skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unlike your peers, there is no precedence for you. There is no preconfigured direction for you. There is no magic set of courses to get you where you want to go. Don't be discouraged, this is a very very good thing.

Reading Hacker News might get you excited, thinking "There are tons of people just like me out there!", but we are geographically distributed; and most aren't like you at all.

I know some of your story. I lived it. I've had a lot of success, and here's how I came about it:

Write a list called "What I want to be making by the time I'm 30", and devote it to memory. Stay abstract and philosophical. Talk to people who know about who you'd need to hire to accomplish those goals, and go learn to be those people. You have time, but not as much as you'd think. It takes 10 years to master a skill, and I'm guessing you'll have at least 4 to master before your list is ready for implementation. Start now. You can do more than one concurrently. The further along you get, the easier it will get. The goal is to master. Maintain a hunger for purity. Don't use something until you know exactly how it works, and why it was created. If you like something, try writing your own version.

It will be very hard at first. Keep that list in mind for motivation. Get jobs requiring your required skills, and always volunteer for the tasks your coworkers are afraid of. You will make mistakes, you will fail from time to time, but every year you will get better, stronger and faster.

Someday (if you stick with it) you'll be able to invent and build things that are yours, and yours alone. Things that matter. Things that change lives. Corporations will depend on you specifically. You will move the state of the art forward and make the world better.

Make sure you never forget what it felt like when you were new. When you'd take out a pen, and draw interface designs for a product you can't build yet. When "This would be so cool" outweighed "This will be so hard to build". Create your own challenges and break through them.

You'll do great :). I'm looking forward to a chance to hire or compete with you some day.
Yeah, that was fun:

#starting at 467s and outputting the images of the next 3 seconds
ffmpeg -ss 467 -t 3 -i video.mkv output.%04d.png
# crop image to 1px slices 280 pixels from the left.
gm mogrify -crop 1x+280+0 *.png
# stitch them
gm montage -border 0 -geometry +0+0 -tile x1 *.png image.jpg

Perfect example how easy and straightforward it is to use command line utilities.

Now someone just has to find movies with static camera scenes that have a lot of horizontal actor/object movement.

Random example showing Bill Bailey as a demon: http://i.imgur.com/AWWG8.jpg

Some static rallye car cameras from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2QMuT04EOw -> http://i.imgur.com/GV3bY.jpg

Needs either higher framerate videos or longer scenes.
> I speculate that, in a world of total transparency, things like this will become much less important as everyone realizes how weird nearly everyone is.

We've done this before and it doesn't work that way.

Back in Colonial New England, say Massachusetts in the latter 1600s, nearly everyone in a given small town would be essentially 'transparent' to pretty much everyone else. There was so little room, and so few people, that there wasn't space to have much privacy.

And social norms were horrible. You couldn't get away with being of the wrong religion, with being suspected of adultery, or a lot of things that are either ignored or not considered problems now.

People didn't learn to accept others. They forced others to conform. And the revelations never stopped being interesting to those who enforced conformity.
"I speculate that, in a world of total transparency, things like this will become much less important as everyone realizes how weird nearly everyone is."

Seems like very wishful thinking. It seems to be hard-wired into human nature to be suspicious of, and consequently antagonistic toward, noticeable differences. Forcing those differences out into the open probably won't significantly alter the impulse toward hostility. It seems just as likely that the differences will come out into the daylight, but the prejudices will sneak into hiding. I'm not sure if those prejudices are more dangerous when they're naked, or when they're cloaked.

I think you raise an interesting point, of course. I guess I just have a more cynical and pessimistic view of the result.
The reason Raspberry Pi is famous is not because there doesn't exist another faster or cheaper product, it is because it is the best product for the right price. By increasing the price they risk losing the marketing edge that drove so many to them.

Also, napierzaza: It looks like you have been hellbanned for almost a year now. I din't find anything in your comments to suggest why and I am not sure you realize this since you have been consistently posting informative comments.
Rowing as well
"7. Use vi-mode in Your Shell"

Tried this and gave it up. Your shell may be (somewhat) vi compatible but the applications you use mostly are not so you'll have to break out of the vi mindset at all sorts of inopportune moments. That, and modal editing, while perfectly alright for text editing, maps rather lousily to command line operations. You're much better off getting used to some basic Emacs-style key bindings that work consistently across a wide number of applications (including OS X text fields, IIRC).
If the author is only using Quicksilver to find documents and launch apps, why use it at all, when you can just Cmd+Space and use Spotlight to do the same thing?
This 1,000x ! I'm always friendly to the indian guys, but it's really really frustrating that they can't answer questions for you.

+ there is a cultural gap, so sometimes it's hard to communicate about certain things; even though their English is good.
I believe there are settings for both photo tagging and location tagging that allow you to review the tag that a friend makes before it is public.
I would think that the transaction was perfectly legal, and that EA could in no way force people to pay for the games. I wouldn't however, be opposed to the idea that EA could revoke ownership of any subsequent free games obtained once the code had been successfully used, but it would be a PR nightmare if they did.

EA's only reasonable option is to eat the loss and write the cost down as a "lesson learned".

Isn't there precedence to this? For example, cases where Amazon priced something wrong and people bought at that price, even through the the price was almost certainly unintentional. I would think Amazon would have been obligated to honor the bad price until they discovered and changed it just like companies are on the hook for honoring mistakes in ads (although I think they might be covered by disclaimers these days).
I guess I can't support 'most'. It did happen in two out of three experiments for which I actually had intimate details.

But this is one of those things that will never get a trustworthy citation, and yet is probable (replace "most" with "significantly many" to increase probability according to your own probability measure).

A drug tested today on humans has, with high probability, been shown to be safe, but most importantly, effective, in an animal model - or is already known to be effective and safe in humans for another use.

Note the term "effective". That means that it is known to have a measurable effect. For many drugs, it is therefore probable that the (human) subject receiving the treatment can tell that it isn't placebo.

Specifically, quite a few psychiatric drugs are known to cause obesity, compulsive thoughts and lactation (even in males). Niacin is known to cause flushing (at lower levels, it is not externally visible, but the sensation is still there). Viagra was discovered during an attempt to treat hypertension. I'm sure the subjects could tell it from the placebo. Similarly for Minoxidil.

To actually assess how prevalent this is, you need at least access to notes made during the experiment, or worse - you need to do measurements and stats that weren't made in the first place (and which making may only make the results less promising; which is a problem in for-profit development)
I'm not a psychologist, but I notice some things that I look at differently.

You mention "being an average programmer" and learning new things feeling like work because they make you feel "too dumb or stupid."

So what is fun? Something you are good at? What are your expectations?

You also mention "trying to find my passion" Cal Newport wrote some articles of how "following your passion" is dangerous advice because it doesn't work like that.

Perhaps you are depressed and you just need to find some meaning behind what you are doing? Have you read Man's Search for Meaning?

Because being good or bad at programming doesn't have to affect the enjoyment you get out of it. I know some grumpy rock-star programmers who seem to unconsciously be chasing this concept of being accepted or loved when they finally reach whatever level of perfection they have invented for themselves. Imagine how frustrating it must be for them, every flaw is preventing them from receiving what they desire.

I worry that your line of thinking is: I'm not happy. -> OK maybe it is because "I'm not a good programmer." -> OK, let's try becoming better -> Progress with natural setbacks -> (Frustration because you aren't becoming happier) -> Maybe it is because I'm not a good programmer -> OK, maybe I need to do something else.

Also, moving to a new country is hard for everyone, it sneaks up on you.
I was wondering about integrating the two. The only way I can think of is for sjs to sit on top of TypeScript. It would not have to specifically understand TypeScript, instead there could be a macro file for everything TypeScript. These macros would just pass things through.
Currently sjs doesn't support changing syntax, so this is probably not currently possible as described.
I've spent a couple of weeks at Communitech and the energy is absolutely amazing. Everybody was incredibly driven.

If not mistaken, Communitech even claimed that "one new startup comes out from there every day".
I'm glad that Poland wants to honor these people, but to say that Bletchley Park has been overlooking them is utter nonsense.

1. Here's what Bletchley Park says on their first history page about their wartime role (http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/wartime.rhtm):

"The Poles had broken Enigma in 1932, when the encoding machine was undergoing trials with the German Army. They even managed to reconstruct a machine. At that time, the cypher altered only once every few months. With the advent of war, it changed at least once a day, effectively locking the Poles out. But in July 1939, they had passed on their knowledge to the British and the French. This enabled the codebreakers to make critical progress in working out the order in which the keys were attached to the electrical circuits, a task that had been impossible without an Enigma machine in front of them."

2. There's a memorial for the Poles at Bletchley Park (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ell-r-brown/5109679597/) and they have an annual Polish day.

3. There's a special page on the Polish contribution (in English: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/history/polish.... and in Polish: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/history/inpolis...)

I do agree, however, that the 2001 film Enigma was an utter piece of crap that depicted "Turing" as straight and a Pole as a traitor.
There's an endless philosophical debate between evented (Node, EventMachine) and blocking/threaded architectures. And evented programming seems to get a bad reputation in some circles as an "over-hyped" paradigm. But it's cases like this where the difference becomes truly clear. A developer making a native extension for an evented architecture is forced to make every operation nonblocking, while consistent lock release is much more of an optional optimization for a blocking architecture. Sure, you can get equally good performance with a blocking architecture, and slightly easier syntax, but for many of the native extensions you might use, it's very possible that the authors didn't think to do this type of analysis, or even know about rb_thread_blocking_region and its ilk. So naive implementations may be wasting threads exactly like this example. I'd much rather have nested closures where I'm relatively guaranteed that the only inefficiencies are in CPU time rather than blocking.
Meditation: A Compass and a Path
Really? Wow, I'm surprised to see someone with that sort of attitude. What makes you say that Chrome is spyware?
I loved arguing with him and watching major argue with him in #vsta and #fmios. Unfortunately I can't find the IRC logs anymore.
> I think the point of a social network is to stay connected to people with whom you are comfortable being yourself.

The problem is that people you barely know add you, and if you reject the friend request you're indeterminately labeled as an asshole. This has happened to me several times to an extent where I was called out on it in person. My rule of thumb was that I don't add people from whom I wouldn't appreciate a call at 3am.

I had to break this because apparently the fact that it says "friend" doesn't repel people who I haven't seen in years. SO right now I'm using lists and I've put tons of people in 'restricted' but still, this mentality is annoying as hell.

Regarding family: I'm friends with my grandmother and I hate it. She doesn't understand most of the stuff that I post about but she still comments stupid things on my posts and pictures. Well now she's on restricted but if she'd ever found out I'd be in trouble.
While you're specifically asking about finding your first few clients, this previous thread has some great overall advice for finding clients in general as a freelancer:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4585435

Also, we recently launched the beta of matchist (http://matchist.com) to help freelance developers like yourself find quality clients and get paid on time, every time.
We all know it's an awful situation. But what do you do about it?
I simply do not understand the point of Refer.ly . What problem are they trying to solve? Sure, there'll be a lot of people who will spam refer.ly links all over the internet, but you don't get far with that. Unless, they pivot into something else, I don't see why they should succeed.
If you "invite" someone they're automatically added.
It's an often repeated piece of common wisdom, but, for whatever it's worth, my experience is the opposite. I've had a number of jobs in my life, some of which I got through a friend and some by replying to an online job ad, and the latter kind were much better jobs, both by subjective feeling and by objective metrics I can think of (like, how much time I spent there before leaving, or how much money I was making.) It seems strange to me that people feel it's advantageous to restrict your employment options to companies where you have some kind of inside connection.
Does Amazon EBS affect Redis performance?
> I do not believe that Facebook is a net positive and believe it should be avoided.

I agree with you.

I'm very happy I'm socially allowed to not be on Facebook.

There are a lot of people who are essentially forced to be on Facebook due to social obligations.

Your social solution can't work for them. They need a technical solution or a different social solution.

And, no, the 'different social solution' isn't going to be "Get everyone to accept LGBTQ people."
I've also found the customer service to be pretty good for the standard stuff but there is a blurry line between smile and The Co-operative Bank that confuses them.

For example, I can pay in a cheque or withdraw funds over the counter in a Coop Bank branch, but if I want to set up a foreign bank transfer I have to use the an online secure message. When I asked why I was told over and over "smile is an online bank". Which I suppose is true, up to a point.
DFJ-backed Retailigence gives shopping-app developers local product data
I may be missing something, but what does it mean to "hold something in a session" if not to either
(1) store it in a cookie (encrypted or not) or
(2) store it server-side with a token stored in a cookie pointing to it?
It sounds more like labeled security. (SENoSQL?)
For what it's worth, my response wasn't to the article, but to the GP from jgrahamc.

I acknowledge that the event in question wasn't a result of something the users in question did -- but that illustrates my point all the more that Facebook should be avoided.

Somewhat more ontopic, I'm a little hesitant to accede that someone adding you to a group makes you a member of that group in spirit. Sure, perhaps it convinces some folks that it's true, but so what? If somebody adds me to an open group entitled "People who hate women", I think it's easy enough for me to say "I didn't join this group, and I don't hate women. If I happened to actually hate women, I could see that being slightly more touchy, but whether or not anyone joins me to said group doesn't do anything to stop someone from simply accusing me of hating women, which is the same net effect (I believe).

I'm sympathetic to those affected, but am generally unforgiving of anyone surprised that Facebook screwed something up.
IME the role of logic in decision-making has been greatly overemphasized. People need to first be convinced in an emotional/intuitive way, then given logical arguments to support what they are experiencing.

The idea that a person -- anyone, not just "dumb people" -- think first about a matter rationally and then act in a matter consistent with logic, is failing to address a huge component of human behavior: people only behave in their rational best interests if/when they are not emotionally invested in the outcome.
I don't understand how this is a response to the above point. Kaggle competitions and academic research are on a different timescale and have different goals. Most of the algorithms used by Kagglers were designed by academics - and those academics were rewarded for producing those algorithms with grants from both for-profit and non-profit organizations. Both individual and deeply collaborative endeavors have a place in capitalism and contribute massively to economic growth and scientific progress.
مسابقة الشهر العقارى الجديدة 2012
The solution here would be very simple: make it optional to join groups and ask you if you want to post that you've joined. It's that simple.
Show HN: Rightmove + Zoopla + Gumtree properties on one map
9 Sep 2011 [1] seems to be the date at which they introduced that. I have since set that setting as you recommend, but I was definitely on Facebook before that. I guess the unsettling feeling (combined with this and all the incidents where changing an arcane library of settings is quite often bound to leave an open passage) has just stayed around since then.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/09/the-new-facebook-pr...

EDIT: Just made a double-check now, guess what? An open passage:

Note: You can still be tagged, and tags may appear elsewhere on Facebook. I can't review the tags if they are found on someone else's timeline.
As a Vim user, I've always been drawn toward using vi keybindings in bash.

However, as a Mac user, all of the Cocoa text widgets more or less support emacs keybindings, so having a working knowledge of basic emacs movement commands has been very useful.

The emacs bash/readline keybindings also have a really neat trick that the vi bindings don't -- keyboard macros!

Ctrl-( to start recording, Ctrl-) to stop, and Ctrl-x to execute.
The way I do it is: map caps lock to Ctrl in System Preferences, then download this tool[1]. The setting you are looking for is 'Control_L to Control_L'. When you hold Control it acts as a modifier but if you tap it, it acts as escape.

[1] http://pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/
> The mere existence of a physical key does not make it security through obscurity. It's the fact that the same physical key is distributed to thousands of people with no good way to control them all or compensate for a leak that makes it security through obscurity.

Semantic nitpick, but how does that make this security through obscurity? S.T.O. is not betting your system on something you can't ever change, it's betting your system on hoping the attacker won't guess how the lock works. I think we should be careful not to use inappropriate labels, as this dilutes the language and makes it more difficult to communicate.
To drill down a bit: How did you find these events?
I get annoyed when I read things like: "A performed 4.9% better than B", when the comparison is between two proportions.

Just say it like it is, without putting a slant on it - A's response rate was 0.6% higher than B's.

I don't care if the results are significantly different, if the difference between the two samples is so small.
Probably not, as the slit is kept looking at one plane. You could turn it into a video one pixel wide, though.
> I did read it, you are trying to pretend you said something other than what you post says. You made all the fallacious claims I pointed out.

Clearly we are NOT speaking the same language.

> As for evolution, no you did not evolve to do anything

Clearly, again, we are NOT speaking the same language. You react as if I said "I evolved with the goal of breathing", which is a possible, but improbable, interpretation of what I wrote. I meant "My kind has evolved the ability and necessity to breathe", for which "I evolved to breathe is" a shorthand, acceptable where I live.

And if you can point out how my statement that "I do not claim that there is evidence of difference (I cannot provide any)" can be construed as anything but "There is no evidence of difference" (that I know of), I would be grateful. Because you are calling me a liar in not so many words, and I don't like that in general (but I don't really care either, given we're both anonymous)
Is it not sticky, or are there issues with pageup/down/spacebar? Because the latter is a known issue, and I've filed a GitHub issue fix request.
I think the big difference between private and public is that the public authority uses force against the property of others to exclude speech, supposedly deemed as disgusting to a particular group, but you have to recognize as history shows that it will be abused to limit legitimate political speech.

Private forums like Hacker News in no way infringe on the rights of others, by using their own property (web site) in a way they deem fit.
stonemetal's point about plagiarization is excellent. I had in mind something along the lines of media piracy, except in EA's case there is an actual cost (since their bandwidth provided the content, and their servers will have to support it when they go online). I think the majority of people accept the fact that piracy is ethically wrong, even if there is no cost to the producer. When you pirate, you are enjoying content that someone else produced with their finances, time, and talents. The social contract is that in return for that enjoyment, you support the content producer by purchasing a licensed copy so they can be rewarded for their efforts. When you pirate, you deprive the producer of that reward.

The same deprivation occurs here. EA's reward for publishing these games is reduced or removed because people acquired them when the "door was unlocked".

I do not know enough about formal ethics to express my point here, but I would look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative under Perfect Duty to show how the concept of piracy doesn't hold up under the Categorical Imperative.
What Does OS X Say When You Ask it to Pronounce Itself?
This sounds very promising, thank you! But i couldn't find your adress in your profile. It just said founder of Nuuton under the about.
I hadn't, so it certainly is possible.