skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was trying you out, because if you make such a statement then I am lead to believe you stay away from languages that don't provide control over bounds checking.
I call BS!
Request IDs — a simple analysis technique for service-oriented architecture
Oh for heaven's sake,

[locate individual high contrast pixel] != [ability to distinguish individual pixels]

Vision and visual acuity is not this simple. See, e.g., http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/lum_hyperacuity/

I don't actually know, but perhaps seeing something as pixelated requires being able to resolve the edges of an individual pixel.

A better test would be to see if people can detect a difference in the pixel "phase" (for lack of a better word) of some pixel-drawn object (that is, show identically shaped objects that have a different internal pixel organizations because of their position on the screen). Do an ABX-style test, see if you can tell the difference.

I'll bet you can tell the difference on a classic display. I'll bet you can't on the iPhone 4+.

[edit: made the comment slightly nicer ... :/]
> I understand perfectly the words but the attempts to draw parallels with Singapore makes absolutely no sense.

That may be the case but the fact that he was making an analogy between the way governments and private industry are setup, the mix of conservative ideology and lack of some of the freedoms was obvious. Again, whether you agree with that, is another issue, but your phrased you answer as if you didn't understand that he was making a comparison.

Basically it seemed you were skimming through comments about Turkey saw a comment on Singapore and just replied "what is this doing here, we are talking about Turkey".

It is also interesting that the gp post indicated clearly what he thought it has to do with Singapore if you want to continue the argument you can perhaps provide counter-arguments to their point, instead of insinuating that they got lost and thought we were discussing an article about libertarian city states or something.
This will NEVER happen.

For one thing, it would be trivial for us to re-learn how to make one. The folks that had NEVER invented one did it in short order without computers and specialized equipment. They weren't even sure they'd be successful the first go around.

Possessing this knowledge would be very useful in a world where other nations didn't have it. Just look at history to know the reason why.

The only thing stopping the spread of this knowledge is the early warning provided by watching for the attempts of governments to acquire it themselves. Once you know they are trying, you use political/economic/military pressure to force them to abandon the effort. In some cases that works (South Africa). In some cases it doesn't (North Korea).
the US is more dystopian than singapore, if you ask me.

have you ever been to singapore?
have you been to singapore?
That may be the case for you, but in vision research, people measure spatial acuity differently. For examples, see http://webvision.med.utah.edu/book/part-viii-gabac-receptors....

A main reason why your definition isn't used much is because it is highly dependent on the relative brightness of the dot and its background. You can see a dot that has a millionth of the area of an iPad pixel, as long as it radiates the same number of photons on your retina [edit, make that a thousandth or so. Something a million times as bright might kill the cell it lands on before it can send out a signal. http://www.displaymate.com/iPad_ShootOut_1.htm#Backlight_Pow... claims 7W for an ipad backlight; that's over 2W for a million pixels. You wouldn't want to shine a 2W laser into your eye. If you don't believe that, google 2W laser pointer on YouTube]

Landolt C's may be a bit tricky to get right on a web page, but you might try and code a staircase experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychophysics#Staircase_procedu...) with illiterate E's.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

I'm not quoting that at you to be self-righteous. I'm using it to illustrate that most people in the world seem to believe that political freedom is considered a good in and of itself. At least in the US, anyway- it's in our mission statement. It's not just a good thing, but one of The Good Things, that's worthy of being pursued independent of wealth.

You seem to consider liberty as a means to an end. That's a perfectly fine viewpoint, but I think you should recognize that you're not debating about singapore, but about that underlying assumption.
>What you're describing is a borderline sociopath, not a result of closed allocation.

The difference is that you can easily get away from such managers under open allocation.
Fasctimidating
> The government is looking for (and creating when necessary) any excuse to attack Syria against its people’s will.

Wait, I thought Syria/Assad is the bad guy. The Turkish people support Assad but the Turkish government doesn't? Now I'm confused.
And yet Israel has a policy of not confirming or denying they have a working weapon, although everyone knows they do.
That's hazy territory. While I understand what you're trying to get across, there's really no point adding layers of hidden meaning and subjectivity to the term "programmer".

(non-software) engineers, lawyers, graphic designers, accountants, chemists, doctors define themselves by occupation and not some subjective non-metric of passion. Why exactly should programming be different?

I'm not arguing that programmers shouldn't be passionate about their work, or work on side projects. However, there's really no point in prevaricating over what a "Real Programmer"(tm) is, beyond the very simple working definition we have.
Wow.

I am speechless.

As someone who was born and raised in Turkey, and visited Singapore for long periods of time, let me say very clearly: you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Turkey and Singapore are two completely different worlds, with different histories, cultures, and geopolitical situations, and are not related in any shape or form. There may be a few surface-level parallels, but that's where the similarities end.

I am stunned however that a person who very likely has never even visited either place (much less lived in them) has the gall to call what Turkey is going through "Singaporification." I mean, it's not like I haven't noticed the anti-Singaporean sentiments on HN lately - they don't surprise me, since a lot of HN folks are white middle/upper-middle class and lean libertarian[1], which is the exact opposite of Singapore. But using the events in Istanbul as an opportunity to bash Singapore is just... petty and shameless.

I would love to give you a detailed breakdown of the differences between Singapore and Turkey, but that would be an essay. I'll highlight a few important ones.

Singapore is one of the least corrupt countries in the world. Turkey on the other hand is rampant with corruption, especially the current government. That's part of the reason why the protests started: the contractor that was going to build the mall on top of Gezi Park has ties to the Prime Minister, who was going to profit from it. That's just ONE example.

Singapore is extremely diverse culturally. There are several religions and languages. As a result, there are often no culturally accepted behaviors. In a sense, Singapore does not really fit the traditional definition of a nation, and instead has been called a society in transition. In contrast, Turkey has a very strong cultural identity rooted deeply in the country's history and predominant religion, Islam.

The two country's governments are also extremely different. Singapore is a de-facto one-party state; the dominant party, the PAP, has won every single general election since the first one. In contrast, Turkey is a multi-party system, which creates very complex dynamics in the political landscape.

I can go on, but you get the idea. Hopefully.

[1]Table 10 in http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa580.pdf
Evolution takes much longer time than selection. And human evolution does not function like it did since humans have medicine and society, which means if you can't eat grains, for example, you don't die and take your genes out of gene pool - you just take some medicine and eat something else and live happily and procreate. So evolution has nothing to contribute with regard to organisms modified by human selection - it's both too fast and evolution doesn't have a chance to do its cruel business.

Im modern mind "evolution" has became synonymous to "natural" in the quality of "it has no nasty science in it so it has to be good". In fact, neither "natural" nor "evolution" has nothing good in it - nature is impersonal, immoral and unimaginably cruel, viewed from our point of view. And if the science can do something to correct it - it is great.

For example, sweeter apples we enjoy now appeared in the last couple of centuries, and the US varieties in the last century alone, before that apples were mainly used to make cider or applejack. A couple of hundreds of years is nothing for the evolution.
The SICP Stanford videos by Sussman from the 80s and reading the book was an experience that sounds almost exactly like the author had learning C. It was one of the moments where I realized I enjoyed programming as much (or more) than design.
Thanks for the information. I like the sound of your 'better test'.

(This is not intended in a particularly serious way – but I do notice pixellation in type from time to time on my Retina MacBook Pro.)
The expertise they are building isn't going to simply disappear. The incredibly huge Norwegian sovereign wealth fund aside, even once the North Sea is completely used up, they can export their knowledge & skills to other countries with hydrocarbons.
80 (i.e. along the shore in Berkeley) is really bad quite often, but you could possibly skip most of that. If you can avoid that, it's not too bad, although the 880 parts in Oakland (due to port/construction traffic) can be bad.
Here's one other thing to keep in mind: as with employees, contractors and freelancers are, fundamentally, being compensated for their time. If you don't provide your time, you don't get paid. And you won't get paid more than once for a given hour, week, or job. And there is an upper bound on what someone will pay you for an hour of your time, no matter how "good" you are at what you do.

If you are looking for the sort of security that doesn't depend on an employer or a client paying you for your time, you need to create something that will generate income for you even while you are not working on it. At night. On the weekends. While you are working on something else. This could simply be a portfolio of investments. It could be a software product that you can license or sell over and over for a low marginal cost. But you won't ever get to this by just selling your time to someone else.
I suppose that's another way to do it. But I can only speak to my experience, and I admittedly don't have much experience with recruiters. I've never used recruiters for either freelancing or contracting and I have a freelanced in several years.

Edit: also, many of the other comments here were, get a client, not speak to a recruiter, so this was somewhat a response to that add well.
Ouch ... Boulder huh? Now you've got me wondering who your talking about so I can warn others...!
>>You really have no clue what's going on, do you?

Actually, it is you who has no clue.

Please read my response to the parent. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5809506
Slashdot was very similar back when it was still popular. I think it's something to do with hacker culture in general...
Saying it's wrong fixes nothing. What realistic alternative would you prefer instead, how do plan to get people (e.g. factory owners) to follow it without harming the people you're trying to help?
"I know for a fact practically every piece software I use is programmed in either C or C++."

How confident are you that that software will work as expected? How much are you willing to bet?

The fact that a language is popular does not prove that the language is good, nor that it should be used, nor that it is not causing us problems. Just the other day on HN, there was an article about a massive number of vulnerabilities in X11 applications -- all resulting from problems that you have in C and C++ but not in higher-level languages. Entire classes of bugs that are common problems in C are just not an issue in other languages.

Sure, it is possible to write unreliable code in high-level languages. It is just a lot easier to write unreliable C code, and C programmers are much more likely to do so (even those with years of experience).
The problem is not fear, the problem is unfamiliarity and cost. If US company decided that all company communications from now on would be in Mandarin, it would be a mistake - not because Mandarin is particularly bad or frightening, but because most people in US would not know how to speak Mandarin and thus would not be able to participate in communication without very substantial effort.

Code is a form of communication too, and it must be done in a way that is understandable to fellow developers, otherwise costs of development raise immensely and the whole project comes under threat.
Sure, but he's also making spurious generalizations which appear to owe more to a 1993 William Gibson article than any understanding of the motivations or actions behind Singaporean paternalism or Turkish modern Islamism, which are not at all alike. Throwing in Franco's Spain - certainly the Western European country whose economic policy priorities least resembled Singapore's - doesn't help matters.

Other than a not-uncommon desire to stay in power and grow the economy, Erdogan really doesn't seem to share the same endgame as Singapore's de facto founder. One is a traditional Muslim accused by his critics of undermining the secularist underpinnings of the modern Turkish state; the other an ardent multiculturalist who ended up apologising for a comment suggesting Muslims ought to be less strict in their observances. Erdogan recommends Turkish women need to rear at least three children to "keep the population young" and helped provoke the riots by trying to tighten regulation on abortion. Lee Kuan Yew introduced the "Stop at Two" family planning advocacy campaign and legalised abortion.

Ironically it's values that Singapore's uber-strict legal system has rigidly defended - anti-corruption, state secularism and individual religious freedom - that the Turkish rioters claim motivate their opposition to the Erdogan's government. They've managed to leave more trees intact than central Istanbul too. :)
I'm a freelancer that has started his own company, and I contract with a lot of companies, one in particular could have been considered a startup at one point, but I'm not sure you'd call it that now.

I think of VC as debt. I've worked really hard to stay out of debt. Apart from a house, my goal is to never take a loan out or borrow money for anything. We have two pretty crappy cars, but we paid cash for them, and honestly, after some repairs and such, they've been running fine.

To bring it home: I treat a lot of my business the same way. I'm extremely skeptical of doing work on "borrowed money." This once-startup contract I have has been profitable (by good margins) for 5 years now, and I've been working on a $2 million project for them about 7 months now, but it was all with money the company already had.

I've turned down lucrative work in the past because they had financiers involved. I tend to work on smaller, more manageable projects (with the exception of the aforementioned example) because of this. Maybe a little more work at times (to find work), maybe a little less money, but I've never had an issue getting paid (except that one time when the business literally got washed away in Hurricane Sandy), I've not had to meet crazy deadlines or feel that sort of pressure, and I'd still consider myself to be doing very, very well.

All that said, and I am a college dropout. But I wouldn't recommend people do drop out of college, especially for a VC gig.
Ram* (won't spoil your filter), REMOTE possible for client/desktop C++ programmers?
Supply and demand don't give value, they just set a price.
I'm not sure if I can understand the reasoning behind this comment, but if I were to follow up, there have been (not sure how factual), in the case of the so-called Arab Spring (or Arab Winter, as I call it, given what happened afterwards), accusations that some of these revolutions had a "push" from outside.
Some suggestions-

1. Tormail rather than hushmail.
2. Get on the cypherpunks mailing list, you'll get lots of input from lots of smart people http://www.cypherpunks.to/list/
3. Use Tor for everything that pertains to your project.
4. Find a group that really needs your product and have them on your side, like dissidents in dictatorships, talk to them, find out how your product can help them, if you're in a "democratic" country and the authorities come after you, you can legitimately tell them that you're helping to free the people of a country, it helps to be able to name dissidents who have been murdered by such a regime, you can then ask the agents of your state if they are in favor of these murders, in many countries advocating murder in a different state is a crime, so it is most likely they will not answer your question, merely asking that in a recorded interview will most likely see you free. Afterwards, assuming you are free from state interference it is important that you make it public what has happened to you, do interviews with tech and liberty minded media, talk to the EFF, NOT Wired.
5. Have contingency plans, like having your schematics, code etc ready to be distributed on TPB like the 3D printed gun from Defense Distributed has been.
6. If you are at some stage going to release what you have non-anonymously, do it through a separate legal entity, like a limited liability company, so any legal ramifications are borne by that legal entity and you are not personally liable, you will need a lawyer to advise you, you might contact the EFF and have a conversation with them.
7. Be careful, and good luck.
dont forget www.atlantic.net/cloud, it has a free trial!
this smells like a js engine optimization. you wouldn't expect substantially different machine code to run for "Direct assignment" and "other". i wouldn't be surprised if the loop is being unrolled or something.
That's fantastic! I'll have to use that with my kids.
Actually the cloud's not much in SV. Rackspace is in Texas and Amazon's AWS leaders are in Seattle and their biggest datacenter is in Virginia.
1) The editor(s)/photographer(s) probably wanted a nice photo for this post, like whole family being working together to the same issue. The mother may seem un-involved if both the son and the father would focus on the screen. Or maybe for some other reason it was just the most sweet-looking picture out of the series.

IMO, it is easily to get distracted while working in somewhat unfamiliar conditions. I can easily imagine that, if someone takes a photo of me coding in front of my laptop, I will end up looking weird and distracted because I would be nervous about camera.

I am pretty sure that if someone wanted to fake it(even unintentionally), he would pick more "realistic" photo.

2) Just saying it wasn't validated doesn't mean it can't (and doesn't) work. Of course there is a link to wikipedia entry, but there are mixed data, and far from the claim "It doesn't work, plain and simple" (to which you agreed).

30-40 years ago it was mainstream to deny intelligence in non-human animals. But now, there are evidence that animals are intelligent: crowns learning to use tools, dolphins passing mirror test, parrots learning to count objects(and doing a lot of ther cool stuff).
There is no shortage of people who have an innate love and aptitude for programming. There is a shortage of companies willing to offer training.
My Dad is often amazed at how pedestrians in Canada leave their own survival up to the whims of drivers. They'd be dead in the developing world.
I don't think it is disingenuous. Any company that creates a new communications channel increases the surface area for government to intercept. Any company that creates a service which you interact with, with high frequency, creates a log of behavior for the government to intercept.

The only difference with modern web portals is centralization, which allows the government to seize it in one chunk, vs distributed amongst N different organizations, but that's really only marginally more secure, because the government has no problem bulk subpoena-ing all of the major service providers.

The only real protection is to use pseudonymity everywhere and to never reuse a pseudonym between two different services.
Being able to get a 16GB MBA would tempt me about as much as a Retina MBA.

A slightly-lighter rMBP 13 or 15 would probably meet my needs, and would be Retina and 16GB. My MBA 13 2011 only has 4/256 which is kind of limiting. It's not quite worth upgrading just to go to 8/512/non-Retina.
Because we're talking about programming here. If we were talking about music for example, the same will apply. There are singers and there are artists and there is a clear difference in a song well made and a commercial song. Even if the last one makes you more money. But for programmers there's just that one term to use. So the need to point the hidden meanings.
Awesome, that's really clear. Thanks.
The "Retina" display is just a marketing term which means that a person with 20/20 vision cannot distinguish individual pixels at a certain distance. Movie screens do not need to have a high ppi ratio because you view the screen from a greater distance. If you have better than 20/20 vision, or press your face up against the screen, you will be able to resolve individual pixels quite easily.
Company's updated product could improve in one area. Maybe. It could also improve it in another area and not the other one. Possibly.
While I can empathize with Olemis on the reception of Brython on Hacker News, I'm not sure one can infer from that exchange (or the admittedly high number of similar conversations) that developers are incapable of being impressed. This just doesn't jive with my experience at all.

From the dozen Hack and Tells (http://hackandtell.org/) held around the world to the hundreds of stories developers have of their first time looking at ffmpeg's source to the growing number of live Javascript console demos (great one here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jArKzo-h3R0) to Dan Kaminsky's DNS bug discovery - I feel developers are very clearly capable of being impressed. It is a pretty regular thing.

It is, I will say, a very, very hard thing to do. I encounter it each day in my gig serving developer communities at Twilio. I have to bring my best work to them every time I ask for their attention - anything less ends in derision or, even worse, dismissal. Developers are natural skeptics whose daily work's default state is broken. This engenders a very high velocity needed to escape that skepticism.

Further, while HN certainly qualifies as a representative set, it is a specific demo of developer. There is a wide swath of developers who don't participate in this forum - poor reception here rarely means poor reception everywhere developers live.

Finally, I would submit that if impressing developers is one's goal in a project, one is probably set up for disappointment from the start. Amazement is an extrinsic factor that makes a poor primary goal as many factors governing success lie outsides the code one writes or the product one is building.

I always feel happiest when I fix the problems I want to solve elegantly and those solutions are widely adopted by the people primarily suffering from those problems. Whatever people think outside that scope doesn't really affect that satisfaction.