skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Being kind and humble isn't the only path to accomplishing great things, of course, but I've seen enough examples of it to conclude it's a very viable path.

It is a very viable path and on top of this, they naturally create little coves of open-hack spaces where like-minded geeks hang out :) I was lucky enough to have met a few and spent time in their company. They were all very accessible, if not shy at times. Visibly detached from the career path concerns and fully immersed into technology, building and tinkering.

On the opposite side, I had a misfortune to meet less talented types, yet with egos only matched by the senior management. They fervently protected their turf and enjoyed dispensing condescending remarks.

I will never forget as a junior dev, I was trying to understand how a piece of the system works and in my search came up to a stellar DBA asking about a stored procedure of interest. After a couple of minutes of witty pokes at my expense, he concluded: "Listen, you don't need to know this. It's not your concern. Go away."

Well, eventually, I got access to the guarded secrets and figured it out :)
How to Clean A MacBook
Hydrophobic, dirt-shedding spray is indistinguishable from magic
But in retirement you will want to remain engaged and involved with the world. A nice free software project spun off to others to maintain would fit the bill?

Hint: the two distinct prime factors of my current age add to 16 and I'm over 50
You have made the Internet-libertarian/goldbug mistake of thinking fiat is a dirty word.
Message passing is an ancient and well-understood mechanism for producing parallel, scalable, mutable-state imperative programs. Feel free to continue to not learn math :)
From a game theory perspective, where you are seeking tangible rewards for your work, I totally see your point of the disadvantages of publishing your code: it's purely a short-term weakness.

From the perspective of what "science" is claimed to mean, namely the advancement of human knowledge in a way which is repeatable and verifiable, it seems axiomatic that sharing your algorithms, code, and data are necessary and beneficial to the scientific community.

As a researcher, you don't gain a lot from publishing YOUR code ... but you sure might gain a lot from being able to re-use someone else's code in your domain, or more easily replicate someone else's experiment.

In short: You should share your code because it's the Right Thing to Do if you want to grow human knowledge.
Sure, I'll buy your damn book
Self-driving cars don't necessarily help. Really, it's more a routing problem. Buses with human drivers would probably be fine if you could come up with a working system to route them on demand. Self-driving might save money in the long run, but cars are probably not as efficient as buses in a big city.
What makes you think this is open source?
Yeah, stop getting paid well for working hard!
I didn't equate the laws themselves, I equated the people struggling to change them.

You could apply it to any law in history that has been changed through the action of a few people.
Thank you so much for saying this. One of the main reason I contribute to projects on Kickstarter is that I KNOW the big studios/publishers/whatever are consolidating. They're racing to produce the things with the biggest mass appeal. Sometimes, I just want to see niche things survive. '

It's the same reason I go to the small businesses in my neighborhood sometimes. I can get similar products elsewhere for cheaper, but their existence in my neighborhood makes my neighborhood experience better. I think of it like an awesome tax.
Refactoring / DRY to me is not about creating monolithic, generic do anything functions. It decomposing code into layers of abstraction somewhat like mini-"DSL"s. The top level functions are tying together next level "down" helper functions. Which may themselves be higher level tools over something like DB api. More than 3-4 layers is probably a smell.
It is very clear that you have not used the latest Ubuntu with Unity.

In fact, Ubuntu is the only distro that has done anything innovative in that area. Some old linuxers hate it but that's life.

Right now I'm using Ubuntu precisely because of that. It is the first Linux that looks better and really different to the old Mandrake I used to run back then.
The IRS Just Sent Me $160,000. Can I Keep It?
People seem to have this idea that the world should be "heads I win, tails you lose" in their own favor. I can't say that I blame them, it's incredibly depressing to see a company get rich off of your work. But it fails to take into account that a person might create absolutely nothing of value while they draw a paycheck/salary and in that case it's the company that loses, not them.

That's how things go in engineering, though, you generally don't get employed unless you're willing to sign over whatever IP you are going to generate at the job (and sometimes even off-the-clock ideas too).
B-School Billionaires
Going by release dates (which is how we normally gauge console games' ages), League of Legends is about three years old, MineCraft is about a year and a half old (a lot of people forget this because it had both an open alpha and open beta, unlike any console game I know of) and Diablo 3 is not even one year old yet. Their average age is less than two years unless you're counting time in development, by which standard GTA V (due to release late this year) is like three years old.
AOL Is the Weirdest Successful Tech Company in America
I still don't buy it.

I disagree on many points, but the easiest to argue is that it does, in fact, have inherent value. At its most general, that value is in allowing people to make exchanges they wouldn't otherwise be able to make. In particular, that sadly seems to be centered on drug trade. The fact that someone designed the mechanics has little to do with it.

Back when BTC was close to USD$30, I was wondering how much meat there was to it. I had enough that if the market was going to vanish it would be a damn shame if I didn't cash out (so to speak) before that happened. After a bit of thought I decided to hold on to the BTC. I made a comment to a skeptical friend that "bitcoin can't fail." Then came the compromises and the price of BTC dropped like a stone.

I was disappointed, but I didn't feel like I'd lost my tiny fortune. When I made the statement to my friend, I knew what people were using it for. I was confident they would continue to find value in it and the price would rise once again. My prediction has been satisfied. I don't feel like my confidence was ill-placed, or that I got lucky to see the rebound and no edict has repaired the shaken confidence of BTC traders.
I was inspired by jslinux and decided to write one such emulator myself. Of course, the architecture I'm emulating (Lattice Mico32) is much much simpler than X86.

It is open source, available at http://www.ubercomp.com/jslm32/src/

I did both an interpreter and a (much faster) dynamic code generator that generates blocks of code in Javascript so it doesn't have to decode every instruction over and over again.

Oh, and before doing the project, I sent Bellard an email, and he was very polite and helpful. Even sent me some compliments after I was able to optimize it to run at a decent speed. A true master!!!
Or not someone in America. May be someone from a Scandinavian country.
It's a mistranslation, and you are ignoring the context.

He points out that every time he has been beaten up or robbed the assailants have been immigrants. And by immigrants, he clarifies, he is not talking about 7th generation Finns but about "turkblattejävlar". The phrase he uses can't be directly translated. It's a generalized racial slur of moderate intensity with a clear subtext of social class.

In the context, and when contrasted with "7th generation Finns", he is using the phrase to refer to a certain demographic: young males of low socioeconomic status, most likely originating from the Middle-east or North Africa. In polite conversation this is the subset of the population that you would euphemistically refer to as "ungdomsgäng" or "youths".

But, as you can see, he is not in a polite conversation: he's in a pub, he's drunk, and he has just called brokep "a fucking vegetarian leftist bitch ass bastard" who's driven by "ideological pussy-inflicted instincts". In that setting and with that tone the phrase was at most a less than appropriate way of referring to his attackers — hardly an exhibit of "right wing racism".
We don't seem to see the Python community embrace magic and shiny quite so much as in Ruby.
That alone seems to help.
I really hope this is the case, but the feeling is that the war is only for the top 5%-10% talent, and that the less than rock star developers will have a real problem in the future. I have read an article that had a recent "study" on this (we all know how those studies are accurate), but can't find the link in any case, so it remains just my opinion. (I'm a non citizen on a temp work visa, so I'm all for getting easier immigration paths, but still I think the risk to the local job market is not just giving more visas, the risk is better offshore / remote options in the not so far future, like faster bandwidth allowing 3D video conferences, remote presence robots, and simply growing improvement in offshore talent offering, this might sound funny now, but I'm sure a few years from now, YC will even fund a few companies that do it)
This guy's history speaks volumes about success and being good at something.

People who want to get into Software business because of money and people who want to learn how to play the guitar because of popularity have one thing in common: they only envision the outcome. They daydream of sitting on a load of cash or being surrounded by friends (and girls) when playing a tune.

People who get really successful at something enjoy the freaking process. Most of the times (if not all) they don't even realize they are heading for success: they are too busy enjoying the improvement of their craft.
> As a longtime gamer, I desparately fear the idea of a locked-down, touch-based, and endlessly monetizable future for my favorite hobby.

Games for intelligent people who aren't variable-reward-schedule drones will always be around. I would like to invent such games that are touch based. I don't see any reason why this can't be done.

One influence that the keyboard has, with it's very large number of buttons, is a tendency towards bloated, intellectually uninteresting (for most people, excepting the deep end of the Aspberger's spectrum) complexity of a phenomenological nature. Let's have lots of arbitrarily determined entities that interact in arbitrary ways, but dress this up in a sci-fi/military/fantasy context. It's the same reason card games tend to have the same sort of complexity. Lots of cards can fit in a deck. Lots of keys on a keyboard. Gotta use them!

The reason why games like Angry Birds and World of Goo have such wide appeal, is that they combine relatively few principles that have the elegance of math or physics (because they are math & physics) allowing them to generate genuinely emergent complexity of the kind most human brains find fascinating.
Herd Immunity Demonstration
Most points in this document are great, except for the argument about high salary in lieu of high bonuses and great benefits.

High bonuses have worked well for Wall St traders, as well as for exec-level employees in all industries. And great benefits clearly work well, as proven by Google.
Nope, it was LOT (national Polish carrier). Not that big as United ;) but significant in central Europe.
Nice! I've been wanting to do something similar for a while but have been busy working on other side projects, glad you got to ship it! Out of curiosity, what apis are you using?
> I'd rather just pay the $150 myself and get the product 2 day shipping when it is actually a product.

You pre-pay $100 to reduce the risk that it never becomes an actual product
This is some of the best visual design I've seen in any iOS productivity app. Nearly every other "work" product uses a skeuomorphic "list on a sheet of paper" approach or an ultra-chrome, "this is a high-tech product" look. Basecamp has found its own visual voice, which I think works really well.
That looks really slick. The cost isn't too outrageous things like ceracoat and duracoat seem to be in the same price range, of course those are not hydrophobic but do add a layer of protection.
My apologies, then. However, this is the risk that the attention-grabbing pinch of sensationalism afforded by "copy & paste" brings with it.
That's just a complicated way of saying that you think some people's social choices are inherently worse than some idealized social path that you are advocating. Not everyone is the same as you, or even wants to be the same as you. Not everyone gets social satisfaction from "getting out" and "experiencing the lives of other people" in the way you're talking about, and that doesn't mean there is something wrong with them. Some people derive satisfaction from finding cool phone apps, some don't. Not everyone wants to "change the world," or disrupt a market, or get rich. Et cetera.
> Instead he chose a safe route of employment and as an adult he should understand that it also usually comes with limited upside.

Did you even read the article? He turned down a lucrative career in a family-owned construction company to do this. He quit largely because a detached retina makes it impossible for him to draw. He's been doing this for at least 20 years; The Oatmeal has only been in it for 3. Have some perspective and modicum of respect.
HTML5 whiteboard. Product for client-designer collaboaration.
I don't think this is particular to the Disney comic. How many game developers are being paid proportionally with sales? Usually sales and marketing people are the ones with those benefits, not the content generators. On a flip side, is not like they invest any money on the final product as they are generally being paid as a regular job.
Ruby rescued me from a life of non-programming. I'm happy to see 2.0 inching closer.

I graduated Physics in 1995 and my programming experience had been hobbyist on my Apple II at home as a kid or on my Physics course projects, in simple languages. All my friends went into tech in some way or other mostly programming. I looked at C but after a little poking it scared the heck out of me and, intimidated I gave up and did slmethjng else. Only when I had to did I come back to trying programming 15 years later and discovering Ruby I learned that I could, and that I can. I've loved it ever since.
Epic closes Infinity Blade: Dungeons developer, Impossible Studios.
Nothing has inherent value. All value is relative. The difference between fiat (paper) currencies and currencies that are composed of a physical good, like gold, is solely the ability to control quantity. Fiat currency can be (and often is) produced in unlimited quantities, which leads to inflation. So-called hard currencies, backed by a precious metal, are limited in their expansion by production of that metal.

This is why so many are coming out in favor of metal-backed currencies, because it restrains governments in what they can print to pay their own bills and their ability to devalue the savings of the populace (as Venezuela just did minutes ago, devaluing the savings of its citizens by 47% in one fell swoop).
case in point:

The Effects of FreeSurfer Version, Workstation Type, and Macintosh Operating System Version on Anatomical Volume and Cortical Thickness Measurements

http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0038234
It's pretty hard to find nice Obj C resources, so this is much appreciated. The annotations on the slides really help out - thanks for doing that!
> don't try DRY until you've seen at least three repetitions

A significant number of bugs I've had to fix over the years were the result of just two repetitions. Invariably someone updates one of them and not the other one. Or copies the first one, then updates, then forgets.

This happens over and over and over and over. I'm so sick of it that I want to punch my coworkers (I don't usually get angry quickly but this has been wearing on me for a few years now). So I will continue to refactor at the second copy.
Can't or won't do to the time? Don't do the crime. Committing a crime in a civil society is not bravery if the perp offs himself before standing trial.

Whether or not one sympathizes with the man's motivation for committing those crimes should not influence their respect nor breed contempt for the law.
He's speaking to the lack of real innovation in input methods. Compared specifically to consoles or tablets.

Now, you can argue about weather that's true, but it's not immediately dismissed as "self serving".

He's nodding to consoles here.
We're close. Online cam performers are taking bitcoins for sessions/requests. There's at least one subreddit for this, though I can't recall the name, having stumbled across it with the /r/random page.

It wouldn't surprise me if bitcoins were already being exchanged for escort service or some kind of "hookup" business via side channels already.
Django Unchained – Introduction to Python and Django
I agree there's little direct credit given for developing software, but it can be helpful for early-career researchers to gain name recognition. Even if nobody knows your actual work, if you wrote some software lots of people use, it makes people feel like they know you from somewhere.

Admittedly, it's tricky to do, since that name recognition only really matters if you can also manage to publish enough papers. Realistically grad school is more likely for that than during a postdoc or as an assistant professor. Some grad students manage to release some widely used software (well, usually "widely" in a particular niche), which I think does help them build up more prominence than someone in their career stage might otherwise have had.

On a different angle, having produced some reasonably decent software can be a nice thing to have in your back pocket if you ever consider moving to industry. Having N papers and one decent software package is probably a better academia-to-industry transition CV than N+2 papers and no software packages.
Thanks. I'll hit 40 this year. I don't know when I'll be able to retire from my day job... If I start a company, maybe I won't retire :)

Yeah, I hear you about the "if only" thing.
It is odd because I feel like I have gone looking for older pre-1999 posts that used to exist in Google and they are no longer there. I had just assumed that support for pre-2000 was dropped.
Is it spam free?
He's analogizing to the fictional "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". There does exist an analog to the real world "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy": Carl E. Linderholm's "Mathematics Made Difficult". Utterly hilarious.

Regrettably, it's out of print, and you have a choice of paying upwards of $138.50 (abebooks.com) for a used copy of a book of jokes, or finding the pirated pdf I once encountered in a search (I've no idea how complete that was).
The first part of this article reminded me of freshman year of college.

-----------------------

Me: See you later, mom!

Mom: What are you doing?

Me: Driving to <neighboring state> to go to a party and play Guitar Hero with some people.

Mom: Neat. How'd you meet them?

Me: I haven't yet, we just know each other from the forums. Everyone's coming, some people are flying in.

Mom: Isn't that dangerous?

Me: Why is it dangerous? I know them from the internet.

Mom: Exactly.
The Python world has had very, very similar problems. Two popular Django add-ons (piston and tastypie) had remote code execution vulnerabilities due to the exact same cause as the recent Rails RCE vulns: insecure deserialization of YAML.

See https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2011/nov/

This isn't an exactly equivalent situation, since this wasn't a problem with the core Django framework --- but that's in part because the core Django framework does less. Functionality similar to these extensions is bundled with Rails.
I actually was featured on Gigaom! I'm guessing the writer found this thread, although I did post a few other places on the web. I'm so excited, but I have to maintain in the back of my mind that this doesn't mean I got in.

http://gigaom.com/2013/02/08/which-iphone-app-may-get-you-in...
I think most people just assume there is broken Javascript or something.
Sure, most people probably do, but Lion & Mountain Lion hide the scroll bar if there's a trackpad, as was the case for me. I clicked the link from pg's Twitter feed, read the words "Airbnb is poised to bring memorable local experiences to our truly global community", thought "that's nice", and went along my way.
Both great services, but I'd need a greater level of customization to get it to work.

Would this be something enough people would use to justify it as a weekend project?
"For the programmer who is truly interested in improving their mathematical skills, the first line of attack should now be obvious. Become an expert at applying the basic methods of proof"

This may be good advice if you want to get into pure mathematics, but huge parts of maths are not pure.

Applied mathematics is very relevant for programmers - especially game programmers. It's not a sin to sacrifice mathematical rigour for the sake of discovery.

It doesn't even have to be a direct map (e.g. actual implementations of calculus or such). Just understanding various bits and pieces in granular detail can help you get precise and testable quantitative ideas for problems.

For instance, a while ago I wanted to implement a kind of smooth up-and-down motion for an object in my game. Almost immediately I thought of equations of this form:

(y position) = (some amplitude)* sin((some frequency)*(time)) + (some value to denote the origin)

This is a first step for some fairly interesting up-and-down motion - the rest is all a matter of finding suitable constants.

Similar things come to mind when you want to move an object smoothly to another position along a line, with a decreasing speed:

position = ((position you want to move to) - (current position)) / (some constant) + (some minimum speed)

This stuff just flashes before your mind if you've done plenty of physics (or 'mechanics' in mathematics) before. What's more, you'll know countless other ways of increasing the complexity of your equations without having to do much trial & error hacking (except to find things like constants and such).

For games, I'm convinced that there's still an incredibly huge variety of mathematical behaviour that has yet to be harnessed for the implementation of actual game mechanics. (Games usually just use some game engine's implementation of only some parts of classical mechanics, for instance.)

Never underestimate the relevance of applied mathematics to real-world programming, even though it doesn't really occupy a spectacularly prominent position in CS-focused courses.
I have no idea if it's possible to edit my post, but I'd like to add that my project was just featured on Gigaom!

http://gigaom.com/2013/02/08/which-iphone-app-may-get-you-in...
I've got my old Duck comics in a box with all my Richie Richs, and the old classic Duck stories are really something even today.
Correlation Study of Factors affecting Google+ Local Rank