skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. Do the right thing, you might get credit for it. Do the wrong thing, and sometime, sooner or later, it'll pop up and kick you in the arse.
Name too close to "yiff" to take seriously.
I find it fascinating that programmers working in C++ seem to spend a lot of time thinking about language design.

There is a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of language designers. There is the notion of technical debt that we all deal with as programmers, but the meta-debt the language designer accumulates is astounding.

Let's meditate a while. As we read this, some young, well meaning C++ programmer is writing another String class.

I don't even know if talking about Tony Hoare's NULL story is really that relevant. After all, that's a single feature of a programming language. In the context of C++, talking about NULLs at the language level is like arguing about the colour of your Edsel.
Can we compare PHP and node.js without it appearing as bashing ?

Im critical of PHP, my impression is it has no advantages apart from being more established. I've written code in both, to do similar tasks so feel I can compare them fairly.

My impression is PHP is more messy, with no real advantages to balance out what I would call 'legacy syntax cruft'. I really see node.js as a natural evolution from PHP.

To be fair, its well known that Javascript has some bad parts, some of its own legacy syntax crud, but you can write in a modern style that avoids most of that - so I think its an order of magnitude less cruft in practice than PHP, and small code size reflects this assertion.

I know modern PHP in OO style can be more readable, more amenable to programming in the large than old-skool top-to-bottom PHP... but I think the lispy functional features of Javascript lead to more readable 'code as thought' : map/reduce, passing functions in variables in practice is more useful to me than OO is, it leads to simpler code.

A lot of people feel emotional attachment to PHP, if you love it use it. But all the things I do love about PHP, I love more about the node.js/javascript combination. You might like it too.
I agree that an honest debate on the topic is what can lead to a reasonable and valuable process of dealing with the issue in terms of law. And it's because of that that the term "assault rifle" has always bugged me, because, let me be quite honest, I've come to realize that what so many people mean when they say that term is really "anything that looks scary and mean and military-ish".

IE, show them this: http://i.imgur.com/XZmPlGQ.jpg,
and the response will be "Yeah! Ban that! Nobody should be able to own that!"

Show them this: http://i.imgur.com/a916R.jpg,
however, and the response will be much more muted, perhaps with a bit of "I think my Dad had one like that for hunting or something..."

Of course they are functionally equivalent rifles, each semi-automatic. But one looks scary/bad-ass, one looks like Dad's hunting rifle.

I don't mean this all argumentatively or semantically. I think this issue really matters. If we are going to pass laws based on the outward appearance of something, then that's the kind of law - and legal process - I am very wary of. If, instead, we have an honest and reasoned debate on the issue, going through a process of deciding if, say, semi-automatic weapons should able to be owned by citizens; and if there should be a limit of the number of rounds in a magazine - or if people should be able to own a rifle that accepts a magazine; then that's the kind of process I can get on board with.

I think it's dishonest to ask a voter, "should we ban assault rifles?" I think it's much more honest to ask, in effect, a series of questions about firearms, to get at the meat of the matter in a way that is sensible.

But I don't think I'm going out on a limb here when I say that as it stands, people want to ban scary looking guns, and that is the depth to which they evaluate the entire issue.
1.
Call credit card company and get your money back.

2.
Build something that is 100% your own and does not depend on middleman's platform.
It might be better if I respond to this in two ways:

1) If you're a libertarian:
The government will hopefully keep it's hands off and the market will adjust -- as big companies take over smaller ones and make mistakes, new competitors will arise when they take measures that people don't like (as in, if Yahoo does something bad enough with Tumblr, someone will make a new, even MORE hipster Tumblr alternative)

2) If you're not a libertarian:
Responsibly upheld Sherman anti-trust and monopoly laws are in place to stop things like that, hopefully. (see Google in just about every court appearance in the last few years)
You should look into Spark: http://spark-project.org/ and Shark (Spark + Hive).

I personally find that using the Spark repl is both efficient and flexible; and being able to cache data in memory makes for very fast iterations, especially when doing something more sophisticated.

There's also Cloudera Impala, but I've never used it, nor do I think I'll ever have to given what the AMPLab folks are doing.
Wouldn't you need to shield the wiring too? That stuff goes everywhere. Im not certain on the need for this though.
From a few recent projects:

The subprocess system is fairly awful in both usability and portability.

The shutil filesystem tools had bugs and documentation issues the only time I ever tried to use them.

The various compression libraries had horrible performance problems last time I tried them; shelling out to various command-line equivalents was around 4-5x faster.

The command-line parsing tools are OK if you want to write a *nix-style command line tool, but not quite flexible enough for more advanced/customised uses.

I have yet to discover any decent GUI library for Python, standard or otherwise, so I'm not sure whether this one counts.

Logging is flexible but can be awkward to configure, particularly across an application that wants various logging itself but also uses libraries that offer to log.
MiApples - Blogs Stats 110,003+ - Sunday 26th May, 2013 - ADD FREE SITE
Textbooks! Good textbooks strike a balance between coverage, depth and compression of reasonably current knowledge. They're not cheap brand new, so consider buying $current_ed-1.

When I want to learn a topic, I literally buy a textbook and plow through it. Sometimes I'll buy a handbook or student's guide or pop. account of the subject to go alongside.

I took an accounting unit at university. One of the smartest decisions I've ever made. I even crack the book from time to time to refresh my memory about something.

Start with a financial accounting book intended for freshmen students in your country, and then management accounting (which is largely universal), and branch from there. A lot of accounting is actually about adjusting for imprecision; meanwhile, finance is about uncertainty.

There's even a software-focused management accounting / finance book: Return on Software by Steve Tockey[1]. It's good.

When you have the basics of this stuff, lots of business chatter becomes much more comprehensible. Your clients will appreciate that you speak their language and understand their pain points (cashflow is the biggest pain in any small business).

[1] http://www.construx.com/Thought_Leadership/Books/Return_on_S...
If you disagree with this:

> I think someone who didn't know a lot about the facts could easily read TFA and come away with the idea that there exists some connection between our gun violence problem and some or all of rifles, military rifles, AK-47s, kit-build rifles, bump-fire stocks, build parties, or armslist.com.

...then we likely don't have much to discuss. I agree that the article doesn't imply much of anything, which as I've said is what I find misleading. Because it should imply that these rifles and kits and parties and people are harmless, because that's true.

My worry is that reporting about these "legal, untraceable" rifles which doesn't include a note to the effect of, "But in practice, it's just a hobby, this really isn't dangerous at all," baldly factual though it may be, will have only the effect of spreading FUD about harmless rifles, which since they also happen to be the very coolest and frankly most Second-Amendment-appropriate guns will only further radicalize gun owners and drive us further from compromise on legislation that will really save lives.

If that makes me a "gun advocate" in your eyes... Well then I'm not sure what that makes you.
"a Very Smart Person"

Did he win the Putnam?

spoilers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35083
As a thought - time distance and shielding were the 3 features of my education on radiation safety. What if the plane was very large - such that the crew were a long way forward of the reactor? Would some kind of hydraulic movement to shift the cockpit forward once altitude was gained work? This sort of thing happens to wings, why not cockpit?
What did you read, and would you recommend it? I'm looking for some good reading on the subject.
> I was still working full time at Powerset on July 1, 2008

I'm curious how this works normally. He was employed full time at PowerSet nine months after he started working "full time" on Github. What did Powerset think of his devoting his time and energy to Github? What is the industry norm? What about the IP issues that complicate the matter? Couldn't Powerset have claimed ownership over Github since he was a salaried employee?
Unmanned aircraft were impractical during the Cold War, which is the only point in history when nuclear-powered aircraft were seriously considered. Drones are workable now, but political considerations alone make nuclear aircraft a non-starter today.
I disagree. Languagelog (an eminent source of linguistic pedantry) is saying exactly what mkl is saying. His quote is in-context, I don't know what more else to say.

Can you elaborate on your theory to the contrary, Stavros?
On the other hand, I'll trust even one peer reviewed well done study over someone's passionate anecdote any day. Even the best of us can fool ourselves into believing incorrect things. Experience doesn't help in this either. Unless, of course, your experience involves doing proper testing of ideas. But of course, then you have data.
Nice design and things look clean.

"If we think your content makes the cut, we'll showcase it."

So - add some bit explaining why "promoting by you" is actually great.

I mean what kind of promotional power you get so the one would bother to leave his email address?
>At some level I am suggesting this has nothing to do with earning more money but rather being able to get a job and not loose it to someone with a degree.

Really? job security? are you telling me that they are willing to hire people without degrees, but then they take the opportunity to let us go first when they have layoffs?

This makes very little sense. The hard part is getting 'em to give you a chance. After you have the job, well, it's easy enough to compete on performance.
I've tried Facebook ads proper: decent CTRs and good targeting, but I had a poor landing page for facebook users so eventually underwhelming conversions.
I'm guessing it suggests that those who are truly paranoid about others snooping into their tarsnap-saved data may want to make their tarsnap payments anonymously as well.
I agree completely. But it still doesn't account for all the reported clicks/engagement that never hit my servers.
> Sorry but I just don't see how bandwidth and XML could ever be a problem for Google.

Then why comment? If you have nothing to input from either side. Doubt is not a valuable commodity.
I used C# for a long time and consider it to be one of the best examples of a statically typed language. The generics are very well done. Implicit typing from 'var' makes half of your statements almost dymanic.

var list = new List<int>();

Many of the base types are pass by value (int, bool, dates, etc...).

There is terrific functional support through LINQ.

It is a great language. I just don't want to work on windows and it only has full support there. The library support and community are also pretty bad.
>Also, you might feel out of place in a regular college.

So how is that working out for you? is it weird being the old student?

My guess is that I'd do much better socially now in my early 30s than I would have a decade ago, simply because my social skills are dramatically better. But, I dono. Being the old guy could be kinda weird, too. But my social skills were really, really poor in my early '20s.
I've quite a bit of finance tech experience in London, and my brother is a SAP recruiter, and the biggest thing I've learned is that most developers undercharge. There are many good devs paid $600/day, being marked up to $1500+ by agencies. Often it may go through several different agencies because one isn't on the preferred list and get marked up at every stage.

If you want to make $200/h+ and your a decent hacker, my advice would be to perfect selling yourself. Like any other sales, learn you anchor it on the value they get not your cost. Use the fear of them not meeting deadlines because they got an 'inferior' cheaper dev. Most recruiting managers are not spending their own money and have budget, but THEY will be the one the line if their project f's up.

The value to them is important. They don't pay you to be a great programmer, they pay you because they have a problem which needs code to fix. This explains why Excel VBA devs with some domain knowledge can charge $1000/day at investment banks for being a 'tactical problem solver' ie quickly hacking up neat spreadsheets for traders/analysts.

The big consultancies entire business is sending out £2000/day 'experts' who are just fresh out of college CS grads. It's absolutely insane how much big enterprise/ government are paying for substandard tech contractors.

If your specialised and that speciality is in vogue, then double up twice. Kdb specialists were being paid $10k a day by several investment banks. Many algo trading devs can charge that high, especially if they have low level (FPGA/GPU) experience.
Sure we can. And Node.js definitely shows off some functionality that PHP should be jealous of (referring to that 'PHP is meant to die' article). I am probably going to experience it myself soon when tapping into Node.js territoriers. But it's not a proper comparison if you put plain old basic PHP up against an ExpressJS project instead of using a current PHP framework such as Laravel 4.
Hey! I am a developer based in Louisville, Ky as well. I don't know what sort of things you develop/design for, but we have this thing called build guild that a lot of us attend each month. It's mostly for web, but there's been a handful of mobile guys there as well.

You just missed it this month (it was this last Tuesday), but maybe you'll consider coming next month? I hope so!

http://louisville.buildguild.org
IRC is so lightweight, it's what NASA uses for their antarctic weather flights.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/01/antarc...
HEY ..
I agree with you in retrospect and most certainly if make an investment in the future will structure it much better. With regards to the repayment of the loan. No. If the the business had failed I would have written off the money.
As long as you can convert the AST into a git Tree Object[0] you should be good to go.

[0] http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Internals-Git-Objects#Tree-Ob...
Front-end developer in Chicago, $20/hour.
You have passive income?
That's your answer.
Invest in ability to keep this source of passive income active [and growing even] for the next 12-15 years.

That's more fun than investing in some other corporation's crap for "promise" of return.
The safety issues were not the full reason that the Concorde was grounded permanently. It was grounded temporarily until the design issues raised by the crash were resolved by design changes (Kevlar lining in fuel tanks, burst resistant tires). If safety was the real driver, the improvements would never have been made and deployed.

The real problem was that the Concorde was a 1960's design in 2003 with only 20 units produced. As such it did not continue to receive upgrades and other refinements that other aircraft do. Compare what a 737-100 looked like and what a 737 you'd fly on today looks like. That's just the visual changes, think of the improvements you can't see. Like improved cockpit controls. With only 20 units parts were expensive. Airbus didn't want to support the aircraft either.

I'm sure there was some decrease in passengers after the crash. But I don't think there was a public outrage. With time the numbers would have recovered. They retired the plan not even a full year after restoring service.

As I understand it Air France was selling tickets at less than their cost to operate it. While both BA and AF announced the cancelations at the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if Air France was the group that decided to pull the plug first. Taking out half the planes would have made the maintenance even more expensive for BA.

Finally, Richard Branson tried to buy the BA Concorde fleet and continue operating it. Branson is not an idiot at business, he obviously thought there was a market there. For some reason that's not clear BA refused to sell to him. Which leads to the other possible reason for retirement, the airlines figured out they could make more profit selling subsonic first class than Concorde tickets. Not selling to Branson prevented him from having the supersonic competitive advantage.
As an independent contractor, one thing I feel I need to point out is that the hourly rate that the consultant gets, and the hourly rate the company gets charged for the consultant's time, are two VERY different things.

For example, my rate is between 90 and 110 dollars per hour for long term work. I would like to think I could charge more, but this is what the market will bear where I live. HOWEVER - there's almost always a vendor, and sometimes several vendors, between myself and the company. To the company I work for, my hourly rate looks about 10-40 dollars higher depending on the layers I go through. So for me to make 100/hr, it's likely the client is being charged 130/hr.
I think it depends on where you're working and the client. I have certainly turned down work at < $40/hr (particularly in metro LA or Bay Area).

On the other hand, I've also taken work at near $40 and even less some non-metro areas (even with 10+ years of experience at the time), just because I was available and that seemed pretty closely dialed in to both the general market and/or what the client could pay.

In my mind, the biggest thing to work out is:

1) Can you work a reasonable amount of time at the current rate without having to worry about money? Some places you can rent a decent 2 bedroom apartment for less than $700/month, and $30-$40/hr will be fine.

2) Are you sending the right signal about your value? And are they sending signals about how they're likely to treat you?

Once I made the mistake of pricing myself at $45/hr in a middlin'-sized California town. I later learned that other contractors were being paid in the neighborhood of $60-$75. I wasn't terribly dismayed by this fact alone (though it's always disappointing to know you left potential income on the table), but my perception was that my contributions and opinions ended up being less valued than some of the other more highly paid contractors, none of which seemed to be demonstrably more productive or skilled (and some less).

A year or two later I had another contract gig come up in the same area, and the presented an absolute ceiling of $40/hr (if they were perfectly happy with me). I already knew that was on the low side for the area, so I said no. I later found out an acquaintance had done some time there and said it was a very high pressure situation without much respect for either work-life balance or the professional opinions of contractors.

I've heard it said that you make money as much on the business you don't do as the business you pick up. Try to find out as much about market value for your location as possible. If it seems low -- if you're not sure you'll have enough money or that your contributions will be respected -- keep looking, unless you absolutely need a bird in hand.
I guess my real point is that if my choice as an LP were a16z or some other asset class, I'd maybe even slightly overweight vc as an asset class. If I were an LP who could get into YC (maybe they would take a non profit like Watsi if they raise an endowment?), obviously overweight. But if you couldn't get into a top fund, and didn't personally know the founders of a 30-50mm fund which you thought would do exceptionally well (500 Startups?), I'd underweight or just avoid the asset class.
How Are Google's Street Maps Recorded?
>I am proposing that a degree becomes more important later on in life

Hm. Why do you believe this? Because we are expected to move into management? I think most of the middle management I've worked under have had degrees, so that seems valid. But the owners? business owners very commonly have incomplete college educations. (and I've worked under more than one middle manager who has run (and failed) a small business, and then went and got a mid-life degree from something like the university of phoenix. The experience owning a business seems to carry some respect in middle-management circles, enough to overcome the shame of going to a school advertised on daytime TV.)
I the united states, studies have indicated that food stamps produce an economic return of $1.85 for every dollar spent. I would imagine additional cash spending could have a similar effect.
> I made mention of a Paint Bucket and the interviewer asked me to implement it.

That is one interesting question. It can be solved trivially with BFS, but there is also some crazy way of doing it without using the stack (or a queue). I am sure the MS Paint uses what I call it the smart zamboni algorithm. You basically pretend you are a zamboni driver, and paint the screen avoiding obstacles but being careful not never paint yourself in a corner. It is complex but uses no stack space. I don't imagine there are any people that could implement it on the whiteboard. I was glad to see that he didn't do some impossible feat.
I'll do it for 25 cents.
hi zigurd,

point 1 - noted.
As far as development jobs are concerned, the work is out in the open enough that, while education (formal or otherwise) remains important, the accreditation part has little value.

It is difficult to evaluate, say, a doctor - possibly not the best example, but the first that came to mind - based on his past surgeries because much of that data is never recorded, and what is recorded is impossible to access for a variety of reasons. Therefore you need some kind of system to say that, yes, this doctor is capable of doing the job.

Programmers do not really have that problem. Everything you do is recorded, and in many cases that data is accessible for any prospective employers. Worst-case, if you really have nothing else to show, is that you have to spend a few weeks writing some software to publish to GitHub. With that data, you can prove some level of competency, which is already everything a degree can do and more.

So it is not that education is not valued. It certainly is: You would never be able to do the job without some kind of education. It is that your work speaks for itself, so the degree does not need to be valued.
Wow, I would have to say that seems completely unreasonable, even if you were in the smallest of towns in NZ. I don't know of anyone (inc. students) who charge less than $40/hour for development freelancing.