skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, I was going to write a huge post but I'm short on time so I'll just list what I made good use of after HS (my experience wasn't in the US btw). Boolean logic and boolean algebra and database design practices and SQL hands-on all have come handy multiple times. Programming was taught badly but after getting a hint of it, I managed to learn it my myself. Data structures and algorithms (usual stuff that you do in college but we only did up to binary trees, O(n) and without the math behind of it) again taught badly but I complimented school with independent research. OSI layers and other networking stuff. To this I would add some introspection in the popular protocols like TCP/IP, HTTP and SSL. We also had a computer architecture session that came in handy in compilers class later in Uni. And finally we had one of those project workflow sections with UML, waterfall and whatnot. Totally outdated. Should have been thrashed. I would replace it with hand-on deployment and development software hand-ons like Linux/BSD, basic shell, setting up OpenSSH, IP Tables, Nginx, vim/emacs, git...etc
My favorite quote: "Thus, using what might be consid-
ered the lower bound in terms of security, US banks offer
the upper bound in protection: zero liability." I love that passwords are just flat out considered about the minimal you can do regarding security in such a quick sentence. Love it.
Do people really expect to get something like that by the time they're 30?

If you don't get it when you're 30, then you're not going to get it at 35 or 40. Age without progress decreases opportunities. He's 29 and has shown no progress, and you seem to be surprised that he's expecting progress.

We can mock his douchey goals, and perhaps we should, but the fact is that a whole generation was bred for executive positions that are no longer available (and shouldn't exist).

What he probably needed to do, in order to pursue his douchey vision of a cushy cigar-smoking executive job, was get an investment banking or management consulting job. Those aren't my favorite industries, but a few years of time in them will open the kinds of doors he wants. The BMW and the fatal heart attack at 45 could be his, if he had made the right moves years ago. However, it's too late for him now. With an empty resume, he can't compete against 22-year-old college grads. That's just how it works.

In the Mad Men era, a college degree got you a junior executive job. You became an "account executive" or a marketing person. Sure, you were still someone's bitch-- being at the bottom of the executive-track totem pole-- and you probably had no direct reports, but you were on a track toward something better.

Those junior executive jobs are gone. Why? After 3 decades of downsizing, the corporate "fat" has been trimmed. That's probably a good thing, but what it means is that all those junior-executive jobs have been filled by people who used to be senior executives. Companies don't have the slots to take on 22-year-old proteges anymore. Again, it's probably good for the world that we're not generating all these supernumerary "executives" who do nothing but annoy the people doing the actual work, but it's not good for people who were bred (through parental expectations and undergraduate education and, in some cases, graduate degrees) for these positions.

Undergraduate college is the liberal arts. (Sciences are liberal arts.) "Liberal" in this sense has nothing to do with political ideology, but rather means "for the free". The contrast is servile arts.

It makes me angry when self-righteous Baby Boomers complain about "entitled" Millennials. On Sunday, they write on the Internet about these supposedly entitled schmucks who won't settle for anything less than a career-track job. Then on Monday, they turn down the 27-year-old barista who did take one of those crummy jobs and now has "no relevant work experience". They made and supported this world and they can fucking eat it.

The real problem is that the whole concept of "management", in the traditional sense, has become pointless.

College breeds you to be one of three things: (A) an academic or researcher, (B) a highly-skilled professional with high autonomy, or (C) a manager. Class A is dying out. Class B is losing autonomy, as the professions are eroded and traditionally intellectual fields (e.g. software engineering) are commoditized in an idiotic lurch toward a manage-or-be-managed corporate world, and class C is becoming obsolete enough that these junior executive jobs don't make sense and have been cut.
After seeing this thread, I tried looking for ways to do bangWithFriends in a cryptographicly private way. Eventually I googled "bangwithfriends cryptography" and the first result was this thread.
Ergo, the prosecutor should have dropped the case... because he didn't want to be branded a felon, or feared rape?

As valid as those concerns may be, neither of them is a reason to discontinue prosecution...
People would be much more apt to become hobbyist developers if they even knew where to start; we're all curious beings with problems we want to solve. My interest in web came only after I realized how easy it was to look at the innards of a site and go from there. It's not that simple for most software and games at the moment.
There's a guy who lives in my neighborhood that blows glass; his specialty is blowing Klein bottles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottles). I know about him because2 or 3 days a week he shows up at my local post office right before it shuts, with a net bag that has 5-10 boxes in which he is shipping out to customers. He knows everyone at the post office by name and always gives them a big hello; he has printed and affixed the postage at his home/workshop, but brings them to the post office so he can see the tracking numbers get scanned. As there is no paperwork to fill out, and they know him, he gets handled almost immediately - typically someone will come out to scan the packages when they hear him arrive.

And since there is usually a line of people at the post office near closing time, invariably someone asks what it is that he's shipping (because it's unusual to see someone turning up with a bag of packages like Santa Claus). And he tells them what he does. Strangely, he never has any business cards on him (people always ask). So he asks them to give him their phone number instead. And they do. Now, I'm going froma small sample, but I've seen this repeat itself often enough to think of it as a schtick; at a conservative estimate, every time he drops off his packages, there's a 50% chance that he gets one new customer lead. He sells the bottles for ~$25-50 depending on the size, and marginal costs are pretty low. I'd say he's doing pretty well at his craft business, since he's shipping out a few hundred $ worth of product every time I see him, and more to the point he seems like he's having a really good time.

Obviously this sort of thing doesn't scale well, and imposes a ceiling on the amount one can earn. But as Adam Smith observed, while the division of labor may be highly efficient it's also soul-destroying. Running a one-man show like this is certainly a valid alternative to working in a shop where one is regularly called on for 'crunch time' or 'sprints' or 'hackathons'.
I think that's a perfectly fine use of the word "unstable" in the context of government.
Q: "I use Firefox Nightly, maybe it fixed the issues that are breaking your app?"

A: "If it's using -webkit prefixed CSS, that's pretty unlikely."

There's actually been talk of non-Webkit vendors supporting the webkit prefix. Opera already does, Microsoft and Mozilla have said they need to support it in at least some cases.

"Non-WebKit browser vendors first started talking about implementing the -webkit prefix [in February of 2012] during a CSS Working Group meeting. Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera all said they felt the need to support -webkit, lest their users be relegated to an inferior browsing experience (because so many sites are using only the -webkit prefix)."

http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/04/opera-forges-ahead-with-pla...

Tantek Çelik of Mozilla: "At this point we're trying to figure out which and how many webkit prefix properties to actually implement support for in Mozilla. Currently we have zero. Zero is no longer an option for us."

Florian Rivoal (Opera), Sylvain Galineau (Microsoft): "Zero is not an option for us anymore either."

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Feb/0313.h...
Not sure how to read this

http://www.imgur.com/6PZkdHU.png
I really like that one. Now if someone could fix this issue we could even deploy it on heroku again: https://github.com/paulasmuth/fnordmetric/issues/90
Well, they do have names and phone numbers. They could ensure the thing is available for the lifetimes of their users by hiring some assassins. I suppose technically taking out a hit doesn't guarantee results, but I really wouldn't argue that technicality with them if they started killing customers.
> "The reality is that bank robbers nowadays are idiots"

Once when I was getting off the bus, a police car pulled up right in front of us, 3 more police cars pulled in behind the bus, and even more were approaching. The police pulled a guy off the bus and took a roll of cash out of his pocket and put it into an evidence bag. I found out later from the girl who'd been sitting next to him that the police asked him if he'd just robbed a bank and he confessed right there on the bus.

One of my bus driver friends told me it's common enough that they have a procedure for bank robberies -- their dispatch phone rings, they listen to a description of the bank robber, and if he's on their bus they call back with some sort of code word. Of course, the robbers think they're being oh-so-clever getting onto a city bus, because nobody would ever guess that's your getaway car.
They stay in business because their competitors' databases are in worse shape. Or because the data wasn't as important as they thought it was.

Verizon's billing system is the same way. Is it bad? Yes. Is it worse than AT&T's? Probably not. Are people going to quit Verizon because of billing errors? Well, I did, but most people wouldn't.
Why do the tools need to cost anything at all?
These are just hardware sales. Of all of these the 360 has the most follow-on game/other services sales.
It is surprisingly difficult to remove credit card information from an Apple ID. There seems to be no way to do it online.

You must use iTunes (machine of the installation seems to be irrelevant) or an iOS device and in some cases there is no guarantee it will work without providing new payment information.
Tech geeks have a hard-on for Elon Musk. The same is true for HN.
I just launched this project on a Digital Ocean $5 VPS ... it seems pretty fast. (nginx + passenger + Rails)

http://romancepass.com

I've been a happy Linode customer as well. But being able to deploy silly side projects like this for just $5/mo is really cool. This is my 3rd DO VPS and they've all been great. I had a PostgreSQL problem on another one and my support requests were replied to really fast.
The problem with "learn x" from a motivational standpoint is that it is extremely open-ended. Say I want to learn more JavaScript. How do I know when I've met my goal? If the goal is indefinite, how do I measure progress? This is very demotivating.

Instead, try to find something completable which requires the skill you want to get better with. Build something, even if it's mostly frivolous. You need a destination, a path from here to there, and the ability to measure progress along the path.
I've been shouting this for as long as I could: Once Apple (or maybe an Android company or even someone new) enters this market in earnest, Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo should take watch.

Apple has the infrastructure to deliver games, has tiny/medium/large touch devices that can connect via bluetooth in many customers hands (which already play games), and many many game developers familiar with the platforms. Every big studio has an iDevice team and there are hundreds of good iPhone games out there. If Apple can position the AppleTV as a console (maybe open it up to developers) or build something more along the lines of a traditional console, they will crush.

You can already do cool stuff like stream the game to the TV via airplay and use the device for a score/map screen (basically a WiiU) and it works surprisingly well and doesn't need cords or anything.

The only other real competitor here I see is one of the bigger android vendors like Sony or Samsung. If Sony could get the company in shape and stop producing products that compete with each other, they have many of the same advantages as Apple. They have android devices, experience making console/tv/etc hardware and even own game studios. They make every kind of electronic that goes in the tv room. But Sony has had this for years so that seems unlikely. They have already had huge employee slashes and are floundering.

Samsung has the same thing going on. They make everything and they have huge android phone/tablet penetration. I could see them easily jumping in on this and I hope they do. More competition blowing the doors of this stagnant industry could lead to a renaissance of smaller game studios.

EDIT I should add that Valve also has a chance here. There are many rumors swarming about a valve console or something similar. They have the distribution system and the games market experience, but have no experience with how to make hardware. Remember the last time that happened? I believe they called it the "red ring of death". I'm not saying valve can't pull it off but hardware is hard to get right. I look forward to what they do.
MS could make development cheaper but still charge a 30% tax on game sales (which would actually be double what they take on a disc game).
Nothing will.

But look at the posts in the threads related to this story. There's plenty of paranoia going around, with the automatic presumption that the NYT had some axe to grind with the original story or financial incentives to embellish the story.

I just think that any claims that Tesla makes deserves the same level of scrutiny that people here have been giving the NYT article.
ha! i guess i write mostly crap software, too :)
i really wasn't trying to imply that you should simply open up the market to self-publishing with no restrictions or oversight. that would screw the customers and therefore the brand very quickly.
we did this poorly at microsoft with windows in the early days, and they are still doing it. it's tragic how easily malware still spreads on windows. it's amazing to me that android has so much malware, that google didn't think through security and sandboxing well enough. or revocations, etc.
if i were to make a recommendation for xBox development, it would be to build a developer program where I could develop on my console and a few other (100?) consoles (so i could test), akin to how we can do iOS development, and apps would have to be submitted to a store and approved with a little less weird oversight than Apple uses, but quite a bit more oversight than Google or Microsoft uses, to make sure they aren't doing something evil or stupid or aren't malware.
it's not so much a belief that making life easier for developers is the most important thing as it is the belief that a free market will allow customers to get great apps and will prevent artificial barriers in distribution and promotion from blocking innovation. customers will spend money where there is innovation.
Isn't this how the console market works? You lose money on console units, but make it back in licensing?

Or are you saying that, taking licensing into account, the Xbox still lost money for Microsoft?

2005 and 2007 were a long time ago. Do you know of more recent numbers?
Automated Insights uses MLB’s data to generate real-time factoids
Seriously, the fact that I can't plug in an old keyboard to the PS3 for the occasional password or search drives me nuts.
I just bought a fairly capable gaming PC for around $1,000. It's not the absolute fastest thing but it certainly performs more than well enough for all the indie games I've bought.
I doubt that they'll release the logs too.

But when you are basically screaming out "You're lying, and I have proof of it" and then take your time delivering the proof, it doesn't look very good in the court of public opinion.
Since it isn't clear in the article, ilikecode.wordpress.com is Nat Brown: http://kotaku.com/164683/a-brief-history-of-the-xbox

He's commenting on this thread too as natbro.
(sorry that is a lame font, let me find the knob on that gizmo)
Actually, I think he's screwed. As a 29-year-old with no work experience, he's at a disadvantage against 22-year-olds with similar empty resumes. When good jobs become available, he won't be able to compete.

The real problem is that the kinds of jobs that liberal arts education trains people for are:

* academia and research, which have been contracting for 30 years.

* autonomous high-skill labor, which has also been getting rarer, and which would require further education on his part.

* executive jobs that have since been judged supernumerary and probably don't actually make economic sense.

People like him used to get "junior executive" jobs where they might have no direct reports, but were clearly being groomed for something better. (Think Pete Campbell in Mad Men.) Those jobs don't exist anymore and that's probably a good thing, because they don't make sense, but that is exactly what society prepped him for-- something that no longer exists.

He's now in the state where he can't get quality work experience because he doesn't have quality work experience.

If I were unethical, I might start a business as a "reinvention consultant" and give guys like him a fake work history (shell companies, references, ~3 months of training in the very few things he actually needs to know to be a corporate executive) and a second chance. There will be a lot of demand for that kind of service 5-10 years from now.
Netflix Allows The Creative Community To Do What It Does Best
They accepted my Hong Kong phone number, which has a plus in it and has a different number of digits than a U.S. number. Either they're using better phone number validation than 95% of sites, or they're not validating the phone number format at all.

Edit: I was able to activate my account and log in with out getting a txt or anything, so presumably you could make up a fake phone number with the wrong number of digits, and no real person would get spammy calls.

You could always try setting your phone number to Bobby'); DROP TABLE STUDENTS --
More! More! I want to see more!
DuckTales: 25th Anniversary Retrospective
http://bit.ly/PUUCKE
Part and parcel in that when you start a venture you expose yourself to decisions that businesses or consumers make to buy or not buy whatever it is that you're selling. So there's a risk that it might not go so well. The VC business model is such that they depend on at least some of their investments paying off. If they measure that age is a factor that affects the likelihood of an investment paying off, should they use it?

I don't have a strong opinion on this. I'm just trying to determine which part people have a problem with. The two objections that I can think of are:
1. Not believing that age could be a factor affecting the likelihood of a venture.
2. Believing that even if age is a factor affecting the likelihood of a venture, VCs shouldn't use it.
Unusable. Stuff needs to line up
The segment about terrible error messages really resonated with me. I was actually just thinking yesterday about how, after so many years, Windows errors on personal/home computers still tell you to talk to your "system administrator". Microsoft has never understood the basics of the personal market. Bad UX is in their blood.
Call it what you want. It was a genuine gesture for your well-being. If I offended you - that was not the intent.
Sergeant Stubby
Heh, that's almost exactly what I'm working on now. After looking at OpenStack and other solutions, I rolled my own.

My solution is cloud agnostic, and does have (almost-there!) multi-node support, and was built to support a local cloud provider (via Linux Containers) .. so you don't have to be online, pay an external provider, or pay the latency cost if you want to run stuff .. you can just do it locally.

This is LOADS more complex than it may seem: due to dynamic virtual network infrastructure, configuration dependencies on network locality, resource requirements, portability concerns, security concerns, etc.

Our primary non-local cloud provider is EC2.
It'll be interesing to see what Sony reveals next week when they unveil the Playstation 4; one hopes this device will be capable of downloading something in the background.

I have to say I find a lot of Apple stuff maddeningly quirky as well, and don't think they have a magic fix for this space. But they could certainly shake the space up if they choose to enter it, and I wish they would since more competition is good.
Why not return the favor and call it "Jobs"?
I don't know if people on HN are following the rumors related to the next-gen consoles, but it looks like MS is going to be addressing at least one of these issues: UI fluidity. If the rumors are accurate, then MS has a multi-pronged approach to making the UI a lot more fluid. While the 360 reserved 32MB of RAM for the OS, rumors suggest that MS is reserving 3GB (out of a total of 8GB).

Furthermore, MS is apparently using a hardware-based display plane system where there are 4 independent display buffers that can be refreshed/displayed at different resolutions and framerates. 3 of the display planes are for the game to use (one for the HUD, 1 for foreground, 1 background) and 1 plane dedicated to the OS.

I do 110% agree with the author that having a more app-store like ecosystem would be absolutely huge, and if MS were to properly implement, would let them compete vs Apple.

If I had the money I'd buy both MS and Apple stock, because one of them is in the best position to win the living room in the next 5 years.
Top 5 lessons I learned doing startup weekend - Miami University
Yes, the solution for any N is all permutations. I realized that the morning after writing the recursive algorithm I shared. It was pretty fun trying to come up with a recursive step to generate all queens for N, given all queens for N-1. Even now I can't say for sure that no such recursive step exists.
The beginning is silly: "Why do people keep using Excel to build giant, error-prone spreadsheets?"

This could just as easily be: "Why do people keep using programming languages to build giant, error-prone applications?"

I can't even read the rest of it. Excel is so successful because it lowers the bar for creating applications. They might not be pretty, and they may have expensive bugs, but its like everything else in the world.

I'd bet the amount of value Excel has created in the world far outweighs the consequences of any bugs in the worksheets.
Yeah it came back now
As a male software engineer, I find this smart, educational and entertaining. But then again, what the hell do I know about it?

How can I show support for this without sounding like an idiot?
I wouldn't spend 5$ on OpenOffice!
http://thumbnails.hulu.com/14/908/70876_512x288_generated__7...
Resolver One was a great idea, but it has been discontinued:

"But while many people did buy Resolver One, we struggled to turn it into a commercial success. The vast majority of people are happy with either Microsoft Excel, or one of the free alternatives available from Google and the like. Since mid-2011, all of our development focus has been on a new product, PythonAnywhere."

http://www.resolversystems.com/eol.php