skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The awesome Tramp, is it? IMHO, of all the software on my hard drive that I use regularly, Tramp is the most likely to break or hiccup in a novel or unfathomable way.

It does fill a need or 3, I must admit, and I hate to be negative, but if that is the best example you can come up with of the positive effects of putting Emacs functionality in external programs, that makes me lean towards the conclusion that it is a bad idea to put Emacs functionality in external programs!
I live in the US (bay area) now, but I've lived for significant periods of time in the middle east and asia in the past.

I know the US gets a bad rap as far as personal freedom is concerned (high incarceration rate, capital punishment, etc) and this is indeed an issue in some other places in the US where I've lived, but I love it here in the bay area.

You should try it for a bit and see what you think. Interestingly, I'm planning to move to Europe, most likely Germany :) and live there for a bit to see what that's like.
Ask HN: idea for an android app
hi everyone this summer i want to practice building android apps but don't really have any idea
so i'd like to ask the HN community about somme ideas to make.
i'll publish it on the android store for free and the source code on github
Guile integration may matter, assuming it happens (not everybody seems happy: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2012-04/msg00...)

Python in Vim has slowly become the go-to choice to talk to an external program from Vim,
because VimScript is simply that bad.

I know little, however, about how hard ELisp makes it to interface with an external program.
The examples he gives (a JS interpreter in ELisp, and Semantic) lead me to believe
that the authors wrote all that in ELisp because it was easier than to play with an external program.
Am I wrong?

Will Guile ease the task of interfacing with an external program?
Yeah, I have a friend who worked at google who lives at the cannery lofts, and used the west Oakland Bart google shuttle a lot. I still would want my car in case I wanted to work late, or go somewhere other tha directly home.

Another annoying thing about 880 is the trucks and general narrowness. It is technically 45mph but people do 70-80. I hadn't had an accident there, but it kind of sucks vs the rest of 880.

You are aware that a lot of the Oakland/emeryville areas near 30th and such are pretty gangster, right? My friend had a loft there and I kept showing up at her buyer while the cops had the block shut down to serve a high risk warrant.
What is this? The Isreal bash Turkey thread?
You may have misunderstood the comment (or I have).

I don't think they were saying that a few scripts and utilities would get you what github offers. I think they were saying with some scripts you could automatically fall over to another mirror when github goes down, then switch back when it's up (updating the repo on github when it's available again).
You suck at coding*
My only problem with this idea is that by doing this we could stifle the progress that they are making at the cost of our own desire to push our ideals on them.

Yes they need safety regulations, but that really does need to come from the Chinese workers. We should help them make those demands if they want but we shouldn't force it on them. I.E. Opening a site where workers can Chinese workers can complain about their working conditions (ratings) which then propagates those ratings to the products. We would use the product reference as a guide.

But to force that upon them, in my mind, is wrong. It's hard to find the line between empowerment and external control. This is an issue many Americans had when donating to Haiti. They'd try to give an American fix and it didn't work because that's not what Haitians wanted or needed.
This is very easy to say. Politicians are just reflections of who we all are.

And imho they have the hardest jobs on the planet today.

There isn't a course on Khan Academy, that they can take, which tells them what to do when uncontrolled chain reactions are set off by Social networks. The results will always be messy.

And to then say if they just did the "right thing" all will be well, isn't being very realistic. When the "right thing" for different sections of society is so different.
Ask HN: When to apply for a real job?
Hello.

My question is mostly aimed at self-taught developers - when did you consider yourself good enough to apply for a real job?

I realize this sort of issue is difficult to quantify, but I'm curious as to what level of skill is actually needed to work as a developer professionally.

At this point I've been writing a lot of small utilities(<200 loc) in python, random scraper/parser scripts on odesk, and playing around with Django. I can build a site or a blog engine in Django, but the ultimate problem is this:

How do you know that your skills/your code are/is good enough to work at a company.

If this question is too broad or doesn't make sense to you, keep in mind that I probably do not know industry specifics as I haven't been exposed to the real world yet.

Cheers.
Why guile, which has exactly zero usage outside a few GNUtoys.

Why not, e.g. Racket? If you're going to go the trouble, _get it right_.
Yes, a friend's motorcycle was severely damaged last week from someone trying to steal it. He was upstairs in our apartment eating dinner. Nine more months on the lease!
Great idea, I was trying to figure out the story! I've read there's been an internal blackout -- the turkish media isn't covering the event.
You do raise an interesting point. I think calling jail time what you called it is a bit extreme but yeah, lots and lots of people do get thrown in jail here.

I don't have a good answer as to what I would consider "just punishment" by the state for things like robbery, etc. However, throwing someone in jail for littering is certainly extreme.
>Or, you get free markets and laissez-faire capitalism, the greatest wealth-producing system known to mankind

Or the suppressor operating at the greatest scale known to mankind (from colonialism and imperialism, to 2 World Wars, post colonialism and still counting).

For, if you want to measure the wealth created by capitalism by the last two (or three) centuries, you cannot just add what you like (e.g the internal US market) and hide the rest under the carpet. Add the ecological impact to the whole thing, and the numbers do not look that good.

Not to mention that such a thing as pure "free market" never existed. It's a slogan, like "Don't be evil". What does exist is a huge market system that's "laissez-faire" only for those in power (countries and individuals) and "take it or be crushed" for others.

And in which the huge wealth comes along with grabbing resources with military might (not very "free"), imposing tariffs and embargoes to who it pleases you as a big western power, operations covert and open to have friendly people (including brutal dictators) in "allied" countries, and the like. Nothing very "free market" about them.

(Actually, from the moment there is even a "patent system", which controls industries and markets of trillions of dollars worth, there's not a "free market" system anymore -- and that's just the tip of the iceberg).
well, if you look on their front page/most popular, you can see the top courses, prices and number of students... top 2 are Excel courses with like $3.5m in revenue generation apiece. Nice to see Zed Shaw up there with around $150k.
I don't have a high opinion of my musical abilities :), but I agree that catching-up is both a doable and daunting process.

But, finding niches of interest to focus on usually helps, as it does when crafting really good songs in a specific style, one that matches your musical abilities and understanding. You may not have the chops, but you can still create amazing work.

With programming, I have the issue of wanting to catch up on everything and do side-projects (eventually, I'll run through this class => http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay/courses/2012/fall/330/course/...), but I have found success in trying to pick-up things in conjunction with a task at hand. If I have to build a web service, I'll start that research simultaneously. Starting IOS work... then spend time with C, understand Objective-C's runtime, read about the history (and play around with Smalltalk). This piece-meal approach seems to make the jump more "doable" in my opinion.

I think that people without a CS degree can obtain a good, challenging gig if they have a good niche to school themselves in, and of course, pick-up the gaps from the people they work along with who have that background/knowledge.
Here's the thing, estimating software development time is essentially equivalent to estimating time to think + overhead. Overhead includes actually typing the code, booting the computer, dealing SVN issues, etc. The overhead is relatively consistent, and can be minimized and predicted. Time to think is highly variable. Previously I used to work for a consulting company. After about a year of working there the company started to settle in a particular niche. We built libraries to do things, then we just started to churn out work. Predicting development time became an exact science, because all we had to do was estimate overhead. There was very little new things, so time to think was minimized to nearly nothing. I hated working in a code factory, so I left for greener pastures. The new place has a lot of new things, trying to fit it together is a real challenge, and requires thinking. My estimates are no where near where they were at my old company.

My main point is this, estimating software time is hard because you don't know what you don't know. If you can solve that problem, you solved one of humanity's greatest challenges.
There has always been internet censorship in Jordan, I don't think this is particularly motivated by a "potential uprising".
It's illegal to possess cocoa leaves and extracts of cocoa leaves in the United States of America without a DEA license or prescription. [1]

[1] http://www.erowid.org/plants/coca/coca_law.shtml
The following resources are good & FREE

- tryruby
- rubymonk
- ruby.about.com
- Programming Ruby(http://docs.ruby-doc.com/docs/ProgrammingRuby/)
- http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/ruby
- http://rubylearning.com/satishtalim/tutorial.html
- ruby.learncodethehardway.org
- rubykoans.com
- https://learn.thoughtbot.com/ruby
- http://iwanttolearnruby.com/
- http://www.tutorialspoint.com/ruby/
- http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/toc/
- http://ruby-doc.org/
- http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/
- http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/
Seconding this, NewsBlur has for me been everything good about Google Reader, and more. You can reshare blog posts on your own "blog" to even non-Newsblur users, which is a really cool feature. It's pretty much its own social network based around blog post sharing. Totally into it.
The key distinction here is that travelling to those places as a successful entrepreneur is worlds apart from being born there, without any genetic or environmental advantages to help one escape such a fate.

Michael is speaking from a broad base of experience, one that is not just a hero's epic of one success after another with a token failure before the ultimate victory. From the heroic perspective (PG, Zuck, Gates, etc.), every setback is but a small dip before eventual triumph. These people sincerely believe that anyone can do what they have, and as a result their worldviews are extremely limited and naive. In a way, they cannot know the other side of the story, because they have never experienced any other outcome.

The cold truth is that the situation Michael describes is reality for the vast majority of the working world. The darling VC-fund kids are a tiny minority, selling hopes and dreams to the masses in exchange for their servitude as employees who will never join their ranks.

It is very hard to see the system as a whole when one is so deeply immersed in one side of it. VC startups will not save the common man. If anything, they will put him out of work and ask him to "retrain", putting him in massive debt for an entry level position making far less than his previous job.

All this being said, I am extremely optimistic for the future, but I understand that the US requires significant structural reform if everyone is to benefit from technology. Not everyone can be a successful startup founder or programmer, and as soon as we accept that, we can move onto an earnest conversation about what needs to be done to make a better future for all, elite and commoner alike.
>As you read them, just keep in mind that there is no agreed-upon definition of "autism" or "Asberger's Syndrome". (Nor does autism exist on a defined one-dimensional spectrum, contrary to popular belief.) Each individual is wildly different. So "severe autism" in one person might mean that person can't talk. In another it might mean they have seizures. In another it might mean they can hold a conversation but can't tie their shoes. The media tends to gloss over this major issue, and in so doing it wrongly connects many poorly-understood discrete neurological disorders.

This is what I find so weird. I hear people talking about their autistic child or autistic nephew or something as if they are profoundly disabled. But I've worked with sysadmins and with programmers who had autism diagnoses. And sure, some of them were difficult to communicate with, but they were working with me, and usually fairly competent at their jobs, I mean competent enough that it was worth significant effort to figure out how to communicate with them.

That, and I work with a lot of people who are hard to communicate with; while only a few of them have told me that their psychiatrist has diagnosed them with this or that... (I mean, considering the stigmas involved, generally speaking, disclosing your mental health issues to all but those you are closest to is a bad idea.)

so my assumption was that if a few of the people I worked with /had/ told me, well there are bound to be others who just keep it under their hat.

But then, if I encounter an Autism advocate, they seem to think I'm very wrong in think there are a large number of socially disabled but otherwise functional folks with Autism, and that I'm doing autistic folks a disservice by thinking so.

>The upshot is that even though it may be great that this particular individual benefits from Coursera, the vast majority of "autistic" individuals I have come across are not capable of processing anything that might be taught in a college-level course. Coursera cannot help them, although perhaps some more basic technologies might.

I think there is a /lot/ of selection bias here, for both of us. I put a good bit of effort into putting myself in situations where you could reasonably argue that I'm the dumbest guy in the room, and am usually provably the worst programmer in the room, and I'm not involved in caring for the 'profoundly disabled' - so I am choosing what I see.

On the other hand, most Autism advocates spend time with those most profoundly disabled; they need the most help, after all. Someone who mostly has life under control, likely, would keep it between himself/herself and the shrink, so I would imagine that shapes how they see the world, too.

But yeah, I never understood why they used the same word for the guy next to me that can kick my ass at everything but talking, and the kid who can't talk at all.
Well, you'll want to think one level of abstraction higher than that. Imagine a camera. When you push a camera forward towards a wall, the wall stays the same size. It just fills more of your view.

You can code the equivalent of that pretty simply. So even if a png is 13x13, it might be drawn as 30x30 if the camera zooms in, or as 5x5 if the camera zooms out.

It's actually much simpler (and more visually consistent) to do it that way. It's probably more difficult to learn, but it's well worth the time spent learning it.
>But what if someone really needs the extra money brought by longer work weeks? Making it illegal for them to work for a price they're willing to accept could hurt them quite a bit.

Oh, but I said it should only be allowed if it's paid for. So that will actually HELP those needing the extra money "brought by longer work weeks".

What happens now it that people slave away extra hours for the same basic salary, and don't get any overtime pay.

And I think it will also help unemployed people wanting work. A company will have to hire 3 people, instead of slaving 2 for 12 hours a day (and it wont hurt them, since no other company could slave 2 people either to get the advantage for themselves).
Take the cube coordinates graphic, switch to hexagons, and you wind up with: Q*bert!
> I fail to see the problem at all from the viewpoint of the corporation.

You're right, as long as the corporation doesn't mind if the public see it as a bunch of greedy, grasping, evil corporate bastards.

In Google's case, its "selling point" is "Don't be evil" and its business depends on trust. It's rapidly losing that trust.

For the record, Google's UK turnover in 2011 was £2.7bn, and based on its profitability, it's making about £676m and should be paying more than £180m in tax in that one year. In fact, it has paid a total of £10 million between 2006 and 2011 on revenues of £11.9bn.

If Google was a moral, ethical company then it would pay taxes that cover the cost of doing business in the UK, where it benefits from UK government expenditure on maintaining the country as a good place to do business (roads, schools, health services, police etc).

Essentially, Google is using fancy international book-keeping to defraud the British public.

That's evil in my book, whatever Google thinks.
This article's "philosophy of Emacs" runs counter to the conventional wisdom that "Emacs is a good operating system, it just needs a decent text editor". If anything what the author describes is a "philosophy of Acme" -- do as much as possible by piping in and out of external processes. While Emacs can do this, there is no guiding principle to favor it over elisp extensions.

I think the philosophy of Emacs, if it has one, is "maximum extensibility". Whether that be with elisp or external processes matters not.

EDIT: forgot the word "conventional" :)
Because Emacs is the ultimate GNUtoy.
It's a No True Scotsman fallacy because Marxism has been tried in wildly different cultures under wildly different circumstances using wildly different methodologies, and in each and every case you've lumped them under a single type of 'non-free' Marxism called Leninism, which then allows you to claim that 'Marxism has a lot to do with freedom' - despite a large body of contrary evidence collected, like I said, under wildly different circumstances.

Yes, it's true that in each and every case, no matter what the initial circumstances, things wound up devolving into totalitarian dystopias, but it's not because they all started off as Leninism. The more obvious conclusion is that since Marxism, despite the intentions and backgrounds of its adherents, always seems to lead to a not-so-good, not-so-free outcome, there is something about Marxism itself that is not compatible with freedom.

This is nothing unusual - ideas often have unintended consequences that differ from the motivations of their holders. But it should make you pause before making statements like 'Marxism has a lot to do with freedom'.
Ask HN: Bad College to California, Any tips for jobs?
Hello HN! I cross posted this on reddit here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1fjmv2/from_bad_college_to_california_prep_work_needed/

tldr; Moving to California, fresh out of college. Advice on getting a job?

Full text is in the link, text character limit is imposed. Thank you for any comments!
> Add some scripts/utilities and you get Github with all their "social" stuff, wikis and issue trackers
I am talking about denatured ("decocanized") leaves and leaf extract. In the US, these are ultimately from Stepan, who is the sole American company authorized by the DEA to import and process cocoa leaves. This is coincidentally the company that Coca-Cola buys their denatured coca leaves from.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Company
This quote is from his lengthy one-on-one interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cfNKKUDcV4) with the Turkish journalist Fatih Altayli on June 2nd. The purpose of this program was to explain Erdogan's ways to people and promote/show his side, it produced just the reverse reaction due to his callous comments.

The one-sidedness of the Turkish TV stations is appalling: Altayli characterizes the protests as "mostly vandalism" and gives the PM a platform to explain his side, without providing that to the other side. While CNN International was transmitting live from Taksim, CNN Turkey had a documentary about penguins! Currently there's a petition (http://www.change.org/petitions/cnn-international-must-pull-...) on change.org to ask CNN to revoke its naming agreement with CNN Turkey, it has reached 40k signatures.
This stuff is super tricky. I tried experimenting around, e.g. doubling the amount of orange oil to make it more organge'y tasting. But it had in my opinion very little impact on the overall taste. It is really hard to get that stuff right. If you have a few $ to spare give it a try.

It is fun, but very very time consuming because you need to stretch ~10ml into 7gallons of water until you can know if you are on the right track.
Whenever two factions within a Muslim state clash, one or both will eventually accuse the other of being Israeli stooges. The same charge is also commonly levelled at any external criticism of a Muslim state or faction. It's the Muslim world's equivalent of Godwin's Law.
What about financing problem, how are you going to finance production of movies, games and, even, music?
And, most importantly, how are you going to compel authors to give their work into public domain? If there is not going to be significant copyright protection you can be sure there are going to be technical means doing the same except without a limited term. They are actually already there due to the weakened copyright. And no, teenagers are not going to crack DRM schemes the next day.
IME, at industrial conferences, your pitches get accepted if you are friends with the organizers, or if someone who is friends with the organizers vouches for you to the organizers or co-presents with you. That's about it.
Indeed! Though I guess what I'm describing about my own transition is me applying what I once limited to primates, cetaceans, large mammals and certain bird species to all animals.

I guess when I was younger, I was able to justify it on the basis of what I concluded to be those species capable of "higher-order" thinking, when it's very apparent we're not sure if there's even that line to be drawn.