skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I find lost in the cracks by many "artists" is the fact that creativity is found in all areas of human activity - it's seductive for systems thinkers to painters to consider their "clan" or "way of thinking" is the sacred and the rest of the world as secular. In truth, there's a beautiful creativity in Music, Painting, Writing, Mathematics, Engineering, Programming, Gardening, Architecture, Exploring, &c...

Also, if I'm not mistaken, painting came about because people studying mathematics were studying geometry and how to relate the real world (using geometry) onto a piece of paper.
I have to agree with everything you said from my study of WWII, but just providing some elaboration.

"(3) Versailles. There were 'reparations'. So, Germany printed money to pay off the reparations more quickly. Then the inflation ruined the finances for much of Germany and created more bitterness."

Some of the Allies were going to make the same mistake in WW2 with repartitions once again. The French wanted to take the Ruhr, the industrial heartland in Western Germany and annex it into France. Other ideas were to make Germany an agrarian society. The primary reason the US created the Marshall Plan was to ensure the reparations and the initial dismantling of the German Industry (later repealed) that were forced on Germany (mostly the taking of IP, such as patents) would not cripple it and make it fall into the hands of the Soviets[1].

"(8) German Army Politics. The German Army had some funds for political activities, liked what they saw in Hitler, and provided just enough 'seed' money to keep Hitler going in politics."

The army did sort of a bittersweet deal with Hitler. Most of the army was not fond of Hitler, but they did see him as a way to restore their faded glory. They made their "deal with the devil" though when they agreed to take an oath to Hitler in return for Hitler dismantling the SA, which the Army saw as thugs and did not want integrated into the army (who thought of themselves as principled and aristocratic). Much of the army took that oath quite serious as well due to the Prussian tradition of loyalty to their country and leader--believing that betraying the oath was to betray their country. However, elements of the military still thought Hitler was mad all the way back to 1938 and had plotted to kill Hitler[2]. However, the capitulation of the UK and France in Czechoslovakia[3] and the later invasion of Poland quieted most of the planning to assassinate Hitler for the time being.

Also anyone who has not seen them, I reccomend the BBC's Fall of Eagles[4], BBC's The Great War[5] and the BBC's World at War[6]. Watching them back to back explains quite a bit about how the 19th Century Monarchies led to WWI and how WWI led to WWII.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_reparations_for_World_Wa...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1944_Adolf_Hitler_assassination...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Eagles

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_(documentary)

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_War
I'm all for drawing, and a lot of what is being advocated here, but I hope we at least make an attempt to consider things like programming and mathematics to be artistic/creative disciplines. I mean, there's a reason many universities intentionally award Math students a BA, as opposed to a BS or BEng. There's a subtle beauty to mathematical precision, and well-made code, so I don't like seeing these areas dismissed as cold, grey cubicles for the hopelessly left-brained.
While I was reading the story, I kept thinking that the kids will start using the "say" command in the Terminal to start talking. That would have been a great story.
Bad strategy. Would increase the price tremendously. This is what I do and I operate on both sides of that business. This particular company got a million dollars for a domain in a similar situation.
I'm more than a little irritated that his idea of "systems thinking" is "understanding how computers works".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking
I'm fine with citizens having drones but not the government.
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What if I took a photo of someone on the ground on their own private property? That's not a crime right?

So whats the difference if I take a photo not from the ground? It suddenly becomes illegal?
Touché my friend ;)
I like to think of this as a response to the "learn to code" propaganda.

If it seems like it's missing the point, or underestimating the "other side", I'm sure it's entirely intentional. Or at the very least a reflection of how videos like "what most schools don't teach" come off to 'artists'.
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The author appears to warp his argument and land his primary criticism on machines and not the people that program them. Which is odd - you should not learn to code because machines are not creative? Much like saying you shouldn't learn to draw because paper + pencils aren't creative...

Machines "aren't creative" is a naive assertion too (forgivable though because not everyone outside of our industry may be aware of the happenings) - there are some truly amazing programs people are building that can evolve creative solutions to many things that no human could ever dream of.
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This is a question I'm grappling with as I'm trying to move forward with my publishing business. I think it's also one a lot of other publishers have been thinking about. How do we measure the quality of content?
These efforts were the German war machine. There was no "Rosie the riveter" in Germany, and the population of Germany was too low to maintain an industrial base while simultaneously killing or maiming young men as they turned 18.
I've been coding for over 20 years now and I absolutely suck at drawing. The only kind of drawings I've ever done are circuit diagrams, but I don't think they count.
I bought a copy of Betty Edwards' "Drawing on the right side of the brain" over a year ago but never got around reading. Maybe I should dust it off and start with it.

Does anybody have any recommendations for coders learning to draw?
I agree completely, but it takes the government paying a private entity to do surveillance. Far fetched, but still plausible
Lightning is a replacement for Apple's old and huge dock connector. You're probably thinking of Thunderbolt.
We added progress bars and silly status messages to our 500 error pages in our web app. Things like a 15 second count down to "recalibrate" or "attempting automatic system correction". It, at minimum, stopped users from constantly clicking a button or link that was having server issues (and thus spamming our error queue). Instead, they'd wait the 15 seconds and then go try again.

If the issue was transient, like a dropped connection to the database or memcached or some obscure deadlock, the "automatic" fixes worked as expected from the user's perspective. We, of course, still got the full error report to diagnose the issue.

I even have a few gems in our user feedback system where the users outright praise the "automatic error fixer" and they wish every website/app had a tool like ours.
I think the future requires a balance of both logical and intuitive intelligence. Both are needed in creating art, ideas, things, and experiences that matter to people.

Einstein was a violinist and a physicist. Why not develop both skillsets?
Stop complaining about the high property prices in Singapore
Because when it's said by a company that is in the business of buying and selling domain names and has sold multiple domain names for big dollars it's BS. I operate in that industry, this isn't speculation on my part.

Otoh, if I approached Marissa Mayer to buy a domain she owned I wouldn't consider "I don't want to sell" "BS".

If I approached McDonalds and wanted to buy "hamburger.com" from them (hypothetical) and they said "don't want to sell" I wouldn't consider that BS.

But this company, that is their business (domains). It is BS.

Lastly, If your vanity domain name is (hypothetically once again) "nowblog.com" maybe you aren't interested in selling it. If someone offers you $100,000 you might be interested, correct?
UXP Systems (http://www.uxpsystems.com)
Toronto, Canada

We're building a platform and corresponding front-end clients for mobile, web, smart TVs, and set top boxes which interfaces with various cable providers/telcos' existing infrastructure and enables these companies to bring their offerings up to par in the age of Netflix and smart TVs.

We're looking for front-end developers as well as UX designers to help flesh out the existing front-end projects we have, as well as help define the direction - both visually and architecturally - of the UI going forward.

On the front-end, we're using Backbone, SVG for markup and animations on hardware-constrained set top boxes, and HTML/CSS for mobile, web, and smart TV. Alot of the front-end challenges we deal with here have to do with trying to optimize our application in order to provide a great user experience when dealing with the limited hardware capabilities of certain hardware platforms we use - we think existing TV solutions are subpar, and we aim to provide something people will enjoy using.

Apply at careers@uxpsystems.com, or you can contact me directly at kevin.wei@uxpsystems.com.
I feel that the different mediums are mutually beneficial. Stories can be told through music, code or a drawing. Often a new perspective can be found in a different medium that applies to another you may be struggling with.
anyone can learn to code. but can anyone really learn to draw?
I appreciate the effort it requires to draw, and create art. But I don't think the author of this page quite understands how difficult it would be for a computer to program another program.

You can tailor aspects of a language to your program, but you cannot simply design a program to think of unique ways to tackle an issue. Math and programming are left-brain activities in practice - but this ignores the slew of abstract thinking that occurs before you set key to the page, as it were.

Coding may not look as pretty as art, and I'm not saying it's more important. But it is wrong to say programming is any less organic than art is. Having a computer automatically generate code is like having it generate ASCII - impressive, but both pale in comparison to what human talent offers.
Wow, how disappointing. Just another lesson demonstrating that if you hear about a law being passed and it sounds good (or bad), it's really just motivated by the interests of those with the most power.
It's so obviously fake, anyone that has one or has ever been on a school field trip would know that it would be impossible to get then to keep quiet. They'd giggle and one would say something within about 15 seconds.

And the guy doesn't remember what product had just launched :)

I feel really sorry for the guy, trying to get attention like this. Pretty desperate.
"The financial system in the U.S. is horribly inefficient. Retail transactions conducted with credit cards cost 2-3%, which is a ridiculously high cost given today's technology."

No.

The reason banks charge high transaction fees on credit cards has to do with how credit cards are billed. The billing cycle for a card is 30 days, after which you have 30 days to pay. This is effectively a loan for which you are paying zero interest. Somebody must pay, though, because you are risky, unsecured debt and your interest rate is maybe 12 percent. Up to two months of free credit therefore costs the bank two percent, which they charge the merchant.

Credit card companies could shorten this billing cycle once the delays of snail mail are no longer commonplace, but that doesn't reduce the transaction cost--it only moves it from the merchant to the consumer, who now begins to accrue interest charges earlier. Consumers could theoretically pay off their debts faster and thus pay less interest, but only to a point, because most consumers live paycheck to paycheck and will carry a balance until their biweekly paycheck isn't eaten up by rent and auto payments--roughly a month.

And I would argue that most consumers and banks prefer the grace period and simple interest calculations; it makes the whole billing process easy to understand.
Same as politicians do. It takes some practice to learn to do that. I would suspect he was prepped in evasion techniques prior to the TV appearance. Actually hard to believe he wasn't schooled in some of this actually.
Humans are suited to our gravity, our atmosphere, our ecosystem, but we still want to go leave Earth.

If you're going to anthropomorphize the martian robots, maybe their ultimate goal isn't to see humans again, but to leave Mars and explore the rest of the universe.
Yes? There are lot of books, videos and other materials that can teach you how to draw better. Like with coding, or anything, with practice you can become quite good at it.
My brain can't do art. I have tried for 20 years. I am never happy and keep going to try and make it perfect. And I never succeed. I end up tossing it in the bin after my attempts at perfection make it look like like a mess.

I like code since it works or it doesn't. Sure, it could be better but as long as it works and is secure I don't really care. And yes, 90% is using PHP.
Did you even notice the response I responded to?

Flexie: "They must have really wanted it as a society and hundreds of thousands must have been involved, one way or another. That's not the work of just a few crazy fanatics."

My point: terrible things were done right here, families uprooted, lives destroyed, hunger, fear, people stored in camps, in our own free country, with millions of witnesses, and yet... these crazy things happened, because society was told by those in charge that it was appropriate to do so.

Several years later we bombed 100k people to their deaths by fire (Tokyo). Tokyo was just one of 67 cities that was bombed with napalm (before we threw the nuclear stuff).

McNamara's comment on the bombing was this: LeMay said that "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." "And I think he's right," says McNamara. "He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals." . . . "LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side has lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

Keep on believing!
I'd argue that the British provided inspiration closer in spirit from their concentration camp system in South Africa during the Boer war.

The Brits had a tough time with the Boers, who mostly used cavalry and light artillery to conduct guerrilla raids on the British soldiers. The British solution was to round up the non-combatant Boer population and starve them until the men surrendered.
The best explanations I've seen of the social and political roots of that period are Richard Evans's "The Coming of the Third Reich" [1] (going from 1870 to the establishment of Nazi power in 1933-34) and the later volumes of his series. The main points he hits are:

a) The fact that by 1933, the majority of the population was voting for parties that were explicitly against the democratic system. Even if there was no majority for the Nazis, there was also no majority in defense of protection of constitutional limits on power.

b) The government bureaucracy and much of the elite (including the then President, Hindenburg, and old military man) were loyal to the State/Realm (Reich) to which they swore their oaths, but not to the democratic order and the constitution, and so were not functional impediments to Nazi power. I was also struck, when reading about their actions and motivations, how little they realized that democratic protections and limits on power protected them as well - when the Nazis took power, the conservative establishment was removed from civilian power by force or the threat of force, using powers that the conservatives had originally intended for use against the Left.

c) Once the Nazis came to power, they succeeded in instilling in the German public apathy and an unwillingness to get involved in political opposition (though not necessarily active devotion to Nazi ideology). A fanatical minority can do a lot of damage if the majority is apathetic or is distracted by more popular policies (like national greatness and revenge on the WWI Allies).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/01...
Texas and its long tradition of "pride of independence" has, at best, only resulted in a parallel version of Federal Government policy. Undesirable Federal policy X will almost always still show up in Texas - it will just be presented and perceived as though it has been arrived-at independently as the will of Texans.

If sovereignty is your thing, other than a strong stand on gun rights there are states in the US with policy that correlates far less with D.C. and they don't make it their claim to fame either.
Attention seeking obviously. That's the point why the op made it up. There's no harm done, except wasting a bunch of people's time.
I'd say a better question would be:
Anyone can learn to code or draw, but can anyone really learn to code or draw well?
The author here makes bold, sweeping predictions about the future. While these might come true, Hoffman offers no concrete evidence to bake up the claims.

Hoffman suggests that because computers are becoming more powerful, the people who work closely with them will be less marketable, and their skills less valuable. Maybe I'm short-sighted, but I don't see this as coming true.
The form factor of Lightning is top notch - all of the USB-variants seem terribly designed after using it. Too bad Lighting isn't free-to-license like Firewire was.

That said, the design for this AV adapter is puzzling. I wonder what the hardware limitation was that prevented straight digital video out. (# of pins?)
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You borrow one if the 5 million other AC adapters on your dorm floor...
The Germans ate their own dogfood. They honestly believed they were super humans and that the Russians were inferior sub-humans who would be easily conquered. There's a great documentary called "Russia's War". In the documentary they read out letters home from the Germans troops. In the beginning they are so confident that they are the master race and nothing can stop them.

Stalin, on the other hand, never lost touch with reality to the degree that the nazis did. His essay "Marxism and the problem of linguistics", written in the 40s, certainly showed that he was thinking clearly and pragmatically in his later years and hadn't fallen into the bizarre delusions that so many totalitarian dictators do. The problem with Stalin was that he was to rational. He didn't believe in gratitude, compassion or have any response at all to human suffering. He also probably though that the Nazis would behave rationally and be more strategic and instead focus on pummeling Western Europe and not attacking Russia, thus leaving it for Stalin's easy conquest.
It's a crime if you photograph them where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy [1]. That's generally easy to interpret for normal (ground) photography. But if I'm in my fenced backyard sunbathing nude and your drone photographs me, that could be up for debate/discussion.

It'll be interesting, that's for sure.

1. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2...
Nope, and I wouldn't miss YouTube's crap factory site from the SERPS either.
Picture a writer. You've seen him countless times in tv shows and movies. Brow furrowed, pencil gripped tight between teeth, hunched over a typewritter, tearing pages out and throwing them into an overflowing waste basket, staring at the ceiling praying for inspiration.

Picture a developer. Brow furrowed, hunched over a keyboard, the room is dark but he glows from the light of the monitor, a pile of empty mountain dew cans littering his waste basket, slamming his fist on the desk in frustation.

Creativity is noticing the absence of something and knowing how to bring from the void into reality. You sketch it. You poke it and prod it. You shape it until it is just so. You love it until you hate it enough to call it done.

Sounds a lot like coding, at least if you are doing it right.

Please, learn how to code. Learn how to draw. Learn how to think. Learn how to write. Learn how to solve problems. Learn how to do everything until something sticks. Not until you find something that you 'love', but until you find something that you just can't not do. And when you grow tired of it, do something else.
Some of the assumptions made here are absolute nonsense:

1. Programming is purely science: If so, then why can't we teach the computer to do it?

2. Coding is not a "conventional skill" that should be taught: Schools teach physics and math because they make up the system of which we live in, then why not software? It is an integral part of our day to day lives.

3. Software and computers are at a point where they can operate wih minimum human interference: to any programmer this is ridiculous because we all know that we still live in the Stone Age equivelant of what software engineering should be like.
Not a rebuttal, but--

This post reeks of wish fulfillment.

1) Underdog Rises fantasy

2) Everyone thinks they're creative

3) Talent evaluation is difficult enough in the current paradigm. Hiring/promoting based on 'creativity' is even harder. How can super-creative types 'rise to the top' if we mere mortals can't identify them to begin with? (Before you answer with platitudes about track record or whatever, ask yourself how well your solution is even faring right now. There are a gazillion recruiting startups for a reason.)

4) Author takes several paragraphs to explain an idea that requires two sentences.
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As an Awesome user on Ubuntu, I often end up referring to the ArchWiki. Also for a lot of driver issues. Their wiki is really excellent, I guess because when people are dealing with a lot of raw, newer packages they tend to work out the finer details of issues that people later on benefit from.
Artificial Intuition
> BGP, routing, AS, peerings, RIPE and all that kind of stuff

I have good application development and systems administration skills, I run a variety of server daemons including DNS, I maintain an OpenWRT-based home network on a Linksys WRT54GL (I really should upgrade to N, but the upstream pipe isn't big enough to need it and I don't do a lot of LAN transfers). I've written TCP and UDP applications in the past, and I've never had to worry about any of that -- from an application's perspective, you just put bits in one end of the pipe and they come out the other end (well, if you use UDP, there's some degree of luck involved).

I've only heard those acronyms in passing and don't really know how those things work (well, maybe in a vague theoretical sense).

Does anyone know of good resources for learning those things? For example, how to set up a bunch of VM's which speak BGP and do routing and peering?
I'm pretty sure Turbo Tax is not saving as you go. I had just finished entering my income a couple of weeks ago, and just as I started on my deductions, it crashed. None of the work I had done up to that point was saved.
that is a good book. a class based on it would be even better. you can also practice with GIMP
But if they cared about cutting costs they wouldn't have invented their own cable to begin with. When has Apple ever worried about making people pay for things they don't use?

I'm disappointed because Lightening was billed as the next innovation in design, but if the picture quality is worse then what's the point?
Here[1] is an excellent HN thread about that painter in your first link.

The video[2] in the top link of that thread is a little long, but very much worth watching. I was incredibly impressed by this man's perseverence and achievement.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3031684

[2] - https://s3.amazonaws.com/markerdmann.com/Paintings.mov