skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For what it's worth, in my experience with programming jobs, no one really cares what your credentials are. Obviously, some places will, but you absolutely could get a job on skill alone. When I've been involved in hiring, no one paid much attention to the applicant's school - it was a side note, followed by the question, "Okay, so what can they actually do?" It's well known among developers that a lot of people with degrees are actually worthless, and many self-taught people are amazing.
The Power of EPO: Debunking the Flawed 'British Journal' Study
Yay for never using public wifi hotspots, now if I could only impress that upon the millions of Americans who do so everyday...
PDF and ebooks (MOBI, EPUB) optimize for different things.

PDF is for layout -- it is actually more of a graphic format than a text format. Contiguous text may be scattered around in the internal data representation, so long as the location of each character on the page is expressed. This is good for tables, formulas, and other items requiring precise layout.

EBooks are for a smooth reading experience, including wrapping. This will naturally disrupt layout.

I think that with some technical effort, it is possible to build an eBook that flows -- while still allowing precise layout where needed.
The degree of militarization of, and breathtaking overreach by law enforcement depicted here is stunning. 30 camouflaged SWAT officers? To arrest a coder because someone else was using his software illegally? Really?

The case began in February 2011, when Stuart says he and his wife got the Kim Dotcom treatment after about 30 local Arizona law enforcement agents wearing SWAT gear and camouflage dress — some of them with bushes attached to their shoulders to blend into the woods around his house — descended on his home and threatened to send him and his wife to prison for 35 years if he didn’t cooperate.

The search warrant used in the raid said Stuart and his wife were engaged in money laundering, operating an illegal enterprise and engaging in the promotion of gambling. Stuart has tried to obtain a copy of the affidavit used to get the search warrant, but it’s currently sealed.

The conversation for the plea agreement occurred the day after the raid, when Stuart says he was still traumatized by the experience and had only rent-a-lawyers, hired quickly over the internet, to represent him. The lawyers urged him to cooperate and agree to the terms.

And then once they arrested him, this:

Stuart showed Wired a plea agreement (.pdf) signed by former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney James Meadows, which stated that he would plead guilty to second- and fourth-degree money laundering charges and assist the DA’s investigations by, among other things, “aiding in the design of software used to obtain records, usernames, passwords, and other information stored on websites using” his company’s software.

Stuart says authorities specifically told him that they would not use the backdoor themselves but that he would be expected to access the servers of online casinos and others who used his software overseas in order to retrieve the information of gamblers and bookmakers on their behalf.

“They made it clear that they would do nothing. I was expected to do everything, to modify the system to allow myself to get in to get the information they wanted,” he says. “Their whole intention was for me to retrieve information from those databases that were located in foreign countries…. They were going to use me to get to the clients…. But I’m not a hacker, I’m a software developer.”

So in other words, these guys are too lazy to do any of the hard things associated with their job: not investigating, not establishing proof, not getting a valid search warrant that passes the laugh test. So they've decided to find ways around doing their job, and get the accused to do their job for them, via SWAT teams and threats.
I generally agree with his overall YAGNI message. Architecture astronomy and smart complexifiers on projects that could be simple are a couple of my biggest development pet peeves.

I'm not sure I follow how that equates to technical debt though. If anything, unnecessary but well-implemented abstractions and over-architecture are the opposite of technical debt, aren't they?

In my experience, it's all too easy to find developers who will "say no" too eagerly, erring on the side of sloppy copy/paste duplication, inconsistent structure, and poor maintainability overall. Given the choice, I'd much rather walk into more projects with too much architecture than the one with little-to-none which are more common.
A simpler solution would be to reload the page passing a parameter that you want to use other CDN; something like this: https://gist.github.com/4444636
This is one of the bigger reasons I got my iPad (Retina). I can read most PDF textbooks/documents in full screen portrait without any zooming or scrolling with ridiculous text clarity. No other device I have allows for this nearly as comfortably.
French ISP "Free" updated his set top box with an ad blocker enabled by default
Perhaps this isn't a "smaller device", but I love PDFs on my iPad.
Perhaps the difficulties Tim is talking about are really renderer shortcomings and not the format itself, which I had assumed was a lot more restrictive than HTML.
Yeah that's expected, but it's not expected (at least for me) to happen in a chat. But, I never use FB chat so I don't know -- does it also create thumbnails for links and such?
Am I the only one thinking that this contract was probably bound under an NDA, and that making such a post is generally bad practice leaving employment/a contract (regardless of whether there's an NDA).

I know nothing ultra-secret is given away, but if I were looking for a contractor, I'd be concerned that such a person might perform a post-mortem on my company after leaving as well.
The Perfect Call To Action
http://i.imgur.com/wgmvw.png
I've wanted something like this for going on two years. I even went so far as to start building it (wireframe: http://basseq.com/fun/epub/; some epub publishing code written), too, but lost momentum back in September and it's been sitting in my project folder.

So I'm excited someone took this further. I'll be playing with this more. Drop me a line if you're looking for more thoughts, feature ideas, or help.
Not a single sympathizer with the OP?

Kindle books have truly terrible formatting and editing in general. Some are riddled with what look like OCR errors; in others, blockquotes and italicized regions start and end in the wrong places. Images are in awkward places. Sometimes just paging left and then paging right causes the page boundary to move.

The main reason, I've heard, is that even if the Kindle format and reader app are reasonable (and I can't vouch for them), it's on publishers to put their books in the right format. They have no idea how to do this, so they outsource it. Some publishers probably don't care about or dislike the Kindle platform.

I find it really, really sad and bizarre to read books with so many errors. Maybe you haven't come across a really bad one yet, but since it varies by publisher (and I'm talking about big, mainstream publishers), just wait, you will.
Wireframe is incorrect, it was hidden-line removal, which is a lot more complex than wireframe.
Any time you browse via public wifi you might be being fucked with. How often are you actually? My wager, depending on setting, very rarely.
In my experience, multi-disciplinary people of any kind work better than those who aren't. Such a rare and precious thing to understand the boundaries between fields and how connected they really are...
MIPS is still around on Android, too.
> Honestly I don't understand why people get all flustered over email validation

Multiple reasons, and, yes, context is important.

Landing Page: You have one, and ONLY ONE, opportunity to capture a potential new customer's contact info. If they make a mistake entering their email and you didn't catch it you'll loose them forever. You can't send an email to let them know they entered two periods by mistake, can you? They are gone and you screwed-up.

Every single potential customer is sacred. Thou shalt not loose them by being careless.

Forum signup: In general terms, if someone is visiting a forum it probably means that they want to sign-up. In this case, it is OK to make them enter their address twice, make sure they match and send them a confirmation email. They'll probably try to log-on later on and discover something went wrong and re-register.

While I said "that's OK", I also think it is bad form not to at least do enough validation of all input data, including email, to catch innocent mistakes. I think people who are against email validation might have that position because they don't understand it or gat bitten by a crappy regex expression and that is that.

Now your forum sign-up user is angry because they have to enter all of their information again and go through the process one more time. Who knows, they might make a mistake once again. While I don't have any data to back this up I would venture to guess that the drop-off rate for making a visitor enter all of their data multiple times is significant.

Payment Confirmation: Must check as much as you can.

From my vantage point taking ANY action that might loose or annoy a visitor is simply --to be kind-- programming. There's no excuse for that in my book.
It is, I read quite a lot of technical books. In fact, there is no better alternative.

Just use a decent PDF reader such as GoodReader. It lets you ignore the margins so that you get the best experience.
Ya know, I never even considered that PageRank was named after Larry.
See the rest of the comments in this thread about why the fallback can be painfully slow if the CDN is down. I saw your previous comment about making an ajax request with an adjusted timeout, but this is not ideal for making cross domain script requests for a number of reasons. For one, CORS needs to be enabled. Another is that you now have to create a script tag and take the responseText and jam it in there. This is going to be slower than just creating a script tag and setting the src attr.

If you are going to have a fallback, and that fallback may take seconds to activate if the CDN is down, why not just make the fallback your primary?
Suppose you did 100 squats. Which will be closer to reporting your true caloric burn -- a pedometer or a sensor directly contacting your skin and measuring your skin temperature and other variables. The latter, right? The former would probably report 100 steps taken, very slowly.

The total costs are higher though. The Fitbit is a onetime cost of $100-125 where the Bodymedia is $120-150 once and $84/yr. But for me, the cost of the Fitbit is too high for the relatively inaccurate method of collection.
Yes but there's no requirement that any particular PDF reader implement all the extra crap.
Very nice review of different learnings. Keep going!
I'd leave your 6" Kindle for light reading, and a decent 9.7"+ tablet for technical reading.
He really needs to do more self promotion.
I wonder if the problem is specific to whatever algorithm Amazon is using. I've never tried to read a technical book on a Kindle, but on both my Nook and my iPad ePub files work far better than PDFs.

Lines in code samples do have to get wrapped fairly often on the Nook, but it's done in a sensible manner and there's a nice text editor style arrow icon to indicate which lines were wrapped.
PDFs are fantastic, and are still wonderful today. OP's problem isn't solved by PDFs, just like it isn't solved by XML or MP3 or ZIP formats.

Simply put, PDF is a format designed to allow me to give you a document where you can be sure (with certain well defined exceptions that I can work around anyway) that you see what I intended you to see. That works brilliantly if I want you to see a letter-sized 3-color document, or an A5 booklet, or a funky 3" x 9" flyer, or whatever other size I want.

This doesn't work with e-book readers, because my e-book reader isn't A4 or 8" x 6" or whatever other format the book is in. Epub, mobi, LRF etc. give the e-book reader the ability to format the text (if it's pure text, and not, as OP complains, pre-formatted with assumptions the e-book reader can't match) for the screen or for my options wrt. zooming and font size.

I say all of this as both an avid PDF user (I write lots of documentation), and an avid e-book user. You use the right tool for the job. If you're complaining about PDFs on your e-book reader, you're doing it wrong.
Bonobos will share with strangers before acquaintances
Native Android! I love it! As someone who suffered with a laggy HTML5 based WebOS Pre, then loved his silky smooth 3GS, but left the walled garden for a Galaxy S2, I am thrilled about this. My S2’s H/W by all accounts blows my old 3GS out of the water, yet I still find the experience much more laggy than my 3 year old 3GS. I’m sure much of this is the Java VM holding Android back. I can’t wait to have an Linux phone with the native speed of IOS. Great news!
To quote Reddit culture: And not a single fuck was given outside Reddit.
In your local starbucks? Probably very rarely. In the VIP business lounge of an major international airport? I wouldn't be so sure in this day and age...

In the cafe on the corner of your block in syria, iran and similar places though, the odds are a lot better.
Thanks ,sending you an email.
I don't do any e-reading, or else I might be more sympathetic.

I'm all for high-tech, and do lots and lots of reading online, but....I like my books the old-fashioned way.
Just as many best-practices can be applied too early, they can also be applied too late. DHH's rant could just as easily be aimed at too-late application of such practices.

I've found that when I deliberate over these kinds of questions too much it's usually because my design is not quite right, and that when I eventually discover an elegant design the path to flexibility presents itself in an optional and unobtrusive way.

Many designs are possible but the right design is often the one that is easy to think about at various levels of complexity.
It's nonsense, elite was written in assembler. Nobody but masochists were programming directly in hex. The only time I've done it was because there was a quick hack to be done on an apple II and I knew most of the opcodes by heart and how to compute branches. (And the reason for that is that I'd written an assembler). So unless you had no tools you really did not have to program by poking bytes into memory directly. Apropos, BBC basic came with an assembler built in triggered by the [ character.
Is this a Kindle-specific problem? I actually just bought the same book in epub format for my Nook Color and I don't have any complaints yet.

Not sure if I have a higher tolerance for bad formatting or if the Kindle version has some formatting issues.
[APK] Seeder entropy generator to provide significant lag reduction
Congratulations Jeff!

For certain categories of data, it's quite helpful to have a site that scrapes, parses and collates it into a consistent format. This was Punchfork's strength for recipes. Sounds like a good fit.
Diffs for pbxproj files are also not especially readable, so just a merge tool wouldn't be enough to make collaboration easy.

Here's a recent diff of adding some files:
http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/138661/trunk/Source/WebCore...

and the equivalent change in Gyp:

http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/138661/trunk/Source/WebCore...
As a journalist who spent a large part of my career converting masses of PDFs (not the scanned kind, though of course those were also problematic) into parseable text, I'd say the problem was what seemed like a total black box of document composition. A simple tabular text PDF that was generated through some bespoke software package could result in a stupefying variety of text outputs, whether through third-party services like CometDocs or good ol' xpdf. At least with HTML documents, an XML element is an XML element.

Of course, HTML presents the same stupefying array of possibilities, except in the form of visual output...which is why I guess we needed PDF in the first place.
> any time anyone who speaks English eats an Apple my company name has the chance to come to mind

I can't say this has ever happened to me.
Those two versions are certainly different, but better is a difficult call to make.

Of course, I still watch analog NTSC on a CRT TV, so what do I know about image quality?
Wal-mart/K-mart?

Dunkin' Donuts/Honey Dew Donuts?
Well; I also think this is going offtopic but I have to mention "unescape" is not a JS standard but it is available in most JS engines; in the other hand literal Unicode codes in strings are part of the ES specification.
Then they used 'download.com' and 'tucows.com'.
Well, regular English words can also be used in or as proper nouns, like Pagerank (or if the title of a website at Google was "Google's Larry Page").
Point 6 is a rather uninformed opinion. The reason the Keychain and Sandbox API are written in C is because they are designed to be used straight up by C programs without calling in obscure Obj-C land. Have you ever wondered why Mercurial and Subversion are able to put your credentials in Keychain? This is why. Lower-level, general purpose Mac OS APIs have always been written in C, and they should.
You know that old joke? A patient says to the doctor, "it hurts when I do this", and the doctor replies: "so don't do that". Your 6" Kindle was not meant for reading PDF books, so don't complain when you're using it not what it was made for (reading novels).
I can't wait for automated cars.
How about with this model scanner? http://www.mikrondigital.com/uploads/media/RadPRO_SECURPASS....

High Penetration Model: (500/y/subject)	< 2.0 uSv (0.2 mR) / per scan
Al Jazeera buys Gore's Current TV, terms undisclosed
How to Gain or Lose 30 Minutes of Life Every Day
True, but there's no delineation provided in the PDF files so as to ascertain which files require which features (via file extension or whatever), and so it might be impossible to tell if your particular reader supports all of the features provided by the PDF file. The better readers will tell you that some features of the current document aren't supported, while others simply won't render correctly at all, or worse, will just crash the application.

You also end up with users trying to open some dynamic form PDF with scripting and whatnot enabled, and of course your portable device balks because it doesn't support it, so now it gets kicked back to the device MFG because the PDF reader is "broken".
I sympathize with the sentiments regarding tech books in Kindle format. I try to buy all my tech books at O'Reilly since they usually will have each title available in multiple formats (PDF included).
I've had some terrible Kindle experiences as well. Textbooks on learning Chinese here there was no way to zoom in on the tiny intricate characters. Textbooks on learning Chinese where the lines of Chinese had placed incorrectly. Whoever did the translation treated them as images basically, and image support on Kindle is very poor, and in that one book they placed the "images" under the wrong phrases making it completely wrong. Amusingly these are also the books that disabled themselves after I updated my phone too many times, saying I'd exhausted my licensed downloads. So they were simultaneously the worst content translation I ever encountered and the most useless licensing for a developer who changes and reflashes phones constantly. I imagine technical books are similar, with code being treated as badly as Chinese.
You should refund those books.
I'm going to copy verbatim a comment I posted elsewhere in this thread. Apologies...

I don't understand where people are getting the idea that we are to ignore balance, constraints, and reality in deciding how to complete a project.

Absolutely not the case. We're talking about quality specifically, and why someone might choose to pay attention to finer details versus ignoring them.

Your reasons for ignoring details might be perfectly valid and entirely appropriate. The project may not call for artistry and mastery. All very good points for a different discussion.

Don't think for a moment that those who believe high quality is an important factor are implying that it is absolutely necessary. That is simply a false dilemma.
> Some publishers probably don't care about or dislike the Kindle platform.

This is the real source of the problem. Publishers have every reason to suspect that Amazon will eat their profits and would be stupid to help Amazon accomplish its goal.
> I mean, who gives a shit about some nerds when you’re moving bazillions of copies of books that help teens or moms explore new facets of their sexuality?

Can we have this conversation without resorting to highly gendered stereotypes for trivial-media-that-I'm-not-interested-in examples?
I'm all for Objective-C, but your arguments were weak in the first place, and you're dragging a dead horse here.

I mean: "I put about as much effort into my critique as the original article's author did in arguing for C#'s superiority." -- Why even write your critique then? At least the original article's author had a reason, it is marketing copy.

>This is a problem that has bit me in the ass maybe once or twice since I started developing in Obj-C several years ago

The general consensus is hardly that type safety in large applications is something to not be concerned with that only bites you "once or twice" when you are a novice. So I don't see the reason for the anecdotal reference.

>70% code reuse across iOS and Android (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4998661) is hardly what I'd call "portable"

This is horribly mistaken in more than two ways.

1) Nat says: "Both of these apps are using 100% _native widgets_ for their user interface, and I think it's fair to say that both of them are fairly UI-heavy.". Which means it's a worst case scenario. For a less UI-heavy app, or one with a custom canvas based GUI etc, the percentage would be far higher.

2) 70% is far better than rewriting everything (or 0% re-use) if you use Objective-C. You could use C++ or C to write a common base, but then you're not using a single language anymore, whereas with C# you are.

3) 70% in itself is nothing to sneer at when discussing portability. Especially considering your own argument that "write once, deploy everywhere" is a pipe dream, then 70% is quite high level of reuse -- basically meaning you merely re-do the UI parts to tune it to each platform.
I had thought the same thing too, but after updating our app to a mobile web app, we found there are many out of the box solutions that make audio work across various platforms and browsers.
Unfortunately it seems to be broken now, but reAnimator was an awesome regex visualization tool (http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/). It let you enter a regex and would display the state machine similar to this, but then it would also let you enter a string and it would animate the progress of the string matching (or not) against the state machine as you enter each character.
I feel like a god damned idiot, but what the fuck is a guy to do if he wants to read PDF files on an e-reader? They look like dogshit on Kindles. Thing is, I have a ton of them. Most of them somewhat obscure/can't be found in other formats.

I might be talking nonsense here, but I swear there is a niche market for some kind of affordable (<$100) tablet specifically designed for PDFs.
Mozilla is actively working on implementing the Web Audio API (originally introduced by Chrome), which should make it simpler to write cross-browser audio code. Large parts of this work have already landed in Firefox Nightly builds: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=779297
Give us names, add links.
You know, I don't think this is a half bad idea. I mean, deleting offending code is a bit much, but shouldn't a code-by-contract language not allow code that failed a contract to be compiled until it changes? That would seem to make sense.