skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Advice for a frustrated CS student
Hello everyone,

I'm a 21-year-old CS junior undergraduate, and it looks like I can't put my mind into working on side projects.

I don't have problems with the field of Computer Engineering , I actually find it quite fascinating and interesting.
I'm hooked by reverse engineering, and I'm thinking into working in Information Security.
My university doesn't have such a cursus, so I devised I had to earn some experience by myself via some side projects, solving online CTFs.

Except I can't help being deterred and frustrated when trying to work on them. I try to code a little something, a little game, google some documentation, write some snippets, ducttape them together and see the whole thing self-destruct with obscure exceptions. Googling those errors doesn't bear fruit often.

Yes, I'm aware of all the trial and error involved in programming, but I noticed that frustration comes back when I tackle any kind of creative endeavour (I'm currently trying to learn how to draw) and even when playing video games (roguelikes and shoot them up games).

I would also like to feel that thrill when solving problems on your own, making "air castles" from scratch.

How can I get over that frustration? How can I acquire the persistence necessary to undertake any project and see it through to completion?

I know that there is some kind of "playfulness" involved in it, but I can't put a finger on it....

Thank you for your time.
I don't think of a wiki as a "document management system" but rather a "documentation management system". For documents, we like SharePoint. For documentation, I like Evernote. It's great for that - it's available anywhere via iOS/android/web.
Apple celebrates the App Store’s fifth birthday by giving stuff away
Have yet to go through Evan's post, but as you point out, the equations might be the most accessible way to truly comprehend relationships between 4 or more variables.

However, libraries like Tangle are powerful tools to visualize and understand relationships between 2-3 variables.
It's not a red herring. I was comparing the commenter's idea that "with enough time you can crack anything" to a system which cannot be cracked and how you wouldn't want to use it for this purpose anyway. I was not attempting to further the understanding of the capabilities of modern cryptography as I don't have all day to sit here and rehash whole textbooks on crypto.

Also, what active adversary are you implying would defeat the one-time pad? Lead pipe cryptography? That pretty much works for everything.
East Bay is huge and the BART is fast. You could live in Walnut Creek, Fremont, etc and have a less than 25 min train ride to Oakland. You really can't write off the whole east bay because some of Oakland has a high crime rate.
Honestly, it is the tech mecca of the world, so what would one expect? If you move elsewhere, like Portland, and if you hope the tech community continues to grow there - then eventually wouldn't you be hearing about series A rounds in the coffee shops there as well?
And about home ownership being the "American Dream"....the jury is still out on that one. It seems more like the "American Debt". Unless you have a family with children, and want a place for them to grow in to with good school systems and all, there's really no need to jump in to home ownership. The first several years you are mostly paying interest, so you're not building equity. Not too much mention all the money you've put down already. So unless you plan on living there for the long haul, just rent. Having a reasonably priced roof over your head should be part of the American Dream, not necessarily home ownership.
This looks pretty awesome. It's also the first time I've heard of Vala, so I read through the tutorial of that too. It's also interesting.

I don't suppose there's a way to use this with Windows, either as the shell emulator for Cygwin or a shell emulator for an SSH connection? Then I could actually have nice shells when I have to work on a Windows box too.
No problem. Glad it helped.
SF in '89, before tech started hitting, was not a pretty place. The Dirty Harry movies of the 70s, I think, were inspired to some extent by the decaying city. Technology breathed life into the Bay Area (San Jose was not much better back then either).
No, just comments about wasting 1K on alcohol in a single night.
It will be nice to see your comparison of the cost of living between Bay Area and, let's say, Sydney. Can you please provide one? Starting with the assumption that AUD 80k salary in IT in Sydney for the software engineer position will be equal to around $100k in SF.
I think you are oversimplifying things.

People comprising the government are not "just" people.

They may have personality traits that compel them to seek out high-power positions.

They may suppress their natural good intentions because where they work, "things are done that way and everybody does that". After several years of such cognitive dissonance, they may just completely change personality-wise.

&c., &c.
Twice burglarized in South Berkeley. Not worth it.
People spending all their time fixing broken libraries that they would have been quicker writing themselves is a problem that pretty much never happens, there are multiple ways in which to determine if a library is likely stable or mature enough to be used, and testing whether it works or not is usually a fraction of the time that it would take to write the thing from scratch.

If you open source some code without making any grandiose promises and someone somehow ends up in the position where they are wasting their time fixing it, its entirely their own decision / fault.
Replying to myself: It was the first issue. There is a cyanogenmod issue associated with this:

https://jira.cyanogenmod.org/browse/CYAN-1602
> 100-200k a year is a lot of money. That amount easily puts you in the upper quartile of income earners in the US.

It's more stark than that. In 2011, $100,000 would put you in the top 20%, and $186,000 would put you in the top 5%. Of household income.

In 2010, only 6.61% of American individuals had six-figure (or greater) incomes. At 100k, you're already pulling down more than 93% of Americans.

Cites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032011/perinc/new01...
Absolutely tragic. He always brought life to the various video's and podcast's on giantbomb. He will be missed.
where did they live? probably some sketchy part of west oakland where out-of-towners like to move because it's so grungy. you won't get robbed in piedmont, rockridge, montclair, temescal, grand lake usually, or JLS ever. but please keep upvoting this to the top! our rents are already going up because of SF spillover, feel free to avoid it and those of us in the know will keep enjoying our lives in the east bay with no complaints.
Well, it could, if your use case gets down to "pass an entire work unit in, get a result back".
It would be hard to convince european countries that a grave criminal needed to be found at all costs if all he was charged with is a traffic violation. Besides, his leaks are too public for that to hold water. Do I think they'll bait and switch? It's hard to rule out the possibility.
We're in the same camp.
I can and do work on the train. Car commuting is soul sucking. Public transportation commuting isn't great compared to working from home or something but it's not as awful as all that.
Very hard to read grey text on a white background.
New construction ABOUNDS

"22,000 residential units are in various stages of approval and construction."

More units are under way now than have been built from 1993-2011.
This seems like more of a personal opinion of yours than anything based on fact.
Bring a book? I get a lot of reading done on my 1-hour commute.
The author is ignoring the cost side of the equation. Higher education (even public), housing, and health care, have all significantly outpaced wages.
Public Universities have increased in price as states have basically stopped funding them.
Housing has increased because of artificial scarcity through restrictive zoning regulations which prices the middle class out of markets. Today's NYTimes describes of the last apartment listed for less than $600K in Manhattan's West Village (a total of 408 sq feet for $595K). http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/nyregion/amid-housing-scar...

The dramatic rise in housing was through politics that restrict construction that benefits existing landlords over the middle class.

Housing and public higher education costs can both be addressed by electing public officials that are concerned about living standards for the middle class by simply restoring state funding of higher education and deregulating restrictive zoning laws.
It's hard to rule out any possibility. Such is the nature of ruling things out.
Yuck yuck yuck. And yuck to ctrl-Insert / shift-Insert too, though that's better. I very much like the fact that on OS X the default copy-paste keys are command-c / command-v which don't conflict with UNIX's use of ctrl. If I can bind Windows-C / Windows-V to copy/paste in a terminal emulator I'd be happier.

Select-to-copy is yuck for two reasons:
1: After you select, it copies and then deselects. This is annoying if you want to see that you selected the right thing, and it doesn't allow you to change your selection if you see you were off by a character.
2: I like to select to mark my place sometimes, but I don't want that to change what's on my system clipboard.

ctrl/shift Insert is yuck because it's a two-hand keystroke and doesn't have an easy way to remember whether shift or ctrl is the copy. (I don't often make mistakes between the two, but it leaves me unsure of myself which is a half second lost to hesitation each time.)
This also sucks because the scripts always assume some variant of Ubuntu or Debian. Um, no, thank you, damn hipsters.
It would be nice if were true, but you simply can't, there's no magic that makes an expensive server that much faster - it's just a bit faster for a lot more money. It can make sense if you only want 10x the performance and the server is cheaper than the rewrite.

For example, if a $30k car can go 150mph, it doesn't mean a $300k car can go 1,500mph it just doesn't happen. A Bugatti Veyron goes, what? 254mph that's not even double (and it costs a lot more than $300k)
This sounds a bit like asking why anyone buys a Brita pitcher instead of investing in water & sewage sanitation.

The cost and effort involved in chartering a few buses is pretty minor next to re-tooling the Muni, BART & Caltrain systems. The results are also instantaneous. They need to attract employees now, and not in 5-10 years time.

It's worth noting that a public transit commute between SF and SV can involve up to 3 distinct transportation systems. For instance, when I worked for a startup based in Menlo Park I contended with a trifecta fail-fest of Muni (bus) -> Caltrain -> local shuttle, totaling 2 hours each way.
Show HN: Pydwolla, an elegant Dwollla python wrapper
You'd better tell that to builders who are putting up thousands of units in high rise buildings right now.
2nd this and push it up. I live in the area of Oakland, known as lake merritt. It's bordered by Piedmont, still has that "true diversity" as in ALL the colors of the rainbow feel, 20 min commute into San Francisco, AND I have a Damn patio! I love this little neighborhood for all of its nuances.
how is Florida not showing up as Disney?
I'm going to jump on the bandwagon and say that these are very well written - clear and concise, but they still retain authorial voice, and the examples work as intended. I found them of interest even though I work in general systems, but not games.

But, one question: in the "Subclass Sandbox" (http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/subclass-sandbox.html) chapter, shouldn't the activate member function be public? That is, isn't that function the interface to the outside world? As written, the Superpower abstract class has no external interface.
You're arguing for scaling up (vertical) instead of scaling out (horizontal). Both are valid approaches. Scaling out is preferred because your architecture is mode modular and you do not have to constantly buy bigger machines as your usage grows; you just add additional machines with similar capacity. The main problem with scaling up is that price and performance are not linearly related and eventually you will be limited by the performance available to one system. But it's a perfectly valid approach for certain scenarios.
Thanks for pointing out those pages.

I think greater internet access would certainly help, but it's not a panacea as far as Wikipedia is concerned. It might be that no matter what happens, a specific majority demographic with respect to age, income, eduction, and gender will choose to edit an online NPOV collaborative encyclopedia.
Does it integrate with Github or other source control systems?
I wrote a library a while ago that nearly fulfills this entire spec. I've added/changed things that I thought were more intuitive.
https://github.com/kolodny/wttt
I'd rather recommend learning to make Google Glass apps.
Ask HN: What are you more excited about Go or Elixr?
I think two fo the "hot" new languages are Go and Elixr. I'm trying to figure out what people are more excited about to gauge where I should devote more of my time. Just what the title says, are you more excited about Go or Elixr?
Czechoslovak Startups Timeline
> you _have to_ compile the ycm_core

Couldn't you ship a several already compiled binaries for major OSes? What do you do during compilation (and do you have to do this during compilation instead of on runtime) that makes it impossible?

I'm not using VIM anymore, so the question is just at out of curiosity :)
It's not the toupee fallacy - in this case I started with a large sample of fraudsters in my circle and know the outcome for all of them.
The earthquake in 1906 nearly ruined the entire San Francisco. It can happen again at anytime. Limiting the building heights and number of housing is a precautionary measure. The best thing the SV tech community should do is realize the limitations and move out to other cities. LA/San Diego could be the great replacement/extension for SV.
Thanks for all the replies. It was an honest question - I'm not a native English speaker and I get occasionally confused by slang.
It's tricky I think. There are really two orthogonal statuses at play. There's the status conferred by being far wealthier than typical for the area. There's also the status conferred by having a respected/liked job.

In Seattle/SF your wealth status is high, but your interestingness status is low. Dirt low even.

In NYC your wealth status is middling, but your interestingness status is relatively high. I prefer this setup far, far more.

But I'm also not a sociologist - maybe we're defining status differently.
At this point, I might argue for IPython Notebook.
I would like clarification on the repeated statement that FISA is not a court but instead a review board. I am not sure if you are speaking from your educated interpretation, or something that is agreed upon as understood legal 'known'.
Yeah I've thought about it a few times. Maybe when I finish my current commitment, I'll think about it more seriously. Some of the people involved went on to be very famous for their crimes.
If it's an big issue, don't move there! And stop bitching about it. You made the choice. There's thousands of jobs/careers/ventures/opportunities elsewhere. Plus you can work remotely or in a office share/incubator in hundreds of cities.
I'm cool with just a few days of sunshine :). Even in the summer that's a rare occurrence here.
Because if you want to have reasonable availability and low latency you can't just buy two "big" machines.

Going with the incrementally sized approach gives you more flexibility to economically distribute the risk, in addition to the load.
SUSE to support SUSE Studio customized Linux distros
Sure, except that the perception of the middle class is significantly screwed (at least in the US, but probably similar up north).

In the US, the median household income is $51,404[1]. So, the middle class should probably be centered around that number. Say, $35000 to $75000 or so. I bet your looking at that number and saying "No way! I'm middle class and my household income is $150k!" Well, turns out that basically everyone thinks the same way regardless of what their incomes are.[2]

So it becomes pretty hard to nail down exactly what defines the various classes in the USA. Especially with the cost of living differences across the country.

Take a look at Rich Blocks, Poor Blocks[3] and spend a little time clicking around the map. The zip code I live in has a median household income of $38,646 and the site suggests the middle class income range for the state is $53,264 to $68,300.

Anyway, middle class is a loaded term.

1 - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/29/c...

2 - http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/everyone-is-mid...

3 - http://www.richblockspoorblocks.com/
Oakland is currently the 3rd most dangerous city in the United States[1].

What's worse is I worry Oakland will experience the same type of growth the Mission did, where half will become overpriced and homogenized while the other half will continue to be neglected.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/21/most-dangerous-citi...
The Woman at the Heart of Everything Google Builds
Thanks. I'll take both of those into account :-)
Sigh. Yes, you're right. Nothing went wrong during the Curiosity landing, so I can therefore not use it as an example of successful flight automation.

You win this one, it looks like. GG.
Tucson is approximately the same size as Chicago, when talking about the actual city. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by... -- Tucson is both giant and sparse.
You just make an FFI declaration in Haskell:

foreign import ccall square :: Int -> Int

And use --with-js to link against a JS file:

// square.js

function square(x) {
return x * x;
}

Using jQuery would be an interesting challenge. I suppose you could just get the jQuery object and go nuts on it unsafely, or write typesafe(ish) wrapper functions to export. The “ccall” convention is also a bit disingenuous.

Source: https://github.com/valderman/haste-compiler/blob/master/doc/...
No kidding, feel for his wife that has to be a horrible thing to have happen.
I'm sorry, but who are these guys to judge any sort of font? Lower-case glyphs in their body font are as wide as they are tall and have really weird kerning. It's virtually unreadable.
Fascinating. My preferred choice for transmitting arcane knowledge is poetry (in fact, there is a long tradition of exchanging alchemical poetry in cipher).
What I believe is truly interesting is the plain fact that:

We have heard many companies, politicians and even directors of three letter orgs specifically say things that contrast this video. Direct back end access to corporations data without their knowledge.

I love the fact that we are hearing these things in parts. Because after the first video we heard plenty of things from those mentioned above, but then Snowden comes out in part 2 and says those things they have said in the past month, that are directly contradicting and therefore lying.
Create a Hidden Sliding Navigation Bar Using CSS3 Transitions
As a reader of Monocle, I thought the same. Being that they both play in the publishing content world, I'd think Monocle the magazine would come down on the OP legally. Aside from all that, I'm eager to check it out.
>>I'd love the city I'm sure, but after glancing around I've come to the conclusion that home ownership is unthinkable to anyone who hasn't had a cash-out event.

I've never understood this crazy, if not outright insane obsession with home ownership. Why does everyone want to tie significant amounts of their lifetime earnings into physical property that historically has had very low appreciation in value? It's like people have forgotten about the housing bubble popping just five years ago, causing large portions of the population to take big hits financially. (And what is the current real estate craziness in SF, if not another bubble that will inevitably pop?)

Even seemingly rational reasons for home ownership, such as being able to raise a family in good school districts, fail to stand up to critical scrutiny. There are many stable renter neighborhoods with great schools.
Dead Among Those Interviewed in Faulty Background Checks
My beef with JS Promises (uppercase "P") is that, as a programming idiom, I prefer once I have X, Y and Z, do something with X, Y and Z over get X, then get Y, then get Z. In the former case, the provisioning logic is a separate concern; it could be done in parallel, serially, or via some combination of both. In the latter case, it's inherently serial.

I wrote an alternate implementation of promises in JS (lowercase "p") that uses the former approach: https://github.com/greim/await.js
I am also in favor of getting requirements change in the start but the client should be willing to renegotiate if they change the scope too much.
NDA? What NDA?

I mean, I get that people are breaking it left and right, but using slides from Apple's WWDC decks as your illustrations is a bit much.
This is how rvm's authors want you to install rvm :)
Sorry, I didn't mean to come across as being pedantic :) I really do think the distinction is important. It's a foundational element of the language that ties software and hardware together. It's the reason we have things like the OSI model.

A couple of years ago I had a temporary run in telecom, working with a company on a nation wide VoIP roll out. This was the first project where I was working on technologies that were completely outside the realm of your typical web application. I was surprised to find so many similarities. SIP, for example, looks a lot like HTTP. The distinction between messaging and media gave me new insights in to web programming.

As I learned more and more about telephony, it became obvious that the common language between web and telecom technologies was the separation of layers in the various protocols that make up each stack.

Knowing, and respecting, the language that is used to communicate these concepts helped me transition quickly between technologies. Because of that, I try to make an effort to share this knowledge with others.

My intent is to inspire, not to chastise :) I didn't do a very good job of that in my original comment.
Reading on the right side of the screen is really uncomfortable. Goes to show we still haven't figured out this app-design thing.
I used to watch his video reviews on GameSpot around 10 years ago. Extremely sad news.
> Like you said, adding friction can improve things (you mentioned requiring proof of identity)

I said adding proof of a real identity would have some impact, but it would create more problems than it solved, thus it would not improve things.

> The fact remains that adding any sort of friction should be expected to cut down the number of asses

It should also be expected to cut down on the number of users. My argument is that if your objective is to improve the quality of the comments there are more effective ways of doing it, like effective moderation schemes.

> I don't see why requiring authentication via a service that's generally not anonymous (Twitter or GitHub) is a bad idea

Because it's not effective. It raises the barrier to entry, excluding several users who would add value to discussions, without providing any meaningful level of protection. Also, neither of them, as far as I am aware, enforces a real name policy, so I'm not sure what you mean by them being "generally not anonymous."
I imagine what he means by "stabby" is "unsafe and at higher risk of violent crime".