skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My answer is that you are probably not hireable as a coder at the moment. That's not to say you don't have a lot of value to offer and potential as a future hireable coder.

To put it simply: You are good at developing your own ideas and shipping them but that's not what a coder does. When a coder is hired, it is their job to develop and ship other people's ideas.

One limitation you likely face is that your lack of programming prowess limits your ideas or, at least, which of your ideas get developed. By the same token, if I asked you to build Product X (say, a Google-like indexing engine), I'm guessing you'd be hitting walls pretty quickly because your breadth of knowledge is, frankly, limited.

If you want to become a good coder, you probably just need to fill in the gaps. You need to take the time to learn the essentials of computers and programming. Most devs get this through formal study but many also are self-taught. The trick is you need to put in the effort to be self-taught. You need to come at your education with the goal of learning a wide base of knowledge instead of just learning what is needed to solve today's problem.

My personal recommendation for a starting point would be to read and thoroughly study Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job (2nd Ed.). This book just offers a wide range of topics all of which need to be mastered to be a "good" programmer and be able to handle many challenges that are given to you.

http://www.amazon.ca/Programming-Interviews-Exposed-Secrets-...
128GB? If there was a 256GB, I think this would be a no-brainer.

I was really hoping that Surface Pro was going to be my next lightweight laptop, switching from an Lenovo X201. The later Lenovos seem to get stuff screwed up, like horrible resolutions or wonky physical layouts. I want 12", 1080p (or 1920x1200), full keyboard (like ThinkPad), and a middle mouse button (like ThinkPad, although if everything else is perfect I can compromise. A newer i7 and 8GB of RAM should do it, I'll bring my own SSD. Touchscreen is awesome, but I can live without it if need be.

I was even thinking of getting a MacBook (!) but I hate the look and keyboard (plus Windows support isn't always great).

All the slim "ultrabooks" seem to be poor in some critical aspect. Why? Is there no good replacement for the Lenovo X201? I literally want to give some company $2K, and no one can step up and take it.
The DMCA safe harbor (OCILLA)[1] protects against copyright issues. I don't have time to find the laws that apply more broadly. Any laws that protect service providers are going to apply. Tor is just a proxy.

I don't know why you'd think it wouldn't be protected just like an ISP from users who view kiddie porn or FedEx for shipping drugs. So long as you cooperate when the law comes knocking you should be fine.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_L...
It depends on what you launch and where you get exposure.

Obviously whatever you launch is going to have to get exposure with the people you are interested in getting interviews/offers from.

But most of my Random Offers (tm) have included some variation of "So I've been reading your blog" or "So I liked that cool thing X you had on HN frontpage last week"

To the point that one such Thing X was mentioned by half the people I interviewed with that time I was going through onsite interviews at Google.
A 15 year old girl usually doesn't have a fully adult body, though some are close. I agree with the larger point about there being a world of difference between near-adults and true children, though IMO the level of physical development is less relevant than the relative ability to consent. Having sex with a 17 year old who was just starting puberty would IMO be a less severe crime than having sex with a 12 year old who'd been developing for three years.

In terms of whether it is a crime, I am inclined to agree. But then we get into thorny issues such as whether people who are mentally retarded can ever consent.

In terms of biology and mental wiring, the level of physical development matters a lot. I personally cannot be attracted to a woman without breasts. I separately could not stomach the idea of a relationship with a 15 year old, but I can notice that one is attractive. My mental block for, "Never have any hint of a sexual response," is missing.

Complicating everything is that youthfulness is strongly associated with attractiveness, particularly in women. Most men would prefer a 25 year old woman who looked 18 to a 25 year old woman who looked 32. This may be biological and might have important consequences on our history. For example read http://www.davidbrin.com/neoteny1.html (go on to parts 2 and 3 as well) for some reasonable speculation on this.

I should also note that there is a huge disconnect between what I'd cite as facts, and emotional reactions. And emotional reactions vary a lot by person. For instance I personally am disturbed that so many men want women to not have pubic hair - a characteristic that only naturally occurs in prepubescent females. To me that is uncomfortably close to pedophilia. However I believe that most of the American public does not see this desire as particularly grotesque.

I would add that there's a world of difference between "attracted to" and "has sexual contact with", regardless of the level of development. This ties back to the question of whether there are ways to create safe outlets for those with strong attractions to young people -- can the attraction be indulged in a way that reduces abuse? Can the attraction be treated by harmlessly redirecting it away from real children?

I have heard of no efforts into redirection. (Not that I would have.) But we definitely do try to reduce opportunity. This is the point of the existence of laws forcing convicted sex offenders to be in a public register, not work with children, and to live away from schools. Unfortunately "convicted sex offender" and "pedophile" are two different things. Also we wind up with problems like the only legal place for sex offenders to live being under a bridge. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Tuttle_Causeway_sex_offen... for confirmation of that.)

There is a well-known saying among lawyers that difficult cases make for bad law. Unfortunately everything about this topic is rife with difficult cases, and the law that has sprung up reflects this. :-(
s/fix the parser/change the parser/, meaning choose not to support both types of invocation.
Correction. It's the same "niche" Microsoft wrote _some_ software for, and had their OEMs deliver overpriced, crappy devices. Dell's tablet was around $2200, and had the specs of a $700 laptop.

And not to mention, outside of a few apps like OneNote, using Windows XP/Vista/7 in tablet mode is not a super pleasant experience.
Amazed at all the 'engineer X policy or feature request slackers'. Can't say I'm the biggest fan of Facebook as a service but what their engineers are doing in terms of pushing the state of the art is fantastic.

Out of curiosity if there's anyone involved in Facebook on HipHop, has there ever been a discussion about just shifting from PHP to a more performant language, or is a case of still reaping the benefits of PHP in terms of dropping a developer in and not worrying about skill sets?
Education reform is the issue that drew me here to Hacker News,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123

so I am very interested in the new project mentioned in this thread. I'll look forward to hearing more about it.

AFTER EDIT: I can confirm that a bug I reported on this site by how I first posted my comment has been fixed. Thanks.

AFTER FURTHER EDIT: I agree with the other comments posted here that the website developers might as well say as much of what they already know about their company as possible, the better to satisfy website visitor curiosity. Not everyone will be as motivated as I am to sign up for information from a sparse new website. I also wonder if the design is a responsive site design, as one of my browsers shows a horizontal scrollbar that doesn't appear to be strictly necessary. Following up on that comment, some HN participants say they don't see the horizontal scrolling behavior on their browswers. I see it on Chrome, on the Web-reading monitor in my two-monitor setup, at the default zoom I usually have set. I see the horizontal scrollbar briefly appear, and then resolve away, on another browser on my wider monitor (usually used for my text editor) as I zoom in. Probably the media query needs a bit more tweaking in the site's CSS.
Sigh. Too bad you don't say more about this:

"I can DO things, I can get things done; always…but I don’t really know what I’m doing.

Ever."

Why do you let that condition persist?

You are just as problematic as a musician who can't read music. You'd think that it would be crazy to have a musician who can't read music, after all its what they do play music but in fact there are lots of them. They picked up an instrument and just sort of goofed around and now if they hear something they can kinda pick it up and recognize that what their playing isn't what they were hearing, and adapt. Great for playing at the camp fire, or covers at a wedding or Bar Mitzvah, but nobody is going to hire you to be part of their symphony band or the work in the theatre district adding music to broadway plays. And the reason is simple, you can get to an answer, you cannot predict how long that is going to take.

If you want to work as a coder you should start by going through the core parts of a computer science curriculum, algorithms, data structures, compilers, interpreters, OS design, and data bases. You need to take the time to learn how the structure in the first part influences how you get to the later parts, so that when you're given a problem you will know how to attack it and get to a solution, and you'll know that you're not getting closer and to change course and how. Because you will know what you're trying to achieve and understand why what you're doing isn't achieving it. It is going to be painful at first because you might have to unlearn some stuff you picked up along the way.

Now don't confuse (Un)Hireable with "You can't make a living at it." As you've demonstrated there are lots of services you can do, especially if they aren't schedule driven based on when you'll be done with your coding. Just like someone who can play the piano by ear can make a living in a bar playing 'live music' for the guests. But if you are passionate about becoming someone who can design software you really need to understand what software is.

Lucky for you there are lots of great free college classes now you can do online at your own pace. Good luck.
User Friendly Optional Parameters With Scala
How Facebook can avoid losing revenue when they switch to always-on SSL
landing page feedback: I thought about signing up. Clicked 'signup' and was greeted by a dialog that would only allow me to select 'Javascript Developer' which I am not, nor do I wish to be. I'd like to choose 'Educator' but that choice was also not avaiable.
I find it hard to imagine how I could be less impressed with this landing page, even if it does look pretty nice. In this age of launchrock pages that usually amount to nothing, I expect more of an HN post than a vacuous mission statement and email signup button from any serious startup!
You'd need to dial through to ISPs outside of Syria, and it would be fairly easy to disable international calling (probably easier than cutting the internet off, in fact). Satellite is really one of the few ways to get internet access, as you're only reliant on power. Not cheap, though.
Maybe he knows where you can buy a good laptop for $300.
I always thought the term plausible deniability implied reasonable doubt, and that if it didn't, it wasn't plausible deniability. I mean, there's not much point in claiming something offers plausible deniability if it isn't a valid defense in court. Or is there?

Do you have an example from actual case law? All I have is Wikipedia:

"Plausible deniability is also a legal concept. It refers to lack of evidence proving an allegation. Standards of proof vary in civil and criminal cases. In civil cases, the standard of proof is "preponderance of the evidence" whereas in a criminal matter, the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt." If an opponent lacks incontrovertible proof (evidence) of their allegation, one can "plausibly deny" the allegation even though it may be true."
Pushing the Standard - Custom HTML elements for modern browsers
How To Evolve Your Own Job And Stay Relevant
Both Ruby and Perl have the same challenge, and both solve it by treating the expression differently depending on whether f is a variable or a function/method. As it turns out, you can't actually parse Perl 5 [1], but Ruby can be statically parsed [2], and resolves this ambiguity based on context.

I don't actually know anything about CoffeeScript's parser, and I imagine that it complicates the grammar significantly, but would the same approach not be possible there?

(Personally, I'm quite happy to type parentheses in exchange for clear syntax, and it's these very aspects of CoffeeScript that put me off it: I really find it tricky to follow what's going on when function definitions, function calls, and named parameters are mingled. At least regular JavaScript is syntactically simple, even if I do have to type function more often and worry about this.)

[1] http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393
[2] http://po-ru.com/diary/ruby-parsing-ambiguities/
GlobalChat 2 Pro Released to App Stores
Open Source Chat Technology

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/globalchat-2-pro/id566614902?ls=1&mt=12
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/globalchat-server/id566163288?ls=1&mt=12
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/globalchat-2-pro/id571879934?ls=1&mt=8

Droid version on the way using Ruboto. 100% Ruby.

Free crossplatform version using QtRuby: "gem install globalchat" then run "globalchat"

The server is written in GServer, an old ruby TCP server library which works nicely in MacRuby and 1.9.3.

Yes I am begging on my Github page, but it is to hire some help and buy toys and licenses to continue exploring product making.

Someone said to post here, but am not sure if I am doing it right. Anyway the code is all GPL and am looking to build a comfortable addition to IRC, I like using it.

Thanks Hacker News! Happy GlobalChatting !
Right, but it's possible that the trade offs inherent in supporting both forms of method/function invocation and how they interact with function literals may not have been obvious to a different person.

Moreover in a different language it seems like it would be exceptionally hard to know how everything will interact, which is where a tool that can help you explore the term space automatically has value.
Are 3D printer files amazingly huge or something? Why would broadband matter so much?
Your points are valid but I think you're arriving at the same conclusion that the parent is. Since the population groups that have lots of children are generally less intelligent and poorer, evolution is currently selecting for less intelligence. Though the parent called this natural selection, he was really refering to sexual selection, which as you noted is the more important force.
you pay 7 bucks or less and you can manage 5 private projects. best thing i did
Honestly what a lot of the hip startup people with the blogs in silicon valley do scares the hell out of me as well, and I guess that is a lot of Y combinator.

I worked as a developer for awhile so I have some money, and now I am bootstrapping some stuff and I have hired another dev and we also do contract mobile work to supplement. We outsource most of the design work. I have been doing this since around May and I need to check the finances but I am either slightly in the black or slightly in the red(this includes my living expenses). At the current revenue I have a runway of like 50 years though so I'm not too concerned.

We have a bunch of cool stuff cooking in development and have partnered with some other companies on some stuff so hopefully we can stop the contract work early next year.

These kids doing all these startups with little runway, no clear method of generating revenue and basically no experience out in the valley are crazy imo. I think the only people making real money are the VCs and a very few lucky founders. It kind of seems exploitative to me but I'm not out there so maybe it is much better than I think.
Galleries designed to inspire car designers and engineers [video]
Come siidbox.com (Hosted TorrentFlux), Members only anonymous torrent downloads
Awesome. We are to 4 in just a few months [1]: Lit Motors C-1, Appcelerator+Denso, Ford's Open API, and now Moj.io. This space is exploding quickly and as a hacker and car enthusiast I can't wait to see what is next. Best of luck on your launch!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4746532
And portrait mode that has a bad aspect ratio. It's a fundamental mistake for a tablet.

People thought the RT was slightly heavy to hold as a tablet. Will be interested to see their opinions of this.
I think we have to distinguish two arguments the pirates make. Some are saying that they intend to consume your content one way or another, and if you offer it in a convenient medium for an appropriate price then they'll buy it, and if not then they'll pirate it. That's an economic argument. You could call it an economic threat and try to make the moral argument that they shouldn't be doing that, but unless you can actually stop them in a just and cost-effective manner then you're just back to barking up the wrong tree if your goal is to actually accomplish anything.

On the other hand, there are pirates who argue that if the content provider doesn't provide the content in a convenient format at an appropriate price then it's justifiable to pirate it (rather than just doing it whether it's justifiable or not). But that's not really an argument at all. It has to be justifiable because of something. And if it isn't then the pirates are in the same pit as the article: No reasoning and no plan. But maybe the pirate argues that copyright is unjustified whatsoever as a constraint on expression or what have you. Maybe they make an argument about the social contract, where copyright is granted to promote dissemination of new works, and works that are created but not sufficiently widely disseminated are a breach of the contract on the part of the copyright holder that justifies a breach on the part of the consumer. Maybe some other justification. But these are inherently economic and policy arguments with correspondingly clear plans of action: Abolish or reduce copyright, blunt the social cost of the copyright monopoly by allowing as fair use any use the copyright holder fails to supply to the market on reasonable terms, etc.

The article doesn't choose any such premise to attack, it just says "no, dirty pirates are bad and piracy is wrong." That isn't rebutting anything. It doesn't solve anything. There is no plan of action. It's just "no" -- how is that good for anything?
Plastic Found on Mars
Have you actually tried to get hired? If you've never been through any technical (or even non-technical) interviews, you'll likely have a hard time.

So are you Un-hireable? Probably yes. But can you become hireable? Absolutely yes, but with necessary effort.

Start applying. With a list of successful projects like that, you'll get some people taking the bait. Go through interviews, even if you'll fail. Especially if you aren't even interested in working for them. You still get something out of it (practice), which will help you the next time you interview again. Eventually, that next time will be a place you actually want to work at.

(Also, listen to the other comments here about learning version control and doing open source. Those will all be helpful.)
Has anybody tried using dual external monitors? That is a deal breaker for me.
You're so clearly not the customer for this then :). You want a laptop with touchscreen optional.

But your comment is illustrative: who really is the customer? When I want to do serious work I want a 13"+ screen and full keyboard. When I want to just relax an iPad is great.
Dyson Engineers Battle It Out
Agreed. Communication is a skill and it is learnable. I suggest attending a PHP meetup [1] in your area or nearest city. I'm sure many of them would be interested in your background and they in return would be able to help you hone your communication skills, both verbally and in code. Good luck!

[1] http://www.meetup.com
Pardon my ignorance, but can I run Visual Studio 2012 on the Surface Pro 128GB model?

Can I hook it up to another (bigger) monitor and just use a wireless mouse and keyboard and work as if it were a desktop? (The tablet would just be the 'cpu' nothing more).

Thank you!
I think his point is that real top-tier developers are going to despite working with such a grotty language as PHP, so it hurts their hiring process that way. Whereas if they worked in a superior language (an ML, Haskell, a LISP...) they'd attract talent. Who wants to deal with a language such such inane design decisions all day?

I'd imagine people signing up to work at FB do so despite the fact they use PHP, not because of it.
Appeal to accomplishment
>> Significant compared to what?

Significant, in the fact that there's now a less clear choice of what to use when developing a Windows 8 UI or server application.

>> In my opinion: A strong cross-platform C# eco-system is simply not good for Microsoft.

In that case it's a conflict of interests, as it may not be good for Microsoft, but it's certainly good for the .NET community which lets .NET developers re-use and leverage their work on multiple platforms. Fortunately we have Xamarin filling this void, but if it wasn't for them .NET developers would be missing out on the most exciting mobile platforms to date: iOS / Android.
Are your parent/child relationships relatively static? Nested sets might work well for you if so and are db agnostic. But you'll be clobbered if your tree relationships are volatile and you have to update them in a transactional way. I previously had a common lisp script that would hammer out a CSV with nested set info (combining several thousands of XML files into a single nested set representation) that I could plow into a db. Worked pretty well, but some needs to extract arbitrary nodes while preserving hierarchical relationships (think grouping nodes from XML subtrees into tuples) has pushed me away from that solution.
An argument against abortion
Interested to find out what versal is about, but the widget on the homepage doesn't seem to be working correctly. I'd expect:

sin(2x)/2 == sin(2*x)/2
sin(x) + sin(x) == 2*sin(x)
and none of sin(x^2)/2, sin(x*x)/2, sin(x)+cos(x) are correct.
My main workstation is a two year old Air, with no problems so far. I expect it to last me another year, maybe more. My needs may be simpler than yours, though: mostly I just run emacs and web browsers. I rarely use memory-hungry IDEs, and never edit video.
Such a thing actually already exists! Take a look at BountySource: https://www.bountysource.com/

As a backer you can put cash bounties on Github issues (other trackers to come) and when a project committer accepts a pull request for that issue, the developer gets paid.

On the flip side, we're about to launch Fundraisers, which is very similar to the Kickstarter model: create a project spec and get it funded. We're building specifically for open source, rather than a generic platform.

We'd love to hear your thoughts! (#bountysource on freenode)
Ask HN: First time doing a hackathon, any advice?
Hey HN,

I'm about to participate in my first ever hackathon this weekend. I've been wanting to do one for a while and am super excited about it, but not sure exactly what to expect.

I'm doing it with 3 other friends and our idea is something we are doing purely for fun. Since I've never participated in one before I was hoping some of you who have done them could share any tips or advice you might have to making the most of it!
Twelephone (realtime webrtc Twitter experiment) is now a singlepage Node.JS app