skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This homework issue is peculiar in New York City. One issue is that parents do so much prepping to get into the elite gifted and talented programs, that kids are there who don't belong. What is challenging to a gifted kid (the programs are competitive) is overwhelming to someone not quite as advanced.

Many private schools face the same issues. Riverdale is one of the few elite uber-expensive schools that is bucking the trend on overwork. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secre...

It's worth noting that the author of the original article is an acclaimed multicultural writer, and not just a US-centric hack. Of course if he wants to keep his daughter off of pot she's in middle school, he probably shouldn't have outed himself.
Development Of Neal Stephenson’s CLANG Halted
I suggested Mechanical Turk to a homeless guy I had gotten to know briefly, and he seemed legitimately interested in the idea, although he said he didn't have a bank account. I'll bet lots of homeless people would use Mechanical Turk if they simply knew about it and had a way of getting paid.
There must be a reason why Apple's rewritten every pro app they've acquired. My theory is it's so they will port to iOS easily.

iOS is 90% of Apple's business
"If a company isn't making efforts to recognize you as an individual during the interview process, an accepted offer letter isn't going to promote you to personhood."

This is a great point. I've noticed that culture tends to be pervasive. The good experiences I've had with companies started from first contact. So have the bad experiences.
In the interest of DRY:

Yay-sayers: "That's not obvious at all -- look at all Android manufacturers other than Samsung"

Nay-Sayers: "Nokia had the capability to sufficiently differentiate their hardware to avoid the fate of LG, HTC et al."

Neutral: "We'll never really know."
From my perspective (I'm not the GP), I will be using a custom configuration management system that I wrote back in 1999. It's. Like puppet but ssh based, written in sh and standard Unix tooling. It doesn't use a DAG so you have to order dependencies carefully.

That will pull binary packages from ports builds on another machine and install and configure them.
I can't be sure. It was a friend's bike, and I was used to mountain bikes, not racing bikes.

I may have been leaning forward, I may have jammed the wrong brake. The bike may have had any of the problems you list. That combined with the manhole + hill speed was probably what did it.

I now use the public bike system in Montreal, bixi. Very convenient, and they're built like tanks, so I feel confident it won't happen again.
http://simperium.com/ is exactly what you need. It serves as a real-time data layer; you can push/pull from it from the browser, and pull/push to it from your server too.
I am an adequate C programmer, and with some care, I can turn out code that seems to be reliable. I am not an C++ expert, but at one time I did want to obtain mastery over it as well. I ran into problems.

There was some recent discussion about the "Edward C++ Hands" article. [1] And that discussion summarizes neatly the issues I have with C++. Yes, I get that it is a powerful multi-paradigm language. Yes, I get that it will take time to master.

But should this language (or any language; I'm looking at you Javascript) have so many hotly-debated dark corners and pitfalls? It is an enormous undertaking to just figure out what the best practices are. And it is then a further enormous undertaking to get the rest of your team on-board.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6414162
Logical positivism doesn't strike me as a concept with much logical positivist value.
I think I agree with you. Really, companies should care about the employee if for no other reason then because caring is the best way to extract value from them. A happy employee is a good employee, and there is a large hidden cost of hiring a new developer when the old one quits.
Actually sort is even better than normal (purely in-memory) merge sort. It looks at available memory and writes out sorted files to merge.

http://vkundeti.blogspot.com/2008/03/tech-algorithmic-detail...
There is one feature of go that prevents me for considering it when I want to write "low level" code: garbage collection.

It's probably very silly but in my mind that puts it next to Java, above C and C++ in the "grand scale of programming languages".

Oh, and also I don't like garbage collection, so there's that. I'm sure some day someone will explain to me what's the point of it because I still don't get it.
In defense of Excel
From memory, please list the states for which its state capital is one of the three most important cities.

Hell, you can google it if you want. Good luck!
the article shows for me with Disqus disabled
The problem that I find with Java is that it forces you to write code in a certain way; OO programming seems to have become the de facto way of dealing with large problems, especially in enterprise and sometimes I think far too much time is given to design patterns (that do work in a /lot/ of cases) and how they can be shoe horned into the program you are making. Java does have some amazing features, libraries, etc. It also has a lot of security flaws (afaik). Also, IDE's really do not interest me in the slightest.

Writing in Go isn't as strict or structured as Java which I really enjoy. I used to write a lot of C++ and although I was never a pro, I did really used to enjoy programming in it. Go is certainly a breath of fresh air to develop in in comparison and I find that I can write more concisely and if anything performance seems to improve as I am not making trivial mistakes that "powerful" languages like C++ allow me to repeatedly make. KISS.

As always, it's horses for courses.
Well since you're in the UK EU law applies and you get a 2 year warranty on all the Apple stuff you buy. They just keep it on the down-low. Two years is a reasonable life for a device now I reckon before trading up.
Good idea.

Well, it all depends what you want to test. Normally, such an experiment should try to detect which colours when compared can still be distinguished, detecting the smallest notable difference/patterns which don't work for subgroups. I don't see how that could work well with the measurement.

If it really is about the whole row of colours, then the levenshtein distance could indeed work well.
> state-of-the-art 3D PC gaming engine in C#.

How does it compare to Cry Engine, Unreal Engine, Frostbite, ...?

Because these are the state of the art gaming engines these days.
Same with me but with Warcraft 3.

After 2 games, i'm so burned out and mentally tired to play another game.
This article reminds me of being in school (some high school and surprisingly many college classes). I simply didn't do the memorization homework. I turned out OK but my GPA was definitely lower than it would have been if I'd spent all those extra hours memorizing.
"Less is More" works when you have fewer components but you can assemble them together in various combinations to do everything you could otherwise do with more components.

However, when you have fewer components which can't be combined to achieve certain things that you could do earlier, it is hard to see how you can then say "Less is More".

Coming from game development RAII is a blessing. Not having control of memory deallocation is will not sell. This is definitely not a case of "Less is More", it's a case of "Less is Less".
Just clicking through without doing any reordering got me 1042 so I don't think it's in the [0,99] interval. I'm assuming 99 is just an arbitrary "you have terrible eyesight" cutoff.
It's not the minimum wage that hurts those people, but a lack of aggregate demand.
Amazon Cloudfront down?
Amazon Cloudfront down? Seems to be in Australia. Images on amazon.com aren't loading. aws.amazon.com doesn't load.
IMDB, Twitter and Pinterest assets don't load either. Not to mention thumnbnails on a couple of sites I maintain :-(

Anyone else seeing this?
Nice work Ryan. I've been reading through these, and "Code is Design" is roughly similar to something I was trying to explain to my manager not too long ago, but I couldn't quite put it into words. I just sent him a link haha.

The parallels between software and physical construction are pretty amazing.
What gets me about MOST of the stuff I read on criticising c++ is the complete disregard for runtime performance. I write software that has to consume billions of messages a day per instance. I've done it in several languages for different purposes. At the end of the day if you implement the same algorithm in c++ it will be faster. I don't care what you think you can do in node.js, but you are wrong. When you have limited resources there is no option save for c and c++. It isn't a big deal, that is currently how we get things done.

People fucking around with distributed web applications are so immune from the specific cost of adding a line of code because rarely is what they are writing executed repeatedly in a tight loop and thus they lose the ability to quickly measure performance impact
The thing a lot of people don't understand about free speech is the kind of speech that needs to be protected is the unpopular kind; the kind that very few people agree with. Popular speech needs no defending.

I don't understand a lot of Americans who run around talking about "America the free" and then try to pass laws to limit the expression of anyone who doesn't live exactly like they do. Freedom means some people aren't going to agree with you, and you're going to have to accept it, and allow them to express themselves too.
I'm interested in knowing more about that engine. Can you say who/what it is?
What I've done should be proof enough.

It really isn't. It may be indicative of your technical ability however your past experience doesn't give me any indication if you'd be a good culture fit.
C++ programmers don't go to Go because Go occupies the space otherwise taken by Java.

The only real, modern alternative to C++ is Rust, but it's not at 1.0 yet, meanwhile C++ is still getting new features, all the while preserving compatibility.
If you click on 'read more', right bottom of the video, you'll be able to see the controls.
Pretty sure that already has a name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
Angular Directive Examples
> they won't port a linux driver to BSD if the linux driver is GPL.

It's more a "can't" than a "won't". They can't incorporate GPL code into the BSD kernel without violating the GPL.

LGPL-licensed code might be something they could port as a pluggable driver, though don't quote me on the details there.
Isn't Python with PyQt any good?

(That would be my first choice if writing a web app is infeasible, but it's been a while since I've followed the project.)
That's a great conspiracy but I'm not sure those folks have that much market share in the grand scheme of things (and it's possible liberal groups are doing the same thing). I don't know how many news site comment sections you tend to frequent, but I feel like I've seen just as much "dumbed down" liberal "trolling" as the reverse.
As for your getline being slow. It is a known problem.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9025093/stdcin-really-slo...
Scientists Find Evidence of Life Coming to Earth from Space
This argument misses the distinction between the FreeBSD "base system" and the whole of the FreeBSD project, which includes more than 20,000 applications with all matter of licenses -- permissive, copyleft, and proprietary. Taken as a whole, FreeBSD certainly does not exclude proprietary or GPL software.

The base system consists of the kernel, toolchain, shell, and standard daemons. For the base system it is true that we prefer permissively licensed components. Today there are a few components that are not permissively licensed, and there is a plan with credible replacements for them.
In addition to Pavlov's comment: The Chinese knockoffs are mostly eating into Nokia's lowe-end market share. They have been doing so in India and China as well, and since before Elop took over.
Having implemented AES and a few other algorithms in "pure formula" Excel, I fully support seeing more things implemented in Excel!

One of the biggest things to wrap your head around is that cells in Excel are write-once, read many. This forces you to unroll all of your loops, and you generally end up with a giant state machine, with each state occupying a row and depending on the state of the previous row.
Yes. You should be arrested.

Counter hacking is just hacking, the only difference is how you pick your target. And you never know, maybe the owner of the originating system was just another victim. (Hacker breaks in computer A, then precedes to hack computer B leaving trace back to computer A, not the hacker)

It is also against the law in most of developed world.
Awesome post and view what it's like to be a new angel investor and paying back the startup community. We need those who've been successful to support other entrepreneurs even though most investments fail. Love the honesty and matter of fairness. Hope I get there someday.
Comments also frequently repeat what is obvious and don't illuminate the bigger picture. Ie a Pythagorean theorem function would have a comment about squaring numbers and adding them instead of for what it's used in practice.
It will make a difference. Your eyes can see a much wider color space than your monitor can display. By shifting colors, f.lux leaves some of the monitors color space unused, compressing the remaining colors so that some are closer together (or the same even).
The Elements of Comment Style
-1. Try to eat less, and choose healthy food choices.
-2. Get a little sunlight.
-3. Spend time around living creatures.

I spent the last few days inside putting together a website,
and I feel like crap. My normal aches, and pains are turning into something serious in my hypochondriacal mind.
For those who don't know who Rob Pike is, he's pretty awesome, helped create UTF-8 among other things, and now works on Go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike

He has given some really great Go talks which are available on youtube, about an hour each:

Origins of Go Concurrency Style - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DtUzH3zoFo

Lexical Scanning in Go - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxaD_trXwRE

Go Concurrency Patterns (One of my favorites) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6kdp27TYZs
5 facts about Tesla and electric cars that may surprise you
I believe that we have done so much damage to Turing, that while this is a nice gesture, it does very little to the redeem society for the abuse we heaped on one of our greatest thinkers.
It's potentially a leap forward, if it's done right. This wasn't done right - it's harder to use than the old version.
And I actually missed some time. In 8th grade I was taking the bus to school, so shift the timeline up 40 minutes or so to handle that (was over a half a mile to my bus stop).
Do you need another 5 hours of coding to prove that I'd be a good culture fit, or would a 30 minute - 1 hour interview and the high recommendation of my references suffice?
Elop was placed to hit the ice berg, he did, mission accomplished.
Any chance someone can get this working with pictures of clouds too?! ;)
I think kids should be taught to perceive the mechanics of any system and leverage those mechanics, within the bounds of ethics and fairness. They should ignore what people say and focus on what they do.

I absolutely don't condone lying or cheating, and I think it's a huge problem in schools today. But kids aren't the only ones that lie. American education is predicated on a basic lie: that it's about learning. In fact, it's about sorting.

In law school, I had a lot of friends who wrote organized exams with good grammar and coherent structure. This is what school taught them was important. I wrote these horrible, rambling, repetitive exams with poor grammar and spelling and no structure other than conforming to what I thought the professor's grading checklist would look like. Ironically, I now have a job where I get to really think and learn and write, but I couldn't have gotten it without playing the sorting game.

Learning is great. But learning is what you do while researching Hacker News posts. School is no place for it.
The trick is that the Japanese students have student-led after-school homework groups to get this stuff squared away. Look at it this way - if a kid has 3 hours of homework per night, and they get off at 3PM, and they did work in their homework club until 5, guess what? At the time you saw them, they'd only have 1 hour of homework per night. That would be manageable.
If her hobbies are conflicting with her homework, she can either (a) accept poorer grades or (b) set aside some hobbies. What he's doing --- demanding perfect grades with a schedule that doesn't have her starting homework until 8:00PM --- is physically harming his kid.
Good job, Ben!
My main machine is a Lenovo T61 manufactured in 2006. My backup machine is a T400 from 2009. I have an HP48 manufactured in the mid 1990's still. All work perfectly.

2 years is taking the piss. Seriously. I feel people have been programmed into thinking this is acceptable.
... then because there's no "unused variable 'errorCode'" warning, I forget to go back and robustify the code

Well, you can always assign the error code to '_', and then just grep for those later. Or you can take the 10 seconds and just add the code to return the error as sambeau suggests.
Sorry, I was not clear. We are not about to start producing commercially useful quantities of helium from fusion anytime soon. Yes, fusion may produce helium as a byproduct, but even if we could perfectly capture it, it won't be much compared to global usage for a long time. Too many positrons and gamma rays.
So Excel is a pure functional language?
Interesting how different the discussion went - minimalism as a design aesthetic back then vs. c++ programmer outrage this time, all because of a different title and abstract.
I scored a 97... (I am red/green color blind). Here's my results (still think it looks fine looking back at it haha): http://d.pr/i/h3OT
The Apple hate is strong with this one.

I thought the M7 was presented as a co-processor, from Apple.com, which has nothing referring to it as a chip:

> Every iPhone 5s includes the new M7 motion coprocessor that gathers data from the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass to offload work from the A7 for improved power efficiency. [1]

As a co-processor, its probably embedded in an SoC.

[1] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/09/10Apple-Announces-iP...
Matcha (抹茶)
Without knowing any other language? Sure.

Coming from a strong background of similar languages? Sorry, you're wrong there. Perhaps you aren't familiar with Erlang; it is the "everyman" of functional languages. The things I think you'd call "idioms" (not really sure what you mean as that's a very loose term), let's say recursive programming, pattern matching, carry over as-is from any number of other functional languages. Pattern matching? It's a mix of OCaml and Prolog. Terms? Imagine Scheme had tuples in addition to lists. Etc. The only "new" concept is the message system, which if you know anything about networking, is pretty straightforward.

In other words, if you know pretty much any other functional language, it's almost trivial to translate basic programs to & from into Erlang knowing little more than its syntax, which as you concede, is simple.

OTOH, if you're coming from, say, PHP, sure, learning Erlang will be difficult as first you have to understand functional programming. But you're asserting impossibility, so counter-examples are moot.

Ten Years… I've been coding over twenty years in more languages than I can count… I have a good idea how long it takes to learn a language well. Maybe I'm biased because it's the latest language I've studied, but Erlang was the first non-toy language where I skimmed the reference manual, said "huh, that was all unsurprising", and started coding effectively.
Oceania Cruises Bon Apetit Culinary Center
Splashbox - Hi-resolution photos delivered to your Dropbox
Don't forget to browse the photo gallery: http://www.flickr.com/groups/cloud-to-butt/

And the code on github: https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt
The reason is four-fold:

* Performance doesn't matter for a large set of systems we write.
* Performance is far more a product of the programmer than the language you use (within reason, naturally. Don't do Video decoders in Python :)
* Large-scale systems where there is no single tight loop anywhere are way different beasts. Their performance stems largely from fast RTT in the edit-compile-test cycle and programmer productivity. Not from fast native code execution.
* To some problems, latency or sustainability matters more than throughput.
I scored a 0, so it is possible; there may still be a bug (perhaps my order was wrong but it still gave me a perfect score for some reason), but it is possible.
And how do those soliloquies serve you?

The things they need to memorize for life are the things that serve you for life. Arithmetic is a fantastic one - you should be able to do all forms of simple arithmetic in your head, and everything to do with fractions and simple algebra on paper, and you should be able to do that stuff so naturally and instinctively that it's like riding a bike or speaking English. Because that's an ability (not just knowledge but something you can do) that will serve you for life.
The trend toward memorization homework is part of the larger view of education as social assimilation training and obedience training.

If the homework required "rationalization, not memorization" then the brightest students would easily coast through in minutes the same material that would take the dimmer students hours. With memorization, the curve is flattened significantly and grades are much more closely tied to effort than to innate ability.

All this is intentional and has the desired outcome -- colleges offer many classes where the student who is used to drudgery and memorization can simply thrive by putting in the hours with flashcards, and can then go on to a career where obedience and compliance with drudgery are highly valued traits.

The problem with this is that it misses the more important point, which is that abstract reasoning skills can be taught too, they are just often taught very poorly and so kids who have a small leg up (largely by accident) get a big unfair advantage and in a non-memorization world reap significant benefits.

I'd be extremely concerned if my child were being asked to memorize material that was not strictly necessary for some kind of reasoning exercise.
> "In the end, when I code in C++, it's because I believe my code will run faster"

Completely agreed and exactly my point. I am not moving to Go because is solving problems that I don't have.

Pike said: "That way of thinking just isn't the way Go operates. Zero cost isn't a goal, at least not zero CPU cost."

So Go's philosophy is to make some compromises for the sake of making programmer's life easier. C++ is the other way around, there is a cost the programmer has to pay in other to have code abstractions without impact the performance.

I don't think anyone "loves" to code in C++, but people tend to like the performance that C++ provides and are eager to pay the cost of programming in a monster language that no simple person fully understand.