skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From August of this year, but still nice to see this again.

I don't even need to read the blog post. The title says it all. djb wrote about this in the docs for qmail many years ago.

My idea of a great "user experience":

I switched it on/started it up, it did what it's supposed to do, in a predictable span of time, without asking me questions or requiring me to fiddle with anything.
"Consider me extremely jealous that you are studying under Prof. Aho, he's one of the greats."

If you don't mind being taught by Prof Ullman instead, Coursera has a course on Automata coming up https://www.coursera.org/course/automata
Everyone has a face. Not everyone has a phone with Bluetooth 4, a full battery, and a location fix.

(There's a reason why we carry around plastic cards for paying with things. They're cheap and simple.)
I remember "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones licensed by Microsoft as the center of their advertising campaign. That is really a catchy riff and it worked very well to generate buzz about the launch. (Windows 95 introduced the Start button.) The common television ads for Windows 8 seemed built around synchronized opening and closing of tablets/laptops. My, how the mighty have fallen.
Sometimes, in big projects, there are excerpts of very nice and elegant code. But to imagine 10,000,000 lines of pure perfection it's impossible. Bsides, real world code can be good code, but it's a different kind of code. Textbook code it's not functional, functional code to me, it's way prettier than some simplified example.
Well to be fair, if you're the type that is sure that you can simply will your beliefs into becoming reality (preferably without recognizing the concept of reality), then you almost certainly fit into one of those two groups.
I've felt the power of Haskell before, through tidbits I've learned and books like Learn You A Haskell. However, Haskell still presents itself as a giant rock in my mind, somewhat impenetrable and obtuse. It's so different from my normal thinking processes that my brain has an incredibly difficult time adjusting. It's like my thinking process turns to goo after the first few layout steps.

Basically, I wish I could understand Haskell so I could harness its power.
Windows seems like it's heading toward being an indistinct blur.

There's Windows Phone 7, which was an innovative break from its WinCE-looking predecessors. Now we have Windows Phone 8, an evolution. Looks good. We also have Windows 8, with that same new formerly-known-as-Metro UI, which looks like the phone UI, all of which grow from the UI ground tilled with WP7.

But Windows 8 also lets you get the old, familiar Windows Desktop -- although not on the cheaper Surface. Oh, right, Surface: a highly unscientific survey of the three people within shouting range reveals they have learned that the Surface is "Microsoft's cool-looking colorful iPad thing with the click-on keyboard". A high quality, very interesting, promising product, except, well, there's the laptop-priced one, the RT, which has the "old" Windows available, sort of, and the iPad-priced one, which is the pure touch one, although it has Office, albeit not fully re-imagined for touch. Is it only Microsoft that makes Surfaces? What about Dell and Acer? And what about the beautiful, fluid-looking Windows we see on the commercials, with a little girl swiping through tiles on a giant touch screen, using a painting app -- which one is that, exactly? How and where would one go about buying that computer with that OS? And how does that relate to the colorful clicky tablets?

Yes, I know how to get the answers to those questions, but it's a confusing mishmash from the consumer perspective. You don't have a strategy if you never say "no", and at some point Microsoft should have said "no" to calling both its touch and non-touch products "Windows". They're creating genuine interest in these new things, but there's great uncertainty among the kind of people who don't read YC -- which is to say, 100 percent of the people they seek as customers, to a close approximation. They have some good new forward-looking products, and they're suffocating them in a scattered go-to-market strategy, and a miasma of confused branding, marketing, and advertising.
I love the first half of the movie, because it shows a lot of what a real startup is like. It's incredible how they did the overlapping dialog to show the fast pace of thought. Adding it right now.
If you have a link to this, I would love to read it. It makes a lot of sense, and I'd be interested to read it in more detail
I'm currently writing a book and the pointers are great. Had been having trouble getting good momentum going due to the nature of the topic, but the bit about creating the structure of the book and then filling it in is just golden. I do the same thing with programs, but had not thought that it just applies to writing too.
Selling licenses, like most commercial desktop applications.
Only two weeks of vacation, no free food, etc.
I've got Windows 8 running on dual-monitor setup and I predominantly used the traditional desktop interface. I have to say the experience is significantly better than Windows 7. Not only are the performance improvements for boot/resume/shutdown vastly faster, but the desktop UI now natively offers fine tune control of placing taskbars on each display. You now also get control configuring backgrounds independently on each screen, spanning across both, or having both be the same.

I don't use the new ui for work, but I do find it very useful to quickly check things like weather, read news, etc since its incredibly fast.

The biggest fundamental flaw I came across is the fact that you can't have metro apps open on multiple monitors simultaneously. Definitely an odd decision.
From what I've seen at IBM/HP, interns/coops usually get paid somewhere around $20 to $25. A bit lower if a freshman, higher if grad student. And last I heard, the MECOP program at Oregon State sets a floor of $15 an hour for interns and it sounds like the vast majority, if not all companies, pay more than that.

So while not an apples to apples comparison, I'd say at $15/hour you're low assuming no equity. That said, unless you need the money to survive, I would view the job as a springboard to your future goals.

So if you're learning a lot and enjoy what you're doing, I'd recommend sticking around. Maybe you can make a play for some equity? On the other hand, if you don't feel like your skills/resume are developing, consider looking for an upgrade (pay and personal development).

On the last point, I've been out of college for almost 10 years now and I still pick up quite a bit from my coworkers. It sounds like you're developing on an island which is both good and bad. You learn a lot, but you also miss out on the expertise of others. Something else to consider.
Piwik feaures crowdfunding
Can you elaborate or share a link? This sounds great.
Thanks for the explanation. I was really hoping to find something like the SqueakNOS project

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=239339

ROS calls itself a 'meta-operating system', I guess the definition of an OS is sort of blurry!
Probably because most people prefer /not/ to touch their screens, making the screens greasy and cloudy and making their shoulders hurt. Undoubtedly, touch screens increase cost, increase weight and decrease battery life, as well. In other words, there's /very little market demand/.
I recommend people study APL / J / K for the same reason: It has the right primitives that make everything expressible as maps, folds, filters, scans, ranges, and stuff like that.

Even more so than Haskell.

It doesn't have monads and the kind of abstractions that lets you modify control flow semantics. It doesn't even have the facilities to build abstract data types - which makes you work with less-abstract data, and realize that although some abstraction is useful, most of what is practiced today is useless.

APL / J / K promote, at the same time, container abstraction, and concrete down-to-the-metal real work.
Very long sales processes but yes. It is better to be a Salesforce-like platform...
How Salesforce did to enforce a cloud platform as a SPOF for CRM?
Learn your tools. New developers will need to do the same. There's zero substitute for experience. Rails solves the most common problems easily.

It's extremely common to do things upon saving. Once you need to do more than one thing upon saving you then move to a more "event" based approach.

Rails was mystifying when I first picked it up, and parts of it are mystifying today. But something as trivial as the callback chain will be second nature after some time and several apps later.
> We should find a way for people to become great without sacrificing their lives. Why? Because we want everyone to be great.

I don't think you are actually expressing a coherent desire. To paraphrase the villain in The Incredibles: "If everyone's great, no one is."
I, as well as most of my friends and family, beg to differ. We have no desire to be touching screens a few feet in front of us, smudging them, and contracting a nice case of RSI in our shoulders, as well.
Apple is deeply rooted in several younger generations. MS is trying to crack this same market and get people to switch to their newly created walled garden. Kind of tough to do when you're fighting uphill against an existing, entrenched market.

Shows just how badly MS has bungled the personal computing market that somebody on HN could write this, and have it make sense.
This.

A lot of Haskell's power comes from it being able to enforce the validity of this style of programming. C++ does not - and when working with C++, you have to reason at both the C++ level like you always do, and at the Haskell level (but without the compiler verifying your work).

That's extra burden without extra benefits.
It is a new type of electric rocket, based on laser-driven plasma wakefield accelerators (which exist and are being developed for particle accelerators). It does not exist as a rocket engine; it hasn't been scaled for that, but it appears to be practical. It would be an extremely powerful and efficient electric rocket, with exhaust plasma achieving speeds of 100 million to 1 billion km/hour.

Key points:

* Extremely compact, efficient particle accelerator

* Specific impulse of 3e6 seconds (30,000 km/s), at very low thrust

* (that is >30 times better than any working ion or plasma thruster)

* Thrust can scale, probably

* Would allow interstellar travel in hundreds of years (vs. tens of thousands)

Not much on wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_acceleration

Competing electric rockets (which actually exist):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magn...
Hacking the System
How can we all together _hack_ the system for our own good?

(With respect to issues like 1. Security of Women 2. Bribery etc. )

(Context: Whats been happening India)
Steve Jobs was a great salesman. I've never encountered any record that said he was a great programmer, let alone a shitty one.
I have to take issue with how the binary system is explained. Not because it is wrong, but because it is comes off as way too intimidating for what it should be.

Binary arithmetic is not useful for the beginner. But binary logic is extremely useful...and more importantly, binary logic is something that non-programmers typically have a blind spot for.

Someone once asked me what digital concepts non-programmers should be familiar with...at the top of that list for me is the concept of everything being either 0 or 1.

For example, the answer to the question: is 2 greater than 1? can be represented as a 1, for "true"

So how do computers solve complex problems? By breaking a complex problem into many, many, many yes or no questions.

How do you tell if a pixel is reddish? Its R value is greater than a certain threshold (and of course, this comparison is a composition of multiple binary operations). How do you tell if in a given photo if a man's eyes are closed? Well, given a set of pixels where the eyes are located, calculate whether most of those pixels are reddish rather than white (or brown or whatever the person's skin is). And how do you locate the eyes in a jpeg in the first place? Well, that's more binary decisions...which leads you to talking about functions and methods and encapsulation of complex code (another feature of programming that non-programmers should know).

Once a novice can see how everything, whether it's comparing two numbers, deciding a web-scraping strategy, or designing an AI, can be reduced to yes-no questions, then I feel that programming becomes much more interesting...after all, they need a way to process those countless yes-no questions in a reasonable amount of time.
Except that their algorithm, overall, seems like a failed strategy.
If you have a use case that doesn't fit into your basic CRUD why not just create a new REST resource for it? For instance in my current app we have an InstallsController. This creates a new installation of the plugin, updates the user's account and send out an email. I've always steered clear of model callbacks as they don't play well with FactoryGirl/Machinist etc. As such the controller's create action describes everything that happens when our plugin is installed(it's still only 4 lines long).

This strategy of using new REST resources combined with modules for models where appropriate seems a very comfortable way to structure a large application. It fits into the rails conventions well and doesn't require new developers to do anything they're not familiar with. The other nice advantage is that your routes configuration gives a great overview of everything that can happen in your app.
Have any of the Howard Hughes documentaries or dramatizations been any good?

I've seen some fairly positive reviews of "the Flying Scotsman", about a bicyclist (Graeme Obree) who built his own rather innovative designs and broke several world records.
It's evident from the interview he actually did program, granted no where near as well as Wozniak. I think he easily makes it on the list as a leader of engineering organizations.
If only Microsoft would make it easy to buy!

I installed VMware Fusion yesterday and decided I'd like to have Windows 8 for it. So I looked for a download to buy and Microsoft has one.. an "upgrade" that costs about $40. Except I need something that's from scratch.

Long story short, I either have to pay $700 for an MSDN membership or buy and wait for an "OEM" version to come from my favorite PC parts vendor. Let me buy an ISO and a license key fer chrissakes!

I am wondering if it's viable to download a pirated ISO and then buy a license key only somehow, but if not, I'll have to buy a disc and rip it on another machine after the holidays.
Batman movies would be great for this list - he's one of the few superheroes that doesn't claim to have any actual super powers, but rather derives his power from kickass, well-engineered gear.
Honestly, my answer to this came about many years after living through a very theoretical CS undergrad, by way of a chapter in Charles Petzold's book, 'Code' (of all things. I originally bought the book for my dad to help him understand 'what it was I did all day'). Basically, the insight centered around the physicality of how FA are taught; FA are usually taught by thinking of the FA itself as being fixed in space, and the tape as moving through it. I always found that this lead to me thinking of the FA as a mechanical entity, driven by some sort of magical tape; a useful thought exercise to be sure, but not something that had many direct impacts on modern computing (outside of the obvious regular language avenues). If you instead envision a FA as being a flying head that moves back and forward across a tape that is fixed in space, the ideas behind modern CPUs become much more clear: the tape is memory, the FA is a CPU being stepped through successive states, and the 'location' of the FA is the PC register. It's a seemingly small difference of conception, but one that finally brought together two worlds for me that had evolved largely distinctly before then.

It's tough to give justice to this insight, except to say that it really helped crystalize the jump between the theoretical side of CS (which had always been clear to me, if never terribly 'real'), and the applied side of CS (which had always seemed to have evolved in some sort of semi-influenced paralel universe to theory).

I don't know that it's the enlightenment you're looking for, but it's the one that eventually found me.
Nicely done!

Side note: for those of you inclined to try this, or make use of Java's Robot class in any way, a word of warning: Robot takes over your mouse and/or keyboard entirely, so if things go wrong (e.g. an infinite loop) you'll have to restart your computer. It can do far worse if you're not careful, too, so feel free to read up on the mistakes of others before running in guns blazing.

http://alvinalexander.com/java/java-robot-class-example-mous...
In what way is math empirical? If one wants to prove that 1+1=2, one does not take one apple, add another apple, and observe that one now has two apples. One defines:
x + 0 = x
x + successor(y) = successor(x) + y
1=successor(0)
2=successor(1)

One then takes the true true statement
1+1=1+1 | Identity
And finds:
1+successor(0)=1+1 | Definition of 1
successor(1) + 0 = 1+1 | Definition of +
2 + 0 = 1+1 | Definition of 2
2=1+1 | Definition of +

I made no observation to prove 1+1=2. What I do observe is that if we map the counting numbers to the count of how many apples I have, and we map the addition operation to combing to groups of apples, then the mathematical result is consistent with reality.
However, if we empirically discover that the mathematical result is not constitent with reality, than that does not mean that the math is wrong, it simply means that the reality does not behave in a way that corresponds to the math.
SpaceX vertical takeoff reusable rocket 40 meters jump
You can learn enough Haskell syntax without learning nomads. It isn't very complicated.
Our inability to disprove a statement does not mean that the statement is true.
The spacesuit one has been explicitly disowned by its author. "Programmable semicolons" is the rough modern consensus on the best one-line metaphor.
Cherry Is Shutting Down Its On-Demand Car Wash Service
Care to elaborate on how Godel's theroum implies a bug in the successor function.
not a direct way, but try this [1].

[1] http://slickdeals.net/f/5275360-UPDATE-10-21-EIGHT-LICENSE-K...?
Don't give up. I kept myself at it for many days, thinking while walking/eating and even before I slept. Eventually it clicks. Probably the most memorable experience I have had as a programmer, so far (still young).
>> the columnist who bought a pregnancy book for a pregnant friend on Amazo

> that's really a "bug"

This thinking worries me a lot, especially when applied to what Google is heading for.

So now many people are removing all buttons and settings, because they think that every button or setting is a failure to guess the user's need.

The epitome of this move it probably Google Now, and I fear it is going to fail or to stink. My instance of Google Now tries to guess when I will drive back home and notify me with a traffic estimate: Until now, it was successfull and mildly useful once in 20 tries. So in fact, I have been spam-notified 19 times by Google itself! And me driving home has a relatively high predictability, compared to buying books, going out, etc.

I just read Thinking Fast and Slow for the second time, and the gist of it, in this context, is that the world is much less predictable than we think it is. If the Bayesian statistical approach or even simple formulas work better than intuition or experts in so many domains (financial, political forecasting, clinical diagnostic, etc), it doesn't mean it should be used, it means these domain have very low prediction validity. For instance, the only valid and proven prediction for next year stock price is "80% chance to be between -10% and +30% of current stock price", and this is useless common sense. Just as the only correct explanation for above the average earnings this year at any company is "below-average results last year produced lower expectations , and we are regressing to the mean".

Moreover, if some few things are to be found predictable in my life, I probably would not want to be recalled of this saddening fact. Suppose you are hiking next week-end in the mountain nearby. If a Google Now thingy tells me, two hours before leaving, that I should not forget my socks, it will give me the same feeling as a caring and annoying mother: "Yes Mom, call you there; No Mom, I'll not forget to wash me hands..." Who did like this when a teenager?

So, either personal life events are not predictable, or they should not be predicted because most people would rather keep the illusion they are in control.

What technology need to do is to empower users with helpful (or funny) tools. When I am treking somewhere in nowhere land, I feel empowered to be able to pull a satellite map and GPS positioning from my phone, and I use it whether I'm a bit lost or I just want to check the road again. But I really really would hate it if the next Google map would detect from my speed that I am hesitating, and pop a "Just turn left after the next oaktree to get back to your car, you sucker".

Google's new trend is in parenting its user, I am not sure it is the correct move.
With templates/generics, polymorphic in return type is no problem. Consider Java Guava's

Lists.<String>newArrayList()
Just like religious people "worry" about those resistant to the fold. It's a form of pity inflicted upon those unconvinced by his perspective.
I don't have a source, but the same thing was explained to me during a sea survival course. It was a requirement to be able to enter a Sydney to Hobart yacht race.

This course included spending time in a very cold pool in full gear and attempting to activate and enter an inflatable life raft (over and over, and in the dark).

I was reasonably insulated but not in a survival suit, and I lost virtually all muscle control after about 15-20mins.

The shivers left me so weak I could barely climb the ladder out of the pool.

The instructor explained to me that this was the major point of the exercise. The right strategy is to try to minimize heat loss by bringing your knees up to your chest and not moving much (Assuming you have floatation).
Thanks for the link; I'd forgotten about Qt and JavaScript, which is funny, since I was just thinking about learning it.
I just recently started attempting to teach myself how to teach with my friend and his girlfriend as Guinea pigs using Zed's books as a guide.

Another thing I would add - go slow, but let the student explore and achieve on their own. Small accomplishments without frustration are much more motivating and "sticky" in the mind.