if your project never makes money you've at least got something you are more passionate about and to talk about in your interviews other than cleaning houses.

edit to add: one more idea maybe take some free online classes like from Uber or Coursera? I think this is a great idea for anyone actually I just started the Coursera Scala class myself and having more fun programming than I had in a long time. This is not so much for resume builder as it is more to clear out the cobwebs and get you thinking like a programmer again.
Very neat. Thank you!
Here's a bug report :)
When I zoom out of the grid-based listview using semantic zoom, and click on one of the columns, I expect to see that column in the view. Currently, it just goes back to the previous state of the zoomed-in view.
Have you spoken to anyone about possible depression symptoms? I think it's all a matter of perspective and attitude. Most of the things you see as negatives seem to me as positive aspects of society. Come on! Most of us reading Hacker News have really great lives! We're in the top 1% of the world's population with wealth, freedom, leisure time, etc. Don't complain...go out and explore the world!

It's silly to assume that everyone's dreams are dead. Some of us are actually living our dreams every day.
you cannot make these comparisons. the valuation multiplier based on revenues changes by the industry. an industry with HUUUUUGE overhead [expensive real estate and tons of staff] cannot be compared at all by revenue to a tech startup that will never have anywhere near that amount of overhead.

is the valuation high? potentially, but this is not a metric that will tell you anything at all about that
What do you mean Twitter updated their logo?
Twitter changed their logo. This is a growing catalogue of websites & apps that didn't get the memo.
Deploy mobile apps from Dropbox
For example: Facebook ($FB)
Let's look at the source shall we?

When I arrive I'm treated with a bar across the bottom that asks me to turn on cookies. Cookies are on. That's a good sign.

Looking around I see the "Hot Topics", the first two news stories are fake. It took about 24 hours to vette though so they are still riding off residual traffic from old lies.

Reviewing the article, the rousing source for this news: some guy's blog. The article's title could be "Chris doesn't like the new approach and believes heavily in metaphor.".

The card idea in the app store hasn't changed my purchasing behavior. The ability to see the list is still there, but added functionality to browser WHILE downloading has been included. This minor item ensures that when I'm spending, I keep spending. It means more money will be spent and I can guarantee the numbers will show this in the coming months.
Are you free or slave? Are you successful, or not? Are you loved enough, rich enough, respected enough, powerful enough? Whatever.

Don't give too much energy to these thoughts. Bring some prayer/kindness/meditation/mindfulness into your routine. Yes there is injustice. Yes you gotta pay the bills. But there is also an aspect of life that is much bigger than that.
I agree that the programmer shortage is overblown. I'm a contractor and am currently putting out feelers for my next gig. My resume and background are "very good" from a recruiter's perspective, and even I have issues getting in the door at some of these places. The sad bit is that most of the time I find out the job is something a junior dev right out of college could do, and the rate is $65/hr.

Along that vein, almost no place is interested in paying for talent. I consistently get incredulous responses from recruiters when I tell them my rate. Many companies cap their reqs at $90/hr or $100/hr. This seems like a decent rate, but a major part of the problem is that the recruiting firm wants to take 30% of that hourly rate. If the maximum cap is 100, that means the contractor is getting (at most) $70/hr. Companies either need to up their rate, or cut out the middle man completely. The vast majority of recruiters I encounter today have a premium LinkedIn account and just spam everyone that matches keywords. Are you telling me a company couldn't have an intern do that kind of thing for a lot less than the recruiters are getting?
One of my main problems with the store is that the single card view doesn't even work well. Perhaps it's because I'm on an iPhone 4, but the loading time that comes with this new configuration absolutely destroys the experience for anyone wanting to find anything. Perhaps when we all have gigabit connections on our phones this card view will reign supreme, but until that point it's a completely short sighted attempt at improvement.

Btw, I also speak as a developer who has had their sales slashed enormously due the concert of changes that started in late July. My main title has sold at least a handful of copies @ 2.99 a day for the past two years; that was until the store started to limit the amount of queries a user would get from their search. We have a very sexy icon, and very unique concept for the game. I actually thought the high rate of piracy at the beginning of the app's life was the reason for the continued sales, but after the changes started to take place; sales are now limited to about 1-2 a week, I know it was because of the app icon and screen shots.

Anyway, I mostly speak here as a user, and this new App Store has not been welcomed. I miss Steve.
Dijkstra is cursing us from beyond the grave.
I'm not depressed, although I do admit the post came out that way. It was actually meant to be somewhat humorous about the absurdity of the human condition.. but perhaps a bit too dark for you guys :p

Are you really living out your dreams though? Or are you settling for the dreams that are allowed within the confines of the system?
We show everyone who else is viewing a Ticket. This helps to decide who will answer the ticket.
Oops: MIT Miscounts MBA Students, Pays Them to Defer
Perhaps, but applying a label to it does not make it any less accurate :)
How long will it be before iOS 6 Maps kills someone?
I opt-out as well, I am a non-US citizen so I am a bit scared to cause any fuss considering the general friendliness of the US federal government.

I was physically searched all three times passing security, opting to do so in public rather than in a booth as I prefer to be violated where there are witnesses. All-in-all, the TSA treated me fairly well considering the circumstances apart from in San Francisco where a passing female TSA agent smirked and commented saying "Come on, he is enjoying it!", laughing as she passed me by. That, that was a bit of a punch below the belt...

The Dutch are now trying out the same scanners and they were not even remotely friendly when you opt-out. My plead to you over there in the states is to stop this madness before it spreads. Just as with liquids and all else, the US has a great influence on the rest of the world and in this case, I fear, for the worse.
Dunno, I installed it, popped in an address and it just sits and spins forever. iOS 5.1 maps comes back immediately.
It looks like the 'paid' and 'free' sections are new releases, sorted by newness. There does seem to be some curation comparing results vis-a-vis iOS 5.

The 'new' section for each category seems to be previous 'new and noteworthy' titles for that category.

This would all be a good thing except for the single-card layout on the smaller devices.
Thanks for the tip; i've only worked with the hash and hashchange event before. It seems the window.history object has quite a lot of goodies for this kind of manipulation :D

Do you happen to know then why popular sites like Facebook aren't using this approach to preserve infinite list position when going back? There probably is some big disadvantage i'm not seeing.
>For one author, that can be managed. Many authors, the cache is constantly being defeated.

That's irrelevant. It's the pages view count that counts, not how many authors are in the same cms.
Don't know. Doesn't really matter. I suppose I'm more the blue pill type. As long as my dreams/goals/experiences feel authentic and rewarding, it doesn't really matter if they're a product of social conditioning.

A lot of it is luck. I'm so lucky that the activity I enjoy most, building up a business, happens to also be highly valued and rewarded by society.

This kind of angst is definitely a first world problem. Go travel and see how most people in the world really live. You'll find a new understanding.
I'm pretty sure the reason you churned through a dozen developers is that they found anything better to do.
can we do similar things at hacknews? it's one of the slowest site I visited daily
Trouble in paradise? Cracks show in Microsoft-Intel alliance
Upcoming IT Events for Networking and Storage Professionals
Details please. Maybe you cannot name names but give us a clue.

There's no way AirBnB is going to try to IPO after the Facebook debacle. They must entice someone to acquire them.
The higher the valuation the more enticing. Pump it up!
this wired article on project xanadu is a fascinating read: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html
Okay, but what is ellipse(50,25,32,5)?

"ellipse" and numbers are only hints, just as blank buttons and dials are only hints.

Programmers rely a lot on IDE support now to see the parameters...which is exactly what Bret is talking about!
The layout also limits the space allocated to the app's title. When scrolling though the top paid apps, it seems it cuts off the title at 7 characters. Basically, almost every app ends with "..." due to space. This is terrible.

The card view is slow, and my App Store crashed once I reached search result #100 (I was searching for my own app). I'm on a 4S, which should be albe to handle the load.

They did introduce the "Related" tab within an apps page, but I'm curious to see how that affects sales after a few weeks.
Pretty sure this based off his previous posts: http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/27/airbnb-spam-allegations/
His argument really seems to be that the relationship between the input and output is not obvious, not that you don't understand the words themselves. The blank button is a fitting analogy to the uncertainty of the arguments.
I miss him too. I bet he would have been pretty pissed at this design.
Whoa they actually took the * out! HN they took your advice!
I disagree. You know what buttons are, you know what a microwave is, you know you need to put the food inside and then push some buttons to indicate the time, then press a start button.

The thing that you don't know in the programming example is what those numbers do. I've written processing.js code before and I'd be half-guessing if you asked me what each parameter to elipse() does.
2000 servers? My god. Aren't most blog posts just static pages or generated static pages? A good html cache setup should help a lot.
The force is strong in this one.
remarkably insightful bits:

"Programming is a way of thinking, not a rote skill. Learning about "for" loops is not learning to program, any more than learning about pencils is learning to draw. " [1]

" Transforming flow from an invisible, ephemeral notion into a solid thing that can be studied explicitly. "

" The create-by-reacting way of thinking could be stated as: start with something, then adjust until it's right." ( its funny how lean-startup could be compressed into this one bit )

" Visualize data, not code. Dynamic behavior, not static structure. "
Why don't we make the speed limit 5 MPH and save a large number of the 45k deaths a year in the US? We could save thousands of lives, but it won't happen.