skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because these guys are notorious for copying every startup in the valley:

http://www.pinspire.com/
http://www.wimdu.com/
etc
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I got a fishy feeling from reading that post.

It's like it's written to not mean much, but get money from ad impressions. I didn't like the post in general, nor the title.

I don't think he makes very good points, except the variable/conditional/etc thing.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5086824
Nice lib!
I'm almost 35 so I'm definitely somewhere in the middle. I'm not at all scared of being sidelined by young guys because I do not define myself by current skillset (currently a web developer doing mostly Ruby/Javascript in various forms). What experience has taught me is that being able to program well is an incredibly valuable skill if and only if it is applied to the right problems at the right time. So while some of my skills over time have had an extremely short half-life (Netscape/IE 4 CSS), and some has had an intermediate half-life (HTTP/SSL/web servers) and some promise dividends for years to come (bash, vim, linux sysadministration), the ability to leverage and apply technology to real business problems is something that will always be valuable. It doesn't matter how many genius kids drop out of the ivy league, they have to earn their experience in how to succeed in the business world. Of course, if I am always looking for a job I am subject to ageism, but that is why increasingly I look to put myself in founder/consultant roles rather than simply coder for hire.
Oh, it's wrong to clone startups because it's wrong to clone startups. Got it, thanks.
I think lots of people would actually want an invite, me included.
Perhaps a simple solution would be to allow down-voting on dead posts (I only seem to be able to upvote?) This would allow such users to continue losing Karma, and give a way of distinguishing users who gain karma and should lose their hellban, and those who need permanent banning?
Badly conceived "to do" lists don't work, and it is not just because of context, or what tool one is using. It is really about whether or not you list small-enough actionable items that have a concrete condition of "done-ness".

Each item in a to-do list that is carefully thought out will contain a verb, an object, and an implicit/explicit way to know that the item is complete. More importantly, each item describes a discrete action and not a huge project that may require a large indeterminate number of actions. A to-do list should contain a list of items that can be completed in a matter of hours or at most a day or two.

For example, "secure the business" has no objective way to know that it is actually complete; that is a huge project consisting of perhaps hundreds or thousands of specific actions. It does not belong on a "to do list".

There will never be an "app" that solves the problem of to-do lists. The problem of to-do lists is that people put the wrong things on these lists.
>... yet clearly marked as advertising...

That's bullshit. If something uses the same font and page layout as editorial content, it will always be mistaken for editorial content. That's the whole point of it.

And using weasel words like "sponsor content" is definitely not 'clearly marked as advertisment'.
While I think it is great that we can now do things with ease without having to worry about all the details, I also think it limits us when doing things. This is not a problem in entreprise/commercial software development because it gives more control for the manages over the developers and the development process, thus reducing complexity of the process. However, this is a problem for us who are driven by curiosity and the joy of creative problem solving.

Demoscene[1] is a good example of this. Back in the day when people wanted to create great looking audiovisual works of art, they had to program them for the computer. There were no movie/3D/CGI editors to do the job with. The whole scene revolved around the technical limitations and beating them. People formed groups which competed against others by creating ever-more stunning effects with more and more content on the screen. Now, new people wonder why do people bother doing the art by programming some obscure old machine? Sure it would be easier to use Sony Vegas for visuals and FL Studio for audio? But hese people miss the point. Some people are not driven to play with these things in order to create art. They are driven by their desire to do creative problem solving. These days the scene has lost it's appeal in public because there's nothing special in stunning graphics on screen. And very few people really care about the fact that some of the works are created within very tight technical constraints[2][3].

All this is gone and "dead" though. Not only demoscene, but the spirit of ceative problem solving within technical constraints. This is the problem I have.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWcbj7ksqwE

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DjBq2O0XXk
As a sidenote, I find it humorous that the MLA site can’t be bothered to use real quote marks when quoting something.
Improve your REPLs with rlwrap
Hmm. I checked a few of the names that occurred to me immediately -- jl, DaniFong, rachelbythebay -- and you're right, none of them are high score candidates here.

Still though, I'm not sure if that's evidence of some kind of discrimination, or just evidence that more women have the good sense not to spend too much time on HN.
Definitely agree about building a CPU. I keep meaning to get my hands on a hobbyist FPGA. I used them a little last year before I dropped Uni, and really want to get back to it.

For now I'm satisfying myself with plans for a diode-matrix-microprogrammed CPU :-)
Ironically, SparrowOS makes a good point about Don Quixote here...although in his usual cryptic religious incantations.
> Web development is, for the most part, write-once run-anywhere, from an x86-on-steroids desktop PC to a pocket-sized RISC device (even for people with very small pockets)

I find it shocking how so many old-timers fail to see how amazing the web is in terms of being the first de-facto cross-platform cross-media technology, and instead lament the loss of powerful proprietary GUI toolkits. I mean sure portable HTML/CSS/Javascript is incredibly difficult and it's full of warts, but it's pretty minor considering the accessibility of something that can be accessed on any device running any OS, by people with any disability. Yeah, so the win32 API was more elegant for throwing up a toolbar GUI, big fucking whoop; it's like Louis CK's bit about complaining about the Internet on an airplane, total blindness to the accomplishments in front of us.
Akelarre Restaurant by Pedro Subujana in San Sebastian, 3 michelin Stars
Inspirational. While I don't always like Kim's work, I admire how he kept putting his work out there, and it paid off.
Ask HN: Can you ask someone to be your mentor? How do/did you find one?
I read a lot about how a great asset it can be to have a mentor when you want to be an entrepreneur. Today as a young entrepreneur (20yo), I'm asking myself if I should have a mentor. I know a lot of people in the business and I would love to have someone especially as a mentor, I often talk to him, he gives me some advices but it's not mentoring though.
So I'm asking HN the question, should I ask him to be my mentor or just see if it comes up some day, how do people do usually ? Is it different whether it's in the US or in Europe ? Also if you have a mentor, how did you find yours ?
You don't have to be in the US: "(iv) a non-U.S. resident authorized in the country in which the member resides while participating in this Competition to perform services as an independent contractor."
Personal Robots
Which country do you live in? Many countries prop up brutal dictatorships for their own advantage. The United States, picking just the easiest example of many, has a long history of supporting oppressive regimes, so presumably every US taxpayer ought to be similarly ashamed. Do you benefit from anything like that?
How much research have you done so far? How committed are you to achieving this?

I ask because your question is worded in such a way to suggest you've just had the idea and want other people to provide some answers. If that is the case then you have a bigger question to answer - if the first thing I do when I've had my grand idea is to want other people to tell me how and what to do, how passionate am I about this? Because you'll need passion to see you through the long road.
Yes, I agree with the religious point.

"And all the foundations that we took for granted in the western world have been either destroyed or not developed in the past in those countries."

I agree with this. But "try teaching people about WESTERN style education and western work ethic / values, etc." Yes, cultural relativism only goes so far. But one could try teaching them japanese values as well, it would be good.

A society can only progress with certain values and rules, and what we call "western civilization" is pretty much that, otherwise, we would be maybe talking about tribes in Europe being conquered by who knows (not that tribes in Europe didn't exist).

But of course, as you said, it needs a foundation, and this took a long time even in the case of Europe.

"So a tribe in Africa that lived perfectly fine in a relative balance... and they are left to adapt to this new context or die."

This has happened how many times in world history again? Oh and "relative balance" may be an exaggeration. Old "innocent" tribes could and have destroyed their habitat. Example: Easter Island. That also happens in South American tribes.

"We adapted to the modern world by choice and by developing it (and over centuries at that). They are FORCED to "adapt to it or die, pronto". It's not at all the same."

I agree. But see, several countries are already adapting. Angola for example.
It is very close to being a TM, but there are differences, because of the way you describe the DFA in Brainfuck in contrast to a TM.

Also, TMs are not entirely formal in the sense that there exists multiple TMs which all are equivalent - but there is no correct implementation. So when people say TM, or even BrainFuck, then it is not entirely clear what machine they mean.
People are still pushing the boundaries in every direction, it's just not as easy to see in one place, and not as amazing because we are desensitized to it. I mean we'll never be amazed again the way we were by Doom when it first came out, but don't tell John Carmack he's not trying to squeeze out every ounce of performance from today's hardware.
Ruining the game for everyone; two things I love about Helvetica

— Terminals at right angles to the stroke. http://c.jon.gd/image/3Q0y2u323j3C . Arial looks particularly sloppy with jaunty terminals. It is possible to have a similar grotesque sans-serif feel with offset terminals (see Univers & Akzidenz Grotesk) but they're a crucial part of what give Helvetica its character.
- The uppercase R. Has a really strong leg compared to Arial's half-assed flaky leg.
Nicely done. I got most of those wrong! Which is why I leave typography to typographers.

Suggestion: wrong response page has a small graphic that emphasises a difference between Arial and Helvetica. e.g. the shape of the top part of the lower case r, &c

Then you have a teaching tool...
I really don't consider myself a typography expert or designer, but I found that easy and got a perfect score.

There are obvious tells in almost all of them -- mostly lowercase "s", "c", etc, in which Helvetica is has perfectly level edges and arial is angled.

The only harder ones are some of the all caps examples like TOYOTA.
Then I stand corrected, thanks.

And for those asking, I read through the terms and conditions until I bounced into this and jumped to a hasty conclusion...

Eligibility
This Competition is open to all members of the TopCoder website, who have agreed to the terms thereof, and who are at least 18 years of age. Competitors must be:

(i) a U.S. citizen,
(ii) a lawful permanent resident of the U.S.,
(iii) a temporary resident, asylee, refugee of the U.S., or have a lawfully issued work authorization card permitting unrestricted employment in the U.S., or

For the last line indeed says:

(iv) a non-U.S. resident authorized in the country in which the member resides while participating in this Competition to perform services as an independent contractor.
This is very Microsoft-orientated. Even the open source software he recommends is Windows-only (Dev-C++, Notepad++).
i like the new features given in <a href="http://www.papablogger.org/2013/01/Fedora-Linux-18-Spherical... 18</a>
I never understood how people can do work for a company then be upset that that work becomes to the company and not them.

The guy seems to be complaining that he can't show Apple's IP on his website? Come on.
I always liked that Brainfuck was nasty and impractical because it was very simple, and not because it was obtuse like many other esoteric languages.
This article sounds like something a non-programmer would write for a research project.

There's lots of little mistakes throughout, such as imprecise definitions for compiled/interpreted/VMs and calling DevC++ a compiler, but beginners wouldn't know the difference anyway.

The real problem is that there's just flat-out bad advice! Many of the links he posts are just the first search result you'll find on Google, yet are terrible resources. In particular, cplusplus.com, w3schools, DevC++, and cprogramming.com are things you'll hear experts warn about for being outdated, having misinformation, or just poor explanation.
Also in applications where bit-errors (or disconnections) are to be expected, the <length><data_of_length_length> ... approach makes it hard to re-synchronize after errors. (think of a serial cable that might be dis/reconnected, or radio-frequency links.)

A more robust encoding reserves some bit-pattern as a <start-of-message> marker, and escapes regular appearance of this marker in the payload with some special sequence. (see, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Level_Data_Link_Control ).

When you start putting (for example) single "blink"-messages in distinct payloads in such a framing container, then the <length-of-message> byte of blink becomes redundant, of course.
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Yes. Yes I do. 19/20, and the one I got wrong was Mattel.
I've posted a response and I enjoyed our back-and-forth on this particular topic on the other thread where this case is discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5084791
Interesting - do you remember at all how you first got into programming? How did you even find out it was an option? And what was the first thing you tried to make?

BTW, I'm the OP and I'm 38, I started with Logo on Apple II's at the Library, but I'm wondering if there's something more we should be doing to help kids get into this stuff.
I use 5.3.10 because I am on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in production, and 5.4 is not backward compatible with 12.04 (issue with Suhosin).
I'd imagine there's quite a bit of room for innovation from both a design and technical perspective in that space given the stigma around working in it.
That is almost the exact experience I had. I got 17/20 and the ones I screwed up all had capital letters.

I couldn't see any difference between Mattel and Toyota.
Congratulations, you've just made criminals of Google.

Because clearly they profit off the distribution of other peoples work without their permission every day.
Hi mflindell, what browser were you using to visit the site?
This issue was occurring in Chrome for 2 reasons: the first was to do with image scaling and has now been resolved thanks to your comments.
The second is due to Chrome's DNS Pre-fetching feature which causes many sites to lag. To disable this feature, look for "Predict network actions to improve page load performance" under the 'Show advanced settings' section of Chrome's settings tab.

Thanks for your input, and sorry we havent been able to put together an iOS version for you. Maybe if we get enough users, one day Apple will reconsider.

In the meantime, please tweet about us @thefrontpageapp. The sooner we succeed on Android, the sooner we can set our sights elsewhere.
Cheers!
I am a designer (I mean, actually I am a coder that for some freaking bizarre reason got a design degree), and got a 19/20.

For "Mattel" my choice ended being random.
And for Flask users there is flask-sslify[0] by Kenneth Reitz for this.

[0] https://github.com/kennethreitz/flask-sslify
This is a great point, I didn't consider how many people got turned off a computer right from the start because of an unfriendly interface like a basic prompt.
Yeah, the Mattel one was the only one that wasn't instantly obvious. Just happens to have the only few letters in Arial and Helvetica that are actually comparable. 3M was the funniest, looks shocking in Arial.
Could you cite where it states that you have to be a US citizen? I can't see any restriction apart from the usual ones on Quebec and the axis-of-evil countries.

It's entirely possible that I'm looking at the wrong place, that's why I'm asking.
Yup, I definitely meant advertising here but had marketing burned in the brain because of the original comment.
I'm confused. How is that any easier? It's six of one, half dozen of the other.

I'd much prefer to write Objective-C code than pure C.
This is sheer insanity to me. I just don't understand why comp sci isn't taught as a fundamental course like math. Do you have a sense why nobody was enrolling? Was it seen as too hard, too nerdy, something else?
20/20. Mattel was the only one I was uncertain of, but the correct answer was slightly blurrier, due to it probably being an actual logo copy scaled down or up slightly, as opposed to a "freshly-made" duplicate for the purpose of the test.

Toyota was easy enough, as the capital "O" in Helvetica is more oval than round in Arial, and more round than oval in Helvetica.

I'm not a designer, I'm a developer, but I do enjoy typography.
I just picked whichever looked better and got 18/20. Failed on Crate&Barrel and Mattel.
Mattel is the genuinely incredibly close, the 'Y' in Toyota is the obvious tell if you've spent a while looking at Helvetica though.
In the ones where you don't have the flat edges to work from, I found Helvectica is the "bolder" one.
Travel now
actually a was bored after ten right answers or so. It was really easy. At first I only looked for what "looked better" because I generally like Helvetica but find Arial really ugly. After doing the first answers, I started to see the minor differences and now understand why I like Helvetica better.
People are always pushing the boundaries somewhere. These days there's much less space for it though.

Another interesting domain in which creative problem solving rules the game is computer security. But it too is going away once we move away from C and C++ based infrastructure.
18/20, and I'm no design/typography expert. As others have said, it was on capitals. But the point of the site is clearly to show people can't tell the difference, and I can.
I'm no designer nor typographer and got a 16. I felt that most of the time the Helvetica variant was heavier (as in, more bold) most of the time. I had no idea of the different R and of the right angled stroke.
Ask HN: How did you get into programming?
I get the sense that most programmers are self motivated and largely self taught, at least when getting started. I got started with Logo on an Apple II. How did you get started? Did your school play a role at all?
Fn.py: enjoy functional programming in Python
> sometimes people get hell banned that probably don't deserve it.

Speaking about that...

There are also accounts that have their comments show up just fine, but all their submits get "hell banned"... That is, you think your submit is shown on the new page, but it's really "[dead]" and you can't see that unless you have "show dead" turned on.

If you have "show dead" on in your account, see my submits history for an example of this - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=powertower

Right after I submitted an article that criticized Apple stock, all new ones became dead.

Would love to know why 1) my account is like that and 2) what happens when I upvote someone elses submit (if my upvote hurts them, or even counts).
Fun test!

Mattel was also the one that tripped me up.

As the GP said, the caps on the S, C, T, etc were usually the giveaways.

The flourish at the bottom right (not sure the correct term) of the R in TARGET gave me at moment's pause. But each of the logos was customized to an extent.
If you just pick the fuzzier looking image you'll get the majority of them. Very neat idea though.
Speaking with my security hat on: This is a really nice library, but you also do the same validations server side right?
Yes, the differences are easy to see, as everyone has said.

But the important part is that there's a difference in feel and theme that's not really measurable and identifiable in direct comparison.

The subtle difference is far more important than trying to identify the tiny details that don't really matter. And in that sense, this game (while fun and interesting) misses the point.
In games, for example, it's pretty common for bandwidth to be tight enough that a useful optimisation is quantizing floats down to shorts (which is good enough for e.g. quaternion representation of weapon direction). In that environment, the idea of using XML or JSON is ludicrous.

(i.e. the Web is not the Internet)
The perfectly round "O" was the giveaway for me. Helvetica just feels more "literal" to me, if that makes any sense, with its perfectly horizontal endings on "C" and "S" and "t", so the round "O" seemed more likely. Mattel nearly tripped me up too, but I noticed that Helvetica was bolder throughout than the Arial equivalent, so it wasn't hard.
t -> techcrunch.com, r -> reddit.com, a -> (my banks website), o -> http://outgrow.me/ (weird, I must never use o), n -> news.ycombinator.com, m -> myfitnesspal.com, x,z,v,e,j -> nothing, b -> Large message board in my country, g -> google.com, f -> facebook.com, s -> store.steampowered.com, y -> youtube.com, h -> hipmunk.com (Again, I must never use h since I never ever use hipmunk), k -> http://kisstixx.com/ (Was on sharktank, looked it up once), d -> docs.google.com
This has been on my mind recently as I have been invited to "Barclay's Social Enterprise Weekend": http://barclayssewnorth.eventbrite.co.uk/

Two things kind of leave me undecided:

1) Narrow brief: Here they are very narrow and specific about what areas would be suitable and it is clearly very closely aligned with their own interests. (However a blog post from one of the companies on the judging panel gives a more open ended brief: http://import.io/barclays-social-enterprise-hackathon-2013/)

2) Outcome: There aren't any "prizes". I suppose this is social enterprise, so you could consider a monetary (or similar) prize as slightly against "the spirit", but really I was kind of expecting more of an incentive from a huge multinational bank?

Anyone else seen this or otherwise have any thoughts on this event?
Surely there's something here for everyone: http://programming-motherfucker.com/become.html
by "2 log" you mean log_2
I found the first few were training me to see the differences, the rest was like playing a matching game.
Also Helvetice tends to look sligthly "heavier" (thicker) when put side by side with Arial. That gives away many examples at a glance.
Yes - 19/20
Botched Mattel
Andrew Kim was going to get hired by one of the big companies sooner or later. He's just so ridiculously talented that it had to happen eventualy.