skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm in the same boat you are - learning new stuff is hard and feels like its impossible to get anywhere. It's taken me over a year to release the simplest of android apps.

I think, though, that its a lot like learning programming languages. Once you get one, you get similar ones easily. I hope so, anyway.
In Defence of Hand Coded SQL
Would you care to elaborate on this?
Of course not. And everyone doesn't need to learn how to drive. Or speak Spanish. Or cook for themselves. Or balance credits and debits.

But people who can do any of the above proficiently have many doors and options open to them that others don't. And those who can do it at least a little bit can at least have some awareness for when they hire someone to do it for them.
The name makes me think this is a codecademy sister site. Otherwise, very awesome.
The young and rich snapping up Tesla's Model S
I left my startup last year. I didn't sell it, but had saved enough money to last me 3-5 years. It's enough to make me feel free to work on whatever is important to me.

One of the unintuitive things I have struggled with is that now that I can do anything, I have a hard time choosing to invest time in something unless it feels like "the one" project. It has to be so important it was worth saving so hard and leaving my startup. So the bar is much higher for what I spend my time on. I realize this feeling is stupid, but it doesn't stop me from having it.

I bet being wealthy and having a huge hit feels similar. Notch probably feels MORE like giving up on any given project because he second guesses himself. Since he can work on anything, it HAS to be amazing, or why else would he choose it when he can choose anything?
I've done some benchmarks with millions of rows, and a default PostgreSQL installed via apt-get on Ubuntu works fine. I doubt whether the majority of PostgreSQL users really need to install from source (especially considering how much harder it makes upgrades).
Oh, and I forgot about getting off of coal. Even if there were 10 more Fukushimas, it still wouldn't be as much radiation as what coal produces:

"The radiation that fossil fuel plants spew into the environment each year is around 0.1 EBq. That’s ExaBecquerel, or 10 to the power of 18. Fukushima is pumping out 10 trillion becquerels a year at present. Or 10 TBq, or 10 of 10 to the power of 12. Or, if you prefer, one ten thousandth of the amount that the world’s coal plants are doing. Or even, given that there are only about 2,500 coal plants in the world, Fukushima is, in this disaster, pumping out around one quarter of the radiation that a coal plant does in normal operation."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/08/10/the-fukus...
I think the authors of the presentation† would agree with Schneier about the math, and I know Tom Ritter's working on a bit of a follow-up. But I don't think they'd agree on Schneier's message here, which is that people who use RSA have nothing to worry about. The Joux small-char DLP stuff isn't going to directly impact RSA, but RSA in its most commonly used key size (1024 bits) is not secure, and the next common size up (2048 bits) is ~5x slower. It's past time people started moving away from RSA.

† My name is first listed among them but I did literally no work on it; I'm as confused as you are, but flattered.
My recommendation have at least 1 monitor in vertical as a reading/script/working buffer monitor. the vertical space really helps in reading really fast, i display 125~ lines of code all at once and if my functions are grouped right, i can see the exact flow right there on the screen. it is NOT faster to switch windows, your brain/eyes loses track of where within the document it was last. (try reading two books switching in the middle of paragraphs)

Another big reason I like having screen space is that I can display my required specification/ design doc/ uml/ ms paint, whatever it may be while coding.
Shut down the site. You win.
And he plays the market psychology to his advantage - it's quite obvious he does this.
Maybe everybody does not need to learn to code
This attitude is what's wrong with the open source software. It is important to him, but not that important to spend time getting to know code base in a language he might not be familiar with in order to implement it himself. Or he just might not be a programmer.

If you want actual users for your project, not developers, than either implement what they ask for or say you don't want to. If enough people complain, it is a good sign that you are missing important features that prevent adoption. Build it yourself is not an answer to those users, and is just plain annoying.

If you want to be able to answer with "send me a pull request" then just stop creating end users software, and build some library instead that is used by developers.
I tried to import my feed.ly feeds to this but the page stuck on "OPML import is happening. It can take a minute. Don't reorganize your feeds until it's completed importing. Refresh to see its progress." and I got no errors in the javascript console. It looks promising though. I find feed.ly to be too gimmicky and noisy. I like the minimal style of go read.

One thing that's missing from every google reader replacement I've tried is the ability to infinite scroll through a feed history. Somehow google knew how to request RSS feed pagination parameters.
Pay the guy! He could have sold it and made lots of money. He was trying to do the right thing. Too bad he had to go to such extremes to get someone's attention.
Every student should have, at least, exposure to coding and the opportunity to learn it. This has not been the case in my lifetime.

In middle school, a special instructor was brought in to teach programming to the GATE kids. She decided she could only handle one student. So out of the entire class, only one kid was exposed to programming in school

When it was time to enter high school, there were two public schools in the area. One had an AP Computer Science class, but the student body was notorious for its high rates of drug abuse. My parents stuck me in the other, which offered no programming classes at all.

In college, I applied to be a CS major, but I was required to choose a second major since CS was impacted. The school admitted me into my second choice of major. Despite pleading my case with the CS department and arguing with the provost after I enrolled, I was unable to switch into the CS major or take CS classes.

I don't mean to whine. I'm sure I had it a lot better than many self-taught programmers. And maybe if I fought harder, I would have gotten in. But the education system did me no favors in learning CS.

And when I see politicians and Silicon Valley billionaire executives lamenting the lack of skilled programmers in the U.S. while doing nothing effective to fix the problem, I have to roll my eyes.
Well, we don't need to assess fictional scenarios, we can take a look at what this hacker has achieved.

1) Lots and lots of negative press. (we wouldn't talk about this if this wasn't true)

2) Embarassing the CEO of a company and thereby also hurting the reputation of his company

3) And on top of that he breached his privacy

And you still think that they treated him too harsh by withholding payment?
I mean couldn't he have waited a few more days or reopen the ticket - or maybe just use Facebooks test accounts?
It's not like he waited for ages, he brought this bug to attention last friday.

But yeah, waiting a whole weekend was probably too much for him to take, so he obviously had to post on MZs wall.
Sorry, I don't offhand but you can probably find one by just searching for "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime" by Charles Tilly.
But then how do we organize the productive capacity? We need the course bins to blindly assign human "resources" to, otherwise we'd need to recognize the heterogeneity of the positions and people that fill them. Do you want the IT support techs in the office 60 hours a week and the managers for just 20 hours a week?
> Not everyone is comfortable with the command line, so this is great for people like them.

This is probably "elitist" of me but I feel like someone who isn't comfortable with the command line should be learning that before they tackle Postgres.
What these stats don't show, however, is the heavy use of 2D barcodes in industry. Whilst they have failed as a means of enabling the public, their true widespread use is worth remembering
Cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pONjMF-...
most people can learn to drive, learn another language and learn to cook. a much smaller number of people can learn to code competently.
It is within mature markets. It is orders of magnitude more difficult for an American firm -- especially a small one -- to market in South America or Asia due to language and culture barriers.
your milking this aren't you. I know the truth.
7 tips for decreasing your blog's bounce rate
This isn't a fair statement. A better statement would be "Go would be hardly mentioned here if it weren't for all of the effort and documentation put into it." There is no doubt though that Go would not be moving along so quickly if it weren't for Google, but I think this is a case of 'correlation is not causation.' Dart comes from Google also, and while I see it from time to time here, nowhere like I do Go.
Myself, I tend to trust and prefer Mozilla as a company more. That said, I find Rust not only unusable, but really too big of a language. I find Go the perfect mix of features I desire, and I cannot be the only one. So, I like Go as a community and as language and certainly not because Google is behind it.
In addition to the factors described in the article, in the United States there is an additional and very real incentive to work "bullshit jobs" and that is that health insurance is tied to employment (far less expensive when purchase through or by your employer). Unexpected healthcare costs are one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy, so this creates an unnecessary incentive to have a job.
> The Web site voluntarily sent this data, mostly just simple text.

If you know of a way to configure Apache to deliver web data to everyone but a certain subset of users without having to force the authorized subset to use authentication then the whole world is all ears.

In fact, I'm sure HN could use this good news first so that they don't have to use such a non-specific ban system as IP bans...

But until then 3taps had no question that they knew the web site operator did not want them to access their website at all, and in fact had to go out of their way to get around the IP ban, so let's not pretend like the court decision here is setting some kind of general precedent.
This is pretty common verbiage in chess books, forums, and youtube channels. If you haven't been keeping up with the online chess community I assure you it's worth your time!
Linux reaches out to hobbyist developers
Not surprised that the top four comments at the moment disagree with the author. I strongly recommend that anyone who was affected by the 2008 economic crisis read his best-known book: Debt, the first 5000 years.

You may still disagree with his conclusions, but you're more likely to do so in an informed way. It is the only treatise on the subject of debt, which I have been able to find, that actually makes sense. I say that as someone who has read far more Hayek and Rothbard than Marx or Bakunin.
I evaluated payment provider for my Germany-based SaaS and came to a similar conclusion. Paymill is great to get started, but Braintree wins in the long run (just do the math).

Obviously when your product is growing you don't have time to just rewrite the payment processing and migrate all data to a different provider.

I guess this is where something like "Spreedly" comes in. It is an additional abstraction that allows you to switch payment providers easily. At least so I read. Does anyone have experiences with that?
This is a pretty misleading story. It doesn't address the regulatory issues in the market whatsoever.

Olga Kharif also reported in 2011 that the iPhone 5 would have NFC. See http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-25/apple-plans-service.... (It doesn't.)

PayPal's general counsel testified at the DFI (now DBO) oversight hearing in Sacramento in March, 2013, which was initially scheduled for November, 2012 to take place not at the state capitol, but at PayPal's San Jose headquarters. Clearly the regulations matter to them.
Qr codes are a cool and useful technology. For example, I can tag the code on this page ("http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22367") and store it in my app to read when I am in the train. For some reason I do this a lot.
Here in Singapore, there are QR Codes everywhere and most of them are really userful. At Somerset 313 you can tag a code which opens a map on your phone showing you the shortest path to your point of interest.

QR Codes are awesome!
NSA Leak Reporter Says 'U.K. Puppets' Detained His Partner
I like the positive/zero sum analysis. Alas, in the UK, living near a viable job is actually regarded as sum positive!
A Summer Science-Fiction Reading List
The productivity of London tube workers results from their work on an enormous and unique capital asset.
Did anyone else have a strong feeling of Douglas Adams while reading the OA?
> Interesting argument, though I currently think correctness is more important in programming. Their proofs are hand-wavy compared to our programs.

This is where proof systems like Coq come into play. You can write code in Coq and then use Coq to formally prove properties about it -- the CompCert C compiler [1], for example.

Or you can model real-world problems in Coq and use Coq to help you prove them. Either way, proofs don't have to be hand-wavy.

[1] http://compcert.inria.fr/doc/
Hmm, it seems that one wouldn't be in violation of that if every answer was "I want a lawyer before I am willing to answer that".
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2013/06/28/cpp-con... lists some non-library C99 features not in C++.
Oh man, I did something like this years ago, but for teenagers. It's super fun to make them. Just think maze + dice and you can come up with some cool stuff.
Reading economic discussions on this board is like reading Congressional debates of SOPA.
Cool Design Features Hidden On Stuff You Use Every Day
Lame and you are speculating an errorenous news..
66 Personal Development Habits For Smart People
If you don't understand why this is far worse than nuking London, then you have no reason to be on HN.
Most have dynamic addresses, but business/corporate networks do tend to have static blocks from what I understand. Remember static IP used to be required to use SSL/TLS at all, and still is required if you want to support XP clients.
Anecodote: We've switched to Stripe and Paypal (from Paypal's merchant solution only) and are happy to have pushed about 50% of our processing away from them. But we probably won't get much past that. As much as the developer experience sucks, a lot of customers love using it, especially internationally.
It matters if you try to count backwards from popularity to quality, by correcting for other factors.
Wikileaks Just Released A Massive 'Insurance' File Encrypted with AES256
Our app used to ask for Twitter write permission in order to provide "follow" buttons. It was infuriating: we only wanted to be able to follow/unfollow for people (since our site used Twitter's social graph rather than rolling our own) but in order to do so we had to ask for full write permissions, which caused people to freak out and assume we wanted to tweet on their behalf or make changes to their profile.

Contrast with Facebook which has a much better implementation of finely grained permissions where you can opt to only ask for the permissions your application needed.

In the end, we switched to asking for read-only permissions for most users and let them upgrade to read-write the first time they wanted to perform a Twitter-write operation. This was a hassle from an engineering point of view but did completely eliminate complains about us asking for too much access: http://lanyrd.com/blog/2012/twitter-read-only/

We eventually moved to our own social graph, which eliminated the need to update Twitter's graph from our interface entirely.
I often see this argument coming about. Someone talks about how great language E is because it has feature X. Then someone else comes along and says languages A, B, C, and D also have X. As though that somehow diminishes the value of having feature X in E.

Go doesn't try to be full of fancy new ideas. Most of the ideas come from other languages. Go tries to be the best collection of known ideas that it can be, examining benefits and tradeoffs each step of the way and giving sound reasoning for each decision.

Recently I found myself slightly annoyed that they use hg instead of git. Sure enough, I found an explanation in the FAQ.
http://golang.org/doc/faq
I just did the math real quick as well, and i really don't understand their choice for Paymill. Braintree's rates are so much better, they are loosing so much money in the long run!

Posted a chart in the comments at the blog.
> Let's adopt GMOs! It's from the guys that brought us Thalidomide!

That it a somewhat cheap shot. Yes, science makes mistakes. But I don't think switching over to the anti-vaccine, homeopathy-supporting type of crowd results in less mistakes.
Except for the orgy-porgy part. Still waiting on those to start up, Aldous.
We should at least give them a shot and a nudge in the right direction, hey?
Thanks for the blog post and going into how difficult it is to accept payments in Europe.

I would like to add one - IMHO important - point to PayMill: They do not support credit cards from the USA.

source: https://www.paymill.com/en-gb/pricing/ (click on "fees for card types and countries" - the US is not mentioned in that list)
Depends on level.

I teach basic maths to adults and teenagers (the latter tend to be the ones at the back of the class in compulsory education). One of my big projects in the first part of the year (before the exams loom over the horizon) is to encourage students to read the textbook themselves. In the rare classes where this becomes accepted, I can use the lessons more like seminars and get the students moved up the problem solving ladder.

Given that we have had reliable maths textbooks since around 1215, and printed ones since roughly 1580, the difficulty of achieving this always surprises me.
To make it simple, the jobs exist because people need money to trade for things they need (including the vital food/shelter/health care). Since it's a capitalistic world, nobody gets paid/given stuff for doing nothing, that's considered parasitism. So the jobs exist, even though pointless, because the people need and want them.
The point of the article is that if you run a service that allows people to sign in with Twitter you may end up with thousands of people's OAuth credentials on your own server, including some people with potentially very influential accounts.
Disagree. Everyone needs to learn to code.

I was taught long division as a child. Didn't like it; who does? Nor do I use it.

But...

When I was 15, I finally got a chance to study programming. One of the first things our professor showed us, was how to do string-based long division, with a computer.

The enlightenment was profound.

Why was I doing this, when everyone else was learning to symbolically find quadratic roots on paper? Why do we teach algorithms for years, and never, ever teach Algorithms if you don't specifically ask? Why is Al-Khawarizmi's legacy in education Al-gebra, and not Al-gorithms, which are actually named after him?
document.writeln is generally frowned upon in production code since there are better ways to manipulate a page using the DOM. I still see it used occasionally for debugging (although even that usage is disappearing, as most browsers have some form of debug console available) and in tutorials and books for beginners.

Here's a Stack Overflow post that outlines some of its pros and cons. http://stackoverflow.com/q/802854/1288
Exposure and opportunity are the keys. Not everyone should learn to code, but everyone should be exposed to programming and given the chance to pursue it. Replace the year I spent learning cursive with a programming intro.
Personally, I don't spend my time learning, I spend my time making. For instance, recently I wanted to learn a frontend framework. After a lot of debate I picked Ember having never used it before.

I knew I wanted to use it for our dashboard so I built it whilst constantly looking through the docs and various tutorials whilst I hacked things together and learnt as I went. It was completed within 2 weeks and then I just refactored. Had I sat down with a book or a course before hand it would've taken quite a lot longer to get to the point where I thought I could make something.
I have a favorable impression of Marsaglia's Xorshift / Xorwow. Not least because it's a linear operator over GF(2) and thus, properties about its behavior, such as the period or bijectivity, can be determined analytically.

If you're using it for a hash function, I'd advise several repititions for good mixing. Hmm, maybe I'll write a blog post about that...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xorshift
What do you use for your SSH key. RSA? Just curious. As far as I know RSA and DSA are the only options for SSH, or is that wrong?
Not sure why this is something that is particularly the worry of developers. Such havoc can be wreaked through simple phishing at the user-level. Even at major organizations, two-factor or OAuth authentication may not be the standard, meaning that a market-changing Tweet is just one well-crafted email away. That seems like by far the easiest attack vector for a hacker.
No one drives their car in NY anymore, the streets are too crowded.
I know it is the British who detained Mr. Miranda, and not the US but Groucho Marx would have loved the setup.
I've seen people bring up basic income when such concerns are raised. I myself am undecided on how effective it would be, but it seems like now is a good time for conversation on the matter to begin.

So am I. It's a fascinating idea that could be the most important improvement to our economy since the introduction of the labour market, drastically reducing poverty and increasing socioeconomic mobility.

Or it could cause widespread inflation and tank the GDP. I'm not sure anyone really knows which way it would go. I think the only way to know is to try it out on a small but representative subset of the population (e.g. 1%), then a larger subset (e.g. 5-10%), before doing a full roll-out.
Have Braintree really standardised their transaction fees at the 0.9% + €0.10 rate shown in the table near the end of the article? I thought that was in addition to the interchange rates, which vary widely. The difficulty in figuring out what a transaction would actually cost us with Braintree was one of the major reasons we never got going with them.

Edit: The Braintree FAQ[1] appears to agree with this. It also says they have €15 as their chargeback fee, not €11 as shown in the table in the article.

[1] https://www.braintreepayments.com/faq#pricing-question
The ability to program is the literacy of the millennium. One thousand years ago "Everybody [did] not need to learn to read", yet today, many countries have a near 100% literacy rate.

However, I don't think we need to force today's programming languages upon people. Let's invent the printing press of programming languages, making the cost of learning to program much easier. (IFTTT is working on this.)