skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having gone from a non-technical co-founder in my last startup to a technical co-founder in my current startup, I could identify with your post, so much so that it was almost like I had written it myself. Also last few months I have always been frustrated with the slow speed at which I write code as compared to others. And that sometimes makes it hard to enjoy the process when the time difference between when you think of a new feature and when you actually see it working in front of you, is large. But now next time I am feeling frustrated I will think of this blog, grit my teeth and just carry on.
Even if you are a "normal white male", your wife and children aren't.

It can be fairly trivial to find out family details of a target and harass the wife/children.

Maybe you don't have strong opinions that would inflame someone to the level where they would interfere with your life like that.

But it's ignorant not to have enough empathy to think that does happen in a world where a woman can be stalked/assaulted after someone sees her out jogging.

My 21 year old straight cousin was gay bashed for walking home from a bar with his equal straight friend.

I've been racially profiled even though I'm white because I have a Fred Armistan-like hodge-podge of vaguely ethnic features.

People are dicks.
How Changing a Button Name Can Increase Conversions by 56%
Too bad Rasperry Pi didn't start on an ARMv7 Cortex A5 at least. So much effort being put into a near-death ARMv6 architecture.
> While I sympathize with these arguments, this isn't how the legal system works. The law doesn't work on absolutely provable certainty. It works on reasonable doubt, intent and (hopefully) facts.

Hah, you still think that the legal system makes an ounce of sense. Read the below, weep, weep again and then ask yourself how you didn't realise that you were living in the dark ages up until now.

http://alwaysfamilycenter.com/2011/08/26/justice-is-blind-an...

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. If you care to know, read up on the reoffending rates of prisoners and the types of systems which have particularly low ones. Look around you at all of the seemingly civilized people who call for blood when their sensibilities are offended strongly enough.

Where we now stand, in this aspect, is not at the heart of civilization but on the very fringe of it - and hardly anyone has noticed the fact. The legal system, just like everything else to do with humanity, is solidly anchored in emotion, not logic.
Allowing a single page of notes can be good, as it forces students to summarise the subject.
Rather choppy on iPhone 4S.
What I've read between the lines: "Attention! Attention! I'm so fucking special!"

Is the OP's use of email rendered impossible by massive amounts of email spam from google recruiters? That's just laughable. If I were to receive emails once in a while from a high profile software company showing interest in hiring me I'd have a god damn boner. 99.9% of people out there will never get this chance. How self-involved does one have to be to write such an awful blog post?
Go sign up for TestFlight right now... it is going to save you hours of time, and countless emails/headaches.

http://testflightapp.com
The volatile keyword is effectively that keyword. The trouble is that people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want some optimizations (e.g. a memset that's more efficient than zeroing byte by byte) but not others (e.g. skipping the whole thing).

By specifying volatile and zeroing out the memory in a loop, you're guaranteed that the compiler won't optimize away the zeroing. But if you want something faster, you need to get cleverer, because there's no universal "optimize this way but not that way" command.
Ah weird, I always assumed "modern" programming languages were bootstrapped (for all the advantages that it implies), didn't know it's not the case for Ruby. Good to know.
The UI components visually do not adhere to the general Twitter Bootstrap appearance.

And it uses tables (!) for laying out the toolbar buttons.
ECT: An Electric Cure for the Mind
I don't really care; people can do whatever they want with their money, _obviously_. But I am kind of surprised Jobs owned/commissioned a yacht. I always figured owning a yacht was an abject status symbol, and that somehow Jobs tried to be 'above' these things. meh
First of all, the whole "attack" starts with a Gizmodo quote. Nuff said.

"They are very effectively competing in the market for tablets."
Yep, it doesn't take a genius to sell anything at loss.
So... the takeaway is to stop adding bugs to programs you write? Heh, I've been trying to do that since day 1.

Seriously, now, it appears that experts are more akin to taking the scientific method approach to debugging: isolate and bisect down to the point of the bug. Novices just haphazardly change stuff until stuff appears to work.

I think a lot of us can think of friends and co-workers who fit these profiles.
The reality is someone like bmelton probably can write what he wants and get away with it. As a normal white guy who believes in technology and etc. etc. It's very unlikely that he has, or will ever, face oppression for his views. And that's probably why he can't relate to these particular views.
If he were Arab, Black, or Latino he would probably be able to relate just fine.
Yeah, that is true, but I think that is probably a valuable life lesson!
Pseudonymity for everyone helps the ones who do need it, because then they don't stand out.

If you're not part of any minority or have no radical politics, yeah you might not need it. But even then, you would want the comfort of the advertising industry and your future employer not being able to disrespect your privacy. (Public data and privacy? Yes.)

Why then is it good to kick people out for using pseudonyms? Why does it have to be a requirement? Do the benefits of real names even compare to the benefits of pseudonymity? I don't think they do.
Hey thanks for asking - and yes, in the preface to the book I do explain how I figure this stuff out. But basically I:
- study the C code for a long time
- step through it in GDB a lot
- add printf statements and recompile it to print out debug/trace info
- actually change it to see what would happen if things were written differently.

A lot of hard work! I do the hard work so you don't have to :)
Average white guy might need his anonymity too. Don't think you or other people at Google are a representative sample of the society. The outcry is justified.
Forget the Javascript tricks; the idea that an ordinary person can look at a URL and decide if it is safe to open or not is ridiculous. Even if the browser could 100% show people what URL would open that doesn't give users enough information to then know if it's OK to click on it.
Software development, particularly in imperative languages, is as intuitive as it gets. Things like algorithmic complexity analysis, distributed and parallel systems engineering, fault tolerance, cache invalidation and prediction, etc, can become fairly complex. But building a hobbyist project as simplistic as it sounds like the author is building? Easy and intuitive.

I'm really getting tired of this "programming is hard" meme. It's not.
Typo on your github page description.
Fluid UI and the Mobile Gold Rush
Paying them in milestones basis.
A Billion People in the Dark
Thanks! That was what I meant. I'm building a CMS and I'd like to include a layout manager.. I'll certainly be checking out Jetstrap for inspiration.
Snapchats: 20Million photo shares per day
Does this work for odd number of children?
well paying, no.
Enough to put gas in the car... sometimes.
We’re not creating anything. We’ve always found ways to distract ourselves.

Life is a horrible place underneath fishing, video games, Twitter, hiking, stamp collecting, sports, coding, horticulture and everything else we’ve invented. It would be impossible to live with the knowledge that you’re going to die and have nothing to take your mind off things. That’s why solitary confinement really is torture.

I had the “get rid of all my possessions” phase too. I sold everything and lived out of a 28-liter backpack in South America for 18 months. What did I learn? That everyone just wants a distraction. Often with some combo of drugs, booze, sex and music. Yeah, sometimes I climbed mountains or got cultural and moved in with a local but it was all done to keep my mind off death.

It’s all the same crap. Even criticizing others for their preferred distraction is in itself a form of distraction.

I like cheap red wine, vicodin, and PlayStation myself. Sometimes I suck down caffeine and crack open Knuth to read up on data structures but I don’t feel it’s any better than the former. Whatever keeps the dopamine flowing is fine by me.
What to look for when hiring a data scientist
Netflix: Post-mortem of 22 Oct AWS degradation
For me it was a long progression of specific moments.

I remember understanding the DOM for the first time, understanding server side code for the first time, chaining methods, JOINs, scope, regexp, MVC, a lot of individual things.

My most practical advice is that you ignore hot new frameworks and languages for now and stick to what you know until you know it much better.

But, as soon as you feel comfortable with what you're doing you should take the next step.
Not that if you establish a pseudonym another sites first, like Lady Gaga, you can use that psuedonym on G+.

You can also engage in G+ as a Plus Page as though you are a rock band, with just about all the features of a personal user.
But you do need have a person account to own the page, but I think you can make the owership a secret that only Google knows.
Does OpenOffice have a future?
FTFA>Windows 8 ships with its own app store and it is not an open platform anymore.

If having an app store is the criterion for not being an open platform, not even Ubuntu qualifies. And last I checked, I can still compile and run whatever I damn well please on Win8.

There wasn't even this level of derp when Apple launched the app store for OS X.

Straight up FUD. Windows will always be the premier gaming platform as long as it has the majority of the desktop base, and by extension the best driver support, and by extension the most games written for it.

Valve is going to kill themselves to attempt to make a point, at this rate.
Back in 2007 I got quite far through the Google hiring process, up to an on-site interview and being told to expect an offer the Thursday after I returned home. I was ready to move half-way across the country and get started living in the bay area, moving my life to there.

That Thursday came and went, and I found out that due to some internal bar-raising I would not be receiving an offer. I stayed here in the Detroit area, moved up with my current company, married my wife, and settled into being quite happy here.

Five years on I regularly have Google recruiters contacting me both via phone and email, asking if I'm interested in a position, and exclaiming how good the interview feedback was. When I decline to revisit any opportunity which would require me to move across the country, the recruiters are universally flabbergasted.

Sorry Google, the time when I was excited to move across the country has passed. I still want to do interesting things, I'll just do them on my terms now.
Absolutely! Great advice. I write code every day, but reading other people's code and seeing how THEY solve the problems probably helps me more than anything.
I find the riddle and the answers amazing! But the answers I saw were only for even number of children. Is there a good solution for odd numbers?
HMS Bounty Ship Sinks
there is definitely a need for this, but I wouldnt necessarily approach it that way. For example, jQuery UI does have widgits that are resizable to a grid, however its a pixel resize sort of thing. This isnt so bad if you dont mind dealing with absolutely positioned content, but it gets very messy very fast if you wanted an 'editor'. I think if we could get a plugin that does this independently of bootstrap, and works sanely when you think about things floating and moving around in a browser, think draggable/portlets, then you'd have definitely found a new holy grail. However portlets require certain source expectations as well, and it's just not setup for a grid. Anyway, there are many expensive enterprise CMSes that don't even have this for their author views for content pieces, and it would be a huge feature I think.
While people may not grasp this technical point, I think the common-sense reaction conforms to it.

For example, if I started publishing a sequence of all the binary numbers between 0 and (something huge), I don't think anyone would argue that I'm violating copyrights.

But if I added to that data stream a statement like "take the Nth number from this series and feed it through Encoder X and you'll get Movie Y", I'd argue that's both the additional information and the intentionality needed to make it a copyright violation.
Nexus 7 tablet runs Chromium OS
Random House + Penguin = Big Enough To Stand Up To Amazon?
It's worth noting that the current crop of NoSQL databases isn't _that_ old, and many of these sites were designed and built years before mongo or riak were really production ready.

I'd bet that in 3-5 years this list will have more nontraditional databases on it.
Why does a big funding round slow down your pace of innovation?
> I am ignorant to how much they would matter in real life. I am neither queer nor gender-queer, so while I am empathetic to their struggles, I just can't identify with what are possibly very real concerns about losses of anonymity, and as I've met people who are public with their genderqueer status who haven't been assailed or assaulted, I can't help but wonder if the fear isn't simply perceived fear or not.

I live in an Eastern-European country, which also happens to be an EU-member. One of my (female) colleagues told me how two or tree years ago she happened to see a trans-gendered person (I don't know what's the politically correct term) who had just been beaten up during that year's GayFest. "Blood was pouring out of his/her wounds", was what my colleague told us.

That's why I down-votted you, btw, which I only do once every 2-3 months on HN. Not because I don't agree with you, which should not be reasons for down-votting people anyway, but because you kind of choose to view things through very narrow lenses, which is what the article was writing about all the way.
Yes, exactly we can do ad-hoc distribution but the device UDID is required. For applications that applied to yc in the past, did you submit a link to download the .ipa file or a video demo of the app? or both?
I try to avoid PDFs as much as possible, I hate them.
I am not interested in video playing on Linux. And I used to work for a video editor maker who's products worked on Windows, OSX and Linux. (And used to work SGI) But my workhorse Linux machine is just not for videos or video games. OSX and Windows are for those. That's why I think of Linux as by and for programmers. Not anyone else.

Email does not need window managers, same with music players, chat service, emacs is my "office suite", etc. All of these are generic things for a wide public. For everyone. But OSX and Windows are already doing a great service for everyone.

Why should the free and open OS also be easy to use for the general audience? What's so wrong about it being specialized to power users?

My point is that Linux as an OS for and by hackers has been spectacularly successful. As an OS for everyone else? Meh.
Short version:

Things stop being hard when I know enough so immediate satisfaction is possible. Then things seem easy.

+1 for self awareness progress.
I agree. Google should have done their homework before contacting a past employee (including contractors). Google as a large organization should know why people left their company and the context of situations around it. Some employees aren't vocal about it, but I don't think this is the case.
I didn't meant to imply that it wasn't justified, just that I can't identify with it.

As I said, and I didn't mean to seem oppressive, I empathize with the plight of those who wish to be able to express things in anonymity, I just personally value the kinds of conversations that occur when people are using their real names more highly. Basically, what may be a need for those in the other camp is simply a preference for me, so I get that they have their strong opinions and I have my fairly weakly-held ones, but as we're all entitled to our opinions, mine is what mine is.
In case anyone wants details on what I'm doing:

I started by learning Javascript and found I could understand the concepts and syntax/logic easily enough to have intelligent conversations about strategy with my cofounders, even enough to help with brain locks they had, but found it a little hard to solve my own problems.

After learning Python for a couple of weeks, I found that problem disappeared. With Python, I can just THINK and then write what I'm thinking, which is a huge upgrade for a newbie like me.

I'm going to stick with learning design (including JQuery stuff, which I didn't mention but I have already learned and actually implemented to some extent) and Python to attempt to limit the scope of my learning in order to progress faster toward some degree of mastery.
This is quite a ropey writeup of the talk by the looks of it. I imagine what was actually said was probably different and might even have made sense.
Conversely, if you actually find yourself looking something up multiple times, won't you naturally start to remember it?

Our tests hark back to the days when to "look up" something meant going to the library and flipping through an index. Internal recall will remain faster than external look-up for some time yet, but as the balance shifts the current setup will appear increasingly archaic.
My question is, did Valve say that or is that just some really bad editorializing from the person who wrote the article?

I bet it's the latter.
Just another dreamer.
You should fix the links on your blog. All of them except for the HN discussion link have tommy.authpad.com prepended to them.
NAILED the tl/dr
Easy! Make the balloon large enough to lift N - 1 kids!
Terrible title. Bitter submission.
Eclipse makes refactoring a breeze on large projects, but when I factor in time spent working around Eclipse internal breakage in loading large projects, the advantage is less obvious.
Programming is not hard to learn if you can already think rigorously. But most people have no experience expressing their thoughts using strict formalisms and have to learn that separate skill along with programming.
Don't take crypto advice from unseasoned amateurs
I could be mistaken, but: 802.11n supports MIMO, it doesn't imply it. MIMO is basically multiple antennas (I think).

In real world applications I think the real benefit is increased range. In an office setting, I could definitely see that being useful.
The odd kid out can hold both ends of a string.
Not necessarily. Depends on whether you would have bought it for yourself.
A Creepy Glowing Remote Control Box (FFWD to 0:33)
Turbo-charging your WordPress site with Turbolinks
I'd have to be a first-gen iPad with the rounded back. Top kinda looks like a Mac Mini from the front, but that diminishes in the other views.
Dude, be civil.

> Don't tell us about "false marketing" on amazons side.

Why not? I thought it was interesting.

> Did you notice how Phil Schiller showed the iMac on Stage?

Yep! I didn't think it was especially relevant in the discussion thread for a story about Amazon marketing the Kindle Fire, though...

> He always talked about how thin it is and how incredible but he never showed the thicker part of the iMac.

He did, but not for very long.

> Also noticed that Apple ALWAYS showed every iMac from the side on there website? Since the new iMac, there is only a 20° angle to the iMac, so you can only see the thin border, but not the thicker part behind it.

That is weird.

> Oh, btw: have fun with your iPad mini.

No plans to buy one.
Yes, just tie the last child's string to the last loop.
I think it comes down to one statement: Life is open Google, so school should be also.
Except if a bunch of people get killed, then you'll just look like a profiteering dick.
I'm sorry for the ad hominim, but this view is extremely myopic.

Maybe programming is not hard -- for you. Maybe software development is "as intuitive as it gets" -- for you. But that is an extreme generalization that's simply not fair.

Programming is not trivial and something that everyone should by definition be able to intuit. It requires a very specific and logical way of thinking. It requires intellect. It requires practice. I'd venture to guess that a vast majority of people out there couldn't "just figure it out".

Programming requires interest, practice, intellect and a very specific way of thinking. It can be taught, it can be learned, and it can even be mastered with enough effort (by some people). But let's not dismiss the hard work of the OP and of the many people out there trying to learn (or, frankly, failing to learn) by calling it intuitive and easy.
I too find programming quite intuitive and easy. I also find your post condescending and unproductive. When did you write your first program? At what age did you have unfettered access to a computer? Do you find sports difficult? How about music? Cooking? Every activity worth learning comes more naturally to some than to others, influenced not only by aptitude but by background and learning style.
Don't forget that many people have trouble understanding something as simple as a variable. You have to learn to execute code in your head to not be completely surprised every time you run the program.

Programming really doesn't come naturally to everybody.
I was hoping it would be about the touchscreen issue. I think it's something that needs more exposure.
Scientists Move Closer to a Long-Lasting Flu Vaccine
A little historical context:

Back in the early 1970s Xerox PARC created a WYSIWYG text editor called Bravo. It ran on the Alto which had a maximum of 128K of memory. Approximately 3/4 of that memory was consumed just to store the bitmapped screen, so Bravo would have had to run in about 32K.

As a side note, Charles Simonyi (of Microsoft Office fame) worked for PARC at the time. I might be misremembering, but I think he had some involvement in Bravo.
720p as HD definition will suffice for Amazon.

iPad mini has 768 pixels, but the display is 4:3. It will not display 720 lines without distorting the video. Or cropping. To play 16:9, it will be displayed as 1024x576 with black bars at top and bottom. 576 happens to be SD PAL.
Did Nations that Boosted Education Grow Faster?
Anonymous leak Classified Documents from Greek Finance Ministry server
Personally can't stand Apple as a company, and find their products anti-consumer, anti-developer, difficult to use, fairly ugly, and overpriced.

I see none of the incivility that you saw in the parent comment.

>if I were to counter you, I would then say the entire of Apple's presentations and Marketing is just plain BS.

Countering somewhat negative observations about one company != attacking that company's rival. This isn't football.

Consumer chauvinism is weird.
The problem is as far as I've seen: people don't shift 'just because' or even when the other option is 'slightly better'. In fact, Linux is going to be a sub-standard choice for gamers for a good amount of time even after steam for Linux catches on with the Linux community. The Windows games that people already purchased aren't going to vaporise there's a lot holding them back to the old platform.

People will install Linux enmasse when Linux gets something that the other options don't have -- when desirable games come out that can ONLY play on Linux and no other platform.