skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, well put. You're more eloquent than I am, making me feel like an obnoxious brute. But well put.

Although I wish was like you with the lack of personal hate, but I can't get my head around it. But kudos for doing so. I hope to get there one day. Thanks, made my day.
The 10 Best Toys From Toy Fair 2013
The Panamera and the 911 are entirely different beasts. Plenty of people do not consider the Panamera and the Cayenne to be true to Porsches legacy.

I know which I'd rather have.

If it weren't for the maintenance costs and the fuel consumption I'd happily trade my golf for a 911. I'm pretty sure we'd also have the first Porsche with a towing hook for the trailer full of stuff we normally carry along ;)
Well, if you want to compare a 1970s compiler to a modern compiler, the x86 instruction set will not be a useful target, since no 1970s compilers target it. These particular ancient compilers target the PDP-11.

The larger question of whether optimizations are hardware-dependent is interesting. In some sense, sure. But there are a lot of optimizations in modern compilers that apply equally well to the PDP-11 and to the AMD64; they're just not that different.

My homework assignment for you: write a C function of three or four lines which loops over an array of structs and does some computation for each one, including some conditional and a call to a one-line static function; compile it with -c -O0 -Wa,-adhlns=unoptimized.lst and with -c -O5 -fomit-frame-pointer -Wa,-adhlns=optimized.lst; list the optimizations you notice in the difference between unoptimized.lst, and hazard a guess at which of them are applicable on a PDP-11.
Neuroscience of User-Friendly
I think this post is attracting such vitriol because it has the condition reversed - rather than saying "What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years" - it's probably more accurate to say "A significant portion of the new activities people do 10 years from now will have had their origins in a smart person's weekend project".

Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about this in his newest book Antifragile. He makes a sort of evolutionary argument - people who are actively trying to invent the future must necessarily focus on what they think will be desired or necessary. But predicting the future is nearly impossible! So the huge masses of non-teleological tinkerers - considered as a whole - who simply work on what they enjoy for its own sake, have the advantage. In other words, any particular tinkerer will probably not invent the future, but the odds are good that eventually someone will stumble onto something.
Yes, I believe we will not. Materials science is a bitch, you can fantasize all you want but in the end if you can't build it it doesn't matter much.
I love getting paid to program. The trick is in carefully selecting projects, teams, and clients plus actively setting expectations (e.g. staying in the driver's seat) such that you are not working on other people's schedules. Otherwise, yes, freelancing turns out to be just like having a boss. And that's no fun.
I work for a US company and have had a similar experience to what is described here! My employer had that type of practical education, and so even though I have a bachelor's in Physics I am working as a programmer, gaining valuable experience and feedback.
Just considering the language, then I think Scala is considerably easier to learn than haskell _if_ you're from an OO background. It's a multi-paradigm language making it easy to use it like a better c++11. However, idiomatic Scala is functional, and so you're pushed in another direction by the community (but, importantly, not forced). However, starting with a blank slate, then Haskell might be the easier language to learn.

But if we consider the resources to learn the language along with the language, then I think Scala dominates Haskell. Haskell was painful for me to learn because to become proficient I had to trudge through not only books but wikis, blogs, and code. There is nothing like Odersky's Scala book in Haskell. Learn you a Haskell, the Haskell wikibook, and Real World Haskell are all _terrible_ at preparing someone to become a proficient haskeller because while they show you the language they don't train you to think functionally.

In imperative languages you're giving a lot of sequential instructions to a robot. In functional languages you're programming the robot to understand a new language, and then you describe the way things ought to be in that language.
The Shape of History
Your 3D Printer Could Eat Empty Milk Jugs Instead of Expensive Plastic
Thank you for this info. Seems like pattern, every time a new technology comes along it's Kill, kill, kill it. Patents can be discarted, people in ruin by law fees and years in court... I remember something about the guy that invented windsheeld wipers for cars. Basically the same story although I think he didn't kill himself.
Holy crap - do you mean that penis is a "rude" word in your part of the world - when did correct and accurate English become rude? The mind truly boggles.

How about vagina? Or does the female population of (I assume the USA) not have one?

The interesting bit here is the reputed censorship of standard words not the original article which had no relevance to HN.
This is advice. We sold 9 apps at £2.49 each.
I don't understand how those ideas are contradictory at all.
Manipulating lists is a solved problem in functional programming IMO, but I struggle to define good higher-order tree operations. Complex operators compose very poorly, and have too many options. So instead I write many simple operators, most of which I don't use frequently enough to remember that they exist at all. Or, I just give up and use recursion.
That's a nice concept! Do you do languages other than English? Or is there some API non-English developers or linguists can add new languages or specific knowledge domains?
Mars trip to use astronaut poo as radiation shield
Not to mention that most email has roughly the same security level as a postcard. There are a lot of personal details that I wouldn't want written on a postcard.

Not to mention the fact that lots of 'personal information' is not in fact private, e.g. date of birth (one of my financial accounts uses date of birth), mothers maiden name, social security number, etc.
We may be quibbling over definitions. But do you believe that no mammal has an instinctual understanding of using nipples? Or that humans are unique among mammals in that regard?
The selection of cotton is an interesting one, for if the product were edible the children might get the idea they didn't need to work for money.
https://github.com/caolan/async

Once I started using the async library, all of these problems everyone is illustrating basically disappeared.
It ranks 1, 2, 3 and 4 for me - in the same time.
Use SIMD in web programs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbogram

> An optional feature of IPv6, the jumbo payload option, allows the exchange of packets with payloads of up to one byte less than 4 GiB
As a graduate student, I can tell you, what you are saying is just plain untrue.

Surprisingly many professors I know seem to be genuinely motivated by what they see as a service to society. Typically, more through teaching than research.

Yes, there are a few big jerks who are clearly driven by wanting to show off.
I just recently (a month or so ago) watched and did the exercises in the Google Python Class. That was my first introduction to Python and I stayed interested because the exercises were a bit of a challenge instead of the same old boring crap you see everywhere.

About two weeks ago, I wrote a somewhat complex application to "scratch an itch" at work and have since started in with Django.

I'd recommend the Google class (it's on Youtube).
The Upbeat Statistics on Rise in Profile of, Demand for, Statisticians
Jacques seems to mean that as a group, lawyers are more open to other domains. This is probably because there is no domain of "the law" by itself--law is merely a reflection of society.

For example, regulatory laws must take into account political restrictions, economic theory and realities, and the goals and pragmatic realities and of the specific industry or industries being regulated. Criminal laws must do all that and take into account various socioeconomic factors. Tax law is a balance of economic theory, revenue generation, political restrictions, and pragmatic realities of accounting across thousands of industries.
Sounds like a nice setup, but it always kills the article for me when someone claims that everyone should use the same solution.

It's a bit expensive as well, although I guess a DIY solution shouldn't be that difficult.
Why we should memorize?
> ... do you mean that penis is a "rude" word
> in your part of the world ...

Has it occurred to you that this is actually nothing to do with me, and that I'm merely informing you of something I happen to know from observation in the past?

Has it occurred to you that I am not actually in the USA, nor a citizen of the USA?

Or do you simply leap to these conclusions automatically?

Added in edit: This is not the first time I've provided information gained over the years I've been on the site, only to have someone then accuse or blame me for something they think is wrong or misguided. So you are not alone. Perhaps I should put a disclaimer on everything I write, or possibly just not bother answering at all. What do you think? I'd value your thoughts since you have, in fact, been on HN longer than I have.
Which makes it unvirtualisable for practical purposes.
That's my favorite library! I think people who write in node must just see threads like this and laugh.
"Machines should work, People should think."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk
> "We didn't do this to screw the customer". Sure you did. You have offloaded the cost of a parallel connection, necessary for HDMI, to the adapter. Almost every competing system comes with HDMI built-in. 30 pin connectors could drive HDMI. Lightning can't without having another whole computer in the adapter.

So every competing product charges every single user, most of whom will never use it, for HDMI output. Apple charges (more, to be fair) only those users who need the feature.

How this gets interpreted as "screwing the customer" baffles.
I dropped out of school (college equiv.), started parachuting from airplanes and solid objects, joined the military, dropped out of the military, ended up as a software developer.

All that matters in the end is that you like what you do. And if you don't, you can always quit. You might not always know what you want, but you'll figure it out.
For me, it was my grandfather. He saved as much as he could, set up (whole) life insurance accounts for his grandkids, invested in stock to pass on. He was a traveling salesman in California, selling frozen foods when Birdseye just came out with the concept.

He gave mew a few shares of stock, I sold them for cash a few months later when I wanted to do something I just _had_ to do at the time. He also gifted me with a Bicentennial Coin set, still in plastic. It got spent, probably within the year.

He last gave me the life insurance policy, saying that when he set it up, it would require no payments. It had changed to needing annual dues, so he suggested I cash it in.

I kept it. Years later, after he had passed, my wife and I were trying to get our financial act together, and lo and behold - A whole life insurance policy has a cash value. We borrowed against it and paid of the worst of the debt I owed when we met. We paid it back.

It became the starting piece of our financial planning. We had life insurance, then we built up 6 months of living expenses.

We bought our first piece of investment property to provide for our own retirement (I seriously don't expect there to be much of the Social Security I have been contributing to - matches your complaint about pensions, I think). We borrowed again and made the down payment.

Now we have an extra $1000 cash flowing from the property, we are paying off the policy loan and looking for the next piece of property.

I wish granddad were here now - I think he would be proud. I still miss the hell out of him.
Stay tuned.

That's a major topic in my compilers class, and I'll likely write a post on that as well.

In the meantime, I recommend you check out "Scrap Your Boilerplate" in Haskell.
Have you seen the Python GTK+ 3 Tutorial[0]? I'm still pretty new to Python and it was a tremendous help.

[0]: http://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

edit: Sorry, must've missed "web apps" when I first read your comment. The Django overview and tutorial were helpful to me as well.
I envy my dad's ability to recite Shakespeare plays that he learnt many...many years back. The more I use my gadgets, the more i am losing my memory. Need to find ways to improve my memory.
Show HN: Simple countdowns for startup launch or event
Too bad -- anyone living in Toppenish, WA can't use his town name in an HN headline.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toppenish,_Washington

But I suppose it's for the common good.
This quote spoke to me:

> "Unspace was a convenient umbrella; an excuse for three friends with complimentary skill sets to share a small office"

In a lot of ways my company right now is just an excuse for me and my best friend to build cool software together and have our own office. It just turns out the money is coming with it and we are able to build a real business out of it.

We've had chances to raise money and grow but we know deep in our hearts it's not what we want. It was hard to be "okay" with this because everyone throws the VC stuff at you and makes you think you should be "going big" and killing yourself at 25. Understanding and being confident that we could still be a "big", important, and profitable company in our space by doing it "our way" has been a really big milestone of our personal and professional growth.

Great post.
Since they decided to issue OS updates to existing owners?
Teaching kids to code: It's not about fame and fortune.
I don't see how the details of the hardware platform have anything to do with the advice he could give on the effects on the viewers eyesight, optics, etc.
This has been drummed up over and over, and frankly the trends aren't promising. We aren't graduating any more STEM grads than we were in 1985, despite increased college attendance on the whole [1]. I don't know how to interpret this, other than there aren't very many engineers on the margin.

[1] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/col...
One of the first things you're likely to desire after going through this tutorial is more sophisticated routing, the gorilla toolkit has an excellent reversible routing system that works with the std lib http packages:

http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/pkg/mux
Hey, I'm the creator of Throwww. Sorry this is totally my bad. It's a result of a known bug, but recently I took my MBP to Applecare and they accidentally wiped my entire drive (long story). So before I can fix it, there's a bunch of dev environment stuff I need to setup. Sorry again.
TLDR: my bad.
You can also use:

$ TZ=CST date -d "Sun Mar 3 18:05:17 UTC 2013"

Sun Mar 3 18:05:17 CST 2013

which doesn't invoke a subshell. env vars can always be prepended to the executable name for use with just that program (not sure if that's bash only, though).
The hard part is attribution. Hobbies are just one of the seeds that germinate into fully adopted technologies.

MUDs were definitely part of the inspiration for MMORPGs, but the success behind MMORPGs has a lot to do with commercial internet, the development of GUIs, etc...
I love pee
There is always a demand for software engineers/designers/programmers. According to recent reports there are 3 million open tech jobs in the US. Assuming a pessimistic 50% variation in that number, you still have 1.5 million jobs. The popular dislike for "geek/nerd" STEM subjects in American schools doesn't help. That's unfortunately a societal problem that needs to be overcomed ("I don't know math", "that's for nerds" etc. fine flip my burger then).
Congratulations! You have turned a discussion of the relative merits of learning a critical and historic human discipline in to a rant against virtual machines (illogical, I might add: they are great tools for managing complexity) and the structure of programming organizations.
I believe Firefox OS may be on to something
> As a graduate student ...

Implying an educated person.

> ... I can tell you, what your [sic] saying is just plain untrue.

Did that education include English literacy? s/your/you're/
If you want to make money in games and reach a large audience you absolutely, positively need to be on iOS, then Android before you are on Win8. According to your bio, you used to work @ MSFT so I understand the choice of platform but you want to keep making games, right?

I would take a close look at your retention rates and find where people are dropping out of the game and use that information to make the best iOS version possible.

It looks like a great game and will translate well to touch interfaces. Do it.
While I agree that MOOC is absolutely going to disrupt traditional college/university schooling, I disagree with a couple of your arguments. Actually no, scratch that, now that I think about it, if I had been able to pick my own curriculum then yeah--(snip a bunch of stuff about what I myself learned, did not learn, would have picked, etc. nobody cares about that!)--maybe I would not have learned AS much, but like you say, at least most of it would have been useful to my personal development. And I could have patched some gaps in my knowledge (Analysis) that later on gave me trouble with advanced courses that I really could have gone for otherwise.

And the GP comment was not nitpicking. Nitpicking is when someone makes a big deal out of a small thing. Just because the error they pointed out does not invalidate your argument, does not make it nitpicking. Yours was a pretty big error: comparing dropout rates for a single class to those of an entire education. And it deserves pointing out, because such a "little detail" has a good chance of causing confusion later on in the discussion. And you calling it "pedantic" really does injustice to the GP calling out a genuine error. It's not like they were being rude or annoying about it. And I admit, this paragraph can be considered both nitpicking and pedantic, I still want to say it because you could have been more polite about it. "Right. While that doesn't invalidate my argument, thanks for the correction."
You do realize that it was Apple that first shipped computers with USB to replace legacy ports, right?
Apple still sells millions of iPhone 4(S)s every month. I'd say they care about it to the tune of a few billion dollars.
Thats why software defined networking, Openflow etc, are going to take off, as you can get back control of the protocols and what is going on, and avoid the vendor lockin.
i use "todo.txt".
it is text based todo list, you can edit it easily every where, it has smart phone app and it's very simple to use
http://todotxt.com/
Garbage collection is not the only way to achieve safe memory management.
Why is the physical realization of a CPU’s registers called a “file”?
Hey randomdata, I really liked reading your posts on this thread and would be keen to chat by email. Mine's visible in my profile. Cheers.
Can one say more number of people use VPN/Tor for legal purposes than illegal?
What's HQoN?
Nice. Congrats on your move. I wrote a similar post exactly 2 years earlier when i decided to downshift from my job of about 10 years and go live in the mountains doing photography http://www.kettik.com/go/articles/16. Reading your post made me go down the memory lane and examine my own journey.

Fast forward 2 years and i have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Monetarily its been a complete flop, failing to earn even a single paise in the past 2 years. But spiritually, the memories and experiences gathered along the way have been priceless. Sounds like a classic Mastercard ad, doesn't it :D

All this experience did motivate me to create my startup. I have to say that i totally resonate with your "the only code I write will be for my personal projects" line. It feels more fulfilling this way. But ofcourse there is no guarantee that this would arrest the rapid depletion of my bank balance (as opposed to taking up parttime consulting gigs). Only time will tell.
This is another thing I persistently thought while I was learning Haskell

"It's a paradigm shift, you're used to programming
imperatively, this is not imperative. Think back to when
you first started programming, you got caught on doing
simple things, right? This is the same."

On sober reflection, I don't buy this logic any more. Haskell's ability to be generic is really cool, so cool that it has a massive standard library of itemized, tried and tested bits of logic that can be used anywhere, and I do mean anywhere. All of which you as a new programmer are tasked with getting acquainted with. As a new programmer you must abstract your program out in a way that fits one or more these component pieces, that can fit the standard library. Ouch.

Of course, this library only gives you a toolbox to cover some fundamental logic, you can express really interesting things in short lines if you're skilled enough to abstract your problem out into general behaviour. Even I got this far, but when the problem your working on is best modelled through state, which is basically everything, you now have to understand monads.

What portion of the population do you think can utter these words confidently? "I Understand Monads"

Haskell provides no ramp up, there is no learning curve. I don't believe Haskell's problem is that it's different, I believe it's problem is that it's different and difficult.
If Evernote is not using a key derivation function, I don't know what to say.
Really? The most recent:

"The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey"

Customers who have shopped Movies & TV might like to know that "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" is now available for pre-order on DVD, DVD/Blu-ray combo and 3D/DVD/Blu-ray combo. "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" will be released March 19, 2013.

....

I'm sure there is a setting that I can use to make these stop, but I'm far too lazy to do it.
SEEKING WORK - Remote or on-site (Europe)

http://generalists.co

We're a group of two hackers building tools and applications for startups and great people in areas like citizen science. We've both got experience working at YC Startups (ZenCoder, Dreamforge) and have lots of experience with around cloud video encoding and 3D modelling.

On the frontend we're good with Backbone, SpineJS, ThreeJS/WebGL and D3. Build backends with Ruby (Rails + Sinatra) and Node.js/Express. Also work with Go for processing tasks.

Based in Manchester UK but happy to travel throughout Europe and beyond.

If you're looking for devs who care about visuals and enjoy digging into a an area with a lot of background knowledge: info@generalists.co
Do not teach, create opportunities to learn.
Downshifting. Changing gears down to a simpler and (hopefully) better life
I tried to email support@throwww and admin@throwww. None of the emails bounced back, but I wasn't sure if that was the right place to 'contact the administrator'.

Anyways, great platform, this piece immediately came to my mind when I saw your site; it inspired me to write. The timing is funny though. Credit to the hn crowd for posting the cached version immediately after I had posted the site.
I guess the point is, that you don't need to "ensure uniqueness across..."
When Freemium Beats Premium