skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many comments here mentioned the bubble, and posts like this being a sign. I started recruiting software pros in 1998, and didnt have the benefit of LinkedIn or any web tech beyond doing searches on old search engines and résumé boards. Some candidates were nice about moot wanting jobs, and others were rude.

If the approach by the recruiter is not respectful, thought out, or at all relevant or personalized, by all means thrash away. But if the approach is a legitimate "hey, I've got a job that appears to fit your skill set, and if you're interested I'd like to discuss it with you and learn more about what interests you", then a response should be polite - or just don't respond at all.

I can tell you that many of the people that were nasty to me during the boom were begging for me to even look at their résumé during the bust. I think recruiters do have too much influence on the hiring market in tech, but keep in mind that there will be down times for most in the industry, and recruiters will remember who was respectful and who wasn't.

It's mostly junior recruiters making mistakes it seems, and they do learn by being shamed, so I do accept treating pure spam as it should be, but please (for everyone's sake) differentiate between legitimate polite contact and spam.
I've been using multi-media 'coordination languages' like Max/MSP/Jitter, Pure Data, SuperCollider, Touch Designer, and vvvv for years after I got hooked on the model from my first synthesizer (the Nord Micro Modular). When I had to learn traditional programming in school (Java at first), it felt hopelessly barbaric to me. Imperative text-based languages are incredibly time consuming, error-prone, and difficult to use in comparison.

Don't get me wrong, dataflow programming has its own gotchas– explicitly guaranteeing proper order can be tricky – and it's very hard for people from a traditional background to switch over (they're always reaching for the for-loop that isn't there), but it's quite clear to me that I can throw together a complex multimedia system with, say, camera input, some computer vision, effects, video playback, etc. in, say, 3 hours whereas it would take somebody starting from scratch in any other language at least twice that time if not 10 times[1]. Moreover, after they've finished, they enter a much longer period of intensive debugging, whereas dataflow systems I've built have been much closer to bug-free on the first draft.

Whenever I introduce this stuff to engineers, it blows their minds. I'm beginning to feel like it's a matter of serious importance to spread the word far and wide about alternative programming paradigms that make many of the problems of this decade magically disappear and make programming more efficient and easier to learn.

Shoot me an email if you're interested in more thoughts / pointers on this topic – skiptracer at gmail.

[1] Somebody might be able to argue that they could be just as fast with Processing or openFrameworks, but anecdotally developing in those environments is still 2x slower and bug fixing goes on forever.
Farm laborers get paid by how productive they are rather than by the hour. It's shit work but pays 2-3x more "per hour" than Wal Mart. Plus it's easy to pack in a lot of work, whereas Wal-Mart generally only lets employees work about 30 hours a week.
Ask HN: What "exotic" language to learn?
I'm interested in learning a more exotic language for fun, and I'd like to hear some suggestions. Some I'm considering so far: Pascal, Lisp, Cobol, Fortran, Prolog, Forth, Ada, Erlang. Any others I should look at? Please no BF, lolcode and similar.
It's possible it is sourced with the cheapest components they can find. They don't list the processor as it can change.

People buying $49 tablets may not care as much what specific processor it is.
Eh, not much love lost for LabVIEW here as well. It put me off visual programming for good.
if outgoing connections are blocked, you are probably ok
To be fair, unsalted md5 hashes are only one step above storing passwords in plain text.
Pervious Concrete
Except that, if you have both a WalMart and a CostCo in your town, you'll still make a cost-comparison, between:

cost of set of things found at WalMart A
+ cost of a few extra things not found at WalMart B
+ travel time T

and

cost of set of things found at CostCo A'
+ cost of a few extra things not found at CostCo B'
+ travel time T'

In other words, you might not be able to find all the same things at WalMart and CostCo, or for the same prices, but if you're in the price-range of both stores and trying to optimize your purchasing, you'll still be deciding which one to shop at.
I'm so sorry you went through that.

I don't know if it's a generational thing or what, but if my child beat me in chess at 5 or 6 years old, I'd be thrilled. Granted, I'm not great at chess, but I'd still get them signed up for lessons pronto, and I certainly wouldn't stop playing with them.
Not according to this.

"Farm workers had low individual earnings from farm work; the median income from farm work was between $2,500 and $5,000. Three-fourths earned less than $10,000 annually."

http://www.doleta.gov/agworker/report/ch3.cfm
A small compendium of errors...

For starter, a | b |c doesn't create two file descriptors. It creates four, two per pipe. Then there is a problem with the central argument. For regular files, and in fact all method of creating file descriptor, except pipes, opening in RW mode creates a single descriptor. The reason for pipe() special behaior is two pronged:

1. The raison d'être of pipes is for sequential communication between producer/consumer processes. There is no other reason for their design. As such, it made sense to break the convention of a single FD.

2. At the time of their design, the 70s, memory footprint was a crucial part of any design. Thus, sharing buffers between the producer and consumer FD was primordial, and the best way to make it happen is to create the FD at the same time.

The other problem is that the pipe analogy for TCP is wrong. Which client / server protocol over TCP ever had single direction data transfer? Close to 100% of all TCP usages are between a single client and a single server, communicating both ways.

The design for socket is practical for their intended purpose. Trying to shoe-horn an artifical problem an a design will, unsuprinsingly, no yield proper result.
Nearly all, if not all, of these are based on the "china special" which is an Android tablet built on top of the Allwinner CPUs (the A13 is popular in the cheap ones) Ars reviewed a $99 tablet[1] which was pretty funny. If you go to Alibaba.com and search for 'android tablet' you will find a bunch of these. And if you can navigate the Chinese there is a reference design on the Allwinner site which is pretty much exactly what you get.

Put a capacitive touch screen on an Raspberry Pi and boot Android on it and you'll have a better tablet than this I suspect. If someone does a definitive teardown of the specific Walmart model that would let us know exactly which reference design they used.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/11/worst-gadget-ever-ars...
Where's the fun in that? ;)
An up-to-date Firefox plus NoScript gives me peace-of-mind on that front.
500k for 10%?
9 Facts About Quantum Computing That Will Melt Your Mind
I'm more interested in the identity of the intruder for some reason. Who/what are they? Presumably there are easier targets to steal credit card numbers from, for example.
British ISPs to start filtering out porn by default
Like all famous artists, I suspect it's equal parts talent, marketing, and information cascade.
Right, but they make all their money over a few months, so the per-hour take home is more than Wal Mart. I'm not suggesting that it's a good job, only offering an explanation as to why someone would choose to do it vs. a minimum wage job.
> my beloved and I would marry into an "interracial" marriage

> whatever differences they have with other people in their childhood environments--whether height, weight, hair color, low IQ, high IQ, physical weakness, athletic prowess, or whatever it would be

You seem to have bought into the fallacy of scientific racism. In terms of population biology, we all belong to the same race, Homo sapiens sapiens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
The $45 tablet has a FAQ on the manf website apologising for having screen shots of the Google Play Store; and saying that these are an error that they're correcting.

The $59 device has a PDF for installing an alternative store so maybe they've made a similar error? (http://www.ematic.us/sites/default/files/Installing1MobileMa...) The quickstart guide shows some other app store. (http://www.ematic.us/sites/default/files/EGL26BL_QSG.pdf)

EDIT: the manf website for the cheaper device is horrible. Here it is (http://xeliotablet.com/) they have a faq about the play store on there somewhere.
HTML5 Canvas-based Ant Harvesting Simulation
There's no such thing as an "artificially high" wage. If a union can demand higher wages then those are the natural wages.
yep, I got it a few hours ago.
Paper-thin e-skin responds to touch by lighting up
Actually, no woman has ever won Wimbledon. To win Wimbledon you must be the best tennis player in tournament, and tennis is not a sport at which women can compete at the top level. This is why a separate tournament was created specifically for women.

Some of the criticism in the article is spot on, and properly decries real sexism.

But ultimately, most sporting tournaments are won by men for reasons of dimorphism.
"Living wage" is a pretty common economic concept. Feel free to google it.
Which Shopify app? (Just curious)
> Economists don't like protectionist unions.

He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Gladwell is certainly a polarizing figure, but in no way does he deserve the epithet "moron".
CIA backs study into how to control global weather through geoengineering
To be fair, if you're an engineer, this could be true of many of your possessions :).
A young hacker shouldn't be told to set aside the computer and play Little League baseball.

I absolutely disagree with this. Kids should start to play sports from about age 4 or 5. It doesn't have to be intense. It doesn't have to supplant other interests. Community soccer, basketball, baseball, once or twice a week. It helps them learn to socialize and work in groups towards a goal, keeps them physically active, makes them less likely to be bullied or outcasts at school because they will have a wider circle of friends and will have had more exposure to dealing with confrontation/competition.

Also like it or not, especially for men, sports is a common bonding activity even when you get into adult life. If you can't at least talk about last Sunday's football games or play a game of pickup basketball after work, you are going to be excluded from a lot of networks.
90% of business stay small. What's the point in owning illiquid shares? You might get small dividends maybe?
Keeping Up With The Quants
I'm actually an economist and the term is only used by non-economists.
Someone working as a cashier in Walmart should be able to afford shelter, food, and necessary non-emergency medical expenses. A 'living wage' is just that -- I work for you, you pay me at least enough to survive employment. What that amounts to, obviously, depends on the standard of living in any particular area.
What peer-reviewed research paper are you citing for your claim?
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Der Spiegel published a summary last year of Nazi influence in postwar West Germany: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/from-dictatorshi...
I think Quaint is awesome, but I am also into JS (or CoffeeScript really) since it runs in the browser and in Node.js. I was thinking of starting with the PEG.js http://pegjs.majda.cz/online online UI and hacking it so that certain types of delimited expressions in a document would insert themselves into the grammar. Seems like it would be a way to cheat and get something like Quaint for Node and the browser without having to write a parser etc.
>a cut-down version that presents a smaller attack surface

... or simply a cut-down version they know how to run.

"Mhh, what did that old cron job do, again?"

"I don't know; it was written by Mike, he left 3 years ago."

"oh ok, so not important then."

<12 hours later>

"OMG OUR DB EXPLODED AGAIN! That script was clearly essential! Can you rewrite it??"

"Er, I've looked at it: 2000 LOC of obscure Perl. Gonna take a while..."
> and who defines what that is?

In Australia in the past there was a national industrial court that did this. In Germany regular courts did something similar. Courts are expensive, so why not use a computer program from MIT:

http://livingwage.mit.edu

> most of the Wal-Mart jobs would not exist at all if they were forced to pay an artificially high wage to their employees

People would still buy things. Something like this happens:

> With minimum wage laws, the increased costs are passed to employers who in turn charge consumers higher prices if possible. Faced with higher prices, consumers purchase fewer goods thus leading to a redistribution ....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_wage#Impact

> forced to pay an artificially high wage

And who says the wage is artificially high? Maybe it would be the market rate if market power was more equal.
So minimum wage in Manhattan should be set at $50/hour?
I just read this article and agree with the parts about not talking about what you're going to do before you do it and defining next actions. I admire Joss for being that guy and getting stuff done. I need that inspiration right now because I'm too focused on picking something to work on instead of just working.
Born and raised in China, I can testify that working ethic was bad before they adopted market economics. What skylan_q described was happening in China as well.
The thing that people are getting annoyed at is Apple are claiming this update to be in the name of transparency, even though it's 3 days late and is worded quite poorly.

>Most companies don't even tell you anything happened

Seeing as you're confident with the "most companies" part, name me 5 big tech companies that suffered a data breach and didn't tell the public, or were forced to.

There are laws you know, about informing people about (potential) security breaches.
You don't need a pair of columns to replace a nullable column. I was addressing the second part of your comment not your questioning of allowing nulls.

Nulls have their place I believe, but they are grossly overused. For example, if you have a Person table, then something like a nullable DateDied is logical and acceptable over a sub-type solution. But something like HairColor should not be nullable to cater for bald people, it should non-nullable and reference a table that has a 'none' value.

On another note, I don't think you can eliminate the null concept because they are the implicit outcome of outer joins and therefore means of comparing and aggregating nulls needs to built in.
I got this email about an hour ago. I feel sorry for the folks who are "updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database". Songs will be sung in the opsen bars about about this battle.

From the sound of the email it suggests they have records of some data (perhaps not sensitive data :-) being compromised but no root cause on how it was compromised, so they are re-building systems from the ground up validating, configuring, and then moving to the next step.There are times where this is faster than spending time trying to root cause the exploit.

That said, this is where privacy and security collide. Since logs going back months of what everyone has done on every system really helps reconstruct things, but of course if you have those logs it means that someone else can abuse them.
Yes I agree, but software reuse isn't exactly new. The commenter was obviously referring to functional programming techniques, and I was trying to point out that other silver bullets have been spruiked in the past, only to fall short.

And besides, someone still has to program these libraries - it isn't turtles all the way down.
The Americas started rising in the 1600s. That would preclude them as a factor in the Silk Road's decline.
The Mind-Boggling Implications of a Bitcoin Economy
The default in upcoming versions of SQL Server will use the ANSI NULL behavior.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188048.aspx
Honey Boo Boo wanted an iPad, I said no, it's too 'spensive. But I saw these down at the Wal-Mart, and they's just as good and only fo'ty-five bucks!

Honey Boo Boo! Don't tell me you broke that thang already! I tole you not to drop sketti on it!
This sounds like genetic algorithm programming (see my other comment below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6080492). Writing a program consists of defining the end state. The GA then runs through thousands of epochs, getting closer and closer to the end state (determined by a fitness score for each program), until the solution is found.

I was able to achieve automated programs for printing text, simple math operations, string manipulation, and conditionals. After that, programming the fitness methods started getting complicated.
> PGP UX is horrible and still stuck in the 90s! It's great for people who need it and it was really necessary to be invented. But something like OTR is the real successor.

As tptacek commented on an earlier post, all of the alternatives to PGP provide more or less the same UX that PGP is capable of. It's not inconceivable that my PGP client could do most of the legwork (ie, fetching keys from keyservers, encrypting automatically, etc.) for me while maintaining compatibility with PGP.

In any case, I don't really want to enter a PGP vs. OTR discussion right now, because my original point is that many self-identified hackers use neither. If people read this thread and begin to use either one or the other, I consider that to be a win for now!
You're missing a Ken Iverson language from your list. Might I suggest J? It's unlike anything you've ever seen before, unless you've worked with APL, and it'll give you a whole new perspective on programming.
Ruthless prioritization
Just when you think you've found all the environments for creative coding, you discover new ones and wonder who are these people outside of my clique who use them?
What genus we belong to is irrelevant, this is more to do with how we look.

You can't collectively judge a race that you cannot tell apart from your own. Like wise, if a subset of your race were to look different from you, you would feel compelled to generalize about them. That's human nature.

The reality is irrelevant. Fine, races don't exist, but they are perceived to exist, and the parent is concerned with how his children will be perceived.
As others have said, it wasn't a valid point to begin with. A file open for reading and writing is too "logically 2 file descriptors", yet it's a single fd, just like a socket.
Give it a few years and all those 5.5" "phablets" will be cheap on the used market. :)
There are people who are viewing these parents negatively? That has got to be luckiest boy on the planet.
Panama finds MiG fighter jets on North Korean arms ship
It seems to me this is about finances and has nothing at all to do with whether or not he is allowed to pursue his passions (which he obviously is allowed to do).
as soon as I knew that my beloved and I would marry into an "interracial" marriage ... I figured that my children would have no hope to "not be seen as any different."

Minnesota and asian countries are particularly bad about that sort of thing, but in Los Angeles nobody would look twice.
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If it's impossible to survive in (or on, whatever) Manhattan for less than that, then yes. But I suspect there's a more flexible reality to the market than your question implies, given that people there already work for less than that and aren't dying in the streets as a result.

A minimum wage just means you can't decide one day that sales are down and now everyone makes 2 cents an hour to cover costs [1]. It means there should be an implicit minimum cost to maintaining a human workforce, because people need to eat.

[1]obviously not an economist
This is why you want to use SQL databases quite conservatively. Nearly every product I've seen that heavily leverages SQL has been an unportable mess.

... then you hit the performance wall, and say, "Well, just /one/ of these little features won't hurt, right?" And a year later you're singing the blues.

Standards should be executable.
How Can NSA Spying be Challenged? Even the Big Guys Don’t Know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

If you wanted to get fancy, you could probably load TrueCrypt onto a removable media to have plausible deniability via a hidden volume, or some sort of "bad password? wipe contents!" setup. However, in a country that forces you to resort to such approaches, I would bet that their human rights record is such that they wouldn't mind tossing you in jail because you were "obviously hiding something".
> if you have a Person table, then something like a nullable DateDied is logical and acceptable over a sub-type solution.

But this is exactly where NULLs are bad. "DateDied IS NULL" could mean many different things, semantically:

- This person hasn't died

- We don't know if this person has died (the information was not provided with the record when imported)

- DateDied is not an applicable property for this subtype of Person (for example, if you have an ImmortalPerson subtype.)

There are probably even more, if I wasn't just going off the top of my head. When you do an outer join, you get another level of NULLability--which would perfectly map to another layer of "Nothing | Just something"--but without that, you get those NULLs mixed in with the other three types of NULLs above. And then you insert all those into a table, export it, and import it somewhere else... and nobody knows what any of the NULLs mean.
New Zealand (and probably many other nations) provides a system similar to this where you either have a job and earn as much as you're able (based on negotiating skill and to some extent actual job skill) or you are unemployed and receive a benefit which is supposed to cover your basic living costs.

Without defrauding the system, you are better off getting a job as it provides you with a better income. Despite this, there are still a significant number of people who would rather remain unemployed than contribute productively to society. Many of them defraud the system or engage in crime to boost their income.

I think I would rather see the government guaranteeing a basic job rather than offering benefits for any length of time. Supporting somebody legitimately between jobs is fine. Somebody who hasn't worked in a year should be sent to a labour camp until they decide to find better employment.
Honestly, if you haven't worked in assembly, learning it is actually really interesting.
Very poignant and witty. Better contender for Mark Twain than Sam can ever do.
Factor is, what I would call, a modernised Forth. It is actually a very practical language with batteries included. See http://factorcode.org/
I also think it's marvelous that they've engaged solicitors to handle his affairs. It is good that there is an impartial party whose primary professional interest is in the wellbeing of their son. So many parents lose their way in situations like this by confusing their goals with their children's goals, and having a third party in the children's corner is a great way to control for that.
I'm not sure he was a counterexample. He started playing musical instruments at the age of 3 or 4, and began composing some pieces when he was 5. While Mozart was undoubtedly a musical genius, he had an early start and lots of exposure to music.
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So you want to start a mobile app business...