skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>There's a tension right now between the university as a place to expand your mind and learn for the sake of learning and the university as a place where you prepare for a job.

I see this argument come up all the time. "You might be making more money than I am, but I have a degree, and that makes me a classy person."

It goes right along with the theory that college degrees are class markers, made ineffective by the large number of lower-middle class and poor folks mistaking cause for effect and mortgaging themselves in order to go to school.

The hard truth? For most of us, we can't afford to spend four years and a couple hundred grand "learning for the sake of learning." I have to work for a living. Sure, I enjoy reading in the evening, but even now, I couldn't afford to drop that kind of money and take four years off.

If your parents can't afford to just pay for your school? well, you had better learn something that you can use to earn money, 'cause those loans? they don't go away with bankruptcy.

So yeah; You (rather, those that say school should be about learning for the sake of learning, not learning so you can earn more money) need to acknowledge that if school is 'for the sake of learning' then it's irresponsible to ask the lower middle-class and the poor to mortgage themselves to attend. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with having a four-year long summer-camp for rich kids, but if that's what you want, say so.

(yes, I have been told that I have a 'Napoleon complex' about my lack of schooling. Sorry. But I do think what I say is true, even if the tone, perhaps, has more emotion than a reasoned argument ought. Spending the kind of time and money required to get a BA "for the sake of learning" if it doesn't increase your earning power, is something that only the children of the rich (and recipients of full-ride scholarships) can reasonably be expected to do.)
Jesus this Johnathan Jones piece is pure flame bait pure and simple. I don't even believe he believes it. Doesn't even need a response.
I don't think Go is any more appropriate as a comparison to C++ than Java or C# are. After all, Go essentially competes in the same space as Java and C#--it's a managed imperative language designed for use on a server.

Now, D and Rust are another story. After doing a bit of reading, I'm actually very excited about Rust. For me, Go is essentially completely useless: it fills the same niche as Java, C# or--far more importantly--Haskell or OCaml. If I need code that's relatively fast but don't want to sacrifice memory safety or the convenience of a high-level language, I can do much better than Go.

On the other hand, if I want really low-level access to the system, for whatever reason, I don't have many good choices. I could do C, but that's rather unsafe and unpleasant; I could do C++, but it's a gigantic, overly complex language and also rather unsafe and unpleasant and I could do D. (I've actually heard good things about D but have never tried it.)

Rust gives me the perfect alternative--a simpler, higher-level language that's more pleasant to use but still lets me operate at a relatively low level. So next time I need to do something like that (which, honestly, probably won't be soon), I'm almost definitely going to use Rust, even if it's in active development and changing all the time.

EDIT: In re-reading this comment, I have realized that "high-level" and "low-level" really aren't great terms (at least the way I'm using them). Particularly, they're not mutually exclusive: a language can both support a high level of abstraction and provide low-level systems access where needed. Of course, I can't think of any language that actually does this, but Rust seems very promising.
Why make a class with class methods? Using a plain old module would do the same thing, easier.
Why is targeted advertising bad? Would the author rather see irrelevant ads?
John McAfee has Not been arrested, Belize authorities tell me
JavaScript w/Nodejs is pretty great.

I'm pretty language agnostic, but I'll admit I've briefly fantasized about an ECMAScriptish language that shared all it's feature, down to the object model, weird hybrid half FP/OO and prototypical inheritance, etc, plus some of the propose features and other cool junk like clean macro support, operator overloading, etc, and squared up some of the crazier stuff like weird definitions of truthiness, and looser type coercion.

Throw in a way to set up bindings, GUI toolkit or whatever, and a way to build distributable standalone binaries, and I'd use that as my go to language, esp to prototype and hack out ideas.

It's a fun way to just dump ideas and a few changes would make it a great all-round language worth favouring.
C++ didn't go anywhere to come back. You are probably surrounded by different people now that don't use C++, and hang out on different sites online.

It feels you are trying to find a language that will fit all problems. What happened to using the right tool for the job? C++ is one of the best language choice for a large amount of problems.
I really like this article. It reinforces my belief that the best companies are run by genuinely good people with genuinely good intentions - in other words, that the idea of business as dominated by sleaze and cynicism is either a myth or a partial and declining truth.

The section "Nix multi-task listening" really struck a chord for me. It can be challenging to really focus on listening to someone, especially if you have a busy and easily-excited mind. But it is crucial to put the effort in. I've seen people do some shocking things before - once I saw a friend say hi and ask another friend how she was, then instantly, as the person began talking, look down and start using her phone. Incredibly painful to watch someone start to talk then just fade out as they realise the other person isn't even paying attention. Needless to say, people like that better change their ways if they want to be likable and successful.
For the Indian government it also makes an entirely new set of challenges(problems)
Hey guys, I am the one who wrote this little post. My friend suggested to submit it to HN. I didn't expect to land on the front page. I'll make sure to fix all the bugs and spelling mistakes and improve the examples etc. Thanks a lot for the feedback.
The 11" Air weighs 100 grams (10%) more than iPad + wireless keyboard and for that 10% you get much higher effective resolution, no compromise keyboard and trackpad, option to connect external monitor, up to 128gb storage, USB, etc, etc. Why compromise?
Which would teach you what exactly?
Another happy Hammer user here. Includes fragments, understands Markdown and SASS, and (when combined with Anvil) runs locally.
I wish there were a way to take a slice of Oakland or maybe San Jose (or conceivably, San Mateo), make it independent with great services (Palo Alto quality schools, UK quality police) and pro-growth policies.

Emeryville kind of does this, but isn't ideally positioned (Caltrain and/or BART, highways to Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Francisco).

Ideally also some special tax benefits (at least California, but maybe even federal) due to being "enterprise zones".

It would be politically unpopular to redevelop an entire area of Oakland or San Jose (i.e. moving out everything), and segregating services, but the net benefits would be worth it for even the remaining parts of the city and county.

I think some of the "eastern Alameda/Contra Costa county" areas work on this model, too -- there are a surprising number of corporate HQs for enterprise companies out there, and especially regional offices for non-bay-area companies. Higher density and less suburbia would make it more appealing to startups, though. I was surprised by just how nice Walnut Creek, Livermore, Pleasanton, etc. are.
It probably depends on the group you choose. Try a couple if you don't click with the first one.

The emphasis really is on the "cross." I was a fat slug (and I am once again, I got sick). They were good folk and they let me do what I wanted and what I could. I was amazed after a few months what I could do.

I don't think it makes sense to do one or two things exclusively, we have a lot of muscles that do complicated things. Crossfit makes sense and it worked for me.
True people buy both, although most people who buy a device that you and I are calling a 'computer' those people are buying it strictly as information consumers, and to a lesser extent codified information producers (like instagram or uploading a youtube video). They will never change its configuration, or attempt to program it in any way. It is an information appliance, like a TV, except with a keyboard and a web cam.
Difficult does not mean not elegant. For example, I find ruby more elegant and pragmatic than python though ruby is relatively difficult.

Now the real part : Is haskell difficult or is it strange?
Meh. If you want New York, you know where to find it.
> See other statistics and you will realize that addressing malnourishment, infact mortality rates, middle class expansion all are underway together.

I remember reading that the malnourishment problem in India has gotten worse, not better.
Depends on how you see it: http://www.tehelka.com/story_main54.asp?filename=Ne011212Onc...
Similarly, I've found that playing engrossing video games draws most of my attention from pain -- or anything else really.
I find it interesting to contrast this ubiquitous-connectivity model with the development style of Joey Hess (git-annex, et al) modeled on extremely sporadic connectedness.

Not a comment on which is better. We're in a world of ubiquity. I've worked for months at a time in a purely remote-connection style. But speaking purely as a child of the modem, you can pry my local processing power from my cold, dead system chassis.
Show HN: I'm not a writer, but I've always wanted to write a short story
Not necessarily. If the text is embossed on a button, when you press the button only the button gets pressed but not the embossed text. You show the button pressed state by darkening the button a little (not necessarily the text) and maybe also by reducing the size the button's shadow. Hope it helps :)
Looks like I answered my own question: http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-set-up-a-usb-over-ip-server...

Just ordered my Chromebook from Amazon. Now to wait 8 weeks for it. :-(
Spectacular hull shipping operations
Same here. After I finished reading the article, I felt the need to program something in Haskell, just to get rid of the smell.
I honestly struggled with this question for years. Your former boss seems to be missing some perspective, without a doubt, but isn't it possible to take likability too far? Isn't it the case that getting things done inevitably means stepping on some toes?

With some experience and hindsight, it seems to me now that some kind of balance is what's required. What I strive for today as a manager is fairness and consistency during those tough moments when a team just isn't getting it done. And without a doubt, inspiration gets you much further than admonition. But when real money--and people's jobs--are at stake, sometimes it seems like the right thing is to disregard bruised egos.

Is there a right answer? I don't think so. Isn't what matters whether or not what you're doing works for you? If being an asshole is what worked for your ex-boss, do you think he would have been successful any other way?
The iPad gets double to triple the battery life, has a higher DPI; the wireless keyboard is probably better than the MBA (or at least on par).

Both (all) choices involve compromises. It's a matter of choosing which compromises matter.

In my opinion, battery life is a very very important feature. I can see that factor alone swaying my decision...
Ask HN: How do you test color combinations
What sites or services are there to test different combinations of forecolor and background colors to get the best combination? For example giving them some text and they display different color combos so you can get the best combination?
Show HN: Interactive SICP
Valid point. I find most designers are using custom fonts that are too thin to be readable. They look clean but not readable. But Arial is not a readable font either. Next time try defaulting to Verdana.
It's your right to not hire anyone you don't like, but then it's our right to thing you're stupid. You are. And then you are spoiled. And invested too much into the whole "I'm creating something so great that I'm entitled" school of thought.
Portability is still a good reason to use C++. If you want to be portable between Android and iOS, for example. C# on either platform requires you to ship an extra 10Mb of libraries, and (especially on older phones) adding C# overhead on top of everything else just doesn't make sense.

I write games, mostly, so performance does matter to me, though I'm not trying to squeeze "every last bit of performance" out of a chip. I just want some parts of the code to be entirely predictable in performance. So C++ and OpenGL are still my tools of choice. Been using C++ for years and would ace that set of interview questions (except possibly the list of algorithms in &lt;algorithms&gt;). And yet...I actually hate C++. It just happens to do the job better than anything else.

And it also happens to interface really well to a REALLY good scripting language, Lua.

To some degree I wonder why everyone focuses so much on Java or C#, when the amount of overhead code you have to write is similar in both cases to C++. Yes the languages are easier to understand, which is good, and they're often wrapped in IDEs that make it easy enough a monkey can produce code that will compile, but it still requires a lot of boilerplate to do just about anything. More than C++ in some cases, though not always. So much that they make the IDEs write a lot of boilerplate for you -- but the overhead is not only in typing out the lines, but in screens and screens of code that distract you from the actual problem you're trying to solve, and that you have to sift through to find the code with the bug you're looking for.

So I stick with C++ for things that need speed, and I use Lua for things that don't -- and I promise you that I can write just about anything in fewer (legible) lines of code in Lua than it would take to do the equivalent in C# or Java. And since # of bugs is proportional to the number of lines of code, I end up way ahead.
So true... but there is a next big paradigm; FP FTW! ;)
To be fair - there's a massive different between focusing on something you're passinate about (like coding) and focusing on not thinking. Not thinking and letting your mind relax is completely different from, and often way harder than, thinking about a passion.

Jusy "getting in the flow" is not the point of most meditation.
Forgive the annoying watermark. I find this kind of shipping operation to be absolutely fascinating and, as a software type, a glimpse into "how the other half lives".
I've been pleasantly surprised by how well my chromebook works as a dev machine, and I'd even go as far as to recommend it. A few tips and comments to those considering it:

You'll want the secure shell and chrome remote desktop extensions. Note that there's also a hidden secure shell beta channel [0].

If you have vpn requirements, be sure to check for compatibility first: though openvpn and l2tp are supported, I wasn't able to get either working. Vpn fixes are supposedly in the works [1].

Install ubuntu onto an sd card and dual boot is possible (even on arm) [2]. I haven't needed to do this, though.

Other exciting - but currently abandoned - possibilities: vim and mosh as chrome extensions [3] [4].

[0] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/chromebook-central/f8U...
[1] http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=35515
[2] https://plus.google.com/109993695638569781190/posts/b2fazijJ...
[3] http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/source/browse/trunk/na...
[4] https://github.com/davidben/mosh-chrome
The Art of Money Getting (Golden Rules For Making Money) By P.T. Barnum
First of all, kudos to this guy. He's happy with his set-up. It works for him and it works for a lot of other people.

That said, I feel the need to warn others who are considering switching to a cloud-based development environment. There are some significant disadvantages to doing development on a remote machine. The biggest issue is that you are dependent on Internet connectivity. If your connection is down, you are dead in the water. If it's slow, you'll get frustrated. Connectivity is only going to get better, but the occasions when you're offline can be very memorable. Additionally, your choice of editors is rather limited. Whatever you use, it has to be terminal-based. A GUI editor like Xcode, Sublime Text 2, or Coda is right-out.

Now let's take a look at the advantages. Cost is mentioned. An iPad is $500-800. A cloud server is $20/month. A maxxed-out 11" MacBook Air is just under $1800. If you throw it away after 2 years (instead of selling it), that's $75/month. In the same time, you'd spend $40-55/month for the iPad/cloud combo. Assuming normal bay area wages, the cost difference isn't worth caring about.

The iPad/cloud setup has one big advantage: battery life. An iPad will last 10 hours. Most laptops can barely do half that. But that's pretty much its only advantage. The laptop beats it in performance, capabilities (you can run VMs and test other OSes/browsers), ergonomics, and expandability. Laptops can also output to larger monitors.

After considering all these things, the best solution is whatever you're most productive using. If you find yourself away from power often, the iPad is your best bet. If you often have slow/nonexistent Internet connectivity or you like to plug into external displays, go with a laptop.

My most productive times are when I'm offline, so my weapon of choice is the 11" MacBook Air. I load it up with the right documentation and virtual machines beforehand. Then I spend the next 5-7 hours writing prodigious amounts of code. At that point both myself and the Air's battery are spent.

Again, I don't mean to imply that the author is mistaken. I simply want to manage expectations for anyone considering following him.
Nifty App Store SEO Efforts
When I say "extreme poverty" I am referring mostly to modern conditions in sub-Saharan Africa. I was under the impression that hardly anyone lived in such conditions in 1800. Of course I am aware that there were plagues and famines and caste systems and so on, but I would be surprised to learn that 1/7 of the population lived the way that 1/7 of the population lives now, basically without enough food or water as a part of daily life. Wikipedia says, "In 1820, the average European worker earned about three times what the average African did. Now, the average European earns twenty times what the average African does."
Noted your point, thanks.
Why not do both until you understand the real differences?

The reason people voluntarily stay up late to code, while meditation by contrast seems kind of boring — the reason why people are so eager to come up with different "substitutes" for meditation that just so happen to align with their favorite things to do — is very near the essence of why meditation probably shouldn't be replaced by coding, or running, skiing, drinking, smoking, or whatever your favorite activity is.
Glad to see this article made it into Linux Journal!
I don't see why battery life would be that important for coding. With the iPad+wireless keyboard setup, you're already committing to using a desk or table -- won't those typically have a power outlet? Also, depending on the case/orientation, it'd be harder to keep the iPad in a stand with the charging cord in the way.
There is a lot of accepted theft in our society. For example, American settlers stole all the land from Native Americans. Might as well direct your anger at that.
I've had the "pleasure" of using the predecessor of this library at work.

The code written by someone who's just completed reading the GoF book feels remarkably similar...
Warren Buffet Speaks To UGA Students
For a behind-the-scenes look at how an idea of iOS app got fleshed out into an app try my case study, http://radesign.in/how-i-designed-zsnuz-for-iphone/ It talks about the design process and principles.
thebullitagency.com is a seriously annoying website. Not to mention a total hog of bandwidth for no particularly good reason.
If you're doing anything serious, you need something that is going to compile even when compiler changes from version to version, unless you plan to write only a few lines, when it doesn't matter which language is used anyway. That's why I don't understand your argument for Rust.

I'd vote for D.
I will be creating all 24 of my pull requests to one project. The prospect of a project manager seeing 24 new commits from someone he's never heard of made me think about how funny it would be if a group of hacker's created a "commit mob" like a social "flash mob" but once a week a few dozen developer's descend on to a project and help out creating a few hundred pull requests. If it was highly coordinated it could be as impressive looking as real flash mobs are. If the backlog is pre-chosen by the group and the mobsters pick which issues to work on it could be highly productive without anyone stepping on each other's work.
From what I've read for studies on multitasking the basic problem is:
Humans suck at multitasking. Female or male. We do better when we stick to one task at a time.

The impression that we can do more when multitasking is our own illusion.

Ironically playing action games improves your task switching ability, but you still do worse than if you unitasked.
https://kuler.adobe.com/ - The only color site you'll ever need.
Why the Chinese love building copycat cities
That's a complicated thing to say. Even unoptimized Haskell tends to be very good when compared with other high-level languages. (Space leaks are more of an issue, but they're not that bad and are more than made up for by Haskell's other relative virtues.)

So for most of your code--the parts that aren't tight and performance critical--it's good enough as is and you can just stick to writing normal, concise and (at least in my experience) very readable Haskell.

However, there are always going to be the sections of code that you absolutely must optimize. And this is certainly not trivial. However, even this isn't too bad, for two reasons.

The first is that much of the difficultly comes with a lack of familiarity: you may know how to optimize C++ or C well, but that knowledge is not going to apply too much. Haskell is very strange, but some people clearly manage to make it perform well consistently, so it's probably a matter of experience. A new C++ programmer will find writing heavily optimized C++ code difficult as well.

The other reason it isn't as bad as it could be is that it's possible at all. You simply can't write very performant Python, so you essentially have to drop down to C. In Haskell, this is also always an option; however, even the hard-to-optimize Haskell is still usually friendlier and easier to work with than C!

In some cases, by using the right libraries and rewrite rules, you can actually maintain most of Haskell's elegance (like being able to express your program as composed maps and folds) while still getting good performance.
Yup. But every age has it's storytelling style. Right now, I'm reading Grant's memoirs; It's extremely self-effacing; He speaks of some of his more heroic moments as a young commissioned officer as if he was walking home from the grocery store. The book has interjections marked "PUBLISHER:" where it is explained that he received this or that medal or recognition for this heroic action that he had just described in such a humble manner.

Your storytelling style will effect who your story appeals to. I mean, great storytellers can transcend styles, but for most of us? we're writin' form letters. And really? there's nothing wrong with that.

(I do think there is something wrong with the 'all nighter' myth, especially when told to people too young to know that it's a lie, but it's largely inseparable from the silicon valley mythos.)
#2 will get you so so far