skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't learn to code in college, or at least not in class. Good coders almost universally learn outside the classroom. This is true for people who go to college and those that forgo it.

So if you don't go to college to learn to code, why go at all?
You go to learn the fundamentals of computer science and math which underlie everything that we do.

It's certainly possible to obtain this knowledge on your own with serious self-study. But it's a hard route (albeit one getting easier thanks to Coursera et al.) and given two candidates with equal coding ability, the one who went to college is far more likely to have a strong grip on theory.

Is theory actually useful? I would claim that it is, even for programmers doing CRUD apps and the like. Knowing the fundamental abstractions of computer science and the ways people have applied them in the past saves an enormous amount of needless reinvention. As a concrete example, parsing is a very well-studied problem in academia. But somebody without that background trying to write a parser will struggle far more than another familiar with CFGs or PEGs.

Being able to program is just scratching the surface of computer science. It's necessary but not sufficient for being a great programmer.
Were there ever really common peek and pokes that would change programs?

Yes, "poke 53280,0" would directly write address 0xd020 to 0x00 which then e.g. would turn the border black on the C-64. But those were addresses in the mapped custom chips. More like setting a pixel on a modern GFX card by poke and less changing a program.

The later development of expansion cartridges to give you more lives in games or enable a cheat-mode there would a kind of peeking and poking, but hardware based etc.
An outgoing firewall is a hassle to keep track of, though -- with all the plethora of system calls and background processes that constantly request data the management must take a lot of time away.
College is expensive, and if you need to take out a loan to go there (most do) it is risky. Not only that, but credentialism (the idea that college exists in order to get credentials) coupled with the enormous expense has led to declining standards and quality at American schools. It is not unreasonable to ask why one should be paying so much and taking on such a large risk for an education that is of questionable quality, particularly in fields where vocational skills can be learned elsewhere.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this too at some point. It can be done but the problem is you don't solve the problem.

Now you have this elaborate tool that's going to get insanely complex if you want to really cover everything. You will be spending your time tweaking the generator's config files and adhering to its restrictions. I only made mine generate code for 1 language too, I couldn't even imagine trying to support multiple languages.

Eventually you're going to monkey patch in so many stupid rules because you run into sites that need something you didn't think of, and then it's going to get into this jumbled mess of insanity that makes you want to kill people whenever you use it.

The solution is to leverage your code editor and create snippets that get you 90% of the way. Now you have the annoying boiler plate out of the way but you have end points and their respective http handlers separate for each resource.

Now if you need something specific it's as simple as editing the resource that needs something specific and you don't have to worry about anything.

You trade in some code duplication for modularity and simplicity. I'm going to make this trade all day, especially when you can eliminate most of the grunt work with snippets in your editor.

You want to maximize productivity?

1. Make some snippets for whatever tech you use.

2. Create an extremely basic project skeleton and put this on github. Then clone it for new projects.

3. ??

4. Profit.
Downloading games that you don’t own is definitely
illegal, of course, and it hurts the content providers.
The only reason that we have games to play is because
people pay for them - so please don’t download ROMs of
games that you don’t actually own. It’s easy to buy huge
packs of second-hand console games on ebay, often with
the actual systems included, and it doesn’t cost a lot
of money.

This argument always seems a bit weak to me... I don't see how buying second-hand games and consoles is going to benefit the original gamemakers in any way.

Of course if you could buy the original games directly from their authors it would be a different story, but you can't! Is there something I'm missing here?
Musk's plan in a way serves as a reminder for those of us that tend to overestimate the role luck plays in the personal journey towards entrepreneurial success.

I agree that Elon's results with Tesla and Space X are not principally (or even much) based on luck, but this is (at least in part) because he has the resources to finance his visions directly and can use his tech-celebrity status to help bring them to fruition.

How did he get into this enviable position? It's largely due to the sale PayPal to eBay, of course—and, as those in the know will tell you, luck was a big factor in PayPal's success.
World of Tanks: Los siete magníficos
The biggest reason, I hear, is that Steve is more than a little bit loony.
One argument against using stderr: IIRC stdout defaults to line buffering (or more if piped), while stderr is flushed immediately, so using stderr vs. stdout can yield different results.
> also possibly suppressing the ones I do not pay for.

No kidding!
Where are you studying? My undergrad (City College of New York) was mostly C++/Java with the exception of the PL course, which used Scheme. We also had an elective that taught x86 assembly.

I had to discover and learn Haskell on my own :)
The only ones who could tell if the Japanese were actually ready to surrender were the Japanese.

They refused to surrender after Hiroshima.
They refused to surrender after the U.S.S.R. declared war.
Finally after Nagasaki their cabinet deadlocked 2-2 on the decision to surrender. The Emperor himself broke the tie by deciding for peace (a decision which brought a minor coup of its own).

Adm. Leahy was correct if he was using Western logic and ideals. In fact it was clear since 1943 that Japan would be defeated and had to surrender or eventually lose the war.

He's also correct that it was of no material assistance compared to conventional weaponry. There were only so many atomic bombs available and the B-17s rampaging across Japan were certainly doing a fine job as well.

The part I don't understand is why he thought atomic bombing a city was barbarous, but firebombing Tokyo was how gentlemen conducted warfare. More Japanese died in a single firebombing raid than died in Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki.

This raid I mention occurred in March 1945 by the way, not August. In light of that it's hard to claim with a straight face that conventional weapons were forcing Japan to surrender before invasion of the Home Islands. They had every reason to surrender in March if that was their only tripwire to decide to do so.
http://valleyanon.com/ - I'm building an anonymous blogging platform to help people tell their story without fear. I think anonymity online should be available to everyone and I'd love any feedback you might have.
It's not really possible to do what you want to do (at least not without generating a CSS rule for every possible percentage value), but you can get damn close by calculating the right rotation (apparently "percent * 1.8 - 90") and setting the "transform" properties yourself.

EDIT: here's a "pure CSS" version: http://codepen.io/tlrobinson/pen/aGvrF
Exist a RSS parser API or need to build my own?
I'm building a iOS RSS reader. I use MWFeedParser but hit fast some feeds with invalid stuff. Then I look at https://developers.google.com/feed/v1/ but the data it return is limited. So I tough in build a web service with python and https://pypi.python.org/pypi/feedparser, but now I need to worry about scalability and the associated cost (cost that my app probably will not cover, not sure yet).

I wonder if exist a cost-effective api to parse feeds as robust as feedparser, or need to reconsider my plans...
A vaccine is not a cure. It's prevention - which already exists for mother to child HIV transmission.

Anyway, the doctors don't make any absolutely definitive statements, but:

"Now, after at least one year of taking no medicine, this child's blood remains free of virus even on the most sensitive tests available"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/03/us-doctors-cur...
I am not a NYT author, I am an average Joe with comparatively very few followers and follow. Here is what I did to see a vast difference between what FB was showing me, versus what the reality was.

Create two Lists, add people you know in-person to one list and the unknowns to the other list. Now, only watch these two lists instead of watching the default newsfeed.

I guess you could also accomplish the above by adding everyone to a single list and watch that list instead of the default newsfeed served by FB.

I was surprised to see so much difference between what FB's default newsfeed is serving versus what people are actually doing on the Facebook.
mvp - Fixed :)
"John wrote 'had'. James wrote 'had had'. James' answer had a better effect on the teacher."
Developers set their own rates. Right we are doing intro calls for as low as $40 p.h.
This can go on indefinitely, recursively.

The story behind this sentence is of two students comparing their texts, the one with "had" (version 1), the other with "had had" version 1, yielding 11 "had"s in a row. Call that story S_0. Now imagine a story S_(n+1) where two students write texts discussing story S_n, with version 1 replaced by the consecutive row of "had"s from S_n, and version 2 replaced by a similar row of "had"s, but one longer.
If it happened enough I could imagine there being some kind of controls. Bulk purchases of certain kinds of fertilizer were controlled post-Oklahoma-City, for example. On a lower level, some jurisdictions have restrictions on spraypaint sales, in an effort to combat graffiti.
Decline and Fall: What History can teach us about Facebook, Apple and Google?
Oh, I thought you were referring to their storing of passwords or in transit. I don't think they can store notes in an encrypted format because they do ocr on images, which is actually one of the selling points for me.

I just with their built-in text encryption was better.
I am extremely pro-science. However, I am angry about attempts to scientifically study gun ownership because I know the only reason is to try and violate my rights by restricting or banning ownership. It's just as offensive to me as a scientific study to decide if we should restrict or ban free speech. Unless you honestly think they undertake these studies to expand our firearm rights or strictly for scientific curiosity?
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...
to just veg and to play the two games I actually enjoy playing.

Really. I try hard to keep my tech-hobby time from being "productive". What I do with computers and/or sound is -fun- and the world'll be damn lucky if anything comes out of it but my amusement. When I was a kid I'd lay on the lawn staring at clouds (hard in winter) or run around everyone's houses and lawns with kids (several reasons that's no longer an option). Got another harness, go get yourself a horse.
Conversion XL is a great site, I wished I'd discovered it earlier. Thanks for posting this.
For those of you too young to remember the 90's, AIDS meant sure death in very few years. It was worse than cancer: with some cancers, you stood a chance.

How far we've come :)
The caveat to this is that having a CS degree does not guarantee that valuable experience was gained. There were people who stood next to me when I received my CS degree that were unable to craft basic HTML.

On the other hand, I enjoyed my entire time in college, and I feel that I received a great deal of valuable experience, but I also did a great deal of coding outside of school. I think in my case I would have been fine without getting a degree, but it helped to hone some of the areas that I was not very strong in.
What government entity cares this much about bittorrent vpns?
James's answer had had a better effect on the teacher ;)
I wonder how this child's "blood remains free of the virus" status compares to the 'undetectable' viral loads reported for others (eg Magic Johnson) for many years. Is there a qualitative difference?
I'm at Berkeley.

I also had to find Haskell on my own, but I think it worked out reasonably well in the end. The type theory/semantics class did use a bit of OCaml, but it took a while to get to it.

Also, I should add that--largely due to my own preferences--I've taken a disproportionate number of classes that do not really focus on programming at all. The aforementioned type theory/semantics course only had a token amount of programming, and three other CS classes had no programming at all. They were also some of the coolest and most fun. (After all, I can do programming on my well enough; theory is a bit harder.)
Amiga Workbench in Javascript
Perhaps a silly question: Do they use an error correcting algorithm that scrubs the data and if not, is there a reason?
Didn't unmanned drones play a role in locating Chris Dorner in California? I'm ok with incidences like this where drones are used to look for fugitives in places that may be extremely inconvenient or dangerous for humans. Obviously cheaper domestic drone options makes it easier for more police departments to these resources, but will a low barrier to using these drones eventually lead to overuse of drones?

I also found "FAA officials are required to open U.S. skies in 2015 to widespread use of unmanned aircraft by public agencies and private industry." quite interesting.
A sybill attack on Tor is probably the least efficient attack. It'd be far easier to perform a correlation attack if you know the probable endpoints, or compromise the target's computer (if you only know the source).

I'm sure government agencies run Tor exits, which means they'll see the middleman node's IP addresses and whatever traffic the originator sent (usually HTTPS). They can't do much with that.
Well, I will never work there. Ever.
I'm not so much frustrated about being exactly right at a high level, since I am experienced enough with other languages to get the general architecture down correctly. It's more like "How do you declare a slice of channels of channels of ints? Do you make() it or not? If you want to pass a channel, do you pass a pointer or not? How do you pass and reference a pointer? Do you use make in the outermost scope? How do you iterate over a channel but still handle a close?"

It's stuff like that, things I already know how to do in other languages but whose syntax eludes me in Go. I think all I can do is power through it until I gain some familiarity, though. Good thing the people in the IRC channel are amazingly helpful.
At this point, there are better technologies that are stable. My language of choice, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_lisp
Since openemu.org is now just an information-less "coming soon" page, the following links are probably more useful:

https://github.com/OpenEmu/OpenEmu

and

https://github.com/OpenEmu/OpenEmu/downloads
Water and nutrients from the poop may need to be recycled, certainly for deep space missions. Using it as a rad-shield would help to keep it sterile while in storage.
I still don't see the use case for web app or web game development in Go.

Go ahead and make a mini Go app, re-implement half the features that Express in Node has, then benchmark the 2 with real data using the same data and templates.

Come back when you see that once you start pulling records in from mongodb or somewhere else and start rendering either server side templates with this mongo data or serving json back then the performance differences of the 2 frameworks begin to disappear.

Node will perform better under high concurrency too for most sized responses.

So where's the motivation to switch? If I switch to Go then I have to learn Go + I'm still using Javascript on the front end.

If I stick with Node then I can use my JS knowledge on both ends. This is a really big deal for day to day web app programming and is a deal breaker for html5 games.

Go cannot be taken seriously to be used for web apps until it offers actual performance gains over JS and gets something that lets you write Go but it spits out JS for the client, sort of like Java has GWT (ps. that bombermine mmo uses GWT).

There's also a serious lack of good light weight web frameworks for Go. None of them come close to what Express does for Node, and I'm not the only one who thinks Express is really close to an excellent mix of features without getting in your face.
Also to note, the most accurate available SNES emulator is byuu's "bsnes", which is meant to be an archival-quality SNES emulator. Although it looks like now it's called "higan" since it supports more systems than just SNES.

http://www.byuu.org/
I'd say the economic harm of bootlegging 10+ year old games from large publishers on platforms that are no longer produced is close to zero.
So, I wanted to play some snes9x on my mac mini. It's hooked up to a tv via hdmi; and every time I start/stop a game, it switches the hdmi output and overscans like crazy. I still can't figure out whats going on with it.

Anyone experience similar with hdmi output?
Auto Transport El Cajon, California – Shipanycar
Downloading ROMs has a clear slippery slope to downloading other games. If you get the games the way the comment describes then their is a built in mechanism to limit how much you can get for free, and with more recent games would leave you much more likely to purchase them.
The HIV-AIDS hypothesis is a hoax concocted by someone who never did any research on HIV. Do your research please.
Can you explain a little more what you're getting at? I'm not very familiar with hardware and don't know anything about video. The adapter seems like a neat hack, but definitely a workaround for something. I can't really tell if you're defending it or not.

What's the win from an engineering standpoint here? And why is this an inevitable design (which you suggest if I understand you right)? What are some other options and what are the reasons those might not have been used?
Such people who are undetectable are also on meds. People who are not on meds don't have undetectable viral loads.

I wonder if the kid has the CCR5-Δ32 mutation, which seems to provide natural immunity against certain strains of HIV.
Being fairly young, I can not remember a time in my life when a disease was cured or a vaccine created that significantly reduced transmission. I keep expecting a grand announcement like "AIDS cured" or "Cancer defeated" but there are always so many caveats that it feels like progress isn't being made. I wonder if it was the same way with other diseases in the past, and I am just being important, or if modern day ones are somehow different.
gun control cannot be decided by a science-based, cost-benefit analysis alone. That's because we have the 2nd Amendment.

The 2nd amendment doesn't say anything about guns; it speaks of arms. And we seem to have a science-based cost-benefit based policy regarding all sorts of non-gun arms: you can't buy shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles or landmines or tanks. You can't even talk about practical astronomy with foreigners in some cases thanks to ITAR.
Not true. I live in Portland, and Alaska is the dominant airline here. I have flown with them over a dozen times, and never had a bad experience.
Most of the comments here generally rave about Go, but what would be more useful to us is things that people found not to be so great in it, like michaelfairley's comment. I'd like to know what Go isn't good for, to avoid spending ages writing something in it because I like its features only to discover it can't easily do something I want.
how is this hacker news moroon
Lua String Buffers
Folks should first learn to correctly use "its" vs. "it's" and "lets" vs. "let's". Then graduate to correct past-perfect usage :-)
I think a big congratulations is due for SpaceX; one is an aberration, two is on it's way to being normal. So congrats to them for moving towards a normalization of privatized space operations.
Indeed, and I think many of them are of questionable quality.

I'm trying to remedy this with a language agnostic test suite. [1]

[1] - https://github.com/BurntSushi/toml-test
And I thought that Portuguese could be ambiguous....

I don't think these.sorts of phrases are valid in Portuguese.
An overview of serialization formats. Numbers and anecdotes.
The only two use cases I can think of is playing a video you recorded on your phone at a family gathering, or for playing Netflix on your TV without needing to hook up a Roku or similar.

Edit: third use case, hooking this up to a monitor to turn your smartphone into a desktop computer.
Why use Laravel?
No, that's still making the assumption that all worthwhile solutions are balls of mud, leading to "freeze it in time" as the only sane option for preservation. That's cultural, not inherent to the technology.

If every part of the stack is tiny and connected via common, documented protocols you have ample room for maintenance. That's easily validated by the Internet as a whole (and not the Web, which was burdened by its early design). A present-day "throw-away" that can do more than in the past is, more likely than not, leveraging a bigger and more decomposed software ecosystem, where bits of infrastructure can get remixed more readily. Pooh-poohing the results by saying "they solved a trivial problem" dismisses this underlying trend - tools and services that are currently "weekend hack" or "prototype only" have a habit of turning into tomorrow's "production-grade" if they gain substantial adoption.

There's no particular reason we can't achieve Internet-scale maintainability for all problems, other than it taking time to build protocols of the right size/complexity for every problem domain.
The Pattern Impulse: Thomas Walter Barber’s “scheming and devising”
"In 15 Years Half of US Universities May Be in Bankruptcy"
I'm craving more info. This is such an interesting dilemma to be in, it always boggles and then blows my mind to think about how hard it is to design something perfect enough to never have to physically touch it again in order to keep it working for decades, from a zillion miles away.

Are the A and B computers identical? From the last sentence, it would appear that way (B will become primary and if A can be repaired it will be the new backup, implying they are interchangeable). Why does it take so long to switch to the backup? Was the backup serving another purpose and now it needs to be retrofitted to take the place of A? How is this process done?

I would kill for a "postmortem" by the NASA team!
How It's Made - Inorganic Pigments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKFs2qX-Fkc
Asymmetric connectors weren't bad, it's when you have asymmetric connectors in rectangular plugs that it becomes a problem. I never tried to put FireWire 400 in backward, but USB is awful.
Just to be a smartarse ;):

cat <<EOF > output.txt
some
input
EOF
That is a great question. I guess it depends if the purpose is to learn how to solve problems, or how to use a tool that can solve a certain class of problems.

If it is the latter, I do wonder why single out coding? Coming with a programmer bias, I often feel like I could do a lot more useful automations in my life if I had more electronic and mechanical skills. There are many disciplines that seem just as useful that students would gain a lot from being exposed to, not just coding.
The Jobs Are Never Coming Back
Notice my name?

Some clever bugger managed to get ghoti

and ghoughpteighbteau doesn't fit.

Fun fact: I do not know how to spell ghoughpteighbteau, but I can type it.