skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting post. But is it really strange that it is hard to find people who are interested in programming, or who are willing to invest in learning it? No matter how we improve it, in the end, programming is just instructing a machine how to conduct itself. Which is an activity that attracts only a few people who are intrinsically fascinated by that, and some others that learn the craft because it is good for its money.
We can improve the state of programming to make it more fun or easier to learn or understand, but whether you are writing a process scheduler or programming LEGO Mindstorms, the activity in itself doesn't change. You are still interacting with machines, not humans, you are mastering a creative process, which doesn't always sit well with working as a team, and the end result of your work is machine behaviour. These constraints are bound to scare off a lot of people. Improving the state of programming won't change that.
>Watch that TV show you've always wanted to. Take a walk for no reason at all. Go on that roller coaster once more. Call up your 89 year old grandma on the phone.

I'd say go for the second two options. From where I sit, there's little need to encourage most of us (in the U.S.) to watch that TV show.

Seriously though, this article hits a good point. People are always flying around like the world is ending when they really have tons of time to slow down a bit and treat other people with more respect/compassion.

Next time you're rude to a cashier because you had to stand in line 2 more minutes than you wanted to, just go ahead and slap yourself.
It sounds like he's complaining that it was telling him to go somewhere he already was.
Well, I think this is shortsighted. H1-B is 'bad' because it's increasing the number of workers competing for the same pool of STEM jobs. Steering your kids towards accounting increases the number of workers competing for the same pool of accounting jobs.

Except, I think STEM associates a lot more with 'growth industry' than accounting.
Sleeping with the enemy - Google Now for iPhone, iPad
Man, that Mega Man 2 sure sucks, huh?
Tweet-Powered Tornado at the Weather Channel office
There used to sometimes be ads in paperback books. In the middle of the book would be a thicker page, with a full color ad. I remember cigarette ads were common.

Here's an article about this: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/books/review/Collins-t.htm...
That's because that joke stopped being funny 10 years ago.
Seriously. What the hell? lol. The petition didn't even mention what tax dollars are going to Microsoft...
American Splendor - About comic creator Harvey Pekar, who isn't an artist, just a storyteller. But was the creator of some popular cult-classic comics detailing his ordinary life tribulations and trials. Creativity comes in all forms.

Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi - these are usually more considered artsy films but they also small views of different cultures busy at work and how they interact.

Some of the early Nova series programs (early = 1980's) they had some really great stuff such as the Exploratoruim - its history and a really good bit about how they designed/built exhibits (with the founder, Dr. Frank Oppeheimer)... and another one on Open Spaces, particularly centering on the public spaces in New York and the studies of maximizing planning and design for public usability. It just illustrated to me there are a wide variety of real life problems in need of solutions.

Bell Science Educational Series - (1956-64, available on VHS) covers a lot of ground in many aspects of sciences (not just physics and chemistry) Very approachable for a kid from the sticks. :-)
I sure do agree emotionally with you about "fuck you Origin"... which is weird, because I also think that a monopoly is dangerous for gamers, so why am I emotionally so pro-Valve-monopoly? I guess it's partly because I know that EA _will_ try to screw me, whereas I trust Valve a lot more. Who else is as trustworthy as Valve (i.e. far from perfect, but you've gotta be way better than EA), and big enough to pull it off?

When I think about how Valve built their brand, at least in my eyes, it was a two-step process. First, make a few great games (and no high-profile duds). That's your foundation. Then add all the Steam stuff, and be careful to never ever screw me over. EA isn't good enough at step 1, and while they haven't screwed ME over, there are too many people crying and screaming for me to ignore it.

Who else could diversify the digital-distro ecosystem? Maybe Blizzard? Except now it's Blizzard/Activision, and Activision seems sketchy this era.

Maybe ZeniMax? (I dunno what Zenimax is like as a corporate overlord, but if you sum up the brand credibility of all their subsidiaries, that's a lot of credibility! I might not enjoy playing id games any more, but I respect the hell out of them, and open-sourcing all your engines is exactly the kind of trust-builder that an overlord needs.)
I admit calling out OP for creating a conspiracy theory was a little bit too harsh.

That said, I did not understand a better way to put my point across. The article barely mentions Mozilla, doesn't mention Google at all. They talk about why a guy (a mozilla employee, a former Opera employee) was getting sued.

It does not talk about Opera suing Mozilla. Period. OP took that information and extrapolated it to Opera suing Mozilla because they are chums with Google now.

This is a huge jump in reasoning without any substantial evidence to point at. I am sure there is a Latin phrase for what kind of fallacy it is. I am unaware of it. But I have seen this happen in conspiracy theories, so I put it in the mildest way I could think of. If that offended anyone, I apologize.
Speaking of Google properties on Apple devices - anybody got any clues on when Google Maps might get an official iPad version?
But I guess it should know you're on your way if you appear to be moving along the route to the event.
I love getting history like this. I'll add to the question if any Microsoftians are around: who decided to call it XMLHttpRequest?
If you make a diligent search a requirement, then the incentive is to make such a search impossible to perform effectively; obfuscate the ownership if you can.
yeah... if you can't get a pi to generate some html, then you're doing it wrong. I actually host sites on a pi and it can handle a lot of traffic.

I also host sites that get quite a lot of traffic on a VPS with 128 MB of RAM with no trouble.
> On the gripping hand, tastes can be changed fairly easily - if you eat mashed potatoes a couple of dozen times, you'll learn to tolerate them.

My parents used to be proponents of that idea as well, until they encountered me.

They did at least get a cool story out of it which they relate everything Thanksgiving, about the time 10-year-old me grew a pair and simply tossed the mashed potatoes in the trash instead of sitting at the table for 2 hours.
Pair programming is like treating the other mind as an extension of yours. You have to force each mind to be on the same thought and same problem. If one side wanders off, they have to be brought back.

When one decides to go in a wild new direction, the other has to follow or pull in the other direction. When one makes a mistake, the other has to correct it.

When it starts to flow, it's a form of intimacy that can be extremely gratifying as it begins to feel like 1 or 2 additional programmers are in the room. You learn each others strengths and weaknesses, and the combined power of 2 minds can do things that the individuals were incapable of doing.

I understand pair programming. I've done it, the hard part is finding a compatible human to whom you can experience it with. When it really flows and you feel the additional ghost programmers helping out, it's like sex. A cosmic melding of two minds. When you are apart, it's like 75% of you is missing, and that is kind of sad.
Mining Big Data for Programming Talent
Thanks.

I think there is a lot todo with HN Karma.
Several ideas:
1. Sort posts by karma
2. Karma gamification
a. Show 20 community members with karma score near yours within a period (week/month).
b. Weekly Karma challenges
VF Profiles: Karen Rubin - A Passion to Build in Boston
Isn't aluminum particularly profitable to recycle, even with a low recovery, since it requires absurd amounts of power to smelt the stuff in the first place?

Aluminum is incredibly abundant in the earth's crust, but from what I understand it is the poster-boy for recycling because of the extreme difference in power costs between melting it down, and making it in the first place.
Wow, that is a bunch of places to make the same change.
Ask HN: Has anyone here saved a failing software project?
If so, how did you do it? Was the old team still there or did it need new people?
What is a FLOP, Anyway?
Eh, I find it kind of annoying, a notification for every restaurant, city, country, etc that I look up and have absolutely zero intention of traveling to. It has potential to be useful, but it needs to get smarter first.

Maybe I spend too much time searching Maps randomly.
That's a problem with the definition of "STEM." It's a categorical grouping that doesn't reflect any real relationship. Building web applications is not even remotely related to writing research papers about microbes or subatomic particles. It's a completely different job market. When people say "there is a shortage of STEM graduates" they usually just mean CS graduates. But the journalists writing this are too non-technical to know the difference, so they try to refute this by pointing to statistics that show the US has plenty of STEM graduates. Too bad they're mostly biologists and not programmers!
That's an interesting point. So we can differentiate between top-talent coders who are in high demand from top companies, and the bulk of programmers working for far less at companies like Infosys, Wipro, etc.

But who are Facebook, Google, Microsoft (not to mention, Infosys, Wipro, etc.) trying to hire through the H-1B program? Top talent? Average coders? Why doesn't Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc., first recruit from the masses of underpaid Infosys developers? This would force the "bad actors" to improve as well.
Two things that make me suspect this information is anecdotal rather than from a hiring manager (though I could be wrong):

1) I left MSFT around 2006, but the offers I made to (admittedly, mostly blue chip) candidates in 2002-2004 were closer to 80k and not even at the top end of the L59 level band. I'm not sure those early year numbers are quite spot on.

2) The initial offers are set for the middle of the L59 compensation range/band. As those bands went up, so did all of the others - I guarantee the L59 band is not above the L60 band. If you got hired in 2006, you're at least L62 by six years later (or you would have been managed out, in any non-disfunctional org). Even if you'd been camping and never made L63 (which is a big bump), you would get raises as the midpoint for the band moved over the years. Otherwise, it raises very serious issues with your group's HR generalist about why you have a L62 who's being paid outside (below or above) the acceptable range around the salary band and the manager would have been encouraged to either motivate or manage out the employee, if they really didn't deserve raises to take them back into the correct compensation range.

Microsoft is disfunctional about many things, but the HR generalists were pretty good at tracking and running numbers and asking very hard questions about people who were over/under-compensated or stagnating at a low level (sub-L63).
A related anecdote:

ASU held Emerge2013 (http://emerge2013.asu.edu) a few or so ago. There were some workshops that ran from midweek to the weekend, and on the last day there were some workshop presentations, talks, festivities. It was quite fun (I was in a workshop).

Sterling is ASU's "Visionary in Residence." http://csi.asu.edu/csi/introducing-csi-visionary-in-residenc...

He gave the closing talk of the conference. It was pretty interesting, for two reasons. One, I learned about Vaclav Havel. Two, Sterling called out the conference for being (if I recall correctly) a bit too self-absorbed and navel-gazy. That is, while it was fun and no doubt interesting to the attendees, what practical value did it generate?

I may be recalling the details wrong, but the essence of it was that while he thanked ASU for putting on this grand show he was also willing to poke a stick at it and question its value, question whether it worked in a notable way.

I think in a way he missed the point (or a point), and perhaps had the wrong expectations about the conference, but I'm glad people are willing to stand up and push people to question he things they are doing.

[edit: Just started listening to this Berlin video. "Diegetic prototypes". He's big on that; used that same term in his Emerge2013 talk.)
Watch your GitHub contributions as Conway's Game of Life.
Chef Integration for Automated Monitoring with CopperEgg
Chef cookbook overview and example on how to bootstrap a Centos EC2 instance with CopperEgg server monitoring
How to Brew Coffee Without a Coffee Maker
Cigarettes would not be legal if they were invented today. I've seen first hand what years of pot smoking does to people, it's not worth it.

Drinking to excess is a growing problem and one that should be tackled.

I can't really understand what point you're making, is it that you think class A drugs should be legalised?
Er...no? Like, completely no? I don't care if you question it. Question it all you like. But if you want to claim it doesn't work, you have a long road to hoe.

Personally, "I get other people's work for free" is outweighed by "I get other people's work that I actually want to play." Skyrim doesn't come out of a Kickstarter.
Catchy headlines have been important since before the Internet though.
Chartio is hiring front end developers for data vis
Don't take should from anyone. It is fine not to care about HN karma.

Downvotes and upvotes can mean lots of different things - from expressions of agreement/disagreement, to valid/invalid reasoning or facts, to somebody commenting on my personality.

The first constructive view of karma I had was as editorial feedback on my writing. If someone downvotes a comment, either I did not communicate my point clearly, or I was mistaken, or it confirms I made my point exactly [I will make comments that I suspect will be downvoted].
The Money Masters by Bill Still
The worst offender I've seen so far was on Hulu I think. You could either watch the 1 or 2 minute advertisement, or type the company's slogan into a text box. That really weirded me out...
Under the Hood: The natural language interface of Graph Search
Mozilla kills "Persona" brand for themes - full speed ahead for "Persona" SSO
IMO a lot of "European" economics consists of focusing all attention on the very unusual special circumstances in which it is wise to conduct the left-leaning politics that envious populists prefer and ignoring reality.

I remember seeing lessons from an economics class in Germany where the first lessons include conflict between capitalists and labor and the negative effects of income inequality. In America, we start with basic supply and demand models.
Not to mention younger workers are often more risk tolerant / seeking. If you're 43 years old, with a family to support and a mortgage, it might make perfect sense to take a safer job.

If you're 20 with no family, no mortgage, etc. you sign up with Zuckerberg to 'change the world,' with little concern over whether it crashes and burns.

I think that equation artificially pumps up the pop culture relation between youth and doing great things at new startups (never mind the rarely told stories of failure and misery that can go with crashing and burning). Leading to a false conclusion that youth is superior at things like programming / engineering / innovation.
Probably. It would have to make a lot of assumptions to infer your intention when searching, at least in Maps, etc. current form.

A browser plugin to enable/disable Now tracking seems like it could be handy, however. Though then if you forget to turn it back on you lose what eitally mentioned: "I forgot X, oh, thankfully Now caught it".

But doesn't Google Maps have a history feature that syncs across devices? Now seems like it might be polluting that space.
Yet if it was more accurately framed as $2000 for an iPhone 4 with 2 years of service or $2200 for an iPhone 5 with 2 years of service, she probably would never have picked the iPhone 4. She might have picked the iPhone 5 or she might have picked a dumb phone that didn't require a data plan.
I havent tried charts with princexml, but flying-saucer has capability to do custom rendering. So if you want, you can use a service to get image of your chart and then render that in the pdf as image.
Shouldn't this be true for any industry ?
We were largely inspired by GitHub's Hubot in writing this list of examples. Additionally, it's fairly trivial to use our developer platform to spin up new, private actions for custom services and APIs.

Happy to answer questions!
The Un-series: A collection of what is not
Grab bag of tricks
As someone who has used all three major platforms extensively, I think I could shed some light on this.

iOS has the "absolute best apps" because of the level of polish, design, and near-pixel-perfect elements visible in the apps. I've used Android for years (SGS2 and Nexus 7) and many of the apps are poorly designed and have even poorer implementations. Many of them feel like they are just 5 standard UI widgets put together on the screen is just bland. This can be seen by how many Android applications use Holo but don't try to give it their own personality. Small changes to the UI can lead to a personalized and tailored/polished feel (Starbuck's green standard navbar, Netflix's logo on their own red navbar, etc). Also, iOS apps seem to experiment more with gestures and UX concepts. Using apps like Clear, Google Maps, Haze, etc. really shows you how well thought out an app could be. It just seems like many of Android's apps look the exact same and lack that attention to detail, I guess.

Also, please remember that "more powerful" doesn't correlate to "best." I would rate Clear much, much higher than most Android apps. While it doesn't allows me to access the root filesystem, overclock the CPU, or alter the boot image, it's extremely intuitive, attractive, and works beautifully.
Is "women" the wrong term these days?
Awesome! Sarah Allen @ultrasaurus and @railsbridge featured on National Public Radio.
Act of Terror: arrested for filming police officers - video
Seriously guys, is it really a problem?

Developers use the information to make the product better. They use crash reports to fix bugs without you having to report them and they can determine what operating system and screen resolution you're using so the next time you open up the app, it's been optimised so those ugly black borders have been taken care of.

Granted, they could ask your permission to do this, as some applications do. However, are you really going to spend time integrating an extra layer of complexity between your game, when you're on a limited development budget and the priority should be on making the game more fun?

I believe having this stated in the privacy policy, together with the privacy rules agreed to at installation is more than adequate enough for this level of application, anything more would be overkill on the developers part.
Unlike recreational drugs, motorcycles are a useful tool that enables society to go about its business.

Knives also enable me to prepare dinner and surgeons to remove my appendix.

I don't think that class A drugs carry the same risk/benefit ratio, do you?

Also, I think you missed the part where I said that society and family carry some of the responsibility for that child taking drugs, but then you were too busy arguing the point you wanted to make rather than actually tackling what I said directly.
Yeah, dont credit Apple for ipod, iphone or ipad, dont credit Mark Zukerberg for social networking, Bill Gates to bring philanthropy to main stream, a government to find the terrorist of Boston attacks, It was all inevitable!
Stonehearth is on Kickstarter, Mod focused gaming
Faster, Better DOM manipulation with Dommy and ClojureScript
At least up to the age of 50 or so, at which point real memory begins to erode much faster than in prior decades.
They had Safari for Windows and dropped it. And iTunes and Quicktime both run considerably worse in Windows compared to OSX (besides looking out of place).
Looks cool; I have a question though.

Why are there two "D" in the following screenshot?

http://i.imgur.com/WTQNBEs.png
Yes, they're trying to hire top talent through the H-1B program. Immigration status is orthogonal to talent.

That's the reason they're generally not trying to recruit from the masses of underpaid infosys developers.
I thought the pairing was a nice fit. They both have their place and it seems to work to their mutual benefit quite well.
Interaction without doing the wireframing. I love typography and color theory/psychology, and yes I've done my fair share of user testing - still do too.

The thing is, as a creative individual, I don't pigeonhole myself as a "developer" or a "designer." On some projects, the majority of coding is handled by someone else and I slip into frontend dev and graphic design roles, and product vision. In others, I'll do more backend stuff as I'm the most competent person on that project. And in others I'll do the whole shabang, because it's my project and mine alone.

"And ya, those decisions will suck until we've made them a few times."

You're right, but that's with everything. Practice, and learn why what you you've made/done isn't top-notch and then think about how to get it there the next time. Rinse, repeat.
It is interesting to think how social e-commerce will be like in the future. Sina Weibo and Alibaba(Taobao and Alipay) have so many individual informations.
A metasearch for finding the best time to buy airline tickets
Am I the only one annoyed by blatant overuse of the word 'hacker' in this article?

I'm starting to group this word with catastrophes such as 'rockstar' and 'ninja' now.
Ignore the examples. many things are said right.
I agree that Struts wasn't first on the web.

But a 2000-2001 handrolled MVC framework does not qualify as "pre-Struts".
What I'm talking about here is a malicious service (Relying Party) that provides his own malicious BrowserID client to the user. Web services or mobile apps often provide their own clients. If the user's private key is leaked to a malicious RP when the user logs in this RP, can't it generate fake identity assertions (using the leaked key) to use along with the user certificate to login to any other Persona account? The faked identity assertion can claim to be for any service.
Agreed. Happy to see this caused an eye roll in some one else.

Doing good, but misrepresenting the 'big issues' is not helpful. Too often good intentions substitute for good work.

One should care about the race or gender of someone, the goal should be to attract the most talent. Also, saying 'everyone can learn' may give a warm fuzzy feeling and make people think you are a good person, but it is most likely not true.

Pushing a round peg into a square hole is destructive both for the peg and the hole.
Serious options: Aeropress or Hario V60 drip filter (or similar -- Chemex, &c.), and a good hand-grinder. I use Hario's skeleton/skerton.

Does anyone know of any services similar to Tonx that will ship to England?
I misread the title at 1st and thought it was statsgasm.....
I find it funny that because technology began in the simplest, unencrypted, analog formats that now the government expects the ability to wiretap anything with ease.
Please, give some details on that case, I'd be interested to read more.
Usually true, but Linux hardware problems are another matter. If its FireWire based you just type random things from forum posts until something happens.
The Folly of Technological Solutionism - Lecture by Evgeny Morozov