skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Average developers are those who aren't committed to getting better or keeping up. In some software areas, those two terms are synonymous.

To use a specific example, in the mobile development world, which is arguably one of the "hottest" development jobs (the dot-com-like hype gold rush aside), you have to keep improving to continue to be relevant, let alone 'realize your potential'.

The above average mobile developer keeps up with the best-in-class practices and the ability to deliver to the baseline customer experience expectations for the platform (which keep going up and up - customers are spoiled by the Instagram/Airbnb-type apps of the world).

For example, iOS has gone through significant changes from iOS 2 (original) to iOS 6. Maybe three or even two years ago, using ASIHttpRequest was good enough for async network operations. Now, everything has gone to blocks. Sometimes enough blocks tied/nested together to put Lego to shame. Storyboards have started to replace tedious UIViewController plumbing. Modal dialogs used to be tolerated by customers, now obvious use of them make your app look cheap and outdated. Custom animations (and yes maybe even custom tab bars) are almost expected (this is good and bad) - but simple stuff like tapping on an image to expand it to full-screen and tapping on it to collapse it back to thumbnail - the customer expects that.

As for Android, Android is running at a pace that leaves average developers behind. Someone who still uses TabActivity for apps is rightfully categorized as out-of-touch with the post-Holo look and feel. If you don't have an ActionBar in your app, your app is out of date. Someone who uses BroadcastReceivers for piping data between Activities and Services is out-of-date (see Square's Otto or GreenRobot's EventBus).

I know this devolved into a bit of a rant - but developers have to keep up with the best-in-class practices - and in the best case - "rockstar" class developers like Jake Wharton of Square for Android - can inspire others and give the community the right tools to push the entire platform forward and make it more competitive (in this case, with iOS).

I believe the best developers share their knowledge (whether in a closed environment like a team - or best - Github and conferences and podcasts/screencasts) so that others can become better.
There was a company in the UK that did that, and got pounced on by Trading Standards. They now say something equally stupid, but less offensive to the powers that be.
It's pretty clear that two things need to be changed about how articles are written and propagated on the internet.

First, only primary sources should be cited. If an article is written by a news source, it stands to reason that is is not suitable for citation by another news source. They are both at the same level of empiricism, one cannot be an adequate citation for another.

And second, the exchange of data has not changed drastically in the says since the story was first reported, so this isn't an internet speed issue. It's an issue of people being less pliable to the truth once they've hit upon a wonderful fallacy.

What that translates to is that news articles need to be less sensationalized, more factual and have a much more rigorous set of criteria for what's true and what's not.

I'm not a journalist, but I wouldn't be surprised if journalists deliberately look for what can be sensationalized in a potential story, to the point of unintentionally fabricating material - it is not inconceivable that a reporter simply skimmed some material about the FCC and then this story hit him like a "Eureka!" moment. I doubt it was fully intentional, it was just being caught up in the prospect of a great story.
Slight bug: if you bring the piece low enough, the color invert.
R is my mistress and my wife.

Hadley Wickham held the ceremony.

Data.Table is the glue that holds together our tenuous marriage.

cats[color="brown",summary(tooth_length),by=list(breed,age)]. This line of code will efficiently grab all the brown cats in your data and summarize their tooth length by mean, median and other quartiles then break it out by the cats breed and age.

Every time I use a language I can't lapply I despise the language and all those involved.

R is hugely inconsistent and terribly inefficient. But its also the most irresistible blend of lispy and object oriented for when you actually need to get data analysis done.
With "general public" you mean "computer savvy people who know about number bases and binary in particular" while the "general public" gets on with 1000 GiB = 1 TiB.
Stop redeploying, free JavaRebel for Scala users (2009, still free)
"Because Rasmus Lerdorf doesn't sit with the popular kids" is not a valid reason to dislike PHP.
Indian Govt to recruit digital volunteers to polish its turdish image online
Yes and no.

C and C++, as you note, permit a similar lowest-common-denominator programming style and so a similar class of low-level bugs. While the C++ libraries (std::string, etc) and other differences can help, they can be subverted through ignorance or will, and often are. The strict typing in C and C++ helps eliminate bugs over the same task written in assembly (or Forth, etc). In the same way, goto might best be used sparingly, since the sharper the tool, the more likely the damage done by accident. C and C++ sit at approximately the same "danger" level (potential for low-level access) whereas I think functional languages can be automatically "safer" (admittedly ill-defined), assuming you are willing to subjugate yourself to them and can trust the implementation (which is not always a fair assumption), since compilation boils down to a relational proof. (That's not to say it's my preferred style.)

Furthermore, Haskell and OCaml, for example, can both be compiled to linkable objects (C interface-able), so I don't see the loss of interoperability as you suggest. A Haskell .o looks like any other.
I'm partially ashamed to admit that I got all of them but one: a piece that had straight eastern and southern sides. It looked like a Canadian or Australian state/territory (large and having flat edges), but I couldn't place it.

Also I had a hard time placing Brazil.
If My Car Had An API
You can just use free services to host your wordpress blog without any trouble. Set it up on AppFog or OpenShift, use cloudflare too, and use a cache plugin if needed. I don't think any HN-effect could take that down.
Story of a Q&A Platform Betting on Simplicity
No, you're totally right. I've added our site seal to the footer which verifies our identity. I've also modified our privacy policy with a link to this verification as well.

As we get more coverage, we'll add more symbols of trust right at the top of the page.

We're just getting started, so thanks for your feedback!
But that wouldn't account for almost 15GB difference between the 11" 64GB MBA int hat forum post, and the 13" 128GB MBA in the article.
It was Mauritania. But I also zoomed in after like half of them so that's kinda cheating.
Mauritania ;)
This is a flaw in libcURL, and last I checked wget was just a binary, not a cross platform library.
He's a CEO. He knows that first impressions are lasting ones. It was good advice.
This is true, but totally misses the point of the NYT Magazine article. The 'four marvels' powder was mentioned only in passing. [edited to remove my dig at homeopathy, which wasn't at issue here - it was naturopathy]

The more interesting thesis of the original article is that some inflammatory disease is related to a 'leaky gut' syndrome and that it could be modulated by diet and changing gut flora. Unfortunately this argument was not made very rigorously in the article, and while it remains controversial there is a lot of ongoing research into the idea.
Sure, it's great that it's free and fully functional, but that doesn't mean that anyone's criticisms of its design (which, even you have to admit, are a bit dated by now), aren't warranted simply because it's free.

This is a big problem that quite a few people seem to have. Just because a program is free, does not mean the userbase should have low expectations. It's great that it's accomplished so much, but it needs more work, and design is one of the areas which needs the most work right now. Especially if they are looking to get people to replace Office with it.

And I do agree, it looks okay. It's functional, and the UI gets the job done. But becoming complacent with it because it's free is not the right way to go about it.
Gee, I think I'll hack a former US President whose father was the CIA director and whose grandfather allegedly plotted a coup against FDR. I feel perfectly capable of swimming with these particular sharks. I'm just '1337 that way, I guess.
Since you've mastered IPv4, how about some IPv6 love? My server is awaiting your ICMP packet!
Obviously 5% is 1 in 20. But 5% of what? All accounts ever created on LinkedIn? Really curious about their MAU. I'd bet it's something like 20M. Meaning, if you're in the "top" you're really just one of the people that uses LinkedIn regularly :)

In any case I find the campaign to be extremely effective. Making 20M people feel special is impressive.
LinkedIn crushes targets; shares jump
Not on the 11"
That sounds like a "free will of the gaps" argument (cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps )
> if it was homeopathic, we can be quite certain that it was doing nothing at all.

From TFA:

>several recent peer-reviewed studies have shown that at least one of the active drugs in four-marvels powder, quercetin, exhibits anti-inflammatory activity.

Dismissing all traditional treatments without using research is just as woo-ey as blindly accepting them.
I've never understood that rule, seems kind of arbitrary...
My First Exec Experience
Looks like Koz just posted this: https://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-security/msg/1f3...
So, how does watching shows work? Is it legal?
Not having wget installed stops about 60% of the PHP shell scripts I've seen dropped on servers.
Never heard the term "chemophobic" before, but now that I think about it I have some chemophobic friends. Their argument is always something like this:

"Humans evolved consuming only organic material from their very beginnings up until about 100 years ago. Humans just haven't evolved to tolerate synthesised chemicals in a mere 100 years."

(that's obviously paraphrased but you get the point) But when it's said like that, I tend to agree with them. When they're called "chemophobic" in articles like this, I tend not to agree with them. I've no clue which to agree with.
I only get endorsements from people who have no idea what I really do.
There are many actions that can be taken;

The first and most important is to assume any tool that reaches out to the internet and other machines is suspect no matter what language it's written in, and to treat the entire machine as tainted.

The industrial data approach to this is to have a sacrificial machine that's almost completely network isolated from which all FTP's, curl's, wget's et al are run - once setup 'securely' then image the machine to be able to wipe reset on a regular basis. Use that machine to fetch all data from foreign sites and have it dump incoming files to an in coming queue folder.
Network security should be such that one other machine on the network can read from that folder and all other network traffic related to the fetch machine rings alarms.

Another approach, when using C to develop your own in house tools is to understand that 'C Strings" are not and never have been "part of the language" - go read the spec. in the latter half, after the language specification, it mentions that a particular byte pattern is referred to a string in a C context, it's just a label of convenience.
Don't use the C stdlib functions that manipulate C string patterns, think of them as just an early example of the kinds of things you can build with C, when dealing with tainted data (any data from a network, a user, a foreign source) use hard blocks and hard sizes. Don't fall into the tacit trap that input is "well behaved" .. it never is.
I agree with most of these, excapt for the one that goes, "Strong developers accept that the business costs in a rewrite are usually unacceptable and should be avoided". What if the existing codebase is a rats-nest of complexity? WHat if the previous team were "bad developers" and they wrote code that was neck-high with technical debt? I think great developers are lazy, and not wanting to wade through a bad codebase is a trait of a good developer.
And the app store? But i guess thats a platform thing, not a device thing.
I don't personally own any apple products. Also, pay more attention. It's 3/4 remaining vs. 2/3 taken, or 3/4 vs 1/3.
More than that. My roommate received an email for being in the top 10%. Great marketing/reengagement strategy from LinkedIn though!
> I found R difficult to learn because it is seems inconsistent to me. Now one reason might be that I picked up bits of R here and there without taking the time to learn the syntax from a book (unlike what I did for other languages), but it took me quite some time to be able to make sense of the different structures (vector, list, matrix, dataframe), their differences, and in particular how functions operate differently on these structures.

If it makes you feel any better, I've read several R books and they normally present it in an inconsistent manner as well. I've written programs in some 30 languages over the last 13 years, and I've yet to encounter one that's as difficult to pick up as R. Materials that purport to teach R are, in my experience, almost always presented as a set of recipes for very specific statistical methods. That approach stands in stark contrast from traditional programming introductions that attempt to teach general concepts rather than specific how-tos.

I agree, though, that despite the learning curve, R is rather useful.
Wow guys really.

Iterable<String> s = Splitter.on(" ").split("Hello World");
Multiset<String> counts = HashMultiSet.create(s);
Multiset<String> sorted = Multisets.copyHightestCountFirst(counts);

Or to sort by counts directly

TreeHashSet.create(Splitter.on(" ").split("Hello World"))

Granted this uses guava, but there is nothing really more readable about your ruby code than this guy's java code. To say he 'lacks courage' ... jesus I'm still laughing. "Why didn't you add the sort!" You're too much man.
Actually if it was homeopathic we really can be certain that it would do nothing at all. Maybe the person you were responding to didn't quite state it clearly. I don't believe either that commenter or the article refereed to it as a homeopathic remedy.

I won't get into why a homeopathic remedy can't work. It should be pretty obvious just based on what homeopathy claims
Bootstrap 2.3 Released
Java Enum implementing an Interface
That was boss, "only" took me a 30-minutes! Well done and great for learning geography.
Youre mixing up the fractions.

64gb mba, 48gb free ~ 3/4ths

64gb surface, 23gb free ~ 1/3rd
If there's anyone using my Requests for PHP library [0], just an FYI that it is not vulnerable to this as it handles redirection outside of cURL and double-checks all URLs. That said, I'll be pushing some commits momentarily to ensure that this is also forced via CURLOPT_PROTOCOLS inside the cURL transport.

[0]: http://requests.ryanmccue.info/
Facebook must be hell in Iceland: "We found the following 290,999 people who might be related to you" ;-)
Yes, they should do that.

The reality is that they don't and tablets and phones are no better though.
Whoops. I misread 'naturopath' as 'homeopath'. When you dilute something 10e60-fold, I'm comfortable dismissing it, and it's not woo-ey at all. But that wasn't the case here.

I didn't mean to imply that traditional treatments can't contain active ingredients that can be useful -- they surely can, and are the source of many drugs.
I can't speak for everyone but having 1K of total RAM and no cross assembler from which to write that first native assembler were enough to stop me from attempting it :)
The first guy I met through a friend. I met the second guy while I was a project manager on some application at work. He was a contractor on the project and we had great chemistry. If you have an idea and you find someone that is as passionate as you are about it, I'd say that's a pretty good start.
I've been considering dropping the class as well. The course definitely seems like an R class for statisticians, whereas I am a programmer hoping to learn more about statistics. I'm trying to stick with it but I don't feel as though the course has been beneficial thus far.
If you mastered PHP & Rails, would there be any use case for PHP?
> The problem is not that psychology is not a science. The problem is that psychology has not had its Einstein yet.

Not really. Remember that psychology's topic is the mind, not the brain (the latter is the province of neuroscience). Because the mind isn't a physical thing, it's not open to empirical science. This is why psychologists differ in diverse and fundamental ways -- there's no way to resolve disputes using objective evidence on which different observers can agree (the essence of experimental science).

When a doctor wants to identify and treat a disease, she takes micrographs and DNA sequences, locates a treatment that has been proven to work, then exhaustively validates treatments in clinical trials -- all before declaring that a new disease has been identified and a meaningful treatment exists.

When a psychologist wants to identify a disease, he gets together with other like-minded psychologists and they vote. It was not by clinical trials that grief at the passing of a loved one, and childhood tantrums, were recognized as diseases and entered into the forthcoming DSM-V, it was by secret votes.

Asperger Syndrome was added to DSM-IV by voting, not by science, and it is being removed from DSM-V by (now-secret) votes after much public controversy over whether it's a disease at all. Homosexuality was added to an earlier DSM by votes, and removed later by votes -- no science was involved, but public opinion certainly played a part in both decisions.

These examples show that psychology is more political than it is scientific. When a disease is entered into psychology's "bible", it is only after psychologists decide the public wants it that way. And the reverse -- when a disease is taken out of the DSM, it's because of public disapproval, not science or clinical trials.

For these reasons we're witnessing a gradual move away from psychology toward neuroscience, where objective evidence can be acquired instead of the opinions of psychologists. The present director of the NIMH agrees with this view and is advocating it, recently saying, "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient's illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely "mental," and psychological therapies followed suit. Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses."

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...

More here: http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology
I'm also reading statistics texts. I've had colleagues use R for visualizations, and another tool in the toolbox is always good. But some of the design decisions made me recoil, and I think I'll skip it until I have a need for it at work.
Geekwire doesn't get it
Can you use your brain to 'change your age'?
+1 Especially the "Programmer" who is hunched over typing up his written(!!) document and hanging with his 80's telephone.
Nice idea tho
So many people earnestly want to tell me how if I just drink the right cherry juice, or do acupuncture, I will magically be fixed. It is very annoying. Rather than take someone's anecdotes and try them one after another it seems more sensible to look over the last 20 years or so of research papers and decide on treatment based on that.

Also, 6 weeks on methotrexate is not a very long trial.
https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-samples/issues/entry
I was shocked to read this as well. This summer I went to meetups where after talking with somebody new for five minutes, they would say, "By the way, we're hiring...", to which I would reply, "Yeah, so are we!"

About half of my classmates (in a Statistics PhD program) are foreigners. These are literally the brightest statisticians of their year from their respective countries, and making it even the least bit hard for them to stay in the US is a big mistake. We could use their talent!
Great write up, I never considered using Exec for moving. Certainly would be easier than going through the pain that is renting and returning something from U-Haul/Enterprise/etc.
'Star Wars' spin-offs: A young Han Solo movie, and a Boba Fett film 
http://insidemovies.ew.com/2013/02/06/star-wars-spin-offs-young-han-solo-movie-boba-fett/
If you work in a building with a few thousand people in it, badges are the most obvious way to implement a functional physical security policy. It has nothing to do with your employer's feelings towards you.

Every business that large has valuable data. If your business has valuable data, there is someone out there trying to steal it.
Unfortunately, IE7 in my case should be supported.
There are a lot of users (ordinary ones, that don't upgrade a lot) that are stuck with it.
Not sure how I feel about the swearing on the page.
Author here.

Because O is currently designed to be the first thing code starts with, for green field programming, there was nowhere for the exception to throw to. Hence the exit.

Magic quotes are being checked because I have some ideas for how to improve the PDO API to prevent SQL injection. Those ideas have yet to turn into code for O though.

I've been contemplating turning this experiment into a usable library for production code, which would mean splitting it up into constituent parts, and making O.php a container for those parts. Then the separate parts could be used in isolation. I suspect the string and array handling by itself would be quite useful even in established projects, and it seems people here agree. Will start working on that.

Thanks for your suggestion about character set conversion. That would be a good addition. I'll add it.
Those aren't things, they are concepts.
Court to Consider When Software Can Be Patented
ignore the article, and watch the video near the end.
> That's roughly 1/134 of the total energy released by the sun in a year.

Can't be right, that would make it larger than all the energy consumed in the world for a year
Agreed. I never said that the Surface is a perfect device, it has its problems but its a step in the right direction. For me at least.

I want to see the consolidation of tablets and laptops. I dont care who does it. If iOS and Android become good enough for me to replace my laptop then great!
It's been a long time since somebody tried to convince me that a buffer overflow was an intentional feature of the program they were developing...
Maybe you don't want to allow users to execute code by HTTP?
The javascript API is there because it's the only one I can keep remembering, I always forget the exact PHP functions and have to keep the php docs open. There also didn't seem to be any naming collisions, so it is harmless. Having developed some test and demo code on top of it, I've come to realize it feels too alien inside of PHP to actually use, so that part is probably going away.