skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is genius born, or made?

Clearly, it's a combination of both, but which factor is more important?

Are geniuses the genetic elite, the 0.00001% of humanity? They appear only rarely, but their genius shines through wherever they appear?

Or are potential geniuses more common -- maybe the top 0.01% -- but need the right conditions in which to flourish?

One way to find out would be to look for failed geniuses -- those who showed great potential, but had it nipped in the bud. I suspect a big genius-killer -- bigger than early death or jealous elders -- is access to pleasant career opportunities.

If you're living in Tsarist Russia, writing might be the only interesting pastime. If you're living in 21st century California, starting a me-too consumer web app is a lot more inviting than working on groundbreaking new technology.
Apple's hands are tied by decisions made long ago re display layout. Because elements are positioned absolutely and not via a layout manager, they can't go with an intemdiate resolution - they're tied to either 1024x768 or 2x that.
does this have interesting side effects on the "social" apps that want to import your contacts?

Any fun stories to be found there?
> Do you think you would pay that much?

I'd rather not, because this should really be an app, not a service. I'd pay for that app though.
Interesting comments in Mini's post, presumably by real softies.

This one is interesting:
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the EU mess yet. Sinofski was given responsibility by the board for ensuring that MS stayed compliant with the agreement regarding browser choice in Windows. Now, MS is facing a possible 10 BILLION dollar enema by the EU because Sinofski couldn't be bothered by something as trivial as a check box in Windows. Good riddance.

The MS lack of compliance on the EU browser directive was scandalous. If SS was in charge of that he deserves to go.
UK Government design principles
There was thread on tengine when it was first made open source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3645055
Previous discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4776435
In contrast to your AP CS experience, most students in my lower division cohort in college who took AP CS in high school were better prepared for the crash course we were about to take into C++ templates and operator overloading, having been pounded with Java a year (or in some cases, even two years) prior.

I, on the other hand, had started a web-based photo sharing company with a friend using Python at this point, yet was still struggling with malloc. Going through lower division really made me appreciate my deficiencies as a self taught coder and gave me deep respect for the need to truly grok first principles and theory.

I truly resonate with your sentiment. I don't know that everyone should learn to code, but educational experiences like the one I've shared above make me think that everyone should have good access to proper computer science education, at as early of an age as possible, in case they want to develop their craft.
I'm still figuring out some ideas but dude, make this thing open source. This will be really better.
fwiw Infinity Blade II and Asphalt 7 both run silky smooth on the iPad Mini. My wife bought one because it fits in her handbag and I've since discovered it makes an awesome gamining machine :)
Haven't used a Nexus 7 but it should be similar if not a bit faster. Can't go wrong with either I'd think

[Edit: on the subject of games, don't buy the latest Need For Speed game - it's a simplistic, samey, cynical cash grab from EA. But it's biggest sin is it's just plain not fun]
So, you finally had your first taste of startup success at age 34. And you started Y Combinator at 41.

Think your story, along with many others in the Valley (e.g. Jim Clark), goes to show that this is a long-term game, and it only gets better with age and experience.
NFAs and DFAs both recognise the regular languages (and only them).
> The trick seems to be to never answer, let it ring all the way through, don't "clip" the call, shooting them to voicemail right away.

There's a trick that works on all of the phones I've checked so far; instead of answering or rejecting the call, push the volume button - it will let the call ring through, but it'll silence the ringtone and stop vibrations. I find it to be one of the most useful (and frequently used) features of my phone.
You know what they say, genius and insanity are just two sides of the same coin.
Parabellum - derived from the latin Si vis pacem, para bellum - "If you seek peace, prepare for war".
Ditto.

It seems very weird to put the word "experiences" in quotes. It makes it seem as if the writer is using it sarcastically, or is in some way disclaiming what they are writing. What in the world justifies the quotes, and why wouldn't an editor get rid of them?
Which takes for granted the fact that your input stream is even ASCII to begin with. I'm too lazy to check, but I'm pretty sure this isn't going to catch all printable Unicode characters, for example - and then you're left scratching your head over what the hell the original author was trying to achieve.
The logo is clearly pilot wings. "Wingman" refers to a pilot flying next to another pilot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingman
Good news, everyone! Android (as of 4.1 Jelly Bean) lets you disable notifications on a per-app basis. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this on this thread yet. You'll miss the "it's your turn to Draw Something!" notifications, but, c'mon, will you really miss them?

Settings -> Apps -> Draw Something -> uncheck "Show notifications"

Screenshot:
http://www.cultofandroid.com/16833/jelly-bean-tip-disable-an...
Augmenting natural objects with 3D prints
Programming languages analogized to modes of transportation
TIL: A MicroUSB cable fits in one half of a USB 3 port and delivers 2.0 speeds
I can't count the number of articles like this that I have read. I reject the idea that these old anti-social trolls are the only ones capable of sustaining a company. That all young hungry people are bad and we noble veterans are constantly getting the short end of the stick.

Furthermore the article is clearly biased and relies on purely anecdotal evidence. Perhaps it's the authors inability to work with others and cope with younger coworkers success which is the problem.
Not everybody who uses this website live within in the United States.
I love that "east code" lapsus! Keep coding and good luck to everyone!
Come now, the President of the United States is head of the nation's military. He has no training as a soldier. Do you see where I'm going with this?
Can we stop repeating Apple's marketing bullshit and drop "Retina"?
Of course in addition to the modern meaning, there's the original meaning of wingman (which I presume may still be used by fighter pilots), which is much less sketchy... :]
If his site was still up, I would read it and then write the comment. But instead, I will make some sweeping assumptions about what it says based on the title.

We were never their target market. It is a happy accident that what works for their consumers can also work great for developers. There were always pain points adopting the Mac as your development platform. For example, when it first came out, the JVM available for it was woefully old and out of date. Generally you had to wait 6 months to a year to get the last GA version. Now that the latest is built nightly by Oracle, this is a huge improvement. On Mountain Lion, almost every command line utility (that isn't GPL v3) has been updated like git, ruby, svn, python, etc. At the end of the day, this developer loves that it is still a unix command line with a pretty face. More than I can say for any version of Windows or Linux.
> Are you sure PyPy can overtake LuaJit after warmup. I think it can maybe do it in a micro
> benchmark but I doute that in a complex benchmark PyPy has any chance.

When comparing the performance of different languages, micro benchmarks are about all we have, for better or worse. The best we can do is to run a fair number of different such benchmarks and make the comparison over them. I made my statement on the basis of such a comparison.

Both LuaJIT and RPython / PyPy are very clever systems and there's a surprising amount of overlap between the way they do things. But every system has its own strengths and weaknesses, and it doesn't surprise me personally that neither one is a winner 100% of the time.
Has-many-with-set 1.0.0 gem released
Hmm nginx cannot natively do piped logging?

I like the idea of combined javascript and stylesheets but I'd rather force the combining from the server-side, not a special client-side request. ie.

location /style.css {
root /css;
combine style1.css+style2.css+style3.css;
}

Ohhh... agentzh wrote the fork? The one who made many popular modules?
Why Great Sign Language Interpreters are so Animated
Your first point is certainly true, but I still think that "as important as.." is an overstatement. Problem solving skills are taught in innumerable ways, so what makes programming the most important?

I agree with your second point too, but "computer literacy is important" belies "any job requires computational thinking". I think it's a great cause and I'm happy to chip in, but the hyperbolic text makes me crave a more nuanced discussion of it all.
It didn't really shock me when the Reiser thing came to light. I remember back around 2003-2004 (possibly before) when there was all the hoo-haa on the lkml between Reiser's scratchy personality and his attacks on Torvalds, Cox et al., but backed up with a brilliant FS.

It genuinely was faster, especially for lots of small files (the common case in 2003). It was night and day difference when running a busy mail server. It had lots of nice things too, e.g. it was reliably possible to grow a reiserFS while the FS was online / mounted, which was a neat trick in conjunction with LVM.

There were some folks who stepped into the fray to try and lubricate the relationships a little - allowing the community at large to benefit from Reiser's work, by avoiding the need for the tempered Reiser to interact with others while his work was integrated. That never really happened though, there was noone to successfully defang the Torvalds side of the bun fight (which is entirely understandable).

So when the case came to light, i couldn't help wondering if it was more than likely true.
Wow, never saw that! Thanks! :).
nice! it even provoked me to spend some time writing this something instead of going to bed (sorry for the rant, i'm a bad bad sleep-deprived poet:)

i think duck typing is retarded.
although sometimes it is regarded
as an elegant solution
to your code base evolution
don't let simplicity of use
and the surrounding hype confuse
your inner paranoid coder
who wants to keep the code in order.
don't let your laziness corrupt
your bits and bytes and interrupt
execution of your program.
type annotations do no harm,
but add perfection to the scene.
without'em source code looks obscene.
so don't be shy to add some strictness,
let the compiler check the fitness
of your fondly written code.
and to conclude this episode
i'd like to say it to the masses:
let compilers save your asses!
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...
I wonder how they'll fix these issues in the next version? What's possible next fall, is possible this fall. It's an artificial hold back on those Retina devices. Also, i doubt that there is ANY problem, manufacturing batteries that can achieve everything that is needed next year, today, for the same price as next year.

Tell me what you want, but that's how this market works. People upgrading every year to the next so "innovative" product are just plain stupid.

I have no problem with spending the money, but i will not let me become such and stupid all-buying monkey.
> I keep meaning to write an article that demonstrates how to use LuaJIT for a small but interesting JIT. I just never quite get around to it.

Please do.
If a regex is going to be reusable, then yeah, I'd agree. But dumping single lines of code into their own functions just for readability isn't practical for real time systems. In those cases you really should be using comments as they get stripped out by the compiler.
I have a simply query,
is there a way to replace the dictionary?
the language I would like to change
for me, Klingon poetry is too strange
The biggest issue with any touchscreen in the car is the lack of tactile feedback. I have to take my eye of the road to find the button I need even if I know its location relative to the other buttons.
SurDoc offers free unlimited cloud storage
Free unlimited cloud accounts for #Veterans at https://www.surdoc.com/ with code LOUETK2QK07 (share pictures, access files from anywhere...)
So what, this should have influenced their decisions on the iPad Mini ?

Even if there were some issues with Apple Maps, I don't see why that would have an impact on the feature set of the iPad mini.
Incredibly impressive. This may sound horrible and racist but when I think of China and tech I think cheap, hacky, non-reliable, lawless, and poorly done. That's obviously unfair but based on my experiences with outsourcing and the countless stories of friends it's what comes to mind. Given the advanced manufacturing that goes on in China I should know better. I can't fathom the amount of work necessary to make things function at "China scale".
So, do you propose that u.s. bootstrapped startups have a disclaimer on the registration page saying: "you cannot put foreign characters anywhere in our system"?

Even if you focus on u.s., you will have problems. If you're doing a CRM, even u.s. users will put in foreign names from time to time. If you're building a CMS, users may want to put in a quotation in french, or will simply use copy&paste from Word, which replaces "-" with "—"...

I honestly have a hard time finding a u.s. centric startup which could afford to ignore unicode. The support requests, the fires caused by errors, and the disclaimer that you'd have to put on the registration page, would cost much more than simply learning how to code the f'n utf.

Building MVP is good practice in Lean. Saying "I'm bootstrapping hence I don't have the time to learn the programming tools" is just ignorance and incompetence.
It's not like Unicode gives you extra work, it just requires you to learn a few basic concepts. If you try to build a site which doesn't support Unicode, you'll have to put a lots of safeguards everywhere to cover up for your incompetence.
Apple Maps was a software decision, the iPad Mini Retina decision was hardware. These decisions were made by two different people; Scott Forstall and Jonathan Ive.

Hopefully I don't have to explain further.
What's really missing is a language choice. A switchable dictionary would be great.
You might want to take a look at http://elementaryos.org/ . It's an upcoming GNU/Linux distribution that has a really "pretty face".
Same for me. SO annoyed right now.
There are many compiler books but no books about JITs in general. There are some good blogpost about LuaJit but not that many. Following Mike Pall (MikeMike on HN or reddit is intressting too)

This is a good start:
http://playingwithpointers.com/archives/1010
I managed to get an order in - seems it sold out in UK in about 3 minutes!
There was a more general stackexchange question dealing with this. Actually, there are probably a few - but this is recent enough to warrant reading.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/17858/how-can-i-impr...
Doubtful: the new iPhone shows they are willing to throw that out the window.
I think my mother wrote this article
I sense a daily wtf material here.
Here's the cached version http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iLRdV2y...
All night we hack,
And sleep we lack.
We eat junk food,
The code is crude.
Nevertheless,
Friends are impressed,
When in the morning,
Our post on HN* is roaring!
960x1136 vs 2048x1536 is a significant jump. It's 2,055,168 more pixels, which itself is almost 2x as many as the iPhone.

One big issue is the higher the density in pixels the larger and brighter the backlight needs to be and in turn means a larger battery, more weight and thickness.
So basically what he is saying is that Apple was unable to build a iPad Mini with a retina display and good battery life. But in a defensive move they decided to enter the 7.9" market anyway.
It's PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) which is one of the most popular dialects of regex. But AFAIK there's isn't a hard and fast RegEx standard.

So I'd argue that code is RegEx.

I guess it's just a matter of perspective though.
Japan and India (China, Russia, Brazil) are not CERN member states.

But there are Eastern European, CERN member states. Some from there work for CERN, in Switzerland.

Do not think, that value as in monetary value just stays in a spreadsheet cell at HR. The evaluation has consequences in all other evaluations, peer evaluations etc. It does contribute to the evaluation of contributions etc.
Clojure data structures do not have many threads. Clojure separates the form of the data and the way that they are processed. All Clojure Data Structures are completly feasable in a single threaded language.
Browse HN by Active Threads
> However, once you get into the realm of 'what classified information did he spill in pillow talk?', then resignation seems like the least he should have to do

Then should we keep intelligence folk from ever dating or marrying anyone ever? I don't see how this is any different
What do you propose we use ?

Retina is actually a fairly useful term, it implies a certain pixel density at a certain point size.
Looks like he doesn't anymore.
My experience was equally awesome. My teacher was great, and definitely qualified. She had worked for NASA as a Software Engineer and she even lead a group of interested students in local programming competitions for UIL. Much of the structure she had set up mirrors what CodeHS does, which is really cool. People in the AP course were able to be tutors for people in the Pre-AP course as we shared a room, which helped both groups immensely, IMO.

I think this is a pretty solid product. In my opinion, it's definitely better than things that I've evaluated like it. Getting feedback on your submissions is huge, and having tutors there to help you is pretty awesome. It also solves some pretty glaring issues that still haven't been fixed in CodeAcademy for example. Of what I saw, there isn't a whole lot there yet, but hopefully there's a lot planned moving forward (or even in the non-free content). I think the real value in things like this is the visibility it gives to current students, and most of all the accessibility to new resources for them to keep learning, especially when they hit roadblocks.
I hate to burst your bubble, but "Hacker News" as the title of this community shouldn't be taken literally anymore (this has been the case for a long time now). PG himself often talks about how startups no longer need to launch on other tech blogs, because HN is a force of its own (and in many cases provides much better conversion rates during launches, assuming your target audience reads this site).

This community is comprised of founders (who happen to play other roles than just "hacker"), designers, developers, marketers, bloggers, risk-takers, and generally anyone who likes the idea of creating something from nothing in the tech industry. This includes reading about and discussing industry news, trends, and cult-like followings (Apple).

Regardless of the fact that this community was created with a focus on hackers is now irrelevant, it's become the beast that it now is.
Like it or not, we live in a world where people judge one another on appearances. And naturally some of those people will be in charge of hiring you and advancing your career.

With that in mind, there are several ways that one can stack the deck against one's self. Morbid obesity, poor personal hygiene, vampire costumes, and, yes, visible tattoos can all serve the purpose of closing a door that might otherwise be open to you.

The questions you need to ask yourself are how important is it that all possible doors remain open, and whether you're in a position in life where the occasional closed door leading to an environment you don't want to inhabit might actually be a good thing.

And of course, the big question. Is there even the smallest possibility that several decades from now your life, values, opinions, career, etc. will have evolved to a place where you find it really really inconvenient to have a marker of the social situation and personal biases you happened to have at age 19 permanently stamped onto the back of your neck.

I certainly wouldn't want that guy in charge of my tattoos today.
Purchased from:
Google Commerce Ltd
Gordon House, Barrow Street
Dublin 4
+353 (1) 436 1001

Why exactly did I have to order through the UK again? Grr Google!

(Thats an Irish address, but it's not on sale in Ireland)
> China's web, while accessible via the "regular" internet (vs things like Iran's and NK's version of the internet) is really an internet all to its own.

Same goes for Russia.. and in smaller scale to some other countries.
My brother, a successful (good pay, high responsibility, prevents things from blowing up) mechanical engineer, doesn't really understand programming beyond html basics.

Talking about how we both go about doing time estimates once, he said, "you know, I never really thought about it, but you're paid to do things that haven't been done before"
To answer the first question: The first step would probably be releasing more often than once every 1.5 years.
If you notice carefully the new iPhone is not a resolution change but a size change; they can letterbox old apps because the dimensions and resolution is identical to old iPhones that way.

There is no comparable solution if you simply increase the PPI of the iPad Mini by 50%. It's either 1x pixels or 4x pixels, there is no middle ground.
I'm not going to sign up just to check the interface out. Maybe you could implement lazy registration.
Delete not this post for fear of shame
for written here is the poster's name
And when he's dead his ghost will come and say
Why did you delete my post anyway?
I'll agree that WinRT is not complete, but that's hardly COM's fault. The real story is that they thought they could replace decades of development platform evolution in a 3 year development cycle. And even in that 3 years, they didn't think things through very well, or make many attempts to learn from history. With that I would disagree that it's a good/bad, .NET/COM axis. Many programmers are productive with Win32 and COM in ways that they are not with WinRT.
Dev Resources to Hack the Future Web
At least he's tweeted (few hours ago) that his "AJAX fumble" is "being corrected": https://twitter.com/Chris_Gaun
Vista wasn't a dud. It was mostly seen as a failure because a lot of incompatible software (mainly POORLY written software, but MS is probably partly to blame for that), and a few UX changes that forced to people to be a little more responsible (UAC).
I have not followed this story but I guess he was hiding from wife not from security services. Actually I'm not even sure how entering private life is justified in this situation. I can imagine speculations about leaking sensitive information and etc. but you need proof for that. I'm not saying that his private behaviour is good and I understand that as public influential person he basically does not have private life but that just shows that security services has nothing better to do...
I'm sure this is pointing out the obvious, but it's 'sold' from a Dublin address due to the corporation tax breaks. It's effectively one massive tax dodge - google / amazon / dell etc put all sales through Irish shell companies, really does boil my blood!