skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a great idea. I felt a great sense of accomplishment dismantling a simple finger torch and putting it in a circuit connected to an Arduino UNO and varying the current going to it. It's like programming but in real life :)
Developers' Games of 2012
Facebook testing new homepage?
I've read my grandmothers diary. It was extremely interesting, especially because I got a first persons account of world war II, and the way it affected her and the rest of the family.

But I don't feel like I have some kind of right to know anything beyond what she chose to tell and I hope my kids will have the good grace to look at me in a similar way. By the looks of it that won't be a problem.

It's one thing to be interested about ones forebears, another to be obsessed by it. When my mom went all out on some genealogy site and put all of my details in there as well as those of my spouse, kids and so on we asked her to please stop doing that.

Besides the obvious privacy angles I don't think kids that can't stand up for their rights should be included in the documentation that others place online, by the same token my kids and their descendants don't have an automatic right to any level of detail about me.

I remember that one of the dictators (Kim Yong-Il iirc) of NK had a film crew following him making a documentary about his life. The guy was batshit insane, and I feel that anybody that wants to document their live to that extent has an overgrown feeling of self importance.
Here are the cool technologies we want to use in 2013
This guy is way too far down the VC circlejerk/rathole to recognize how awesome a $500k angel round really is. It is almost as if he thinks you can't become a real company without a Series A->C progression. I know plenty of Engineer CEOs that have done exactly that and have thrived without the pressure of VCs to follow their bullshit methodologies.
Yes I can. But likely you forgot the sarcasm tags ;)
A New Look for Vagrant
awesome.. thanks for sharing what works for you, I will give a try to your playlist tomorrow and see how it works for me.
this is one of the times i feel that hn has a large bubble that i am outside looking in. pretty much everyone i know obsesses about exactly the opposite problem - how long and how successfully we can keep on being pure engineers while still getting promotions, raises, etc.. it's one of the central aspirations of my career not to have to do anything nontechnical for a living.
I meant grad student poor, not living on the street poor.

(Incidentally, we didn't sell Viaweb in 1995. That was when we started it. But from that point I didn't feel pinched anymore because I had a regular salary.)
post is from 11 years ago.
Almost everything you need to know to enter mobile game development on 2013
I'm a tad annoyed that you listed so many books. It loses its meaning. Some of the books you listed are gems, but they are midstream in a long boring list.

I want my 15 minutes back.
The Bible, for example, uses fractions. In Lev. 5:16 - "He must make restitution for what he has failed to do in regard to the holy things, add a fifth of the value to that and give it all to the priest, who will make atonement for him with the ram as a guilt offering, and he will be forgiven."

But I'm with pflats' judgement. I see text like "Indeed, on computers systems which don’t have a hardware multiplication circuit, every time you write ab the computer will repeatedly add the number a for a total of b iterations." and wonder first, won't the target audience be confused by "hardware multiplication circuit", and second, is this actually true? I'm pretty sure they use shift-and-add.

Or, there's a use of "=" to say that "a/b = ... = one bth of a" then on the same page there's a triple bar "≡" used for the same thing. Will your target audience understand the notation shift?

The language "It is worth clarifying what" and "It is interesting to note that" and "We will now illustrate how the equations of kinematics are used to solve physics problems" are part of the same stultifying language you complain about. There's a bunch of places where you can simplify text like "the expression 5×32 +13 is to be interpreted" to "the expression 5×32 +13 is interpreted" -- the "to be" is useless. And the voice changes from "we get" to "you get".

Why is x<sup>-1</sup> different from f<sup>-1</sup> ? That is, the first is 1/x and the second is the function inverse. As far as I see, you don't explain that those "-1"s mean different things. Nor do you say that "f" is another type of variable naming pattern, which describes a functions.

Suppose your student wants to actually do the Moroccan example as an experiment. It will fail, because of air friction. Yet friction isn't brought up here. Newton's laws are not intuitive, because we are used to a world which is full of friction, and frictional forces aren't easy to describe. But the text assumes that the clarity of Newton's laws will be self-apparent, even if it doesn't match expectations.

The Moroccan example also uses "44.145[m]". Who measures their balcony height down to the millimeter? The precision was chosen so the answer would be exactly 3[s], but other examples aren't that fussy. In any case, the answer should be 3.00". Significant figures are hard for students to understand, and I don't see any guidance that a fall of 44 meters should not be answered 2.9950690022496134[s], even if that's what the computer gives.

Finally, good on you for using SI for the file size instead of base 210 units. However, [Mb] is megabit, not megabyte. You should use [MB].
I need a professional chef, a doctor, and an on-call plumber. I'm not paying anything, but I'll be glad to give you credit on my various sites.

If anyone in those professions wants to gain some valuable experience, please contact me.
His point here is that being a programmer is better than being a doctor or a lawyer because you can begin contributing at an earlier age.

Here's the "arrogant" part: for that point to be valid, one has to assume that the future contributions of being a doctor aren't worth as much as the contributions to software one made as a teenager. From my point of view, that is simply not the case.
Thanks for the detailed response!

I think this is a great illustration of the privacy (and thus related legal) issues that simply aren't being addressed in the research and commercialization efforts thus far. We saw a little of this with Instagram's photomap, that people's locations were being "outed" because they were tagged in someone else's photo and that person chose to make their locations public, but it's going to get more complicated before it makes more sense.
Video Game Industry Predictions 2013
The reason for my stern words is that there are crashing bugs that have caused us a lot of headaches. For one, if something goes wrong during serialization/deserization, the response crashes and no status code or error message is returned. So aside from the trademark Microsoft unintelligible design, you also have to deal with crashing bugs that won't be fixed for years, if ever.
FWIW, this is all a recent development; the iPhone 4, for example, was entirely defeated: Apple can't fix it with software updates, they have to go back to their manufacturing process and start using new low-level bootloaders. There are definitely jailbreaks for the iPhone 4 for iOS 6, and there will continue to be when Apple releases iOS 7.

Given that Apple then continues to sell the iPhone 4, and they continue to sell very well, you have to defend the argument that "DRM is working well for Apple" against "jailbreaking many devices are easy" even if not "jailbreaking all devices are easy". This is especially true given that these old devices not just sell, but sell well.

http://allthingsd.com/20121018/older-iphones-still-selling-l...
> They didn't look like any sort of spam or advertising, because there were bouts of normal conversation amidst them.

If you pay attention you'll notice that the verse he quotes are relevant to the topic at hand - he's not just posting randomly.
My Infosec Wish for 2013: A Balanced Cyberwarfare Debate
It Doesn't Have to Be You-The Surprising Reality of Shitty Jobs
A reassuring note for UK readers - I got my number in 3 days, and nobody tried to upsell me on anything. (It's possible there's less paperwork for them in the UK, what with UK company details being centralized.)

They did assure me that this stupid number would be useful for all manner of stuff, which, so far, it hasn't been. But since they didn't charge me for this misinformation, I'm willing to let them off.
Hah, spot on. These people are so far down the rabbit hole, that they can't really tell what they are doing that is actually difficult.
"Damini" girl who was gang raped in New Delhi
I will never let myself consider $30-40k to be poor, at least in Texas. That's enough money to take care of an average family and still have a very nice Christmas.

I'm young, in college, and working full time to support my family (which includes my mother and younger siblings) while my mom goes back to school to earn a degree and work somewhere she will be happy. I made what you would consider in the "poor" range this past year and was still able to pay bills in my apartment, pay all my moms bills for the house she rents, blow money on Steam sales, buy myself and my girlfriend used cars, make a mortgage payment for a struggling family member, and a lot more.

I'm not poor. I have been not rich, but not poor.
I wonder if the author is simply trolling with the first post. He says:

"This myth has many forms, with many attempts to explain the magic power away in terms of some physical characteristics–

1. Programmers who have a penis are good

2. Programmers who do not have a penis are bad

If you believe in this in any way, it is highly likely that you are not only a terrible programmer, you are a terrible person too."

Then on his Twitter he proudly displays in all capitals "Ｉ　ＡＭ　Ａ　ＴＥＲＲＩＢＬＥ　ＰＥＲＳＯＮ"

https://twitter.com/tef/
Microsoft issues fix for IE flaw that could allow PC hijack
I could buy this argument if you were talking about almost any game except starcraft, with its arbitrary selection limits. And if you want groups it's pretty easy to do that with software buttons.
Since you seem to be informed about the books out there that are attempting what the OP's book is, what would you suggest in place of it?

Seems like even with the problems you've listed, it might still fit a niche that I haven't seen filled very well.
An emulation is by its very nature not a "port".
Clickable: http://www.quivee.com/
Wow, sounds like you've hung out with a tough crowd. There's nothing wrong with being proud of your work, and I'm terribly sorry some rude people have tried to take that away from you through such dishonest means. Keep your chin up :)
Netflix CEO gets 100% raise
I doubt that most of the people who pirate have a recent phone: they probably have hand-me-downs from their parents or purchased the device second-hand off of eBay.

In fact, if you consider piracy a feature, you probably purposely purchase an older phone: Apple still sells the iPhone 4, which continues to be trivial to jailbreak.
Ask HN: Where to find a web developer who works holidays?
Our website was just hacked over the holidays, during the time when nobody is working!

I've tried contacting our web developers during this time (an outsourced firm) but, of course, they were on holidays.

For the non-techs, what do you do with your website during the holidays and where do you find a developer during these times?

Thanks.
How we built a solid payments platform?
We have built aa solid payments platform which allows to pay anybody directly into their bank account in over 80+ countries. A huge use for crowd sourcing companies. Any thought?
How we built a solid payments platform?
We have built a solid payments platform which allows to pay anybody directly into their bank account in over 80+ countries. A huge use for crowd sourcing companies. Any thought?
Definitely a tour is needed. Something where I can get a quick lay of the land, without watching a video or signing up. I don't see prices either.

I actually can't give an opinion with so little information.
> It's hard to get a credit card in China.

Are you sure? A lot of "credit cards" in China are actually debit cards, where you must deposit money in your account up-front before you can spend. I don't see any reason why banks would make it hard for people to get these, since there's virtually no risk of bad debt.
"Since information about how another user searches is not known to you, it is not used to give you a recommendation"

Saying that this is the case does not make it true.
This is syphilitic nonsense. His defense of bad internal mobility policies spoiled the whole thing. It seems like he's trying to defend moronic decisions made in large companies as if there "must be" a decent underlying reason for them. Sometimes, there's not. The Just World Hypothesis is a neat way to trick yourself into believing some insane shit that has no basis in reality.

If you're not an execrable fascist, you realize that performance review history part of the transfer packet is a Bad Fucking Idea. This Enron-style "innovation" was intended to intimidate people into working harder. What it actually did was give managers incentives to give inaccurately bad reviews: keep the fuckers captive with negative ratings. Bonus points if people don't know what their exact ratings are and therefore can think they're receiving acceptable ratings (cf. Google's secret calibration scores).

I'm sorry, but the absolute first thing you need to assess when it comes to process is: how will this shit be abused? If the system entrusts a single individual (in the internal mobility case, an employee's manager) to be ethically decent, with serious consequences to others if he's not, it will probably fail.

The real purpose of these bad HR practices (transfer blocks, global stack-ranking, political-success-I-mean-"performance" review history as part of the transfer packet) is to create a false objectivity that leaves badly-treated employees falsely believing they have no legal or publicity recourse.

The vast majority of terminations don't go to court, but companies want to avoid bad publicity as well. The real purpose of a severance is to leave the employee feeling good about the company, despite the separation. The purpose of a PIP is to make the employee feel bad about himself. This is because people are most likely to seek recourse when they perceive a sort of moral superiority. HR's job is to frame events so that people don't have this sense of righteous indignation. A severance brings the company up; "we can still be friends". A PIP brings the employee down; "you have no recourse, because you're shit and I'm champagne".

People who look at bad HR practices and ascertain noble or neutral intent are missing the bulk of the picture. Most powerful people in most companies are just bad human beings whom a less emasculated society would do something about. It really is that simple.
>Again, this does nothing but inflame when instead the intent should be to inform.

Yada yada yada -- one of many similar paragraphs.

Is this post about problems with the suggestions in Furrow's article, or about how prudish the author is and how carefully one must word his posts to get his approval?

I, for one, could do with less preaching and more to the point critique.
Agreed. Whatever you think of RMS, some respect is due anyone who can honestly say "I implemented Common Lisp once".
Stop toying with us, Arrested Development: Netflix denies rumored premiere date
Just because it is hard for people who have the latest-greatest device, does not mean that it is generally hard: many users (I would argue especially the demographics that pirate) either still have or are newly acquiring older devices.
That vaguely rings a bell but I don't think I've seen it in action. Pity!

Maybe the future will bring us something like that again, I sure wouldn't mind. The nay-sayers argument that 'micro kernels are slow' seems to be mostly limited to those that have never actually used a micro-kernel based OS for anything. What I remember was - for the time especially - nothing short of astounding performance, 30K slices / second on a lousy 486/33 was not exceptional at all. At the time most other OSs were doing 20 or so...
80s pop, all the way.
I think the article would have been better served if he just came out and said what he wanted to say, instead of skirting around it.

He really wanted to say, "Respect me, dammit. You have no idea how hard my job is. I just sold my business for $200 Million but some of you still don't take me seriously because I don't know how to program."

Tech cofounders have, rightfully, learned to eschew sketchy/crappy/douchey business co-founders. Sometimes the generality of "business guy" takes the fall with that. The truth is that it's a lot easier to fake having the potential to be a CEO than it is to fake having the potential to be a CTO. If you've ever noticed how ready marketers/business guys are to throw out their credentials, that's because until you have at least a somewhat successful startup under your belt, you can't be taken seriously. You have no tangible skill. You're a liability.

The author wants technical co-founders to know what it's like to be him for a minute.
Worth noting that if you're a "single person business", you don't need to bother with a DUNS number: https://developer.apple.com/support/ios/D-U-N-S.html

(ie: If you were planning on hacking something together and charging for it on the App Store, go for it. This won't affect you.)
Most of that has been on the Internet. I was seemingly popular in certain online forums. I found that just trying to be genuine and talk with people and say "thanks" when complimented fueled ugly attacks from folks who weren't fans. The attacks dropped off when I stopped saying things like "thanks" but it also left me in a position where most people seem to not know how to talk to me at all. I am only just now making in roads into getting people to actually talk to me again. It has been very very tough. But it seems to be improving.
Are you planning to go all out on this at some point?
Import Swatches From CSS to Photoshop
If they're meant to be, somebody will cook up a few great instances and show why monads and other abstractions were insufficient. Until that happens I don't think they need to be in people's standard repertoire. Applicative functors seem to be much more handy.

I'd like to know more about comonads too, but the only interesting article I've seen about them I can recall was this one about using comonads to build a zipper for managing location in a site menu.

http://fmapfixreturn.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/comonads-in-ev...
"The amount of information we need to retain is growing rapidly"

Like the capital of Maryland? I would argue that the need to retain that type of information is in rapid decline, not rapid growth.

The likelihood of me needing to know the capital of Maryland in a situation where I don't have access to Google is minute.

Seriously, I have computers and books to offload this type of trivial information.

That said, I learned the state capitals in third grade and do and still remember them. I just question whether that was a good use of my prime learning years.
"We don't address this in the post, but adding :while conditions is quite a fun challenge."

Eurgh, I hate the common Clojure habit (you see it in for, doseq, etc. loops, and in domonad, which is annoying in other ways) of abusing binding vectors to add in extra stuff that doesn't, in itself, have anything to do with binding names to values.

If you use a very slightly modified version of the macro defined at [1] (modified to use algo.monads), you can do list comprehensions like this:

> (monads/with-monad
monads/sequence-m
(mdo x <- [1 2 3]
y <- [3 4 5]
let added = (+ x y)
(monads/m-result [x y added])))
([1 3 4] [1 4 5] [1 5 6] [2 3 5] [2 4 6] [2 5 7] [3 3 6] [3 4 7] [3 5 8])

The "let added = (+ x y)" is an unnecessary flourish: it would have worked just as well to wrap what followed in (let [added (+ x y)] ...). Likewise (as against domonad), you can just use regular old if; no need for :if.

1: https://bitbucket.org/kenko/macroparser/src/7a492ef941db38db...
This is the method I used in the past when I needed a DUNS number for other reasons. However, recently trying this did not work at all. They simply email back saying "You're not a contractor for the US government" and then close the request.
> I expect some innovative OS research is being done in universities.

Sadly, this statement is predominantly false. That's not to say that there aren't interesting ideas being tried out -- there are. It's just that the ways in which Unix is flawed aren't significant enough to warrant switching to a new system. Yeah, the security model of 'sudo' for any permissions at all sucks, but it gets the job done on production systems, and there are (ugly) workarounds to get better security. Yeah, dependency management sucks, but we have VMs to work around versioning issues. There are tons of people proposing solutions to these types of problems in academia, but Unix is entrenched, there's tons of software written for it, and industry is not going to adopt an alternate platform unless it is 10x better than what's out there. Academia is proposing systems that are 10% better, not 10x better, and add complications to the relatively simple process / file model of Unix.
If you think that always is overstating things a little, can you give me an actual example of an actual process at an actual company that creates no possibility of perverse incentives?
I would be surprised if Microsoft is intentionally indexing links in private documents, but my point stands: Google et al are remarkably good at indexing the web. If you don't want an otherwise public URL indexed you must use robots.txt or equivalent.
Humblebrags are the very definition of "Ha ha only serious".
This is the third iteration of the book, so I think I have gotten the typos-per-page down to an almost non-existant level. I am sure there are some left, but it is definitely not a first draft.
I wasn't aware it'd already been submitted. You're right that it's a bit of a lottery.

Being in Australia, I find that stuff submitted in (my) morning seems to catch some Europeans and night owls in the USA, from whom only a few upvotes are required to climb the rankings.

Once you hit the front page, you're golden.
It's a shame he doesn't mention his friend's name at the end of the piece, but if anyone has the right to refer to themselves as "beloved" I'd say it's David Rakoff.
I agree. We are going to add a video in place of the home screen pic
I spent about 6 months working nearly full time on it, but there are some fundamental flaws with the implementation. Eventually I'll reboot it, but I have no idea when that'll be.
Ken Jennings actually ~is~ a humble guy who's done interesting things, I wouldn't imagine that he fits the mold.
Thank You (2012 Edition)
I listen to a lot of UKF Dubstep mixes on Youtube. I generally like to listen to up beat electronic music that doesn't have a lot of words and having hour long mixes on Youtube is a convenient way to source a lot of content.
I've dealt with these jokers with going after federal grants... very, very shady and I totally empathize. Getting a DUNS number is actually free and you can get it in 24 hours, but you have to call their super secret number for federal contractors. Just tell them you're only using it to suckle on the government udder. It is the same number regardless.
Awesome little site you built! I too like to work to mashup mixes - kapslap being a fave. It's that continuous flow, like you said.