skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm having a very hard time thinking of any positive social change that happened without individuals being called out. Take dueling. The Church preached against it for hundreds of years. Right-thinking people decided it was a bad idea. The government outlawed it. But everybody was afraid that if they didn't challenge people who insulted them to a duel others would think that they were cowardly, so they kept doing it.

But then people like Duke Wellington started getting publicly mocked in the papers for engaging in duels and the practice died out almost immediately.

So, talking about how people in general ought to be nicer won't actually change how people behave. Calling out githubuserxyz for being an ass, though, will make people afraid of being mocked like githubuserxyz and so actually change their behavior.

Seriously, there's an excellent book called The Honor Code about how these things happen historically that I would recommend.
I like Tcl. I like that it is quirky and that it different enough (non-algol) to be interesting to me. I like the folks in the community as well. BTW 8.6 is just around the corner.
Performance isn't just a major concern in his domain - it's a concern in every domain. Why are you even trying to make an auto-threading compiler? Performance.

If using immutable blocks that can be run in parallel performs worse than using mutable blocks in a single thread, then your auto-threading compiler is useless for its primary purpose: performance.
Re: Japan, there is an old comment to a New York Times article that describes how that statistic is misleading: http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/23/opinion/l-what-statistics-....

> Yes, and that is completely cultural, not structural. The US has chosen certain mechanisms

I think we just disagree on the meaning of "cultural" here. I consider the fact of whether you bring a dispute over an employment issue to a civil service agency versus a court to be a matter of structure, you consider it to be a matter of culture. My point is simply to point out that to a certain extent you're pushing on a balloon. Yes, we could restructure things to require less lawyers, but we'd likely require more civil servants instead.
For roughly the first year when beginning to learn to code, I refused to use an IDE or any editor that had intellisense. The result was having to remember the syntax of different languages, method names, etc.

I was in college at this point, so it made spotting syntax errors easy for multiple choice questions or debugging on tests.

I also approached coding problems on paper before typing a line of code. This helped to grow how I approached problem solving, rather than whether the page would run properly or not.

If I were to start fresh I'd still take the same approach. I'm a huge believer in repetition for remembering, and writing out code rather than copy/pasting or have it be autocompleted, eventually pays off.
Sounds more like you love the environment because you feel good shooting people down rather than what's best for the project (and open-source) long-term. This attitude is why more people don't contribute to - and become better at - the process.
This is the expected output (http://cdn.hackerrank.com/fizzbuzz.txt)
I'm not. I'm setting and doing goals all year long, this year won't be any different.
Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (1940)
This disturbing film records the successful experiments in the resuscitation of life to dead animals (dogs), as conducted by Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy, Voronezh, U.S.S.R. Director: D.I. Yashin. Camera: E.V. Kashina. Narrator: Professor Walter B. Cannon. Introduced by Professor J.B.S. Haldane.
process.stdin.resume();
process.stdin.setEncoding('ascii');

process.stdin.on('data', function (input) {
numbers = input.split("\n");
sum = parseInt(numbers[0]) + parseInt(numbers[1])
process.stdout.write(sum+"\n");
});

this is a sample code that takes a two digit integer and prints its sum. Can you use this format and see if it works?
The biggest problem for me always seems to be figuring out what I need to know, rather than finding the resources themselves. For instance, assume you want to learn how to make a simple web app, and have no experience or background in programming, CS, databases, etc. Figuring out where to start and how the puzzle fits together can be really daunting.

You start googling but can't figure out how it all fits together. Javascript, Ruby, Ajax, Python, Rails, Django, Flask, MySQL, heroku, html, css, jquery, bootstrap, appengine, aws, servers, browsers, APIs??? It takes some time to figure out what things even are when you are taking your first steps. Once you realize you pretty much need to know a bit of HTML to make a website, finding a suitable tutorial, while sometimes frustrating, isn't all that hard.

Most people here know how these technologies fit together, but as a beginner I didn't. It took some (frustrating) time to learn how the puzzle pieces fit together, what is optional, what is new, what is proven... etc.

This problem isn't isolated to programming. I think this is a big problem for a ton of self directed online learning. Lets say you convince yourself you would like to become the next Satriani on Guitar, but don't know what scales, triads, or chords are let alone how they are built. Should I concentrate on technique drills, songs, improvization, theory? I have met a huge amount of people who get very intimidated and end out just learning to play songs from guitar tabs, and never progress from a very superficial beginnner level.

Perhaps it is a result of people not wanting to dive in until they can put together a basic mental model of how things work. Regardless, the "roadmap to expertise" problem seems to be real and discouraging for people not willing to just power through it. Can teachers and Tutors be relpaced in providing the direction through the weeds? I'm not sure, but surely solving this problem could be lucrative.
It's an investment. The first few patches from a new person will likely require so much hand-holding from the maintainers that it would have taken them less time to just write the patches themselves.

As that new contributor learns the ropes, though, that cost goes does. Eventually they hit break-even where they are adding more value to the project than they cost. But that requires the person to stick around long enough to get there. There's a pretty high chance any new contributor will lose interest and go do something else.

So whenever a maintainer gets a new patch from a new person, it's always an open question as to whether taking it in will ultimately be a win for the project. Unless you can predict the future, you can't tell if that investment will get amortize out and yield something useful.
ok. I'll change that.
However, it seems the jerk problem is not limited to open source.
> Prototypes don't go into production, so it is moot.

Yes they do.

> No, first versions should not skimp on correctness.

Yes they should.

> It saves virtually no time at all.

It saves plenty of time.

> we just use scalable tech to build it in the first place instead of garbage.

We aren't talking about tech, but technique. There are plenty of times you can do things in a less than optimal fashion that is much quicker to code than the optimal version which isn't worth doing unless the idea gets some traction.

So it seems we just fundamentally disagree.
> if i were better at cocoa dev i would have made a little mac app too.

Have you seen node-webkit[1]? You can easily create a cross-platform app with HTML5/NodeJS capabilities.

[1] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit
The Hidden Dangers of Buying Forum Posting Services
The point is, moral authority doesn't help at all in changing the behavior of people who aren't on your side already. It's very important with leadership and group cohesion, so not opening yourself up to calls of being a hypocrite is something the leader of an open source project should consider when dealing with jerks in their project. But it isn't particularly useful in effecting change from the outside.
Thank you for your feedback. I'll look into why YUIDocs isn't linking to the source.
"Amanda Peyton believes this category is growing rapidly and there is a growing market for stuff that is too geeky or weird for Best Buy."

This is a somewhat dubious assumption. While the market is rapidly growing, it also follows Zipf's law in terms of interestingness. (E.g. the most interesting product is 10x more interesting than the 10th most, 100 times more interesting than the 100th most, etc.) Because of this even an enormous increase in the number of small electronics products will yield only a very small increase in the number of products that would actually appeal to the general consumer. So even if you go from, say, 10,000 products per year to 1 million products per year, the actual increase in products you have to sell that people would want to buy is minimal.

(Incidentally, this is the main reason why I shut down my last startup.)
thanks I played the first one - echoes of silence, is cool, kinda slow when you need to move elements : P but it's cool, I'm going to play others at night.
say (1..100).map({ $_ %% (3|5) ?? ("Fizz" if $_ %% 3) ~ ("Buzz" if $_ %% 5) !! $_ }).join("\n")

is my quick stab at a Perl 6 version. About the same length if I take out the spaces (which I'd rather not!).
My best C solution (scores a 96):

#define d printf(

main(i){i<101?(!(i%3)?d"Fizz"):0)|(!(i%5)?d"Buzz"):0)?d"\n"):d"%d\n",i),main(i+1):0;}
Interesting, these guys have been building 360 cameras for years, but in a clearly different space.

http://www.imoveinc.com/geoview.php
Riak AMI now available on AWS Marketplace
Here: http://windows8startbutton.com/

It's a little customizable bundle of joy, and it'll optionally boot you directly to the desktop.

And just out of curiosity in response to a comment below, I typed "powershell" into this menu's search and it instantly found powershell.exe and powershell_ise.exe
I haven't used Windows 8 besides the release candidates. Is it really that bad?
I don't really have a problem finding the material either for a topic I am somewhat familiar with. Might take some time, might take discerning over more than a few resources on the web. But I do find it. However my point is what you just said, good material is important. And the tools for finding the material search the whole internet which has a bunch of useless stuff. And thus cost me sometime I rather spent elsewhere.

Your sense is correct. But is not around the idea of a search engine. Is about a tool/place that only has good material. Relevant, validated, curated material. Would something like that help you?

Do you feel just as confortable finding the material for a completely new topic as you do for when you are looking for something you know and you are only trying the deepen your knowledge regarding that topic?
Ask HN: Help finding a consultant/contractor
I am a front end developer myself but I am at a loss here so what better to do than ask the HN community.

I have a family friend who is a serial entrepreneur and has several accomplished businesses in the physical goods realm. He and a couple other guys are teaming up to venture into the technical world (more specifically digital audio on the web). They have absolutely no technical expertise.

I am trying to put them in touch with a reputable and reliable firm that can provide folks that act as product managers and steer them in the right direction and one that also has a reputation for good reliable code that can be maintained over the long haul.

They are well bankrolled (can drop 100k+) and prefer to deal with firms only in the U.S. What advice or references would you provide for someone in their situation?

Thanks all

If you prefer private email, see my profile.
I expect a major driver of this is that people always tend to underestimate how much tacit knowledge they're using and so to assume that people who disagree with them are fundamentally stupid, malicious, or crazy when they're really just coming from a different background.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_dista...
After 10 minutes, I was able to log in, but now I can't access the fizzbuzz page ):. Maybe I'll try later.
for i in range(1,101): print "FizzBuzz" if not i % 15 else "Fizz" if not i % 3 else "Buzz" if not i % 5 else str(i)

Even a little shorter :)
Any karma blessings you bestow on other articles/comments unintentionally are all part of the plan of the internet rep gods who nudged your cursor off target.

+rep and be saved.
If it goes into production, then it is not a prototype by definition. Since you are making the claim that doing things right is so much more time and effort, could you give an example of that happening? As I've gotten more experienced over the years, and built up a greater mathematical knowledge, I've found that writing correct code has saved me time, not cost it.
Why didn't you just escape the brace with "\"?
You cannot un-upvote. I am exactly not sure but to do that you need to have certain amount of Karma points. Which I see you don't have currently.
Nice! Much better than my first stab. Slightly shorter (56 chars) P6 version:

say(("Fizz" if $_%%3)~("Buzz" if $_%%5)||$_) for 1..100
I wasn't saying that he claimed to be- it was the OP's statement that it is the "Dustin Curtis™ way of thinking" that led me to say it.
Well... maybe not all of them... it depends.
Alternatively, perhaps nothing changed, and the public propaganda about Linus is generated mostly by people who don't interact with him, and flaming about high-level things like driver support is only tangentially related to what it is like to interact with Linus.
Fast and Easy Move to Your New House
I tried the github option, and the first time I tried, it barfed about "unauthorized credentials" or some such after the redirect back from github, bringing me to another hackerrank login page. I tried it again, and it choked right away with the same message. Third time and it asks to "Confirm Submission", but hung after hitting yes.
That's what I've always done. Sometimes I even rewrite the code when I'm typing a part that I can optimize.
Year in Review: iPad mini was 2012′s Worst-Kept Secret
I'm not sure how to feel about this.

On the one hand, this is something I have always felt needed to exist. In today's weak job market it's important that we do whatever we can to match talent with openings.

On the other hand, I think startups are the wrong type fo companies for this. If I'm hiring for a small (<50) person company I want to make sure the person wants to work on my particular product and help with my particular vision. This would be great for big tech companies though, where they just need development talent and there is sure to be some internal project/product for which you're a good fit.
> people always tend to underestimate how much tacit knowledge they're using

I like how you put that.

Any thoughts on the best way to respond when someone asks you for something that requires hundreds or thousands of hours of tacit knowledge?
The update on the bottom of this post really hits home: "it is the lack of peer-level teamwork towards a common goal that I lack". That made me shudder.

For me, the worst thing in the world is to try and do something in a "team" which exists in name only. If the other folks aren't willing to run at the same speed, then it just starts draining the life out of me and the project. It sounds like the author of this post is in the same situation.

The flip side of this is that when a couple of people agree to really band together, we can go out and do amazing things. It doesn't even have to be programming. The nights when I got together with a couple of friends and decided to "beat the (ticket) queue down" were great. We were all "over it" and did not like our jobs any more, but the teamwork of getting in there and showing what we could still do was worth it.

Two or three of the right people could destroy a backlog of tickets which had accumulated over the span of hours or even days. It would make a dent which would last for several shifts, and probably rescued more than one ticket which would have been criminally mishandled otherwise.

The teamwork basically established that more than one of us felt this way. That's important, since if you're the only one of a kind in any situation, don't you start wondering if you've done something wrong?

I guess life is easier for those who aren't troubled by that sort of "do I even belong here" thought.
Still a good read though. :)
1) Best audio/video lectures on a topic, itunes u has some great lectures, but discoverability is awful. Close to impossible to find good cotent.

2) Find what I don't know from content which mostly covers stuff I already know. Normally when I'm reading something I probably know 90% of it already, but I have to read that 90% anyway to find out what that remaining 10% is.
That hunter s. thompson story is ridiculous.
That kind of think make me dislike him.
Who cares if you type or not, oh world, who. fucking. cares. HN . fuck it. i'm outta here.
Sorry, I've never gotten around to implementing a way to do this. It doesn't seem too urgent a problem; I don't think a few mistaken votes have much effect.
for i in range(1,101):print i%15==0 and 'FizzBuzz' or i%3==0 and 'Fizz' or i%5==0 and 'Buzz' or i
has a score of 102
print(($_%3?"":Fizz).($_%5?"":Buzz)||$_,"\n")for 1..100

No need to quote the strings in some cases :-)
I think they're working on a language for mere mortals instead of FP wizards. Seems cool to me. I mean, you could respond to claims like:

> This addresses problems under which functional programming (FP) labors, like creating cycles of immutable objects.

...that in Haskell we can create cyclical data structures using laziness via tying the knot. But uhh, wouldn't it just be a whole lot easier to build cyclical relationships using mutable state then freeze the whole thing?

I guess what I'm saying is Haskell is hard, let's go shopping... for sufficiently smart compilers!
tl;dr: Focus on journeys, not destinations.
Mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut
I think totally the opposite. Working in group most of the time degenerates into procrastination. Also I find a lot harder to concentrate into problem solving when someone is talking to me.
I don't know why I'm such a sucker for this sort of thing. I couldn't get it to score me, but here's 104 chars of Clojure:

(for [i(range 100):let[d #(= (mod i %) 0)]](println(cond(d 15)"FizzBuzz"(d 3)"Fizz"(d 5)"Buzz":else i)))
There is no input. You have to print the desired result for all numbers between 1-100
https://www.hackerrank.com/fizzbuzz/level redirects to https://www.hackerrank.com/fizzbuzz
I can't see your email (I think it has to be in about) but you can reach me at my username at gmail.
Obviously you have no idea what installation-free and cross-platform mean.
This is a great article and I absolutely agree with the message. I'm learning Java and I use Eclipse as my IDE of choice. The main advantage of using it is how easy it is to access JavaDocs for class, methods, and what not, but I've made a conscious effort not to rely on 'auto-complete' features if I'm implementing something I've never used before. But it is tempting to just use that for everything.
I learnt to code when I set up almost exactly the same business ten years ago - http://www.thebigspace.co.uk

I built it in PHP and MySQL and there was no MVC for me. It was a mess. It's been completely rewritten at least three times, and is due another rewrite.

For about the first five of those years, the hosting cost £10 per year, and £2.50 for the domain name. I believe the site now uses a small part of a Linode $20/month VPS.

It's a fun business, but virtually impossible to scale. Good luck.
Your fired dolphins lose jobs to robots.
What if every resource on the web was put to the test against a community? Rather than just existing, a community would have to sort-of approve you in order to be relevant on a certain topic?

What if that resource was somehow validated/curated by people that have used it before? Or was submitted by an expert that topic? Would you be more willing to give that resource a try?
Frailty is a medical condition, not an inevitable result of aging
Looks like it is even more now..

This link reports 27 people dead, including 18 children:

http://www.pressherald.com/news/Gunman-killed-in-Conn-school...

so sad
How many Power Grid maps do you own? I've found Power Grid gets boring after playing the same map more than a few times.
"Why? The cost for running the fiber has already been paid."

Not every mile is owned by one company, the internet is a series of tubes
process.stdout.write();
I remember OpenACS (or even its precursors). Still running some sites out there, like photo.net.
Debouncing Javascript methods
These are the decisions that build (or do not build) community. The best decision is to look at what is best for the most people, consider as a maintainer where you want the framework to go, and make a careful decision. A cursory glance over someone's suggestion and a dismissal that is ignorant of how the community is working with the project or based on organizational minutia (formatting, variable names, unit tests, etc) erodes other people's interest in making your project a success.
71 characters (129 points) with JavaScript. I actually wrote this quite a while back (and have also posted it on HN before) - code golf is pretty fun every now and then!

for(var i=0;i++<100;console.log(((i%3?'':'Fizz')+(i%5?'':'Buzz'))||i));

For anyone else interested in doing code golf with JavaScript, here's a goldmine of byte-saving techniques:

https://github.com/jed/140bytes/wiki/Byte-saving-techniques
I try to do this when learning a new language/framework from tutorials and ebooks, but it hadn't occurred to me to do it when using other people's plugins or finding answers to code problems online. I like the idea a lot.
This is a lot easier with eval languages, you just make your own REPL and the sky is the limit.
Something about this feels predatory
A father of one of the children's... how does our society produce individuals like this? I know there are probably dozens of answers...

edit: just to be clear, I am not a father of one of the children. I was told the shooter was a father of one of the children at the school. Not sure if that is correct.
Thanks. I must have replied in a wrong way then. Somehow I though that everything is linked to the Karma. Thanks once again.
Good, now everyone can just copy & paste it and the competition is a tie ;)
For those who missed the links (I know I certainly did): http://www.university.firstround.com/
Thanks for your detailed response. I originally misunderstood your point, I thought you were essentially arguing a reductionist view of considering genes and only genes. I agree with much of what you have written, although I personally would fall more on the biological determinism side, where our genes constrain our behavior far more than people generally accept. But that's just my personal view and its certainly up for debate.
Tragedy In Connecticut: Deadly Shooting At Elementary School
Having to switch visual interfaces to get to programs inherently makes the start screen approach vastly inferior for anyone doing work on Windows 8. If I'm in the middle of coding, why in the world should I have to switch visual interfaces, from desktop to start screen, just to gain access to the programs list on my system? That's a very bad design decision by Microsoft.

If I'm just using it for playing games or watching Netflix, sure, then who cares much. Microsoft intentionally forced their start screen apps vision onto everybody to spur adoption of their lagging apps / mobile ecosystem. So Windows 8 by default punishes their power users, because of mistakes Microsoft made years ago, when a few simple options would alleviate all of that by giving power users more choice in customization.