skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's not totally false; Linux will work on almost everything, most of the time.

For certain definitions of the word "work" :-). Much of the reputation GNU/Linux has for being wonky and difficult to use comes not from alpha hacker types, their systems work just fine, but from relatively ordinary people with work to do who were talked into installing "Linux" to escape malware, get access to more free software, speed up an old computer, etc. For these people, editing xorg.conf is an unacceptable pre-condition to using a computer. Is there anything wrong with that? Absolutely not (IMHO).
I'm fairly anti-business as a rule, but this goes a bit too far for me. There does exist a right to refuse service and it is a legitimate, if very gray-area, right. There do exist multiple fora for political speech, though I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "public speech".

What you're asking for is, in my mind, a pretty clear violation of the right to assembly which includes the right to not associate.
I think this was posted on HN a few months ago:

http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html

They ran their own botnet to map the internet, and then discovered other malware already running on insecure home routers.
Why imagine anything that complex? You can buy all the guns you want at Walmart today.

Anyone who can afford a 3D printer and the material can already afford a cheap rifle that will work infinitely better.
gwern, thanks for the reply.

I admire your prolific output, even if I don't agree with a lot of your conclusions (historical and political, that is, because your math/stat is too complicated for me to understand). I have to say, you have sparked a lot of discussion amongst me and my friends recently. The importance of argument from argument instead of from authority is made even more clear when the writer, by virtue of his (her?) anonymity, has no authority to fall back on, which makes his arguments even more critical. But it doesn't matter: some of the most accomplished people in history were amateurs. All that is required is a love of the subject, and you seem to love your subjects. Keep up the good work. BTC coming your way.
I hope that it's also reasonable that I've never heard of Conkeror before now. It seems like a pretty slick project though.. entirely keyboard oriented web browser =).

How well does youtube work on it?
Apparently there were some recent changed to the H1B which actually allow people on this visa to start their own companies. you should look into it.
I think the only cutoff is "lower bound of the height a potentially abusive adult would see it at", and retroactively went back and said "okay this height is average for a 10 year old".

According to what I find from a quick google, average height for a 10-year-old is about 4.5", with it starting to spike up dramatically at the age of 12-13 (from ~50 to ~60"). Without knowing the actual height they set this for, though, it's impossible to say how many kids they would or would not get with this kind of advertising.
Anecdotally I have come across developers that match the description the OP gives of himself. They read a lot of papers, they know a lot about the inner workings of many common and obscure programming languages. Many know and love development process theory and they contribute to open source projects. Here is the but: when push comes to shove, they can't deliver to production.

I've seen many smart coders falling short in real-life scenarios, where they refuse to take the shortcuts and make the trade-offs that most high-paced production projects need to deliver on time. And on the other side of the fence I have seen mediocre programmers deliver quality apps on schedule by allowing themselves to take what to a purist would look like shortcuts. More often than not, companies prefer the latter one.

Perhaps many employers have a process of surfacing stuff like that during the interview phase? Every time I interview someone to fill a position working with developing and delivering applications written in X, and all they want to do is tell me about the awesome type system in Y, alarms start to sound in my head.
After reading your list of professional habits--writing tests, contributing to open source, reading lots of technical literature--I think you're head and shoulders above a lot of employed programmers. I've been the technical interviewer before, and if you told me all that, I'd recommend hiring you, assuming you have a reasonable background. It sounds like you have a real appreciation for craftsmanship, which far too many programmers lack.

I don't know what your code's like, but I'm going to take a guess that it's above average. In my experience, people who think about the stuff you mentioned tend to write above-average code.

Let me tell you what I always looked for in technical interviews. I wasn't trying to determine whether a candidate was an utter genius who would offer novel and clever solutions to hard problems. That's too high a bar; most companies can't expect to consistently attract those types of candidates.

Instead, I wanted to see if candidates would write maintainable code. In other words, my #1 concern was whether the candidate was going to create a big mess for the rest of us to clean up. Will they pollute my functions with a bunch of special-case if statements because they had to add a new feature that doesn't fit into the current architecture? Or will they recognize the situation for what it is and start a conversation about changing the architecture? Will they take a class named Car and use it to represent a House, just because it exposes the method .door? Or will they recognize the importance of logical naming, create a new House class, and break out the .door method into a mixin? Stuff like that.

Not every interviewer makes that the #1 concern. We all have our pet peeves. But my point is, there's usually some very mundane, practical thing they're looking for. Not super-ninja-rockstar coder status. If you can determine what that practical concern is, you can then try to convince the interviewer why you're exactly what they need.
Notch does pretty well at attracting viewers when he codes live.
Anecdotes are not data, but here's some anecdata to support the "it brings new users" piracy argument:

I've been using Illustrator for about ten years. It's my main artistic medium; I'm currently engaged in drawing a comic book entirely in it. I'm at the point where I can pretty confidently say I've mastered it.

I've been paying for Illustrator for about five or six years. When I started using it, I was not a student, and there was no way I could afford a full-price legal copy.

If I hadn't pirated it, I would have not learnt it to the point where I could make enough money using it to buy it and keep it up to date. I would have used some other program, or gone with physical media. And I would not have been buying the thing for the past several years.
Put tracers in the raw 3d printer material like they do with fertilizer, so that 3D devices can be traced.
We know who you are: the scary new technology of iris scanners
You'd think people working on a project would know better than to believe inaccurate press rumors about the project they are working on, but unfortunately that's not always the case in my experience. While I was working in the Office division there were certain rumors about the next version of Office which had gotten play in the press and had become incredibly widely believed among people working on the next version of Office, despite everyone having access to the real plans (and despite the rumors not making any goddamn sense, but I digress).

It's not a matter of being "privy" to the details. Just having the ability to get accurate information doesn't mean you'll bother to take advantage of that ability.
I give it some love whenever I have some spare time!

Mostly built it so I could generate playlists purely with songs that I enjoy, and be able to easily access that from anywhere and on any computer. I figure you're coming from a similar angle? :)
It's a fantastic article.

I feel that the people chasing after the trappings of wealth will be less focused on the hard work involved in actually attaining it. The people that care about making an impact will be more likely to "stumble into" money by focusing on what really matters - what they create.
LOL. That is something I did not think about! =).
What do you use right now to create them? Thanks!
But there's at least some proof that you're able to do something. With Siegler, there isn't proof that he's able to do something.

I'm not saying Andreessen is good at everything, all I'm saying is that he's done something before.
Yea I thought that was funny too. My guess is that a majority of these "memories and moments" are not even images. We use DB to store all of the files for our app and 90% of them are text files.

I kind of hate how soft they make it... "I upload all my moments to my cloud and then frolic through the fields because technology is so meaningful!" give me a break
How not to deal with competition as an entrepreneur
>I don't care that xxxx is deprecated: it should just work.

Setting aside the concept of extrapolating from a small sample size using an admittedly deprecated system (on apparently poor hardware) which hasn't seen any significant use this decade, to "Linux sound is still obnoxious"...

The temerity of insisting that any deprecated software work perfectly is appalling. I am sad to say that my imagination does not stretch so far as to envision a world where this was a reasonable expectation. The one small solace that I can bring away from your post is that such an attitude must engender its own punishment.
Posture maintenance is one reason I fell in love with the Swopper, an "active sitting" stool that I describe to inquisitive friends as being equivalent to a "German-engineered exercise ball that looks like a stool and doesn't pop".

I bought it because the health benefits sounded intriguing, but mainly because I needed an affordable "ergonomic" seat that would fit within a small footprint. (At the time, my home office was very small)

I purchased one for just under $500 just shy of five years ago, and I never regret a single penny spent on it. I have used it for full-time work for all of those years, and I've never had a negative feeling of "I'm in pain because I've been sitting all day". The only drawback I experienced was that I napped more than usual during the first week or two, since "active" sitting does indeed use more energy than traditional "passive" sitting.

I should mention that prior to the Swopper I used cheap office chairs, so I can't compare it to using an exercise ball or high-end ergonomic seating. That said though, I think the Swopper is a great product for anyone looking for affordable ergonomic seating with small footprint.
Was hoping to empathize with the author, but just got annoyed by the end. It felt almost like emotional extortion, especially ending with the daughter bit.

I'm sorry you couldn't find a job in 2-months, but there are many other people who have tried for far longer. Suck it up.
That's an interesting question. While we're kind of taking the conversation off topic, let me speculate.

Imagine, if you will, that you have a popular product that you wish to EOL. And you know that people will not be happy. In fact, there'll be people who are downright angry and feel somehow betrayed. But you're going to do it.

These people want to vent their frustration. These days, they can take to Twitter, blogs and any number of sites like HN and Reddit.

But what if, as you told them you were discontinuing the product, you also gave them space to scream blue murder? And they would be screaming directly at your company, without even opening a new tab in their browser.

Now you've corralled at least some of the vitriol on your own platform. Now you can turn off the comments in a week or a month and all that venom disappears like it was never there.

Whether this is Adobe's intention doesn't matter. It's an interesting idea none the less.
"... will we have to endure over the next month"

So long as people click on those pages, everyone with even the most minute point will write to their hearts' content. I'm surprised that this page didn't have a million ads on it
Where did you get "6 months" from?
Oh man.. mobile compatibility. I have a nexus 4 coming in soon, so I might just give it a go. Making the video go away would make a few people happy for sure.
The real culprit here is draconian zoning laws which are drastically limiting the economic potential of this country and leaving millions of people unemployed or underemployed: http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO

If you were to remove many of the laws restricting redevelopment and the construction of tall buildings, everyone would benefit - property owners, property developers, tenants, local stores, rich people, poor people, the government, etc.
I think the Jeff Bezos' speech about how it's harder to be kind than clever is always good with the young folks: http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S27/52/51O99/. I'm not suggesting you copy it but rather talk about the lessons/takeaways.

I wouldn't get hung up with the pressure of thinking that, for you to help Scottish youth succeed, then you must help this one group succeed. This is a case, IMO, where a shotgun-approach works better than the rifle approach. You should do lots of speeches, workshops, groups, etc rather than just one. One speech - that's just too much pressure. What if you are nervous and come across geeky/hard to listen to? Too bad - the youth of Scotland will never succeed. But what if this is just one of 100 events? I'm not suggesting you "phone it in" but I am pointing out that there is success in numbers. Influence is a numbers game.

Good luck!
I have Forex.io :)

This just made it a lot easier to build a site on the domain
I'm familiar with a few people who have done this, and they really enjoy what they do. I wish anyone doing this all the best.

However it suffers the same problem as 1). That is, you may not have the energy for other projects. I understand the sentiment of your suggestion, which is: "My side project is also my work", but then you are committed to that project for X amount of time. Whereas with a typical side project that I might play with on the weekend, or with open source contributions, I am free to dabble with whatever interests me on that particular day. It is this freedom and flexibility that I am seeking in my life (partially because I have the attention span of a newt :)
Facebook rejects ad criticizing actions of Zuckerberg political group
What Does It Take for Traumatized Kids to Thrive?
I'm sure you must have heard "ya'll" in Houston?
The root of the problem is the tension of interests between the landlords who gain from an increase in property values, even if it prices out current residents, and the residents who have perverse incentives to make their area a worse place to live to keep out the yuppies.

Maybe you could securitize the value of the tenant's rent control, entitling an exiting tenant to a windfall if they are replaced by a higher-rent paying replacement? This would be on the theory that residential property values are an externality created by the people living there.
This is fascinating. Has anyone tried this with another journalist / publication?
I know how frustrating it can be when your bug isn't getting attention, but I've also been on the other side of that. It's not like Ubuntu (or any project) has hordes of developers who're just too lazy to tackle your bug: maybe not many people have that model, or don't tend to switch between speakers and headphones much. Maybe people couldn't reproduce the bug, or maybe just no-one could see how to fix it.

There's a whole host of reasons why bugs don't get fixed, but it's rarely because the project as a whole 'just decided to shelve it'.
Sorry miles, just a bit of friendly ribbing. Hence the winky face, but I guess that wasn't clear.
I've been watching Gittip and have been very impressed with how they're attempting to run an open company:

http://blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746/the-first-open-compa...

It's fun to read through their bug tracker and read discussions with their payment processor and look at debates on how different corporate minutia should be handled.

https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues

Even if you're not interested in Gittip (and I am, I think it's a very interesting funding model) the open company model that they follow should be quite inspirational.
How Technology Is Transforming Archaeology
As someone who generally believes in free markets, I am already unsympathetic to these people. However the venom directed at tech employees strikes me as something more than just economics.

People are having a go at nerds because they can. The scales of social status haven't changed since high school, but it turns out that nerds can earn a good salary, and in the "fascist" free market economy, this means they can live where they like, and the police will even protect them!

I wish I knew about this so I could show up in my Google sweater.
You don't need a "custom exploit" or a "custom developed tool" to access a public file called config.bog and base64 decode the user:pass. This Tridium exploit was well publicized in the past year but too many people (including this contractor who installed it) failed to upgrade the security or install the patches.
Tend to agree (though it's impossible to say about any particular person.) Mentioning TAOCP and SICP at an interview (as he did in the post) would raise some alarms with me. They're not useful books in most jobs, and bringing them up just makes you look like the kind of person who doesn't understand that.
In paragraph 6 and 7 you reject that it's a case of being bad at interview - but then in paragraph 15:

> And for all of this I still blunder my way through an exercise to write a function which returns a boolean in response to the question of whether sequence A is a sub-sequence of sequence B. I still draw a blank when asked what the magnitude of complexity is for the guests function I just wrote (damnit, of course calculating the permutations of a list is n-squared, but this is an interrogation of the random trivia I can manage to recall and I feel like a deer in the headlights).

That does, to me, sound like you do, in fact, have a problem with interviewing. The article is light on concrete facts to build off of, but if you're the kind of person who represent yourself to me (interviewing you) as having such an impressive toolbox as you certainly do seem to have in your possession, and then go on to fail to write a simple function and answer one of the most basic analytical (and, opposed to many other stupid gotchas/shibboleths, actually important) questions in computer science, then my "talker, not doer" red flag goes up, and you're going to have an uphill battle from there.

Basically, it's a case of over-promise and under-deliver.

Again, there is precious little concreteness to build off of, so this is very speculative: try to "modesty-fy" your CV and make sure you don't come off as bragging in any way in the beginning of the interview: under-promise. Also, do some whiteboard code katas. Then do the simple task, ask for help if you black out, and then put in the punch-line: "Actually, there's a really neat way to do this in Lisp".
The existence (and ever increasing popularity) of Sketch can't be unnoticed at Adobe HQ. Therefore:

1. They're going to buy Sketch¹

2. They're about to release a new product that replaces Fireworks

3. They're going to have some version of Photoshop and/or Illustrator capable of the same things.

My guess? They're going to buy Sketch. If #2 was the case, it would have been demoed at Max. If #3 was the case, they'd have demoed at least some of those features at Max.

____

1. When I say 'Sketch', I mean it-or-something-very-similar
A Letter To Every Developer
On Friday I had a remote interview where I was asked to search for the value closest to X in a sorted 2D array (columns and rows are both sorted in increasing order). I came up with a trivial solution to find a specific value, but got tripped up modifying it to find an unknown value that could be higher or lower than the target. I have not heard back from the company.

On Saturday/Sunday, I went to AngelHack SF and did a solo-project that ended up placing 2nd amongst +80 teams and netted me a $2500 credit from Firebase and an invitation to AngelHack's accelerator.

Am I a bad developer, too? Or is the hiring practice of reducing someone's technical competence to a handful of esoteric questions arbitrary and broken?

I am much more proud of the things I have built and the reputation I have with the other developers I have worked with than I am of my ability to find the longest common subsequence between two strings.

I'm guilty of asking these kinds of questions, too. The truth is it is incredibly hard to gauge a programmer's skills and figure out whether they fit into your team over the course of a half-hour interview, and nobody really has figured out a good way to do it. We're stuck with arbitrary questions that yield false negatives (and positives) simply because there isn't a better solution.

Edit: Aaannd in the course of writing this I received an offer letter and an email from someone at a16z asking about my AngelHack project, so I guess my job hunt is over. When it rains, it pours.
Rent increases are terrible for renters (and I rent), but great for homeowners (in that they generally track rising real-estate values.) It's mostly just a matter of perspective.

Nobody seems to complain that the housing market in SF is on fire for the same reasons that rents are up.
That same guy [Billy Rios] is the one who wrote the blog post.
Senate passes bill letting states tax online sales
That's all well and good for that one browser. But that's the bleeding edge of the bleeding edge.

For the sake of legacy code browser vendors would still have to support javascript natively for the indeterminate future as well. No one's going in and changing the umpteen million lines of extant javascript to Dart no matter how many browsers can run it or how semantically nice it is.
I believe the tenability of your scheme varies from "unpossible" to "suitable for sites with such low traffic that the sysadmin can manually verify every login".
Well its not proved so there is no theory, only conjecture.

P is polynomial time algorithms, O(n^k) runtime for some k. Algorithms you can run on reasonable sized inputs. NOT O(k^n) exponential time algorithms.

Often a hard algorithm like finding the most efficient route through a city, can only be optimally solved by trying every combination of route. Thus, it's runtime is exponential in the number of inputs. However, if there existed a computer that could make lucky guesses, it could just guess the correct route and verify the answer. NP algorithms are Non-deterministic algorithms (guessers) that can solve harder problems in Polynomial time, like combinatorial problems. It is thought P != NP (for obvious reasons) but no-one can prove it.

The philosophy of the conjecture is that some algorithms are fundamentally harder than others, but we can't prove it yet.
The really inspirational part, to me, is the follow-through. A lot of people pay lip service to openness, but very few actually commit to it. I really love the idea behind Gittip, but I'm even more impressed with the way they're doing it.