skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Documentation should most certainly be updated as the code changes.

Programmers should realise that the documentation is just as important (if not more so) than the code itself. If people don't know how to use your wonderful API, then it's useless.

If your comments don't accurately reflect the current code, then either the comments are wrong, or your code is: it's dangerous to have outdated comments in the code - somebody may come along, read the comments, and 'correct' the code because the code didn't do what the comments described it as doing.
Three millennia ago, wine existed but the vast majority of people never got to drink any.

Nitpicking, I know, but it's really quite the opposite. Three millenia ago, wine existed, but it wasn't always very good wine. However, if you lived in a region where you could grow wine-grapes (or wine-grade rice, plums, whatever your culture used for alcohol), you almost definitely did.
And now consider the confusion of your users when diff is picked up by ADL, but reverse_diff isn't.

A lot of the code that tries to showcase new C++ features often falls short on some of the intricacies of the language or doesn't embed it into a larger scheme of a library. If my library offers customization via ADL across the board that kind of coding goes right out the window.

I'm aware of the proposals to make function objects through ADL, but this is but one example where the complexity of C++ comes to the surface.
The last thing and skill that 99% of today's fascist corporate CEO's want to do is practice leadership. Their main skill is the con. Conning their way into their positions, and then using the resulting power to eliminate any potential rivals. That is what 99% of today's CEO spend their time on. Talking about leadership is kind of like salving their ego's to convince themselves they provide any value at all to the social equation.
I can't say how "amateurs" maps to MIT freshmen, but I wanted to point out that back in the day SICP was used, in its entirety, in 6.001, the one-semester entry-level computer science course at MIT.
Traditionally, VTxxx terminals only supported 8 colours and a 'bold' variant, while PC hardware supported 16 colours and no bold, so it became traditional to map the 'bold' variants of the basic 8 colours to the brighter half of the PC 16-colour palette. Unfortunately, VTxxx doesn't have a way to set the background colour to bold (why would it, boldface is a thing for text, not backgrounds) so, people had to resort to hacks like setting the 'bold' flag to get a bright foreground colour, then setting the 'inverse' flag to switch it to the background.

Some terminals actually properly support all 16 colours directly, without bold/inverse hacks, but the standard "xterm" and "vt100" terminal definitions don't, for compatibility reasons. If you put something like this in a shell startup script:

TERM=xterm-16color
export TERM

...then you'll be advertising to any programs you run that your terminal supports all 16 colours.

The 256-colour mode is a far more recent invention, and I'm not sure exactly why it came about; I suspect Thomas Dickey had a spare byte in the xterm framebuffer data structure or something and a 256-colour palette was the obvious choice. It is a 256-colour palette, by the way; by default you have the original 16 terminal colours, a 216-colour RGB cube, and a bunch of greyscale values to pad it out to 256 colours, but there's an escape sequence to set the RGB value for any of the 256 palette entries to any value.

If you want to specfically know how to pick colours from the 256-colour palette and you don't mind hard-coding control sequences, the official reference is the xterm documentation: http://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.pdf

Specifically, you want the section named "Functions using CSI, ordered by the final character(s)", then scroll down to the function ending in 'm', named "Character Attributes". To summarize, to set the foreground colour to palette entry N (0 <= N <= 255), send:

ESC[38;5;Nm

...and to set the foreground colour to the palette entry closest to the given RGB tuple (where R, G and B are between 0 and 255), send:

ESC[38;2;R;G;Bm

To set the background colour, it's the same as above except with "48" instead of "38".

If you'd rather use a library to talk escape codes rather than hard-coding them in your program, you'll need to set the TERM variable to a setting that describes a 256-colour terminal (such as xterm-256color), and then apps (like Vim) and libraries (like terminfo) that respect that environment variable will report the full 256 colours as available.

Modern versions of ncurses come with command-line tools that look up the current terminal definition in the terminfo database and will extract information from it; in my terminal I can find out how many colours the active terminal definition reports with:

$ tput colors
256

...and I can print a prettily-coloured message like this:

$ tput setaf 2; echo "hello, world"; tput sgr0

(where "setaf" means "Set ANSI Foreground", 2 is a palette entry number, and "sgr0" is a historical phrase meaning "reset all graphics attributes to defaults"). For a list of names you can give to tput, see terminfo(5).
Why does it have to be infinite? Every restaurant has left over at the end of the day. Is it wrong for the homeless to pick up food from those shop during the day without paying?

Is it wrong for the homeless to sleep in your house in the room no one is currently using?
Life: leaving the academic world and doing things that actually affect / matter to people.

Programming: writing an Atari ST emulator (it landed me a job offer by a prestigious game company)
What programming language to use entirely depends on several factors:

What languages to do you/the team have experience with?
What are the features of the web app? Realtime stuff? Single-Page App? Lots of IO?

I've lately preferred working with Node.js, and Ruby before that.

I know we use Python (with Pyramid) for a lot of internal things at work and the main website is made fully with Java.

The bigger websites of the world use many different languages.

Google seems to favour Python, Facebook uses PHP, Twitter used to use Ruby and now they are mostly Java (?).

So what language you use is not that important in my opinion, you just need to find one that fits your needs. I also prefer to use languages that have a good community around it, that way you can ask others :)
That site is historically interesting (and very useful if you want to write your own terminal emulator) but most actual terminals these days are actually xterm emulators, so it makes sense to look at the xterm docs: http://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.pdf
Life: Doing what I loved first, consistently and without fear.
Programming: Switching to emacs and dvorak.
I can't disagree with anything you said. We seem too have similar tastes as well. lol
> Vaccines and antibiotics are miracles we take for granted; our ancestors would think us mad.

And we damn need to speed up the development, as antibiotics are starting to fail due to their overuse. We take the life without major pandemics for granted, but we will get a cold wake-up soon if we don't fight to maintain this.
That'd work if there were some guarantee that those voting for it were 1) good hackers, and 2) genuinely found it gratifying to their intellectual curiosity.

I think that #1 is entirely plausible, as most hackers have plenty of interests outside of hacking and startups, including politics. I find #2 doubtful. This looks like an article made to "get ones dander up", rather than to shine a light on some obscure but fascinating aspect of how the world works. The latter sort of article are usually really interesting, well written, and provoke discussions that are interesting to read in their own right, rather than extensions of people's convictions such as "Monsanto... BAAAAD".

I wish it were easier to explain the difference between the two, as I think it's usually very easy to distinguish them, and that PG would put it in the guidelines.

Maybe something like "articles designed to get an emotional reaction, or designed to make people agreeing with them feel like they're in the right, should be avoided".
Khan-quality educational videos for biochemistry etc
I am a normal IT guy with some interest in origins of life, evolution, how the body works etc.

I was reading up on basic cell chemistry in wikipedia, and clicked my way to "lipid bilayer". I always found it pretty hard to read and understand about these topics, and wanted to see some animation that illustrated it. The video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ILSsW3tXr8 really did the trick for me. It seems I have 70 or so more videos in related subjects to watch now!
Wait; have you been reading the news? Several epidemics have swept the globe in recent years already. Did somebody wake up, and I missed it?
Having just quit my job for a contractor role in London, I am so glad to see this here.
This is an avalanche of wisdom. I'm summoning the courage to enable "Show GPU Overdraw" on my apps and seeing just how bad it is.

And if anyone else was interested, the developer of Falcon Pro has already started implementing the fixes. To quote him from Twitter (@joenrv): "Reading @romainguy analysis of my app makes me feel a bit like a naked dude in a room full of people staring xD #letsgettowork"
To quote from the Wikipedia article:

"Advocates of SCOT—that is, social constructivists -- argue that technology does not determine human action, but that rather, human action shapes technology."

Sounds like another case of people not understanding feedback loops - that A can both determine, and be determined by B.
Hard to put just one, so I'll cheat.

Life: having a family, emigration, travel, stop caring about money beyond what I need for day to day living

programming: read more code instead of writing more code
This... this is phenomenal. Thank you for sharing this link.

This will cut my development time drastically because I use autocomplete on many different pages of an internal web application and I decide what browsers the sales people (85% of the company) use.

I'll for sure install Chrome for them and save the company time and money by using this HTML5 feature. Nice find!
AUCTeX 11.87 released
Paradoxically, Engineering practice is almost entirely entropy-positive. Turning electricity into heat and light (and minute electro-magnetic patterns, but that's insignificant).
A Primer on Cheap Software Defined Radios
I still do, but I also get a lot of pleasure reading about what Taleb might call 'autistic things.'
Life: Moving to the United States
Programming: Discovering Lisp after 15 years.
The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies. Place 50 is Y Combinator.
It was good while it lasted. All I need now is a new entertainment and a new career. See ya everyone, you will always be in my heart.
I meant serious pandemics like the ones dmpk2k mentioned. Most of the first worlders didn't fear any serious contagion for decades.
JavaScript is going to be the thing at the client end whatever.

Otherwise the choice would best be decided by which language you are currently most familiar with - if you can't use that then use the one closest to that.

Course if you want to use ROR then the choice is made - indeed the choice of framework/platform might just make the decision for you.

In the end it is probably not worth getting too hung up about - just get started and ship some working code!
Throw two 20-somethings from 1912 into a common modern scenario of doing shots before you go out, hitting a nightclub full of techno music, laser lights and people 'grinding', then coming home and indulging in some pre-maritial anal sex (just to be safe) and you might as well have thrown them on a different planet.

This is not how modern twenty-somethings actually behave, except for blatantly stereotypical hipsters.
That's not what open source means. But surely they wouldn't be legally able to sell them if the devices were encumbered somehow; the hardware isn't any different than what's in phones you can already buy.

But as far as open source goes: not quite. The Exynos runs linux, but with a driver suite that is partially closed. You'll be able to run whatever versions of whatever distros are supported, and not much else.
I wrote my own tool here because I too had little interest in complexity of some of the larger generators: https://github.com/Ceasar/staticjinja. It's just 129 lines of code (https://github.com/Ceasar/staticjinja/blob/master/staticjinj...) and so far I've used it to build three sites with the ease I was hoping for. Might be what you're looking for, and at least, you should be able to edit it to fit your needs.
I am a normal IT guy with some interest in origins of life, evolution, how the body works etc.

I was reading up on basic cell chemistry in wikipedia, and clicked my way to "lipid bilayer". I always found it pretty hard to read and understand about these topics, and wanted to see some animation that illustrated it. The video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ILSsW3tXr8 really did the trick for me. It seems I have 70 or so more videos in related subjects to watch now!
I see it starting at $89.
People flee gimmicks for new gimmicks in a hearbeat. Facebook will evaporate one day, like all the fads before them.

Sure there is inertia to social patterns. But to overcome it, you don't have to convince 1B people in a row; you have to create impetus enough to overcome one person, times 1B in parallel.
Life: starting to read again and reading broadly: psychology, architecture, software, theatre, business, anthropology, great literature, philosophy, linguistics.

Work: realising that I am not stupid and that I can make a difference, I began to apply a three-word philosophy to life: "Belief, Thought, Action." All beliefs that withstand scrutiny must be acted upon.
The life and times of Kim Dotcom - The Next Web
Interesting that Microsoft is not mentioned.
Are you serious? Technology makes my life incomparably better. Let's just set a baseline that both of my children, 13 and 18, are alive due to medicine that didn't even exist a hundred years ago. But that's boring.

I'm a translation freelancer whose customers are located in various places around the world; I get my work by email every day, process it using a translation memory that permits me to look up previous translations instantaneously and with the Internet available for instantaneous glossary searches (I no longer even own a paper dictionary - it takes too long to consult it), then send the work back, invoice by email, and receive money into my bank account in Indiana which I access from ATMs here in Budapest. I do all that right from my home, so I can work four hours a day and walk the dog whenever the weather is good, help my kids with their homework when they need it, and in general enjoy my time.

Although I live in Budapest this year (and Puerto Rico for five years, Indiana for three), I talked to my father in Indiana face to face yesterday - I had to cut it off because we were going shopping, but that's fine because I can talk to him any time I want. The week before that I was able to talk to my mom, who just had a hip replacement; fifty years ago she'd simply be an invalid due to inflammatory disease, but with metal joints she's still active and able to walk.

All that against the backdrop of the fact that I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a farm in Indiana. My life then was already incredibly blessed by technology - my grandparents lived twenty miles away, but we still saw them on a weekly basis, which wouldn't have been possible fifty years before that. I was able to go to school because agricultural productivity permitted me that free time.

So yes. Technology has made my life better. It boggles the mind to imagine that people can believe it doesn't.
Life: stopped doing overtime, stopped eating meat and started living minimally (items I own total expenditure of £600).

Programming: ignoring fads and applying engineering discipline to problems.
PengPod raises more than $50,000, plans to ship Linux powered tablets soon
Can we kickstart an Internet satellite project? Out of the control of any regulatory institution, we could continue 'netting unperturbed.

Of course, we'd need a cheap-transceiver-project too. Hm.
Do you have any references for that claim?

Wikipedia summarizes the conventional view. Africa's GDP increased 2x since the mid 1800's, Europe's increased by 20x.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...

See this book to see roughly how these estimates are computed: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9264022619/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

What I'm saying is that if you went to Africa in 1800 I don't believe you would see today's stereotypical child in rags with ribs sticking out of his chest and a swollen belly...

And if you go to Africa in 2012 you probably won't see this, although it was quite common worldwide in the 1800s. If you want to see this, you basically need to go to a war zone, the bush, or maybe Zimbabwe.
I didn't make a personal remark, but yes, what you describe perpetuates a certain conformity.
All good examples. But somebody made the observation that the most significant technology innovation to ever hit agriculture was the rubber boot. It let academics visit/study farms without getting dirty, starting the whole discipline on a road to modernization.
This is the one at $69:
http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.ph...
I'm going to work like a madman and try to leave the techonology field to the business field starting with my MBA. Get ~110 of average wpm by december 2013.

Maybe get a raise, currently making $30k/year when I frequently contribute with rails and maintain 2 gems and have lots of knowledge of Ruby(and time spent) doesn't make any sense to me. Third world countries =(

I also want to go to the Rails/Ruby Conf 2013 in the US(which costs ~4 months of work), which will probably be the last line in my tech career. I HOPE.
We do have a CNAME pointing option available for paying customers.
I pity the damned fools who agree to it thinking "oh that's an awesome idea" and then a month later take a naked photo of themselves.
Yes, it's built using industry standard stuff. But that's not at all what open source means.

None of the schematics are freely available or reproduceable without permission, nor is the embedded software opensource.

The embedded software does expose 'open' standardized API's so the device works with opensource software.
Life: Learned a little bit late to stop being a totally selfish/asshole boyfriend, leaving me open to finding a great relationship and now two kids. It's helped other relationships as well, and there's a few exes to whom I should apologize if it weren't so socially inappropriate to do so. :)

Programming: leaving a couple of fun and well-paying jobs to go to places where I wasn't the best at everything. Learning from others (and teaching others in areas where I excel) has given me more happiness/satisfaction/growth than any single language, project or other discrete event.
Balsamiq, anyone?
Paying customers can customize all the error/challenge pages with full HTML/CSS to exactly match and brand their own site.
I hate this whole standing/treadmill desk fad. It solves the wrong end of the problem. Sitting on your ass is fine but don't do it all day.

I can understand if you're a hamster in a cage but seriously just go for a walk instead.
While i don't necessarily agree/disagree (it depends on context), i will point out it's not the purpose of the antitrust section of the DOJ.
I wonder how "how much money and time you have to invest in" putting in so many arcane anti-crack measures into your software as GGP[0] described.

[0] - Great Grandparent Poster? :D.
There are several documentaries, and several hundred articles I've read as to the anti-trust behaviours that Monsanto participates in. Because this article doesn't explicitly lay them out for you, doesn't mean they aren't guilty. These guys make Microsoft and Apple look like choir boys in comparison for their belligerent abuses of the patent and legal system.
For the single founder who can't code [Jun 2012]
Isn't it just common sense that doing two things at once means you'll have less time for both?
Thanks for replying!

I certainly agree that you’re more likely to get the things you mention at a startup, but it’s possible to get those elsewhere (I have them now, with the exception of inexperience). Since I only need one job, I care more about the upper bound than the expected value.

Everyone has a different definition of ‘interesting’, but, IMO, Microsoft Research has more interesting work than pretty much any startup out there. Since I don’t have a PhD, there’s no way I’d get hired there; I’m just using them to illustrate a point.

As nostrademons points out, Google’s also full of interesting projects. Their process is notoriously slow, so I can’t tell if my resume was thrown into a black hole, or if it’s actually being considered, but that’s at least within the realm of possibility. Even IBM, which is known for not being a great place to work, has teams that are doing really cool stuff. Here in Austin, I’ve heard very good things about their Linux group, and, of course, IBM Research has lots of groups working on fun problems.
Freeing the Device Spectrum with KDE Plasma Active
More Entrepreneurs Embrace Conscious Capitalism
The most likely answer is because of the heavy, ongoing advertising.
gSchool is run by Jumpstart Lab (my employer), who also did Hungry Academy for LivingSocial a while back. I wasn't directly involved in teaching HA, but I did do evaluations of the students from time to time, and they were all competent developers.

What they weren't was super quick to resolve errors. That can only really come from experience. They'd be able to figure out if something went wrong, but whereas I (#50 on the Rails contributors list) would know instantly what was wrong, it'd take them some time. That's to be expected from new devs, though, no way around that but time.
Please ignore the "INTERN", it's due to a misunderstanding on my behalf (I don't write job offers in English often) - we're looking for full-time employees.
Agreed. What hubris to imagine modern 20-somethings invented alcohol, music and sex! In 1912 radio was being invented, Gibson was going strong making instruments, Picasso was shocking the world with disturbing art, women were upsetting men by wearing their clothes or dressing Oriental... and lots of sex was going on.
Dealing With Facebook's Unfriendly New Algorithm
Pirating software has the ability to destroy the value of the entire product line.

Given that Photoshop is still profitable for Adobe, this is objectively false.
Different view on how to learn dynamic programming
I have actually seen plenty of Monsanto ad campaigns plastered on the metro in DC, and even right outside the USDA :)

Google "America's farmers grow america".

It's actually a fairly disturbing campaign in a number of ways. To be fair though, I think the "Billion-dollar patents fucking farmers" campaign wouldn't have gone over as well.
Life: Slow carb diet and P90x. (a little embarrassing, but true)

Programming: Diving farther into photoshop. I know thats not programming, but I really like to play around in photoshop during long code sessions. It helps my brain relax.
All I could find at the site (I can read Korean) was a rather ambiguous statement: "Full Schematics will be publically released on 31-January-2013." Nothing explicitly stating that their circuit board design will be placed in public domain. Also no signs of them having done full IP research.

Given that South Korean open source community is still in its infancy, I doubt their schematics will be released like Raspberry Pi guys did.
Sadly, research suggests that's not sufficient enough to counteract being sedentary for the rest of the day.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39523298/ns/health-mens_health/#...

The idea of these treadmill desks is to keep you from constantly sitting all day. I would agree that one should probably do some more vigorous exercise as well.
10-20 times per day?