skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree this is great advice to keep your skills sharp.

But, as far as auto worker and programmers being the same, I totally disagree. My hometown is a factory town and, actually, one of the few auto plants in the area that didn't get shut down or moved to Mexico.

The average plant worker (I know many, many of them - most of my high-school class in fact) is someone who may or may not have finished high school. They have no job skills except a very specific skill for their particular station on an assembly line. They hate their jobs and they don't generally spend any time trying to learn anything new. I don't say this to judge or criticize because it's their life, they make a decent wage (a fantastic wage, in fact) and it doesn't matter to me what they choose to do. But, I do see them as being at extremely high risk of losing their comfortable lifestyle because if the factory were to ever get shut - they would be completely unable to get a job at their salary level. They are totally dependent on the factory and their skill is completely worthless anywhere else.

This is nothing like any programmer I know. You can't get decent at programming with this mentality and you can't remain a decent programmer without continuing to learn new techniques. Most programmers that I know tend to always be curious and want to learn more. Although some of them don't want to take their work home, at least they like to learn new ways to be more efficient.

I would liken programmers more to a mechanic or a carpenter. It's a more general skill that you can take with you from one place to another. I think the value may go down if more people go into it, but the industry is not as likely to cave in so fast as it did for unskilled plant workers.
String Trepanation
I don't disagree with anyone here.
It had occurred to me that communication would be difficult (I don't think impossible). Mostly I thought the survival skills is what would be learned and then you'd be just like everyone else trying to survive. Maybe some of the knowledge could make it a bit better (locally) but a lot of what we know is really built on things that would be out of reach.

What someone said about geologists and knowing where resources are hadn't even crossed my mind. I was thinking more of a general high school graduate. Anyone with a specialty (math related especially) might do better (again I assume coping and not freaking out or getting a disease immediately).
I ended up on the (Chinese-language) page for 丙正正¹, a Chinese C++ variant. There was a code example, which I ran through Google Translate to see what would happen. The result is surprisingly readable (and obviously a C-family language)²:

Empty chess file :: set comments (character * s, integer n)
{
If (n> = maximum number of comments)
For (; maximum number of annotations <= n; maximum number of comments + +)
Comment [Maximum number of annotations] = NONE;
If (s == NULL or the string length (s) == 0)
Returns;
If (annotation [n]! = NONE)
Delete Comment [n];
Comment [n] = new character [string length (s) +1];
String Copy (annotation [n], s);
}

¹ http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%99%E6%AD%A3%E6%AD%A3

² empty where one might expect void, character, for, string, &c.
The real thing is that they already have the train? It would seem they need to solve a few problems and scale up their track.
Post conditions are odd if you're not used to them, but once you start to mentally allow for them, they're really quite nice.
Then again both train use different technology. Running gear on a TGV is a massive friction generator compared to a maglev, I would think, and consequently the record is very impressive. Still I would love maglev line to be build through Europe.
I like the concept; amazing and gorgeous machine. I will be in market next year to upgrade my present laptop. Pro solves portability problems, and can be a single machine all over for me. I want Microsoft to pack in state-of-the-art innovation in this package.

Ideally, I want it to have:

- LTE,

- GPS,

- a good Lumia 1020-esqe camera,

- Thunderbolt port,

- Touch cover with good touchpad,

- battery life (Broadwell will help), maybe a keyboard accessory,

- and oodles of RAM and SSD space (or make it upgradable),

- Make good Metro apps for their own products, all of the apps are horrible right now. Every single MS Win 8 is a mess.

I will pay big moolah for this machine.
How did you contact your tutors? I know of some startup attempts, was it something more prosaic like a classifieds ad?
To clarify: This post isn't published by the founder of WP Curve. It's my interview with the founder. If you have questions about their service, you should ask those at wpcurve.com.
Is it a statement-modifier 'unless' that bothers you? `return ... unless ...` is kind of idiomatic way of returning early in the function. You get used to this shortcut ridiculously fast.
There's a HUGE difference between "here to stay" and becoming the "dominant programming language of the enterprise"
It's correct to use that terminology even when an object is only partially melted, as in this case.
One of the first things i learned about writing VBA macros was to start every one with application.screenupdating = false. It was amazing how much of a performance hit the screen updating was.
Knocking on the heavens door...
I don't agree at all. Care-giving for elderly is definitely a growth industry. It's not easy building a marketplace, but I think this one has potential.
Gorilla, Pat and Routes: A Mux Showdown
They could've imaged them and then conveniently 're-leaked' it after the item was delivered.
I completely agree but the N64 and GC, at least in their European incarnations, look like crap on modern TVs. They were probably fuzzy back in the day too, but the Dreamcast looks a lot better than a GC and they're from a similar epoch. The last under-the-TV console I bought was a Gamecube BTW, so it isn't like I'm spoilt by XBox or anything.

The Euro N64 didn't have RGB and (obviously) neither have HDMI and building the right cable for the GC is... non trivial. Since they were from the 4:3 era you either get a stretched screen or black borders. On the GC it seems to force my TV to stretch all the time even if I set it to 4:3, which is a bit annoying. At least the Game Boy, DS, etc have their own screens built in so this is less of a problem.
any investor or investor group with enough data points to offer such a judgement

This is a self fulfilling prophesy. Like a 'black swan'. If PG meant to criticise (or point out) that poor communication skills are unproductive, his comment would be banal. He chose this as a cute, cock-tail party line. It was just a poor decision on his part. Its not too dis-similar to another famous SV/C who admitted 'he knows no black people'. OK, great. No we have two prominent people in the Valley who use the rule of thumb: no blacks, no funny-sounding people. Quite embarrassing, really.[0,1]

__________________

[0] 'I don't know a single black entrepreneur'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS93R1YnK-U

[1] http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/nationalorigin.cfm

National Origin Discrimination & Work Situations

The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.

National origin discrimination involves treating people (applicants or employees) unfavorably because they are from a particular country or part of the world, because of ethnicity or accent

___________________

Note that investing is not hiring; there is no employer-employee legal relationship. BUT, <Entreprenuers> need to be careful as they do in fact hire employees. So this is pretty ??? advice to entrepreneurs unless it comes pro-bono legal advice.
CPU feature economics
Symbol macros.
I guess the reason I don't find surface interesting is I don't use a computer on the couch or go to coffee shops.

I do watch my TV close to a full on desktop computer and my Galaxy Note II takes care of everything else including bathroom computing.
A need that I can see is for a class (or at least a few videos) for native English speakers to effectively communicate with non-native speakers, and a way to practice.

The crux of the issue is that by repeating themselves a little louder and at the same speed, a native speaker is treating the (non-native) listener as a linguistic equal. If my brother doesn't understand what I said, it is almost certainly due to the volume of my speech relative to our listening environment, not my content. To assume otherwise would insult his intelligence. If I'm speaking to a non-native speaker, my natural instinct is to extend the same courtesy. It isn't laziness or a lack of empathy. (You could argue it was lazy to speak that way in the first place, but to rephrase it after the fact would be condescending)

I used to work for a company based in Tokyo and, through practice and frustration, learned how to modulate my idiom-laden, Missouri-accented, high-speed, low-volume drawl into something at least partially intelligible to my Japanese colleagues. It required a lot of effort and still sounds strange out of context. If I spoke to my father the same way, he'd laugh at me.

As an American, I think it would be really helpful if part of our education included speaking (and listening to) English as it is spoken by non-natives. We should have to practice listening to and understanding various common accents (South Asian, Chinese, Nigerian, etc), practice making ourselves understood, and learn how to graciously ask for (or give) re-phrasing or clarification.
> If you assume that the observer is described by quantum mechanics, then the Everett Interpretation is logically required to be true. If you want to argue for anything else, then you need to explain why you, the observer, are not described by our best scientific theory. That's a pretty good reason to take the theory seriously.

Arthur Conan Doyle notwithstanding, in science the truth is not arrived at by eliminating the alternatives. Science requires positive evidence -- absence of contrary evidence doesn't support a given outlook. Were this not true, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster would win acceptance through lack of contrary evidence.

> ... the Everett Interpretation is logically required to be true.

In science, nothing ever becomes true, but some things become false. Philosopher David Hume summarized this outlook by saying, "No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion."

On that basis, and assuming we're still discussing physics, nothing is "logically required to be true." That's not science, it's philosophy.
Chinese guy speak English in 9 accents
Apparently not a scalable site which can handle traffic spikes due to HN post :-(
I think a move away form physical media would be a first step. Secondly, the hardware and even software should double as a media center. Lastly, it would be awesome of they had a way to incorporate the 3ds as an optional controller for certain RPGs and such.

All in all, Nintendo may not have its former glory, but it's still a strong contender in the space. They just need to hit their stride again.
They broke 16 out of 32 rounds, with an unrealistic amount of chosen-plaintext. It's not really something to write home about. Rijndael was selected as AES when the best known attack broke 7 out of 10 rounds.
I get the point but then again is demand so high or just in SV and other tech hubs?

I travel a lot and the situation for devs can be very different depending of the context. In LATAM most devs are making less than other even simpler professions and chump change compared to the guys on the valley.

At the same time I meet devs in the midwest that don't get a lot of six-figure offers and have to compete for a good steady job.

99% of the IT industry in silicon valley are simple web apps that are becoming increasingly easy to develop due to better tools and standardization, is no longer like in the '70s and '80s when the actual silicon being made there couldn't be made anywhere else in the world.

But only in the valley, the alley and other such places you have investors putting the money that creates this unprecedented demand for IT workers, anywhere else its business as usual except in the third world where you have IT outsourcing companies popping up all over the place with the age-old business method of paying jack-shit to the local workers while billing first-world companies just a tad less than what first-world developers make.

If you were a developer in a third world country your only chance at a six-figure pay is to move to the first world where there are limitations due to visa and immigration problem, so for a lot of people its not about leaning how to code because they already can. Its about getting to the valley, and even for someone in the US moving to Nocal can be difficult depending on his/her situation.
Enterprises have their own separate store and the Enterprise Surface RTs allow sideloading [1].
And I think XDA developers already have a jailbreak tool and can compile desktop applications on RT [2,3].

[1]- http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/jj874388.aspx
[2]- http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2092158
[3] - http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2092348
No, that's not the problem.

The problem is that they've now got three operating systems: a phone OS, a tablet OS and a productivity OS. They should have stuck to two.

The Surface RT should have been a branded as Metro (along with WP!). The OS should have been licensed at a low cost (not the $80 Windows fee). It should have cost $400 at release, with the cover keyboard.

The Surface PRO should be an Air++ - the logical evolution of the Air concept. A small, light but fully featured computer. Only they could have made it smarter. Sell it with a hub which connects the Surface to monitors + KB/mouse whilst home. Make that switch to desktop mode automatically (with an override button, aka the orientation switch on the iPad).

PCs: the whole Metrofication of Windows 8 stinks of arrogance and head-up-ass syndrome. Yes, offer it as an option. Yes, bring the visual style to all of your tooling (it's pretty!). But no, don't do it in a way that makes working with a keyboard/mouse painful, breaks multi-screen support, breaks a whole host of games and only works to annoy your customers.

Instead, offer it as an option: if the user has a touchscreen installed, ask them what they prefer. Make it easy to switch. Heck, switch automatically (like what I suggested with the Surface Pro). Heck, open that up via APIs, and let smart companies do cool stuff with it.

Instead we have someone senior at Microsoft trying to turn himself into Steve Jobs by copying his negative traits - stubbornness and ego - without having the brilliant vision and marketing ability to make it actually, you know, work.
I think lots of the anger here is not about realpolitik vs ideology as much as pure willful ignorance, wishful thinking and possibly outright delusion.

There's lots of tut-tutting here about the NSA doing what the NSA is supposed to do under the guise of mock upsetness or outright ignorance. But here, when Germany is demonstrated to be part of it? Barely a righteous tone rises in anger.

China outright infiltrates a nuclear weapons lab? Well shame on the US for not vetting their people better. [1] Lets not ever chastise China.

Russia has spies embedded in the US banking industry for a decade? Oh that silly Putin! Here's a picture of him wrestling a bear!

But the NSA breaking codes and tapping phones? Oh my goodness fuck! What will save us from the Stalinist purges!

What precisely do we think the DGSE, MI5, MI6, BND, MAD, CNI, SVR, NSB etc. [3] all do? Rescue local cats from trees? Play with computers and microphones to see "what's cool?"

There's lots of smart folks here, but it's like we're all drunk at our keyboards every time the NSA is shown to be doing what the NSA is supposed to be doing.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_intelligence_activity_...

2 - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/22/germany-china-i...

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies
Of course the headline is designed to attract attention. That's generally what headlines are supposed to do (get you to keep reading).

Perhaps if you listened to the interview, you'd see that the headline is perfectly in line with story presented in the interview. It also covered the backstory that led up launching this service so quickly, and how they're learning to operate and scale it as they go. Poke fun at the headline all you want, but you're missing the point.
Nah I disagree with this. I think Nintendo should instead open up the 3DS platform to indie developers, ala Android and iOS. There are top notch games on 3DS and there could be even more if they made it easier to develop and self publish.

Plus, gaming with buttons is so much better than touchscreen gaming, IMO.
You Can Make Your Android Phone Faster Using Some Easy Steps
Firebase has security rules for reading, writing and validating data. As I mentioned before, you can use the Node module to run your own servers.
AngularUI project to improve AngularJS community quality
Windows 10 Will make your computer a dumb terminal to cloud os
The Wizard of Oz keeps a big machine turning, but that machine isn't really running the kingdom, despite all that smoke and noise and imperial pomp. The imperial palace is merely the largest and possibly least productive participant. The real economy is the unfathomably complex interaction of billions of parties deciding what to make for whom, what to spend on what, what to study, where to live.... The big, clumsy oaf that often takes their money by force without trading anything for it, offers them others' money in exchange for votes, sometimes creates useful infrastructure that helps the real economy be more productive then comes up with new ways to impede their productivity (hiring people who are unfit to produce, telling them to regulate producers, and pointing at the newly hired regulators as a "jobs creation success story")..., that oaf is not keeping the economy going. It's just a big, clumsy participant, but people who can't fathom complex adaptive systems assume the biggest node must be in charge. Yours is a child's view of an economy, friend.
So... if a restaurant owner gets his rocks off by forcing the waitresses to blow him, that's fine as long as the place is profitable?
Somehow I misread that part about him speaking English out of courtesy when necessary. Thanks for clarifying.

So in multilingual jurisdictions there can be strong employment protections around speaking one's choice of national language. In this case the article says there was the Welsh Language Act of 1993, which presumably says that citizens of Wales are free to conduct all of their business in English or Welsh and shall not be discriminated against in any professional or government capacity for speaking either language as they please.

It's about workplace expectations that derive from the local culture. The hypothetical comparison that comes to mind would be if California adopted Spanish as a second language or something.
Updated it as follows:
64x64 ... Safari Read Later sidebar in HiDPI/Retina
Is this "losing the root" really such a big issue? The etymology is recorded for people who want to study such stuff.
Great Video.I Liked It.
It is interesting that you bring up examples of these Irish/English plays, to me these are societies that turned static and frozen after the initial dynamism went away and irrelevant affiliations dominated. Around the time my fair lady came out, pg’s family immigrated away from England to the US. Wonder why?

In any case, we are talking about Silicon Valley here. Not society in general. What made it special is this ability to assimilate talent from all over the world. As has been pointed out by others, people with strong accents are all over the valley running businesses successfully. BTW, significant observational experience from pg is about 100 companies in an economy that has several million businesses. So, yeah not exactly significant if you ask me.
I'd contend the opposite, being fluent in German, English and having strong knowledge of Latin.

German and Latin can create new words or ideas much easier than English can. English creates them 'easier' by wholesale importing them. Take the concept of 'karma', there is no word for this in English. In German this word is schicksal. This concept doesn't exist in English at all other than the Hindi import.
> When that happens it doesn't matters if you are as eloquent as the best orators in history

Not to worry! If you are as eloquent as the best orators in history, you'll do great in Silicon Valley!
No, in fact there are supposed to be safeguards in place to prevent this. The ostensible idea behind H1Bs is that the employer literally cannot, for any price, find the talent they need locally. They MUST hire foreign workers to come in and do the job. And the law is written such that the foreign workers--the ones who are there to do a job that no local person can do--get paid what an american worker would be paid to do the same job.

That's to prevent the exact scenario you mentioned: a company hires cheap foreign labor under the H1B program, displacing qualified local labor.

Of course it's all toothless bullshit, so that's exactly how it works, in practice.
Why You Should Be Optimizing Your Email's Preheaders
Ask HN:  How to promote a new site and get users?
I am getting close on completing a project that I am working on for the last 2 years and now the most important part is starting: getting users to the site and growing the sites traffic.

What are the best ways to promote a new site and getting initial users?
Should I hire a PR company?
Let's stop being intellectually dishonest for a second and look at what PG actually said. He said accents are an issue 1) in the context of startups when 2) it hinders communication.

He is looking at it from his point of view of what running a startup and startup culture encompasses, that is: an environment rife with competition built on extreme uncertainty that can be transcended with the appropriate communicative abilities to fool investors, founders, employees to believe in what you're doing. In that context, it would seem that having an accent that hinders others' ability to understand you is a huge disadvantage.

I do not know about the beginnings of Intel, but Apple in the startup stage had a founding team whose native tongue was English. Steve Jobs was fluent in English and could deliver these great orations about his stupidly crazy ideas to his friends and investors who also spoke English. You can't say that didn't help him. Having a thick accent that prevented him from communicating clearly would've had a multiplicative effect on the unwillingness of others to even listen to his ideas.

PG never just stopped at "people with accents can't succeed or be successful in business." And it's incredibly disingenuous of you and others to continue to label him as anti-accent when he has repeatedly stated the context and details of his position.
No, it is not correct. It exaggerates the facts. A journalist at a conscientious periodical wouldn't get away with it.
It's a nice site for a non programmer although the font hurts my eyes a bit. Her server host must be thrilled now that her site probably overloaded their box with requests.