skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems a lot of people in the comments here are complaining about a decline in the value of discussions on HN. Although I've noticed this I don't think it's the fault of the people commenting. The quality of links posted to HN has declined.

Rather than fact-based technical articles, useful new tools, and cool side projects there are a lot of crappy articles repeating the same things we've heard thousands of times about productivity, standing desks, work/life balance, meditation. The articles rarely present anything new, they are mostly anecdotes presented as fact.

I still find great things on HN and participate in interesting discussions but sometimes when I look at the front page it seems more like a site for people interested in self-help guides.
Email that people thought would be private, has been appearing every year on the front page of the NYT, ever since lawyers realized that it was discoverable, and it was admitted into evidence.

My earliest recollection was 1997, when Eric Bradley, my colleague in Desktop Support, sent a ranting email to one of our top lawyers, pissed off that Microsoft's Browsers were screwing around with Netscape's configuration without asking the user.

http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/lessig+microsof...
Yes, please read the spec. All the specs!

Shockingly few developers will read the f*cking spec for anything. It mystifies -- or perhaps terrifies -- me. It's one of the criteria I try to use to judge if I'm dealing with someone who seeks to truly solve problems, or just keep the build light from turning red.

Some specs are actually kind of fun to read. POSIX is surprisingly pleasant, and sometimes amusing in a "Why is THAT warning label there?" kind of way.

You don't have to treat them like a novel, but many are excellent reference material to keep at your fingertips.
I'm from Ireland, and the government's low tax approach is great for us workers. We get lots of bit US employers setting up here, and hence increasing the competition for developers.
"It is long past the days where email was treated as private communication, as if it was a mailed letter going through the post office."

Was email ever 'secure' in the way you're describing? As far as I'm aware, email gets sent in the clear. The analogy to the postal system would be sending postcards (as opposed to sealed letters).

Edit: fwiw I'm thinking about mail servers, online identity and DNSSEC with a view to pulling together a product in this space.
Damn, ask for a raise.
And if you up the regulations enough to make it anywhere near non-exploitative, the cruise companies will just stop hiring foreign workers and leave them unemployed, furthering the inequality between developed and developing countries.
No, it's not stupid. It's how most people think: hey, this girl is like me and she loves the product, so I will love the product too.

Unless your product is developed for engineers, having testimonials in your sales materials is a must, and throwing lists of hard facts and functions is a sure way to scare customers off.
Keyword arguments with default values is the one Python feature that makes my Go code more verbose than my Python code.

def f(a=11, b="some default", c=55.5, d=D()):
#...

f(c=44.4)

becomes

type Config struct {
a int
b string
c float
d interface{}
}

func f(c *Config) {
a := 11
if c.a != 0 {
a = c.a
}
b := "some default"
if c.b != "" {
b := c.b
}
c : = 55.5
if c.c != 0.0 {
c := c.c
}
d := new(D)
if c.d != nil {
d := c.d
}
//...
}

func main() {
f(&Config{c: 44.4})
}
> Maybe karma is real.

It isn't.
DEMUX Framework 0.4.0 released
If you live in the future, the (robotic) economy will have moved where there is money to be made: in space, on the asteroids, and you'll be left on Earth to your own devices.
Yes, as opposed to "short", i.e. a lambda. I'm sorry if my terminology offends you.
If you have difficulty reading AI book, I highly recommend taking this course:

https://www.edx.org/course/uc-berkeley/cs188-1x/artificial-i...

Just read the chapters that are being covered in the course and you will have read one third of it! Second part will start early next year with further chapters covered.
Isn't that @holman's theme on your website? I don't recall him open sourcing it. (Unless it's the other way round, which I doubt.)
Is Facebook the one blocking the occupygezi pages or is it the government somehow?
Given that I've hired a couple of very good people via it...

And given that a while after that I went through the round (at least 12 interviews by 10 unique people) at AWS because of it (though I later turned that down - I wanted a combination of tech and customer focus, they wanted either one or the other and felt I was too strong technically to be used on a customer focused role)...

Yes.

It works.

If you are hiring you should think hard about how you present it. Corporate-speak is ill-advised, and less is definitely more. Plain developer-to-developer language is the best route.

It is not unusual for candidates to go back over old whoishiring posts, filter by city and then look... so if you can include a permalink to a "positions available" page on your site you will continue to reap the rewards of a good, short advert for quite a while. Make sure to include an email address too (in the advert) so that HN candidates reach you directly rather than get lost in the official HR process.

If you are going for a position, I would advise that you use the opportunity to strike up a conversation and learn about the position and company, rather than just spam them with your CV (how does that help either of you?).

And as mentioned above... look at the whoishiring posts for the last quarter or 6 months, a company in growth probably is still looking.

It works, so long as you realise that this platform connects individuals, rather than treating it as an agency/corp HR style thing.
That's my main problem with the tone that's coming to be more and more apparent-

The criticisms just aren't interesting.

It's disappointing to open a discussion thread and have the top couple of comments be some negative nitpick of something that's shallow or irrelevant.

Next time you're about to post, ask yourself if it's the most interesting thing you could say about the topic. If it's not, why not think for a moment and then post what is most interesting?
> > the possibility of exceeding the bounds of an array
> Not possible in Go, the runtime will panic.

Is -B for disabling bounds checking no longer supported?
It's common but it doesn't follow that it's popular.
Links stopped working on Twitter?
perhaps shockley would have actually preferred if it were called 'germanium valley' :)
Yet a democratically-elected government made a decision in the name of the people to replace this park with a shopping mall. People protesting against that by blocking the construction process (i.e. stand in front of bulldozers etc.) are effectively overturning democracy in order to protect their personal interests.

This is a general problem I have with such active counter-protests, be they to stop a station from being built (Stuttgart 21, [0]) or to block a legitimate demonstration of right-wing idiots. The rights to free speech, to assemble and to demonstrate are important, but in my opinion the right to demonstrate/protest in a specific location does not trump the right of the majority to implement a democratically made decision or the right of a minority to voice their opinion.

That said, there are obviously cases were a small minority has the right to (even violently) protest a decision made by the majority[1], but building a shopping mall in a park is not one of them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_revolution , e.g. Art. 20.4 of the German Basic Law – does the Turkish constitution have a similar provision?
I pinged him. He stole it.
You don't. I'd bet most of the voltage rails on a modern phone are 1.8V and 3.3V. Then the display backlight usually uses a constant-current regulator, and you'll probably have some oddball low voltages for the CPU core and other various things. Given Ohm's law you can generate all that using DC-to-DC converters.
I've gotten a couple of interviews through the Who's Hiring threads. I've found that you tend to get a faster response from posts where the poster include an email address (for obvious reasons).

I've yet to get a job from those threads (if that's what you're asking), but I have met some awesome teams and my pool of contacts has significantly increased.
Am I the only one who thinks that this kind of apps would be so much better if they ran natively?

It's one of the things why I don't like Chrome os concept - some things should not be ran in the browser. A text editor is one of them.
Norway has unions for IT-workers. The union base pay of around 470k NOK (~52K GBP, ~80K USD) is pretty much guaranteed straight out of university if you have a masters degree.

In general I think it is a good thing, although I dislike the biggest one (Tekna) (that I was formerly a member of) because they supported the DRD[0]. I have since become a member of a different union (NITO).

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
Anybody from Apple want to comment what really happened? This was at least six+ years ago, so ideally your NDAs on the actual events have now expired.
Very less covered in India too - I see only firstpost having a story on this.
Even the largest paper - TOI has not even mentioned turky on their homepage.

http://www.firstpost.com/world/protesters-defiant-as-turkey-...
True story and a riddle: Recursive joy
I agree. Reddit has changed for the worse. It seems like HN is changing as well. If only there was a way of keeping out those types of people.
If you are serious about it pack up and move to NY/NJ or the valley. Find a family or friends place you can crash at for a couple months during your job hunt. Or room with students living around college campuses, cause that's a great network you can tap into, to figure out where the jobs are at. It's what I did. Wasn't easy but once you get that first job it definitely pays off.
No it's who ever has the majority wins. Not even the top 1% can make a difference when 99% of the users are upvoting something.
Loath as I am to cite Buzzfeed, but: the images of the people on the bridge are not from these protests. They are from the 2012 Istanbul Marathon. http://www.buzzfeed.com/hunterschwarz/one-of-the-most-popula...
Noro virus outbreaks on cruise ships would put a relatively quick end to that if it were to become popular. Of course you have those in nursing homes as well but a cruise ship is a particularly nice setting. Lots of people in close proximity, and if there is an outbreak you can't really avoid contact with infected others unless you lock yourself in your cabin.
Yes unlike Google, Facebook seemingly easily bends over to censor free speech and citizen pages when the local Government asks them to.
Outside US is a completely different story. In many countries you will hardly see Apple devices.
and others on quora, http://www.quora.com/Istanbul/What-is-happening-at-Gezi-Park...
In comparison, Die Zeit[0] (liberal) has a number of articles currently in slot three of the homepage (slot one is describing floods), Die Süddeutsche[1] (liberal/left) in slot four (they’re based in Munich, so the most important bit is apparently football) and FAZ[2] (conservative) around slot three, too, where slot one is about education. No idea what their printed edition looked like (SZ and FAZ are daily newspapers, Die Zeit is a weekly one). The German word for Turkey is Türkei.

[0] http://www.zeit.de/index

[1] http://www.sueddeutsche.de/

[2] http://www.faz.net/
> You and some other critics here...

You're probably referring to me, since I've been posting all over this thread and I did nothing to preface my criticisms. I really didn't mean to "take the author to task," and I was as astonished and happy as you were to see this piece in Wired. This was just something I became interested in when the news first hit, and for whatever reason I've enjoyed talking about it and breaking it down more than usual.

The only thing I'd criticize him for was that he's basing his back-of-the-envelope on some arbitrary things (the 6V rating and choice of a ceramic/mica dielectric, for instance) rather than trying to base it on an appropriate lower bound. Had he done the latter he would've reached the same conclusion but with a far less outlandish example. It's only bad because relatively small supercaps which would have worked for his example do exist (much to the chagrin of the news stories he's criticizing), and his example makes it look like he's suggesting otherwise.
Part of getting criticized is deciding whether you accept them or not. If you try to fight a criticizing troll, you probably won't win. It's easy to get drowned by criticism, so choose your battles wisely, just like Elon Musk, he quit a political action committee because he sees that the group was too cynical. And as experience teach us that too much cynicism tends to hoards negativity.
I just solved a similar problem in a slower but fairly general way. It's not appropriate everywhere, but it works well for the use-case I built it for.

I can't share the actual code, unfortunately, but by using struct field tags, reflect, and json, you can end up with code that looks something like this:

type FArgs struct {
A int `def:"11"`
B string `def:"\"some default\""`
}
func f(margs map[string]interface{}) {
var args FArgs
SetupArgs(margs, &args)
// ...
}

If f() is being called in a tight loop, your overhead can be enormous, but outside performance-critical code, it's probably good enough.
The first 32 ASCII code points are literally control codes, which are used to interface with computer hardware that makes use of ASCII - for example teletype machines.

To that extent, it's very much worthwhile to have a control code for a carriage return - setting the cursor to the start of the line without advancing to a new one. This lets you, for example, tell an electronic typewriter to double-strike a line for a boldface effect, or strikethrough a line of text.

And once you have that, you might as well have the control character that advances the output to the next line not move the cursor at all, since the operator can just send a carriage return if they do want to start at the beginning of the next line instead of where they left off on the previous one.

With regards to bitness, computers weren't always strictly power-of-2 based (quick example: the PDP-8 was a 12-bit machine). While today, memory is cheap enough that "rounding up" 30 bits to 32, or 7 bits to 8, is definitely worth it in terms of how it simplifies your other logic, back when ASCII was developed that wasn't really the case.
Yes, but in return they get something more mature than PyPy, something with less hassle that bringing along a VM (JVM/.NET), and something less alien and marginal than FP languages with native compilers.

They might not get the best technical experience, but they DO get:

1) mostly imperative (and most LIKE it that way),
2) nice concurrency support,
3) a lot of niceties (first class functions, implicit interfaces, maps, etc),
4) quite full batteries included,
5) lots of other kids using it
6) regular success posts on HN
7) nice, and mostly predictable, reasoning about speed and memory
How then does one handle matters that are commercially sensitive?
It's also a story about how big ideas does not always start from big vision. It can start from something much less grand - like simply a revenge or an act of ego. And then you need other skills to evolve it, it is those evolving that makes small ideas big and big ideas real grand things. The tablet vision is from MS, Steve made it iPhone.
Some people find it deeply unsettling that someone could hold different political views sincerely. They cope with it by assuming the others are compensated in some form for their abnormal behavior.

When I protested in my homeland I heard accusations of being paid to do this, even the price was specified ($20). Twenty bucks to go into a harsh cold night to be assaulted by police and possibly imprisoned on terrorism charges, what a deal :)
I read it the same way. And it's about giving Iranians EASIER access to iPads, Android phones, MacBooks etc so they can gain more information about what is going on in the rest of the world. Given how important technology played in the Arab Spring uprisings it seems strange the US even put these sanctions in place to begin with.
It'd be nice if someone could show an example of a webpage embedding some ruby code interacting with some js code/framework or something like html5 canvas. Just to see how they "communicate".
GistHero: deploy your Gists to Heroku from your iPad
> People protesting against that by blocking the construction process (i.e. stand in front of bulldozers etc.) are effectively overturning democracy in order to protect their personal interests.

I think this is getting at the heart of civil disobedience: the violation of laws or decrees considered unjust.

I know nothing about the Turkish protests, but another example of civil disobedience is Martin Luther King, Jr. He committed crimes, technically, as he protested. But I don't think that it makes sense to say that MLK's protesting == overturning democracy in America. By analogy, it's hard to imagine civil disobedience in Turkey to be overthrowing democracy there.
The "Who's Hiring" threads are very interesting to me, and I imagine they also are for those who aren't currently looking for work. It's fascinating to see what established companies and startups are looking for.

One minor gripe I have about WH submissions is that many still aren't abiding by the rules. I see a lot of them that leave crucial info out, especially those that don't say if the role can be remote or must be at their office.
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Do you really work for Google? It's possible to find metrics for most things. It might be the number of times SRE's get paged. It might be reducing the amount of time SWE's need to worry about thread safety; so even code cleanup can have metrics. The trick is to think big, and to think at scale. Not how to improve things for SWE's working in one team, but many teams, if not all of Google.

This is why life is sometimes easier for the infrastructure teams; increasing disk or CPU utilization by even a fraction of a percent, when multiplied across a large number of systems, can be a big number.

Now, if your product which is measured as having a small number of users, and worse, that number is decreasing over time (which was the case with Google Reader, as has been publicly disclosed), the problem is not that you don't have metrics, but the metrics aren't telling you want might have necessarily wanted to hear. Down and to the right; that's a different story...
>As soon as you have a stylus, you are dead.

This might have been correct at the time Steve Jobs made the statement, but Apple really needs to reconsider.

Apple has always claimed to make devices for "creative" people, yet pretty much every artist on the planet wants Apple to release an iPad with a built in digitizer. Any student that knows what a digitizer is will also be likely to want one.

There is a huge market right now for stylii for the iPad, yet every single one of them is absolutely terrible. There are even a few third-party attempts at a adding a digitizer, and they are just as bad or worse.

Samsung's Note phones and tablets have been selling very well in spite of the fact that the digitizer's are often slow and buggy due to poor application support. If a company like Apple decided to give such a product their full attention, they could make something truly amazing. Perhaps they could even write their own pressure-sensitive compatible drawing/painting/note-taking programs to accompany the addition of the technology.

Sadly, there isn't any indication that they are interested in doing this. Instead, they are developing televisions that most people won't be able to afford and smart-watches.
Aussie coding competition: Codehire Cup - Other languages to include?
Oil and Gas Pose Challenge to Norway’s Tech Startups
I see no such option documented, and I would certainly never enable such a thing in real code.
A Slower Speed of Light physics engine open-sourced
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HN navel gazing aside -- I think this is really good advice. Rather than trying to impress your coworkers -- try to impress your users.

I think the challenge in many companies is getting enough access to your users that you can tell if they are impressed or not.

I'm going to try to think this way more.
>I trust Google more to fight for privacy of my data against the government, than any of those organizations. After 9/11 AT&T practically rolled over for the US government. When a crime happens, the police can subpoena your email, but the reality is, they obtain your phone and financial records first.

I do commend Google for some of the good they have done but I think you are overselling Google way too much here when it comes to trust. They were a part of a trade group that backed CISPA. We shouldn't forget either the numerous privacy issues that Google has had. The last one was getting fined for bypassing Safari privacy settings.

While you have also mentioned many companies, some fairly and unfairly, Google has services that are aiming to compete against all of them in an attempt to gather all the information they can. Google isn't "evil" in this regard but I don't think anyone believes that one company having their fingers in so many pots is a good thing for user privacy or the internet in general.
Even if their NDA's have expired their employment may not have and if you value your employment at apple breaking an NDA, even an expired one may be a bad idea.
Is a stylus really that bad?
I recommend -
http://occupygezipics.tumblr.com/

What puzzle me the most, is the voluntary cooperation of the media with the government. Even if the media does not support this event, how they not cover it at all? sad, I always thought of Turkey as the most successful example of a Muslim democratic state.