skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do I know if I have the aptitude to do programming as a career?
Hello All,

I am currently contemplating a career change. Well actually, it's not much of a career change since I've just been doing admin stuff after college. My education was in liberal art.

My question is how do I know if I have the aptitude to do programming as a career? Like where people actually will pay me money for writing code!?

I'm also thinking about going back to school to get a MSCS; but more importantly, I'm worried if I can even make the cut to be a programmer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks HN!
My second job (For the software product arm a large investment bank) was actually advertised like that.

The pay was great, and so were the hours & work environment.

Mind you, when I got the job, I thought I caught a unicorn.
A lot of the old announcements were due to "we finally squeezed a few more MHz out of the G4/G5, thank god." variety.
My faves:

4. Pretending To Know

3. Not even attempting to communicate (or "communicating" through hints.) Particularly in high-pressure situations.

2. Microcontrolling. (By which I mean: grabbing control of some low-level aspect of the project, or of the team communications, thinking you know better than the team member who already took action to such an extent that you don't need to explain your actions. See also (1), (2).

And my favorite of all:

1. By your very presence. Seriously -- things like overbearing demeanor, poor tact, sexist or jockish language etc can not only be toxic, but instant invitations for your team members to not only begin their job searches immediately, but look forward to the task with vim and glee.
The timing makes all the difference. Luck, too.
As for the logical definition of a "spec," you are welcome to find any inconsistencies or imprecisions in the Nock axioms.

Not my point. The "spec" can be perfect, but you're not saying what a Nock implementation needn't do. If I write NockJIT that optimizes increment-loops into O(1) addition, does that violate the spec? You might reply "no", but someone else who relied on such loops for hardware timing obviously would say "yes".
Just curious, what is lacking in Xcode for C++ development? I've a few years experience with C++ and I find Xcode to be quite nice and usable.
That looks like a completely reputable and completely unbiased source with no monetary motivation or agenda.
Smoke detectors are literally invisible to the average house dweller 99.99% of the time, and the 0.01% of the time where they are "activated", they do their job just fine.

The thermostat was a brilliant entry point into a potential multibillion dollar home automation business for Nest, but I don't get why a smoke detector would be step 2.

Any ideas?

>Nest launched its $249 thermostat almost two years ago and has long brainstormed other things to build, including the smoke detector and potentially a door lock.

A door lock, on the other hand, would be great. A friend of mine has replaced his traditional apartment lock with a pinpad, and it's quite fantastic. He can set temporary passcodes for guests, never has to worry about his keys, etc.
Does anyone else find it ironic that an article about making your graphics simple and easy to understand is published on a website with a name that is unmemorable and unpronounceable? I will never be able to talk about where to find this with a friend because I don't know how to say the name of the website, and it would probably be misunderstood even if I did.
You can still use that data and present it to the pilot in a meaningful way. Not as gauges or numbers but with augmented vision, like seeing through the bottom of the aircraft.

That's also one of the reasons why JSF has taken so long...
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6440009
Good. The Nest is hands-down my favorite piece of infrastructure I've purchased. It's easy to use, looks great, and saved me money over what I had before. Hopefully I can buy lots of new products from Nest Labs to replace the ugly outdated crap around my house over the next decade.
Simplified OAuth for PhoneGap
"People should totally believe your conspiracy theory over the words of someone who actually works at Google (disclosure: so do I)"

Oh yeah, that's all do, trust those accused of scamming. The same goes on Wall Street, SEC, FTC, IRS /taxes etc. If the employees of said company swear on internet forums that they are not manipulating anything, it's over.
It's an eyesore that has to be visible in my house to be effective. See my other comment in this thread.
NSA concerns clearly.
Because not every project is headed by Linus Torvalds. That man has almost no filter (which in my opinion is a good thing).

However, that same type of stuff may not reflect other organizations and members of those organizations in a good light. So there are definitely concerns there.

I'm a developer, and my company's closed source code definitely has its share of profanity and "WTF"s. But that would not fly for things we make available on GitHub, just due to concerns of our image. Most developers wouldn't give two shits about the comment...
Traders may have gotten last week’s Fed news 7 milliseconds early
Well, can't really blame this recruiter, he/she certainly found the best candidate given the requirements.
I have no idea what that is suppose to mean.

Is it because they have ads and large companies pay for them? Is it because they are sending people to wikipedia instead of your site? Is it because they are sending people to large companies instead of your site? Is it because they expect small companies to pay for ads too?
Like many of us, you'll have multiple G+ accounts.
What? Why do you have to think about what the type inference is doing? I've never needed that with H-M in practice, and I've spent a fair amount of time with both Haskell and OCaml.

When I use a good inference system like that, I simply don't think about the typechecker most of the time. It just doesn't come up. The types simply work out, largely because the inference is sufficiently good.

The only times I've had to model the inference in my head is when it is insufficiently powerful, like with OCaml objects or certain typeclass patterns in Haskell. That is, it's only a problem when the inference breaks unexpectedly.

Type inference just works, until it doesn't. And that's the only place I've had difficulties: when it doesn't.

The solution to a problem like that is not to make it break more often! That just exacerbates things.

A less capable system (say Scala or, god forbid, Go) just makes life more difficult. Even if it's easier to run the algorithm in your head. Especially then, in fact: you shouldn't be thinking about it on the first place.
"to get everyone to use Google+"

To which I say: good luck. :-)
I would think remote dedicated servers and VPS services fall under the definition of "cloud"?

The question is whether or not you're paying up-front for hardware, and managing it locally somewhere. If you lease a $10/month VPS, you're using cloud services.
Ask HN: best platform for selling windows desktop software
I'm looking to sell a $15 windows app and I'm looking for a platform to handle the eCommerce and digital delivery side of things.

FastSpring ( http://www.fastspring.com/ ) looks pretty good. I was wondering if anyone had experience using them or if there other platforms I should investigate.
Tech Companies Are Fueling a Key Hedge Fund Trading Strategy
Indeed. I have two quibbles with it, which I've already submitted on Github: the position of the asterisk and the shape lof the lower case r (looks like a small caps i).

Otherwise a very good font.
> has to be visible in my house to be effective.

Why does it have to be visible to be effective? I notice my smoke detectors roughly once every few years: when it's time to change the batteries (oh and that one time where my cooking went wrong and it activated the alarm).
Peculiar - an earlier revision of the article did mention this. Then again, it also lacked the Campaign's comment at that time.
Indeed. The curly brace needs to be little more pronounced. Other than that, it's a good alternative to Source Code Pro.
And that's precisely why I don't use Google Chrome - nonstandard Mac GUI (like Google really has great UI? Please)
Scientific Paper About Wolverine's Regenerative Powers
So your thesis is that google is killing your small company by sending people interested in your business to wikipedia instead? Has it occurred to you that perhaps people are more interested in wikipedia than your business?
Your wish, is my command: https://github.com/justicel/selinux.git
Tore Blystad (game director on Hitman: Absolution) was also from the demoscene, part of the Norwegian demo group Spaceballs in the early 1990s, where he worked on this famous demo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_the_Art_(demo)

Oddly there's not a big game scene in Norway, though. The Norwegian demosceners seem to have either gone into other things, or gone into games outside of Norway.
I'm all for believing that there's a scam when there's evidence of a scam (as opposed to this, where the results are indistinguishable from what they would be if Google were acting in good faith, and no other evidence has been presented).

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=computer

http://www.bing.com/search?q=computer

It's a conspiracy, and we've even managed to rope DuckDuckGo into it.
Of course you could say it's a subset of unification, as it is.

It definitely is, and a limiting one at that. How does Hoon infer the type error in whatever is the Hoon equivalent of the, say, JavaScript expression (a == b && b == 5 && a == "foo"), where a and b are function parameters?
Dell Buys Dell and Still Nobody Buys Dells
93.5% of ratings for S&P 500 firms are “hold” or higher
You'd think Nest would've bought Lockitron by now.
I looks like your complaint might be resolved soon. It seems that 'venv' is in Python 3.4 alpha http://docs.python.org/3.4/library/venv.html .
Gazelle saw 210% more Samsung trade-ins during iPhone 5s launch weekend
$649 iPhone 5s Costs Apple $199 - Hardware - Handhelds/PDAs -
From the other submission, a link to Ziptr's announcements:
http://www.ziptr.com/ziptr-closing-92713
Also, this setting does not address the security of MAC constructions based on SHA-3.

For instance, HMAC over SHA-2-256 or SHA-2-512/256 with a 256-bit key is expected to attain 256-bit security (i.e. the MAC size equals the security level).

Yet SHA-3-256 would not reach anything above 128-bit security, even though the MAC is 256 bits long; to attain 256-bit security one would have to scale the MAC size up to 512 bits instead.
> I have never in my life experienced anything more stressful than running my own software company and being responsible for making payroll.

That statement, I think, says more about your background than anything else. Running your own company is stressful, sure. But compare it to a situation that is just as stressful where you don't have control. For me? High school was dramatically worse.

And that says a lot about my life experience. That I've never experienced anything worse than high school. I'm certain that anyone who has spent any time, say in jail has had it much worse.

Or what about those minimum wage service jobs? that's gotta be pretty bad. I remember the other day in taco bell listening to another customer berate the staff for misspelling his name. I can imagine feeling trapped in one of those jobs. That would be pretty bad. I've never had a job where I didn't feel like I could quit and have a better job within a week. This simply isn't the case for the vast majority of the population; if you work at taco bell, and you get fired? it could be quite some time before someone else gives you a chance. And what about your opportunities for advancement? For me to feel okay about myself, personally, I need to know that I'm 'making progress' - even if you aren't a greedy jerk like me who measures himself with money, I can imagine that the prospect of supporting yourself and your family on near minimum wage- with little hope of improving that would be a lot more stressful than doing the same thing when you have reason to believe that you will be doing better in the future.

Or, what about the military? You can literally be shot for walking off the job. You're paid peanuts and can only change commanders with the permission of your superiors. Even before we talk about combat (which I'm not qualified to talk about.) that's gotta be pretty stressful.

Yeah, I'm not buying the idea that running a company can be rated 'very stressful' on the scale of general human experiences. You have a lot of control over your situation.

I do agree that it can be rated as 'very stressful' on the scale of upper-middle class experiences. But I think that people who run businesses? we are far less likely to fear getting fired. If you have what it takes to run a business, you probably have what it takes to sell yourself to a new employer. The same job is going to be less stressful for us than for most people because we don't fear getting fired like they do.
That's only if you base the Youtube channel on a G+ profile, if you base it on a G+ Page you can name it anything you like:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2848323
It's very true. Many times orgs write generic, catch-all engineering job specs. Or they say they're looking for any 'good' engineer.

They think this is a good idea since it seems to apply to the broadest number of candidates. But it totally backfires - no one gets excited about the role since it's not targeted at anyone.
Something I really disliked was youtube videos that moderate comments actively to warp what it seems people are saying. I was really hoping this would be addressing that but sadly it doesn't seem to be.

For example if you go on a free energy video or a water powered car video you'll notice that normally none of the comments explain why it fake. This is normally because the author is removing the comments that say this (or simply having all comment have to be approved first).

This means that as people read through the comments they get a really warped sense of what people are commenting where they think all 1 million people who viewed the video thought that the video was legit. There's no way to tell if a video's comments are being deleted or have to be approved. Sometimes I might right a long comments just to see "waiting for approval" when I post it. At that point I know the comment will never be viewed by anyone...
Well, it was Nokia the ones who said that they wanted to differentiate themselves, which they clearly didn't since they chose an OS used by other manufacturers as well.
What he's saying is that Nokia could have at least chosen the more popular OS, which would have offered them a higher market share.
They don't access your servers "by default" on the cloud, because they have to go through Amazon, still spend effort, and it probably isn't as legal as obtaining things through a court order. But I think the chance is high enough that it's still worth considering hosting your servers locally.
I can't read that article without hearing "Brahm's Lullaby" in my head ...

"Back to sleep / Little sheep / The USD will be / Just fine..."

Not mentioned in the article: China is signing reciprocal agreements with many countries, which has the effect of completely removing the USD as the intermediate currency.

For instance, if dealing with Brazil, the central bank of each country allows for direct Chinese RMB / Brazil real conversion, completely cutting out the USD's role.

See for example: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-13/china-takes-another...
On the hardware side because smoke detectors typically have a fixed replacement date. In addition, homes tend to have significantly more smoke detectors than thermostats. Throw in the potential of selling security services to the upscale market segment likely to want branded thermostats and it could be a very lucrative.
Show HN: Customizable online clearance rack
I'm not too sure if this is intended to bring the number of open issues up or down...
Stupid people will post stupid things. It's up to those who want valuable comments to weed through them.

I wasn't talking about stupid people posting stupid things (although that is a distinct problem). This is about trolls posting provocative things specifically to provoke drama and outrage. What is entertainment value for trolls is noise to everyone else.
why do you say islam is part of the problem? I ask because I genuinely don't understand...
This is probably the single thing I miss the most when not using Python. It's a really great example of writing a library that lets the user get right to the semantics they want while simplifying a bunch of mostly unimportant details.
It seems to me to be a bubble of sorts, although a strange one. It mostly seems to be centered around AngelList in general and the seed stage universe in particular, where valuations of very early stage startups with cool videos are totally out of whack with where they should be in my opinion. But because the amount of money moving around at this stage is still pretty small - it is early stage after all, so each deal is still tiny in absolute terms - there is less of a bubble effect than one would expect. Reality might be harsh for those startups when they come to long for bigger rounds in future though.
On Healthcare: Knowing What You Pay For
Startups open up $142 billion market
Interesting. The character for greek k (kappa - κ ) is wrong though. The vertical line of the greek k doesn't rise above the rest of the character. It might seem small but it really strikes as ugly and wrong for anyone used to the language.
I think this is an excellent example for the application of duck typing.
I'm not sure about the hinting on the font, or maybe it's the rendering in the browser. It just doesn't seem that smooth.
So your thesis is that google is killing your small company by sending people interested in your business to wikipedia instead?

No it is not. Please read the thread again and again if needed, it's a waste to repeat it or to cut and paste. Many others have made the same point over and over. When in doubt, follow the money and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
"ran out of money" wouldn't have this "we can't say anything, we are closing it now" odor.
Any idea on the release timeframe?
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> The programmer has to model what the inference system is doing in his or her head, and it's a source of significant cognitive load.

Huh? I don't know what your type-inferred language of choice is, but personally I never have to go down to the level of solving constraint sets and unifying types in my head when working any of the ML dialects. Even when writing my own inference algorithms, once I'm able to establish confluence and progress I rarely give the main inference constraint solver a second thought when writing code.
See above, Apple usually gives free upgrade to people who bought a computer in the 45 days preceding the release.
My feeling is that there's a relatively small subset of programmers who adapt well to unification inference, and they think the way you do - they grok the logical problem the inference engine is trying to solve, and don't worry at all about how it does it.

There is a larger set of programmers who try to understand it and run into, well, stuff like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner

I hope you're not seriously suggesting that this content is on the same intellectual level as, say, a good RFC.

A good RFC in fact works very hard to be as stupid as possible, and one source of irritation from the RFC-producing world to the PDF-producing world - so to speak - is that the PDF-producing world doesn't seem to even understand that they have this job, much less are making any particular effort to do it.

The way people should understand the Hoon type inference engine is to think about the concrete reality of what it's doing, not the abstract mathematical problem it's trying to solve. This is simply because human beings aren't very good as a species at mathematics. Hate that that's true, but that it is true I don't think anyone can deny.
If ever there was a right attitude about bringing a radical project in to the world: this is it.

I just spent 15 minutes just _reading_ the documentation. Because it's _interesting_. That never happens.
I was wondering how it's possible that IntelliJ is free for Android development? What drives the decision making to make one product free and the other paid? In a way I like paying for RubyMine, hoping that it won't be discontinued in the long run, although I'm guessing IntelliJ has a much larger user base.
A cartoon comes to mind of somebody staring at a chart of the increasing smoke in their house while the fire starts to eat away their computer screen.

I'd like to have that on a dashboard, too - smoke levels in the building. Very comforting most of the time.

(Sorry for the humor - I am sure they have thought of some worthwhile use cases).
Under the new system you just create multiple G+ Pages for each channel. G+ Pages don't have the real name requirement: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2848323
The idea of a smoke detector which also detects carbon monoxide seems brilliant, except that smoke rises and carbon monoxide sinks, so either you place the device in the middle of the wall (and lose out on early warning) or it becomes useful for one and useless for the other.
Clearly? Really? There is nothing in the slightest clear about it.
Number 2 is what Joel Spolsky calls "hit and run management".

"hit and run management because managers tended to pop up unannounced, give some silly order for exactly how they wanted something done, dammit, without giving any thought to the matter, and leave the room for everyone else to pick up the pieces."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html

This is the most frustrating when you have spent an entire afternoon carefully considering different approaches to solving a problem and figured out all of the non obvious but important edge cases that show why a particular approach won't work to have someone come in and give it five minutes consideration and say "nah, we should do it that way, it'll work out".
Surprised that I had to read so far down the comments to find someone who saw how this best applied to HN. Then surprised again that a few of the respondents still missed it when it was explained.

It's someone with a product for sale to a category of businesses, helping people start more of those businesses. Similar approach could be taken by more entrepreneurs, especially those looking for good blog content.
There's one reason to have a Nest smoke detector: it would have a thermostat.

The reason I haven't bought a Nest is because the device only takes temperatures from one place in my house, which just happens to be a place that has a +/- 5 degree temperature change from either end of the house on a good day.

If the device also gets the temp, a Nest would be far more effective at keeping a house comfortable and saving energy. I'd also worry less about my toddler daughter being alone in a bedroom on an cool night that is usually much cooler than my own (first world parent problems).
Somebody has to hire us "B people".
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