skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Deep down, the people in charge either didn’t think languages make any difference or, worse, bought into the silly “availability of programmers” argument. I’m still surprised anyone would believe such a thing. If i guy came telling me that he wanted to program only in, say, Java because that’s what he knows best and that he doesn’t really feel prepared or interested in learning and using, say, Clojure (or any other language, really), i wouldn’t hire him in a million years, no matter what language my project were using, and no matter how many thousands of candidates like this one i had at my disposal.

The problem is not willingness to learn, the problem is the risk of going into a job, becoming less fluent in a language for which there are more job opportunities, and then being able to get paid as much or more with the new skills they learned.

I am very interested in learning Clojure, Scheme, Lisp. But, these languages do not provide job security unless I want to move. Companies want .Net (C# or VB), Java, and JavaScript- w/ other various associated frameworks and libraries. So I have little incentive to opt to use Lisp at work, even if given the opportunity.

I was a long time Java developer, but have been using Ruby for the past several years. It is really not as easy to find Ruby jobs locally as it is in Java or .Net, but I think it will be worth it because the # of Ruby jobs is growing. I don't see that for Clojure, though I really do wish it well. For a language to gain in the job market have, it doesn't need to be the best, it has to be fun, easy, and safe enough to use for the ecosystem to grow around it.

C++ was more fun than Fortran/Cobol.

Java was more fun than C++/.Net was more fun than Visual C++.

Groovy, JavaScript, Python and Ruby are more fun than Java.

PhP was more fun than HTML + CGI. Ruby/Rails is more fun than PhP.

Note: when I say "fun" I don't mean it in the "challenging" sense of fun like Haskell. I mean writing great, cool things quickly and understanding it easily.
This Family Banned All Technology Made After 1986
Depends if you define "moneymaker" as revenue or profit and how wide of a range you're willing to spread the small number of net positives over.

The only relevant startup lesson I can see in this story, is its the same old pattern where entrenched interests have a huge financial stake in growing, and no opposition exists, resulting in the eventual death or disability of the host. Its the cancer lifecycle. As a design pattern, it kills businesses (like universities... or startups) just as well as it kills people.

Anytime money flows out, have to find some force to oppose it, or inevitably all the money will eventually flow out that direction.

That's what makes it very weird that they specifically selected a fifth year senior in an entrepreneurship program, of all things, to quote. Someone in marketing? Sure. Someone in phys therapy? Sure. Someone in "newscasting/communications"? Sure. But an entrepreneur of all people has the very least resources to be drilling unpatchable holes in his new companies money bucket.
If you think that Win7 backup rivals TM, did you ever try to restore from it?

- The interface is lying. Last time I had 'system image' checkbox enabled and it only kept the totally useless image of the last backup, probably only a few hours back in the backup itself. All the other images were just stored locally.

- The pre installation environment used for restoring has barely any network drivers - you need to somehow come up with your own CD or USB drive for providing your network drivers, often needing to extract the right ones out of some subfolders that you draw from an unzipped setup.exe, since manufacturers nowadays often don't offer them separately anymore.

- The interface for logging in to your network drive is totally bugged. If you get a network error you will only recognize after you've hand-typed the location, user account and password (on different windows).

It's a total mess.
Yes, this post is very misleading. SkyDrive features both a recycle bin for deleted files and a version history option to restore from a previous copy.
You should have read the post. Both your concerns are covered. Not only does he acknowledge that his challenge is not representative of the reality people have to go through, but he clearly spells out his reasoning.

"As I said in my initial post, you won't hear me claim that my experiences from the upcoming week represent an authentic representation of food insecurity in America. My goal is merely to help bring awareness to the issue and spark deeper conversations about food insecurity and possible solutions – discussions that organizations like Feeding America are driving every day."
So. How do I compensate for this if I wish to convert a milliseconds since epoch value to an accurate datetime type? Are these the concerns that smart people who write DateTime types in frameworks deal with?
Natural Language Processing libraries

https://opennlp.apache.org/
http://nlp.stanford.edu/

Cloud provider automation libraries

http://jclouds.incubator.apache.org/

Distributed stream computing

https://incubator.apache.org/s4/

Asynchronous event driven IO, battle tested, mother recommended

http://netty.io/

In-process webserver

http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/

....to name a few. It's probably useful to take some thing that you'll need and look in ecosystem X for it (say... .NET) and then compare what's available there to what's available on the JVM. In my experience, the JVM wins out almost every time when it comes to number of options and maturity of options.
The article starts with "College sports create undeniable campus pride and identity" and leaves this sentence unquestioned, as if it was a positive thing.

Regardless of the money spent (or made, if college sports could be run profitable somehow), there seems to be a huge cost for society by setting the focus on the wrong things.

It seems that being a good student is valued highly by society, but the shortcut - becoming a (sports) star is even better! This leads to a large percentage of young people investing significant resources (time, energy, health) into this dream.

Professional sports is just entertainment, and assuming that the enjoyment comes from a relative comparison between players and teams, or the delta between two rather abstract numbers (this performance, compared to a "record"), then it seems that there are some resources not spent well.

I cannot see how sports and educations should be married the way they are at american colleges. Anyone?
RBS Mainframe Meltdown: A year on, the fallout is still coming
You are absolutely right. It's impossible to estimate how long it will take to complete something you have never done before in your life. Unless the new code being written is absolutely trivial, estimates are going to be guesses, at best.

The only half-decent solution I found so far is iterative development. Take a feature and break it down i to big rocks. Further break down the big rocks into little chunks - each that you estimate would take you less than a day to complete.

Only after completing your first "big rock" in this way can you use your new data to gauge your velocity and give an estimate for completing the rest of the work that's worth the paper it's written on.
I can't believe that Microsoft would be so irresponsible for propagating the myth that file mirroring is the same as file backup! What an absolute recipe for disaster.
I think "King Rat" might also be part of James Clavell's series.

Even if it isn't, you should like it if you like the others
I find it amusing that the team consists of 12 people, and only one of them is a developer (maybe 2 if we count the CTO).

Is this normal for tech startups?
A quote I like is "Done is better than perfect".
IIRC, 1 & 3 are usually the same, and 2 is usually still way too optimistic. And that's from research, not anecdote.

It still might be useful. Use 1 to anchor 3 to anchor 2 and then triple it.

See also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jg/planning_fallacy/
There was a honking big difference between pseudo-science and this blog post, and it was right at the start. Specifically:

"So I decided to find out - and I did! "

Followed up by a link to a published scientific article. Seriously, I don't know what your complaint is. There's a nice dry scientific paper, and a blog post with a more accessible tone. This seems like a pretty good mix of the different types of media (putting aside for now the issue of the paper being behind a bloody paywall).
True. I did it twice on two different installs in the last few days for 8.1 Pro RTM - upgrading from 8.0 which had local account. Both times I looked very hard to create a local account.

Here is a blog describing how to get around it for preview but he describes exactly my experience for RTM.
http://www.infobyte.hr/blog/337/windows-8-1-preview-how-to-i...

note: I'm talking about the install process. not in the OS UI after install.
I guess he used this lib: https://github.com/openpgpjs/openpgpjs/
Shmoocon 2013 - C10M Defending The Internet At Scale
> They're sometimes a good investment.

Has it benefited them, or you, or anyone else, in any way? I suspect not. Have to be careful about the definition of good. Or the definition of investment.

Although no one will admit to being "that guy", everyone personally is certain that everyone else is "that guy" who makes decisions based on (insert disparaged subject).

There is some minimal level of startup lesson in that actually being useful is unnecessary; only a perception is necessary.
Far as I can tell, the argument here boils down to "can't concentrate on coding while traveling". When put in a simple statement like that it becomes very obvious that the statement depends entirely on the person. Many people have little difficulty opening up their laptop and forgetting the rest of the world for an 8 hour stretch, and this would be the type of person who would do well as a digital nomad. If you need peace and stability in order to code - and many, many people do - then it's a bad choice.

I've also found you need to be very comfortable with email and text communications, and you probably need to be good at getting your point across and discerning the point of others as it's more difficult to communicate technical issues without being in person - but obviously very possible, as the number of very good technical blogs can attest to.
I recently read Software Estimation (Steve McConnell, author of Code Complete). My main takeaway was to distrust developer intuition and instead build estimates from data. One example is to look at the duration of past projects of "similar size" (still requires some qualitative analysis). Another example is to count the number of distinct "features" or "components," and build an estimate from those. Both of these still require some qualitative analysis. That will be the weak point of any estimate. The goal is to minimize inputs from developer intuition and use as much quantitative analysis as possible when estimating.
Heating is not a major problem for the poor. Only 12% of the poor were uncomfortably cold for at least 24 hours last winter. (For comparison, 8% of the nation as a whole suffered this problem.)

http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf see table 2.1

Similarly, 73% of the poor own a car.

I guess the budgetary constraints the poor face are not as severe as you seem to believe.
I think you might have missed the point of what the author was saying. Check out the screenshot he posted:

http://www.edandersen.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/image.p...

Notice it says that your files are "automatically backed up to the cloud"?
2 Free Plugins For Increasing Your Blog's Email Subscriptions
At which latitude? I hear those polar days can drag on a bit more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_day.
But people in the fields of computer vision, artificial intelligence, machine learning, concurrent data-structures and others – very smart, very forward thinking people – would pick Java or C/C++ nine times out of ten, and not only because these languages are better suited to their task performance-wise, but because they have other, more important things to think about.

Yes and no. There are a few things to keep in mind.

First, these fields have a lot of finesse for which there's no substitute for years of trial-and-error. What's the right learning rate for a neural network? (There isn't one; real NN implementations have varying strategies for adapting the LR, but even picking the right one of those requires knowledge both of how NNs work, and the data itself, since noisier data means there won't be monotonic learning progress unless one trains over the whole set-- and that's usually impractical.) What this means is that programmers tend to have a longer lifespan and you don't see as much tech churn.

Also, most machine learning programmers use different languages for exploration and production. For the former, Python, R and Matlab seem to be the favorites. For the latter, C and Java are the traditional incumbents, though I could see Scala or Clojure breaking in. Making Clojure performant isn't elegant, but (a) it's not worse than writing Java or C++, and (b) the same is true of Common Lisp. Typically, though, production machine learning doesn't (or shouldn't) have a high LOC-count, especially because most ML projects are there to do things that would sprawl into unmaintainable complexity if done by hand (e.g. speech recognition).

Clojure won't replace C for low-level system programming that requires manual memory management, but even in machine learning, that doesn't apply to most of the work-- remember: half your time will be spend looking for patterns or exploring methods, many of which won't work-- unless you're working at a very large scale. For most of ML, the performance-intensive part is linear algebra, and you usually will end up using wrappers around Lapack (which is in Fortran) for that.

What I would say about the higher end of programming is that engineers care more about "the right tool for the job" and less about "the tool I like best". They're less wedded to one technology stack, so they're willing to use Java if it's the right language for their problem. They're definitely not your typical Java jockeys, though.
It must be suck to be Johannes right now... I wonder how many emails containing random gibberish he is receiving?
I suspect his opinions are not falsifiable, if that's what you were hoping for.
Every company "monopolizes" their own products - the problem for consumers begins when there's only one de facto product in a particular market (e.g. - desktop or smartphone OS). iOS is certainly not in that position in smartphone OS and it can be argued that Windows is no longer as dominant as it was during the antitrust trial.
Its safe to assume on the Internet that anybody that comes to you, is a bot or a scam of some kind. Not a surprise to you, a security consultant.

I understand frustration that you can't convince everyone that you are a good guy. All good guys these days have that problem. Even the good folks at the NSA ( you aren't one of them, are you? )
Neo-Amish?
It might be worth noting that this class (CS1101S in NUS) stops at chapter 3 of SICP. I took the previous scheme version of the class.

Btw, I'm curious as to why the HOJ book didn't get taken down? I checked and the HOP book is not released under a license that allows for derivative works. I'm curious because I've made an interactive version of SICP (using scheme) and I can't find any other books to do this to because no one releases books under permissive enough licenses.
You won't whitelist someone because they'll try to break in from an IP other than the one you whitelisted? How does that even begin to make sense?
You don't have to; solar days are not the same as "normal" days (defined by TAI and used by UTC). This is why we have leap years, and leap seconds in UTC.
Fragmentarium Version 1.0 (“Cologne”) Released
The head of the wikipedia table says it's for 1998 ?
Wait, When Did Software Become So Boring?
A Revolution in Mental Health
What is noprocrast?

It's a way to help you prevent yourself from spending too much time on News.YC. If you turn it on you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
This is absolutely true, and I believe why many companies that understand this are averse to remote working. Yes, commute time is a waste, but getting into an environment and mindset to do serious work requires you to get into your "routine groove".
Show HN: ParsePort - A kill switch for Parse
The Fallacy Of Zero Sum Game Thinking
Private Cloud File Sync with Raspberry Pi under 30 Minutes
Having been semi-location independent for 4 years now, I have come to a similar conclusion.

The theory of decision fatigue -- that you get exhausted by making a certain number of decisions -- seems to be true to me. And the thing is that when you are in a new place, there is a large number of decisions to make about petty things like where is the nearest supermarket, where can I work out, how do I get proper internet etc. Whenever I've set up in a new place, my productivity suffers severely for a week or two. After that, I'm okay but if you travel a lot, that becomes a real price. And it's not rewarding the same way that other guilty pleasures are, it's just annoying.

I remember walking to the "office" in Bangkok one day, having been there for three weeks. I pulled out my iPod for the first time since I arrived. It struck me that this was a sign that I was familiar with my surroundings. I didn't need the full mental capacity just to navigate, I could run that process in the background and allow myself to listen to music. I am not sure what you can conclude from this but I think that it's likely that I had consumed a lot of energy up until that point, which I then didn't have for programming.
I don't think Steve McConnell was suggesting that developer intuition was not relevant. In some of the formulas he suggests for estimation he includes a factor for how accurate the team was in estimating previous projects. Ultimately each developer will need to estimate individual features or other small units.

The other big take away from that book is that estimates should not be a single number but rather a range. If the client insists on a fixed price bid then you start with the higher end of your estimated range and add in something for the risk of a fixed price bid.
"Stay in one place for a while" is fantastic advice. One week is barely enough time to get settled - every time you move you need to find stores, amenities, cafes etc. Two weeks is much better (and you'll appreciate the place more), but even longer is better if you really want to get work done.

A nice room is great advice too - makes a huge difference to your happiness if you can wake up each morning to an amazing view & sunshine in a good location, compared to a small cramped hotel room in a sketchy area. Obviously you have to go with what you can afford, but a cheap AirBnB can be dramatically better than a hotel sometimes.

The downside of getting a 'real job with an office' is that you might not be able to negotiate that 2 months annual vacation, or to get the vacation at times that suit you. You'll have to prioritize what you really want.
And where's the key stored on the client and how is it shared with the server?

I'm too lazy to parse their JS code.
"And to be completely honest, it’s just not enough. I believe that working with a team of people that are more experienced and smarter than yourself is crucial for your development, and as a freelancer, doing minor gigs involving some MVC/CRUD application programming, you just miss out on a world of possibilities to grow and learn."

I've experienced this as well, it was my main grief with working by myself and on the road and ultimately led me to join a company again part time. Sadly the team I joined isn't really what I expected from a team, so I'm already on the lookout again :(
There are currently two open source AOT compilers
RoboVM and avian that can be used for cross-platform iOS/Android development. Both seem to be in pre-alpha state. Seems like a better option would be to use apportable and go the other way from iOS to android. Anyone here have any experience with these?

http://oss.readytalk.com/avian/

http://www.apportable.com/
Your A/B explanation misses the point that the selection doesn't reveal the relationship, only the absolute value. Once you reveal both options, the selection reveals the absolute value and the position in the set.

Using your example, ignoring selection and envelopes and simplifying the goal of the answer: "Here's the letter B from a set of two consecutive letters. What's the other letter?"
> "So here you have a non-US citizen at a foreign university doing graduate work studies, and the United States government came barreling in and not only snuffed out the funding and killed his studies, it also barred him from knowing what it was he had been funded to research."

Help me understand this. How could the US Govt bar Assange from knowing what he had already been researching at the University of Melbourne (funded by the NSA and DARPA apparently)?
Being and having been a digital nomad for the past several years, it can become tiring having to switch up location and work setting so often. While living in Rio de Janeiro, I often wondered how people who are from there work in office buildings in the wealthy neighborhoods (which are a stone's throw from the beach), deal with knowing that fun and sun is literally 5 minutes away at any given moment, that people are always on the beach enjoying themselves while you have to be stuck up in your office with a possible view of the sea.

In any event, I wasn't one of these people as I could take a break when I wished and hit up the beach, etc. It was great...until the project that kept me financially stable went under. Instead of looking for more work, I sacrificed the need to work more for the free time (and ability) to very cheaply or freely enjoy myself in my surroundings, eventually tiring of demanding little of myself after a few months (you can only be young-ish and 'hang' for so long). It's great living in a beautiful place, but even better when that place is very affordable (or, in the least, when you've found a way to make it affordable...almost an art in itself).

In the Bay, I almost never went out because everything cost money and therefore my friends only did things that cost money. Being poor in US standards was social suicide.

In Brazil, I was going out 4-5x per week! My average night out in Rio I'd spend about US$5, maybe $10 (drinks included, try doing that in SF!). Plus, there just so much to do for free, from hiking to beaches, to free concerts and art exhibitions...you name it. Things that other young people are also doing, mind you. In developing nations, or even economically strained ones (I'm in Portugal now), where most people are on a budget, I find the amount of fun and interesting things to do, for free or cheap, increase. Not only do the events and activities increase, but the number of people doing them increase, too.

Being a digital nomad, with at least one stable project, in places like these is where the 'good life' is. But when that stable project goes bye-bye, the sense of the good life goes with it, no matter where you are.

_____

As an aside, having just read the article, I saw that it's a minimalist blog (post) on github.io, which I'm not familiar with. From their landing page, I don't see any offer for blogging.

On Wordpress, I couldn't find any theme like this but on HN I come across these types of entries somewhat often, though this is the first I've seen from github.io. Anyone know how I can get a free one like this, where there's just a white page and words, via any blogging service?