skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What 'programming' skills should an average person ideally have?
Note that my definition of 'programming' is broad enough to include, say, VBA in Excel, and my definition of an average person is 'someone who is not pursuing a career in programming.'

My initial guess is VBA, enough SQL to sufficiently query a mature database, and enough Python/Ruby to be able to automate simple tasks. What are your thoughts?
The question has to be asked, were there members of congress or the executive who were aware of the perjury but failed to take any action about it ?
Do you know he said that?

My experience with reporters (and news producers) is that they get you to say things under one pretense, and it gets swung around with little empathy towards another to tell the story they want to tell (not necessarily out of malice, often just because they want to tell a different story than the facts do).

I'm not claiming he's some sort of saint and he's accurate (or even sure) of all that he's saying, but I'm sure reporters are eating him for lunch and pulling all sorts of shit out of him.

He had to give interviews to raise his profile enough for questions to be asked if he vanished to pre-empt those attempts.
These things do need clever people to work on them. And yes, there are better people out there. But those better people are not working in droves to solve public issues. If you think there's an army of genetic engineers working on food shortage in an effort just to feed more people, you're crazy. The ones working in the field are working for private companies for profit so they can make a buck, not to help less fortunate people.

At not-for-profits there's usually a person who has the drive to help people, and has studied some particular way of solving a problem and will use the same hammer for every single nail they face. They are not applying creativity, they are applying the one rigorous discipline they learned.

My brother works on social issues for latin americans, for example. He is not a genius, he does not have a PhD. But he is trying to solve real, multifaceted problems that people have with the only skills he has available - communications skills. He is only interested in attacking problems from one angle. But that may not be the best way to approach it.

This isn't an isolated example. I lived in DC and worked with volunteers who would all study essentially one thing ad-nauseum. The idea of going outside their field was preposterous because they had no idea how to go about it.

You should also consider that my definition of hacker has nothing to do with software development. Most software developers I know have got jack shit in the way of a hacker mentality.
I've dropped you an email. Been hanging out for a Heroku RethinkDB add-on for a while!
Well, one of the nice things (I think) about being a software developer (and one-time "scientist") is that you get to measure your mettle with nature - to test your ideas out in the real world - to see if your preconceptions hold, or if your ideas are only so much hot air ... and all too often, they are. My initial ideas are always wrong (well, most of the time), and I pretty much always need several rounds of testing against reality to refine my designs into something workable.

Getting the right answer is hard. Really hard. I never understood how some people could go through life and avoid ever being wrong; dancing around responsibilities, never taking the blame, being driven by a (frankly irresponsible) culture that demands perfection.

For me, my failures are lessons; mistakes marking a path of learning and progress.

Good will; systematic persistence; humility and humour - all recipes for learning and improvement: Flashy self-aggrandisement, an emphasis on performance and (self-proclaimed) brilliance: all recipes for deceit, lies and failure.
I spoke at Code Generation 2010 in Cambridge about 'roll your own' code generation solutions and some examples of how I'd used them to reform an existing software development process.

While most people there were UML junkies, and the UML designing 'Object Group' were also in attendance, I still used the phrase UML hell during my talk which garnered significant cheers from the audience.

My conclusion was that there are often all sorts of useful, formal models just lying around and UML isn't necessarily the best thing to rely upon. Three useful and IMHO often overlooked examples of 'free' formal models are: software dependency trees in package managers, directory structures, and database definitions.
I hope it'll boost the development of this awesome tool. Android port anyone?
Yeah, the mind-bending part of the whole thing is that the reason the traders are making trades based on the information ISN'T because the data predicts the long term (or even short term) profitability of any company; they are making trades based on it because they know the number will affect the STOCK PRICE of the company... at least temporarily.

It doesn't matter how good your own data is if the data's release doesn't affect stock prices.
It casts doubt on Snowden's knowledge of the situation. It makes it seem like either Snowden didn't understand what that slide is referring to.

Snowden's rationale is that he was in a position to understand exactly what was going on and that he leaked because he felt it was necessary for the public to know what he knew. Snowden himself contrasted his situation with Manning - he pointed out that Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of documents indiscriminately without possibly being able to read them all or understand their consequences or the risks and benefits involved in leaking them. Snowden said that, by contrast, he was very selective in what he leaked and he understood the issues completely.

But if one of the most serious claims that Snowden is making is wrong, it calls into question whether Snowden really had the knowledge that he claims he had.
I think the point is that younger people tend to be early adopters of a new platform. It's probably easier to get middle aged people to start using a platform popular with 20somethings than the other way around.

So if one wanted to create something to rival facebook, create a place that suits the needs of the younger generation better than facebook does, the rest will eventually follow.

Even reddit seems to have a healthy following amongst "older" people.
Get it here: http://www.llvm.org/releases/3.3/

The main llvm.org web page hasn't been fully updated yet (2013-06-13 22:55 UT).
Fair or not, reputation and corporate history allows different companies to get away with different things. Valve doesn't exactly have a reputation for turning off DRM servers, killing multiplayer servers for old games, and abandoning entire product lines and/or brands.

Conversely, nobody whines about Microsoft not releasing new versions of Halo, (or games in general with the number "3" in their title).
If you're using HTTPS, they can't even see your URLs or headers. That's sort of the point.
http://www.samuru.com is better for concise answers.
> I can not help but read your comments throughout this post and note the obvious bias.

I plead guilty. I do not like Kim Dotcom and what he does. My impression of him is that he’s an egotistical sociopathic opportunistic hedonistic grandstanding thug without moral compass. Megaupload is only a small part of what gave me that impression, I’ve been reading about his ‘endeavors’ for over a decade.

As for Megaupload, in the articles I’ve read over the years, he hasn’t done much to combat piracy on his network, some go as far as suggesting he encouraged it. He also claims patents over web tech like two factor authentication.

He also posed on photos with all the firearms he has, which surely must’ve made the NZ authorities queasy about peacefully apprehending him.
> I dont understand all the hubbub about direct server access

It's upsetting. It's a breach of trust for the provider and the government. It's more principle than technical.

Both the "upstream" and "direct" methods are upsetting, just in different ways and for different reasons.
They probably didn't install back doors and are just pulling in the data from the internet backbone.

Tapping off the fiber.
If the tech companies have been slandered unfairly, why don't they sue the Guardian?
It's important to remember that there are many companies involved here. PalTalk's direct access could be a begrudgingly set up teletype of live chat transcripts while Apple could have provided a VPN connection and a root password. We don't know yet know what access was sufficient to be a part of the "direct access" Prism program.

It will be interesting to see what degree of commitment each of these companies showed to the privacy of its users. It appears that however Twitter was complying with requests, it wasn't as convenient for the NSA as Prism access...
It depends on where the interception device is installed.

Most of the large-scale sites are doing SSL offloading, so one of the first things that happens is the traffic is decrypted. Often this happens in the front end load balancer.

If the set up is as the WP described:

> “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,”

and this equipment is installed behind the SSL offload devices, it would see all the customer data in the clear.
Just use internet sharing on your phone =)
Did you read the link? Your post sounds like every other one discussing MS's strategy without taking into account anything the linked page said. I'm not saying it's true or that it'll succeed, but it doesn't describe MS trying to "stretch" at all.
The problem is that cleartext can't be trusted in the cloud. The only way to really restore confidence is to enable truly private endpoint-to-endpoint secured real time and store-and-forward communication.
This feels a lot like the government telling me PRISM has stopped terrorists plots. Sure, I don't like money going to Gamestop. Although, I'd rather it go to Gamestop than fuck myself over.
Or get the best of both and get an Aeron lab stool and use with a sit/stand desk. You can stand when you want to, and just pull up the stool to sit.

http://www.hermanmiller.com/content/hermanmiller/english/pro...
Federation implies certain things can't be done that centralized systems can do. The most obvious is deleting or editing a message after you sent it, which works on a social network but not for email. (In theory, email could support versioning, but not deleting the old version, because once you send a message it doesn't belong to you.)

This can make federated systems harder to build and centralized systems harder to keep up with on features. But perhaps some day we'll get there.
This is where they would kill it. Search would be supplementary, but if they pivoted and focused on email (eventually rebranding it), then that's a home run in my book. I'd like to see this, and would be interested in beta testing if/when it happens.
Nah man, he's saying Microsoft goes to extreme lengths to keep old 3rd party software running on new versions of Windows. For a long time (maybe still), there was a principle at MS that upgrading to a new version of Windows should never break a 3rd party app.

I can't speak to the emulation layers, but there are tons of verified stories about MS writing special code that actually watched the running processes and adjusted the behavior of the OS. They'd look for popular apps that utilized bugs/quirks in older version (which were remedied in new updates) and essentially emulated that bug for that one process to keep it working in the new version of Windows. Crazy, crazy stuff. Sim City was a famous example.

From Joel Spolsky:
"I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it."

I'm no fan of MS, but that example speaks to a respectable dedication to a principle – rightly or wrongly.
> Am I a customer or a product?

Do you have Cable TV? 70% of America does, knowing that they are both customer and product.
Without a mac, you have no choice but something like BrowserStack

However, when you cave... I test OSX with VMWare following this guide:

http://www.souldevteam.net/blog/2013/03/22/os-x-mountain-lio...
Because The Guardian has 19,998 more documents that they don't know the contents of.
You are assuming they are looking exactly at search requests. Email is unencrypted and so is DNS. The rest they store in case they can break it later.

They were doing this in 2007 at AT&T Worldcom I expect it only got better over the past 6 years.
I know you're just trying to make a metaphorical comparison with railroads, but the story isn't that simple.

In the U.S., intercity railroads found they could make more money by focusing on freight and leaving passengers to poor Amtrak. If Warren Buffet's acquisition of BNSF is any indication, the private railroads are quite profitable.

The decline of intracity passenger rail in the U.S. has many causes (massive public investment in the Interstate highway system for one). Still, it's worth remembering that auto companies played an active role in acquiring and disassembling streetcar lines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspi...
Email is unencrypted in transit.
At least if its just a low bandwidth "check in" you could use your phone as a WiFi hotspot. I know, you shouldn't have to. But it's an option.
Well that depends on what your definition of 'is' is.
They are probably doing both.
>that hasn't happened as much for disc-based games

This is EXACTLY what the used game market does for disk-based games. The only difference between the steam model and the disc-based model is that the producer doesn't get a cut of the game sales.
Anyone else think they are playing "Rope a Dope"?
The initial request/redirect response is insecure. So a MITM can intercept the redirect response and replace it with his own content. That content could be, for example, a 200 response status and HTML pulled from the attacker's HTTPS connection to the target site.

So rather than being redirected to a secure connection, I happily communicate with the attacker instead.
JQuery and Bootstrap with REST example
The comparison to Steam is false to begin with. PC gaming has NEVER been a trade with your friends (legally) culture. Console gaming has ALWAYS been a trade with your friends culture (legally). When was the last time you saw a used PC game store?

Second, there is no evidence that companies who's job is to maximize profit will have any incentive to lower their prices for disc-less games. For this, we CAN look at Steam (and other services). AAA titles are full retail when they are released. The price degrades over time, but the same thing happens with disc releases.

This is a one-sided win for Microsoft (and game publishers for XB1) and is yet another reason to avoid the XBox 1 like the plague. That is the market feedback that Microsoft should receive.
Just take a snapshot of your VM after you have configured it the way you like. I do this with VMWare. When 90 days goes by, roll back to that snap shot.

take note of anything you upgraded since so you can create a new 90 day snapshot with more of the recent updates
I would prefer if someone else did it. Not because I do not trust DDG, but because I don't like the idea of one company providing everything (or too much). Why step into the footsteps of the dinosaurs?
Thats why we moved to US-WEST(oregon).
Random sampling is such a simple, but nice touch. I've built up large tables/collections and only after realized I needed random samples I had to go through and generate random seeds for entries.
There was a post, a little while ago, asking why developers disliked creating documentation. The only response that resonated with me was the double-work required to keep it in sync with the code base. The same can be said of UML and ER diagrams. Only the round-trip tools feel worth the effort to learn, because you can choose to use them when they are useful to you.
Is it True That Google Never Deletes Email from Gmail Servers?
Hi vizzah. These are all Enterprise Evaluation versions of Windows for the most part and they all expire. We recommend you download once, take a snapshot BEFORE first use, then after 90 days revert to the snapshot. Not ideal I know as you still lose any changes you did to the image but saves you downloading again and configuring. Apologies for that bit of pain.

Follow @IEDevChat for updates and stuff.
Again, possibly, yes -- the only insights on offer are seemingly rather obvious: that those seemingly predisposed to violence may be content with engaging with the problem in some other manner; if avenues were made available; That political engagement helps reduce societal tensions, and that providing avenues for political engagement that are as broad in participation as they are deep and detailed in substance may well engage and divert tensions that would otherwise lead to violence; This is well understood; and forms the basis of many peace processes around the world (Northern Ireland, for example).
I thought the actual substance of what was said was pretty good, but I recognized the incorrect use of then/than and its it's as a possible signal for identifying the author, then again, it's possible they did this on purpose to make it harder to identify them. They were 100% consistent in never using than and never using its, which is interesting. They did misuse too/to once, but were not 100% consistent.
Direct Access is a red herring. What I want to know is if they had full conent mirroring, MITM nodes etc.

Personally, I believe there is a possibility that the name PRISM itself is an allusion to the method of data slurping the NSA has been using. Where there are plenty of articles talking about their fiber splicing actions etc...

I take PRISM to mean they were taking streams and were able to focus on a particular 'wavelength' in the stream and mirror it to their own systems.

I don't think they had "direct" access to FB systems - even though there are plenty of former CIA/SS/Military (and potentially NSA moles) already openly working as actual employees of FB - I don't think they necessarily needed full and direct access - the NSA taps the ISPs directly.
I don't think Google is the problem here. AdWords didn't make this mistake, and in general would not make this mistake.
New York State open data handbook
Where do you download older versions of Chrome, please? I uninstalled Chrome 27 completely because it was unusable (slow, pale blue screens, crashy etc) on XP but Chrome 25 worked fine....

PS XP is 12 years old.
I just bought a Herman Miller Aeron.. and made a big desk with trestle table legs and a door.

It's by far the best chair I've ever had. Totally worth it.
The desk is exactly the height I want - the size I want.. because I made it so. :)

Go for the chair that fits you best - even if expensive. You're going to be sitting in it for 8hrs+ a day, right?
Trends come and go. Even the strongest software engineering trends seem to last about 10 years.

More than 10 years ago, I worked on a tool called ArgoUML. Years later, check out what I was surprised to find on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=argouml

Tons of fairly recent videos of how to use ArgoUML. Mostly in Spanish, Portuguese, or Vietnamese.
I'm a fan of the Steelcase Leap for a chair; I switched to it from an Aeron a while ago and my back has been much happier:

http://www.steelcase.com/en/products/category/seating/task/l...

I do recommend going to a showroom and giving a few a spin. It may not tell you if you're picking the exact right chair, but it will help you avoid the wrong ones.
Great post. A theory that makes sense & I have not heard.
The games on demand pricing has to be that way though. If Games on Demand cost literally half the price Gamestop charged, the retailers would revolt, which would cause the publishers to revolt.

The only reason Valve has the power to charge what they charge is because they incrementally built that power - retailers at one point threatened to pull games from shelves for using Steam's authentication!
I've occasionally tried that with my X-Box 360, but without much luck. But if the check-in is very low bandwidth it might be worth a shot.
I have a private writing app and I can confirm that this NSA thing has been good for me too and I'm betting lots of services concerned with privacy. I saw a 5X increase in users in the past week and reviews in blogs are getting more numerous.

I wonder though if now all services regardless of their real focus will start marketing privacy as a feature and muddy the waters, making it hard for consumers to discern who is really about privacy and who just uses it as a marketing ploy.
An observation: Ghostery blocked 22 trackers on this article.

Does it somehow make tracking my every move online okay if it's done for profit?

EDIT: phrasing.
Given that police officers had to break into his panic room (in which a firearm was present) to get him out, I don’t see how he could say such a thing with a straight face.

I don’t perceive him as a victim, even though his marketing team does a great job at making it seem as if he is. The video in the linked article has a lot of production value.
Exactly, I think what we might be needing is a non-US (perhaps Iceland or NZ) based alternative. The moment, duckduckgo becomes relevant enough (i.e significant traffic) then is game over IMO.
And why specifically do you dislike, say, SQL Server? (except for price; obviously Microsoft wants to make money off of it).
Does anyone use this Browserling?
https://browserling.com/
What's the difference between a diff and a side-by-side view of two files? I'd (usually) prefer the former.
Chrome in managed environments supports this via Legacy Browser Support, which allows administrators to select (specifically down to port and URL, if necessary, or just by hostname) which sites to open with IE with the rest defaulting to Chrome (or vice versa, as is most convenient for the particular environment.)
UML is just a notation. It is great for blueprinting software (except that graphics create problems, and UML is graphical), it makes no difference if they exist or not.

The problem is that people are terrible for blueprinting sotfware that does not yet exist. Whatever notation you choose, the problem will still be there.
So now I'm told (by someone) that a retail price always factors in it's resale price! What a crock of shit.
I think he means if they turn off all the servers , so there is nowhere for the console to "call home" to. So you will be unable to play at all.

Hopefully they will just patch the console to enable offline play before this happens, but I guess you don't know for sure.
I thought about saying something very rude to you about me being entitled to my opinion, but I won't.
Just to clarify - this is not simply a petition. We're using a script that the late Aaron Swartz wrote to deliver emails directly to Congress via the contact us pages on legislator's websites. That means there'll be hundreds of thousands of emails delivered to Congress in the coming days.

It's amazing how practical some of the things that Aaron worked on are.
Turkey, you look gorgeous when you are angry
I don't think that an average person should have any programming skills.

Just like I don't think that the average car owner would require engineering skills, or an average eater would require farming skills.