skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>So you doubt they would be able to adapt to an environment that uses the exact same language they've been using for 10 years, simply because they don't know the API?

Not exactly. Probably 95% of "Java Developers" have never touched a GUI, or an event based OS, or graphics code, or an end-user app, for that matter. They'd have plenty of ways to fail besides not knowing how to read a manual.

>Do you think that someone who is smart enough to do Java development for 10 years isn't smart enough to pick up a new Java-based environment in days/weeks?

Weeks, maybe. Days: It depends on what you mean. Start tweaking Java code in an existing app? Sure, why not. Architect a non-trivial app from scratch? Extremely unlikely. Again, talking statistically.

95% of Java developers are NOT as sophisticated as probably half of C++ developers. There's a higher minimum threshold of skill to work on the problems that C++ developers work on than the ones that MOST Java developers work on.

You can be a 100% competent Java developer, and yet not have the right skills to do most of what I do on a regular basis.

And this isn't about YOU; I'm only talking statistically. Most Java developers work on server code, enterprise code, private company apps, and other things in very different domains that thinks that I work on. These things are important, skilled work; and they're VERY DIFFERENT than Android development. Or game development. Or low-level C development.

>Your attitude reeks or arrogance, elitism and lack of empathy. I'd never want to work with people like you in any capacity.

I do believe I'm a better developer than most. I feel like that's based on objective facts, but it certainly can come across as arrogance or elitism. Truth is I'm happy to work with developers of any skill level, as long as they have the skills to do the tasks they're assigned to do. I spent years working as developer tech support for a popular API, and I helped hundreds of developers to use it correctly, and to find the bugs in their apps -- by the end I had a nontrivial fan club, and a lot of people contacted me later to see if they could work with me. But have it your way.

I don't know how you glean lack of empathy from my post. I empathize with people just fine; if I'm hiring someone, though, I have to make a business decision that makes sense, and I'd have to be stupid to hire someone who can't get the job done, as much as I'd love to give everyone work. Too often I've not been ruthless enough; someone with years of experience in Android AND Java and tons of great references must be good enough to get my project done, right? Wrong. See: Mythical Man Month, some programmers are 10-20x better than others.

If you tell me who you are, though, I'll be sure that we don't accidentally work with each other in any capacity. Though since your comment sparked this thread with hatred at people who hire based on (among other things) GitHub commits, I suspect that isn't a danger to begin with.
this reminds me of one of Keith Olbermann's "Special Comments" where he discussed this specific issue:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDXInEft17k
.NET Pills Newsletter #6
taking into account fogginess of emails of the researcher and amount of emails FB whitehat receives daily... I am not surprised they said it's not a bug.

PROTIP: Reports should have PoC and be concise. No information about your bachelor degree should be attached.
Depending on the country some have already reached that definition. Terrorism is a nebulous enough term that it can be made to fit a large variety of entities. That's exactly why it was chosen.
Many places where Chrome runs don't have user accounts (phones/tablets/GoogleTV). In many more places users don't know how to setup an OS account.

Additionally there's a lot of cross-over between features being implemented in Chrome (the browser) and ChromeOS.

Often the browser is used to surface features which are implemented differently in ChromeOS to how they are implemented in other ChromeBrowser implementations.
Octopress & Sublime Text 2
How the hell did I miss that when I looked at that before? Ignore me.
You make some good points, Austinz. I start with the thought of "What kind of life do I want to live?" and then go from there to figure out how much I need to make to make it happen. Then, any money made above that goes into savings or investing or back into a side project. The goal, for me, is to get to the place I want to be and then I will never go out on my own without the business to support it.

I think what you say about toxicity is really interesting. If it's not toxic, it depends on the person if they want to put up with it.

I'm slowly learning which one I am. I think I can put up with it, but I don't want to.
Show HN: Dropdown menu for iOS, can be activated by dragging nav bar or event.
First I want to answer one of your other questions -- could a skilled Morse operator identify a person by his sending style, what we called his "fist". The answer is yes, absolutely. But there's more to it than that -- each CW (continuous wave) transmitter had different characteristics, in the days when most of them were built by their operators -- some of them changed frequency slightly during each dash, some of them had noticeable clicks caused by too fast a transmitter activation and deactivation around each Morse element -- these helped one identify a specific operator along with his personal sending style.

A few years ago, about the time that the FCC abandoned the code sending/receiving requirement, I assumed that CW was dead. But lately, listening to the ham bands, I see there's a surprising amount of CW activity still present.

> Were you able to hear full words or phrases "natively"?

Over time one begins to hear entire words, especially at high sending rates. This is especially true for common words, words that are part of every contact ... example "Name is (name)": "-. .- -- . .. ... .--. .- ..- .-.."

Here's a sample:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ad6oibxzhzk4rvy/morse_example.mp3

As this example MP3 shows, in modern times we can avoid the quirks of manual keying by letting a computer create perfectly shaped Morse characters for us. :)
New Paid Writing Gigs at EmployTown- DigitalForce
Why I compare it to learning a new language is because after a certain speed it becomes almost impossible to read it out letter by letter. When you get good enough you start to see complete words in the light.

When you learn a new language you go through a stage where you're going back word for word to your own language in your head. Eventually you become good enough to start thinking in the new language.
One problem with that idiomatic Scala code is that all inherited traits have to be declared in the same place, making the definition conceptually "too loaded". (Scala's implicits allow for something more flexible, akin to Haskell's type classes, though.)
The post was pretty vague on the criteria used for inclusion on this list. From how many possible startups was this list whittled down? What specifically about each company got them put on the list? Are there any conflicts of interest to disclose? Are any of these 15 companies founded by people who are friends of the author? etc.
8 Popular Infographics on Startup Culture
I've been licensed as a ham radio operator since I was a kid (had an odd, early fascination with radio) and recently got back into it a few years ago.

I find using morse code extremely relaxing b/c it taxes your perceptual system in a way that is fairly uncommon in today's world. Either b/c it is being sent very fast or b/c of a weak signal and ionospheric noise, it's a "full brain" immersion exercise that leaves me feeling relaxed and contented (yes I know it sounds a bit odd).

I recommend it highly. Even for those not interested in radio, there are competitions for high speed morse (it's big in eastern Europe)... check out some of the training software:

http://fkurz.net/ham/qrq.html

and

http://www.rufzxp.net/

Of course, real ham radio contests offer the best combo of adrenaline and strategy...
> He was probably not prepared enough for that, most of people aren't.

For better or worse, Glenn Greenwald is very skilled in these sorts of extended adversarial interviews. As a litigator in civil matters he would spend days being obstructionist in depositions. One of them, involving a dispute with Greenwald's former landlord runs over 500 pages. It was effective enough to get the opposing legal council fired.

So anyone who's working with Mr. Greenwald is probably much better prepared than the average Joe to spend 9 hours being questioned.

I personally suspect this was mostly about getting a look at the electronics Mr. Miranda was carrying. It's basic law enforcement strategy to realize targets will eventually make a mistake and for investigators to put themselves in a position to benefit from that.
But I don't think the intent of the lock in this case is to make federated services impossible to use properly. Clearly, the purpose of the lock in this case was to prevent third party tracking cookies. The problem is, there's no technological way to segment cookies used for authentication from cookies used for tracking in this way.

The Web has an authentication problem. Existing solutions have tried to work around it by leveraging browser features not originally designed for the purpose. The result is privacy snafus like this.

Google, Facebook, et al, would argue that they have platforms, and networks of sites, with a real need for this functionality, whose basic goal is not to invade privacy, but to improve enduser UX when using their services.
> If I could get out of the 1970s and use an editor other than vi, maybe I would get some help from an IDE in this regard, but I staunchly refuse to edit code with any tool that requires using a mouse.

So you've shown that Go is appealing to rigid curmudgeons. Personally I'm still hung up on the "every function (edit: that does anything which might itself return an error code, which in large scale code is quite a lot) must return an error code" thing. Just like not understanding the purpose and usefulness of graphical editors, the creators of Go seemingly (despite their legendary status...) seemingly not understanding the purpose and usefulness of exceptions (waving them off as "they result in convoluted code" with no explanation) is keeping me pretty skeptical.

It just requires I take in some well written, idiomatic Go code so that I can finally "get it", how I'd live without exceptions, but I'm too busy being productive in Python (and enjoying Pypy's ever increasing speedups) to get that interested.
Struggling Division at Disney Pins High Hopes on a New Video Game
It's hard to install two versions of the same browser separately, and changing accounts is just overkill if you only want to separate bookmarks and sign ins or whatever.

It's also really useful if you want to open pages without extensions or without being signed into the website. You can do that with incognito, but this is more flexible. You could have an account that is configured to a proxy and one that isn't, if I understand correctly, and other settings as well.

Also browsers are pretty much becoming their own little operating systems.
Could you give another example of one of these? How do you find them?
God, imagine if Russia had done this, and how the UK/USA would have responded.

The UK's credibility as a democracy is fading fast...
We've banned helmet cams for years. It's not about covering anything up, it's about not getting sued for HIPAA violations.

I wear a GoPro at training events, but would never wear one on an actual incident. We often show up in someone's most vulnerable moment. We're there to provide care and compassion. Making a video recording of someone who is sick or injured is neither necessary for their care, or compassionate.
Australia: Police keen to share phone taps
No, of course they'd do the search again. But that doesn't mean there was something to be found. Though the fact that he hand carried so many devices including thumb drives suggests that there is a real possibility that he was hand carrying bits. That leaves the question if those bits were valuable, encrypted and whether or not the decryption keys were on his person or kept on either side.

The data and the keys travelling together would be a pretty bad mistake, even knowing the keys would be a bad move.
He is a dick but he unfortunately has some ammo in the sense that the Guardian appears to have financed the trip. That still doesn't make what happened acceptable but it will assuage those who lean towards sympathizing with the NSA. The fact that Greenwald wasn't more forthcoming about this makes it even more difficult.
Also worth noting for those who are starting out with PostgreSQL: The easiest way to install it on your Mac is using Postgres.app (http://postgresapp.com).
On my wish list: a network of fabs overthrows IKEA with open-source furniture.
A demo is very different that production code, especially on Android.

Android is NOT just an API. You need to really grok the Activity Lifecycle [1], or your app won't behave correctly. I don't mean just skim it; I mean really get that you need to save state at the right places, or you'll break the behaviors.

You need to understand how to support multiple devices correctly [2], including how to best design the app to scale to multiple screen sizes. Ideally you'll support both phone-sized and tablet-sized devices, and so you'll probably need to understand how the Fragments API works [3]

You need to understand Intents and how they function. [4] You need to know whether you'll need a Service [5].

This is just the stuff off the top of my head that you need a clear understanding of before you write the first line of code. Most of these things are not easy to just "use when you need them;" you need to know how they all interact before you start, or you'll be throwing out a lot of your code.

Android is a really alien API, even to people who've done GUI work before: I think it's very poorly designed from a "Principle of Least Astonishment" point of view. They created a lot of new concepts, and I don't really think all of them are superior to the standard way of doing things in a GUI. But they are what they are.

I've TRIED to work with an experienced Android developer who didn't know all of these in advance, and he tried to charge me for 30+ hours of work for something that should have taken 2-3 hours -- just because he'd lied about KNOWING how to use Fragments. I can't imagine a Java developer with no experience diving in and getting all this right the first time.

[1] http://developer.android.com/training/basics/activity-lifecy...

[2] http://developer.android.com/training/basics/supporting-devi...

[3] http://developer.android.com/training/basics/fragments/index...

[4] http://developer.android.com/training/basics/intents/index.h...

[5] http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Service.h...
Base system, yes. Zero, no.

The Babylonians also had a representation of 0 as being a space. But that created confusions because you can't end a number with a space. For example, 1 and 100 would look the same if you just used a space in place of zero. They eventually created a symbol for zero, but never used it by itself or at the end of a number.

Similarly, the Incas used a space for a zero, but it creates the same reliance on context to deduce the meaning of a space. And since the Incas represented numbers differently in the ones place, that was their marker for the end of a number, which means it can't be nothing. I imagine they could leave a space at the end and use the context of the numbers above or below since numbers were vertically aligned in the quipu.

So no, Incas did not have a proper zero.
Another one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6231686
Batteries are both lossy and environmentally problematic objects to manufacture and dispose of. Also, a good fraction of all the energy used by society is spent hauling around energy storage. Wireless power would help fix both these issues even if it was fairly lossy compared to a copper wire.
"New metric" sounds an awful lot like the current US system where a pound, for example, is defined as 0.45359237 kilograms.
I learned morse at age 11 when I first got interested in ham radio. It took a couple of months of frequent use before it really felt natural, and this was probably about when I started perceiving words rather than characters.

It gets easier and easier the more you use it...
“How Should Artists Get Paid?” Isn’t a Question, it’s an Insult
Reach 1000's of AngularJS Developers w/ One Form
Of Time and Bionic Cockroaches
I think it's interesting that none of the other replies to this have hit on what I think is the truly pertinent difference.

When implemented in an ideal fashion, body cameras would go straight to archival storage that could not be opened without a warrant. The idea is not to be watching it all the time, but to preserve a record that can be used to investigate complaints.

I don't know if that's likely. But even absent that, simple numbers dictate that most of the footage will go unwatched. You'd need a number of officers similar to those out in the field to see it all.

With drones, every moment is being watched and analyzed. There is little chance that drone footage will serve to help someone in a complaint against the police.
All of the Mattermark rankings are done by Mattermark's "propitiatory algorithm."

Additionally, Mattermark is technically YC S12 and has received funding from VCs, so there are potential conflicts of interest for any of their rankings, especially taken together with the first point.
More gameplay by the computer program that learns to play classic NES
For example, if your employer is a non-US government, and feels that feeding all your data directly to the NSA might be undesirable.
It is not the case that every function most return an error.

The Go creators do understand the purpose and usefulness of exceptions. They chose not to use exceptions with this knowledge. See http://golang.org/doc/faq#exceptions for their reasons.
I'd like to share my perspective as a firefighter...

This wasn't some officially sanctioned camera, there for the purpose of accountability. It was a personal camera a firefighter had placed on his helmet. My guess is, it was already in violation of department policy, and only tacitly allowed (every department I know of has a policy against using personal cameras on scenes). This is likely just a clarification that they will now be enforcing this policy.

I'm shocked this policy wasn't enforced sooner. The number of HIPAA violations that must have resulted from the use of these cameras must be staggering, and I'm surprised they haven't been sued yet.

We're not law enforcement officers. We're not there with a warrant, we're there to provide care and compassion. Shoving a camera in someone's face without their consent is neither good 'care', nor is it compassionate.
They banned helmet cams for years too. "Banned", in that the rule was apparently widely ignored. Nobody cared until they showed the department in a bad light.

Just because there are good reasons for banning them doesn't mean the reasons for banning them in this particular case are good.
Unless it is open sourced, I can't validate the claims.
She talked too long to try to narrow him down certain pathways, there are points where she asks something and then goes on while he's trying to answer. Wanted to have a very different discussion to the one he wanted to have I think.

There are certainly points where he was running on a bit, but it wasn't a good conversation. Very clash of personalities rather than giving someone a topic to talk about and moving on when they've said what they have to say.

Part of that's probably that she just seemed to have a list of fairly specific questions she wanted to run through - which is a terrible way to talk to anyone, especially if you've not done your research into how they like to talk and what they're going to want to talk about properly.
Where'd you find that? I found some LinkedIn and G+ profiles that gave no info, and everything else I found suggested that they sold their first company (CadZooks) to Autodesk and then started @Last, but otherwise had no relation to them.
Always go native. Cross platform frameworks are still not very good especially in the design department.
Get a safari books subscription or if you have a (dot)mil address you can get a free account, just call support.
Titrate is invisible.
There's no requirement at all that functions return error codes. If a function can't fail, or if you don't care about if it fails, don't return an error.
On my wish list: IKEA turns into the Amazon/EC2 of fab labs. Just think of a hacker space with that much inventory of materials, etc...
You know, every time I see some Googler shocked at the effectiveness and various advantages of coding in Go, I wonder why Google never adopted Erlang. They could have been getting all these same advantages (and then some) a decade ago :)
http://golang.org/doc/faq#exceptions

A function isn't required to return an error code, but if you plan to deal with errors, it's the easiest way to do that.

I think the Go creators understand the purpose and usefulness of exceptions, they just chose to not implement them in favor of other approaches which work fine, of course, it's a matter of taste, as with almost any "language difference" argument. If you get real hung up on these differences, one might argue that you are the curmudgeon.

I didn't find learning/implementing a service in Go to be terribly challenging, even though I translated an existing Python service to Go. There were frustrating caveats that I had to work around because of some of the great things Python does, but over all the benefits of doing it in Go paid off, and it's about getting something for your time/effort.

Your last argument is totally legitimate though, but it's hard to say what would help you "get it" by throwing random bits of code at you, it's really something that you have to care about, spend the time to dig into, and make the realization for yourself. It may never happen, and as long as Python does everything you need, of course you'd have no incentive to use Go.

There seems to be a common theme (generally speaking) on HN that after the front page reaches some saturation on a particular subject, people start being very critical of it, not on its merit, but because it is taking up space where they expect to see a diverse set of content. I can sympathize with this, but I think it's best to try to dig for the value that others seem to be getting out of things, rather than sighing at the constant cheers of others, just my opinion though.
Perhaps structural changes in the way politicians are elected and retain office would have some positive long term effects. I imagine if it was possible to hold a direct-vote referendum on the current sitting president mid-term would hold their feet to the fire at least a little bit. Also, prohibiting advertising by political campaigns (TV, print, all of it) coupled with state-sponsored, mandetory debates between presidential candidates might force a real debate about real issues.

And assuming we agreed that those changes would be beneficial to the political system, how might we go about achieving those reforms?
I was hung up on error as return instead of exceptions but came in terms eventually. Now i think, compared to exceptions the error handeling is better off with go's approach. They are local, and require more concious effort. Specially while coding for the critical systems this helps as you are not passing the buck to some other section of the code.