skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Saying "Children aren't born smart" is equivalent to saying "Intelligence is determined entirely by one's environment", if I understand the claim correctly. While I'm sure talking to ones children contributes in a massively positive way to their IQ, I think it's extremely inaccurate and ignorant to the existence of real-world outliers to claim that it's the only factor.

If the stunted growth of the pre-lingual deaf that are denied access to a sign language community are any indication, it's probably the most important factor of all, and I think that was the point of the article. I will quote a section of Oliver Sacks' great book "Seeing Voices" that further illustrates this:

The origin of questioning, of an active and questing disposition in the mind, is not something that arises spontaneously, de novo, or directly from the impact of experience; it stems, it is stimulated, by communicative exchange - it requires dialogue, in particular the complex dialogue of mother and child. It is here, [Hilde] Schlesinger finds, that the dichotomies start:

'Mothers talk with their children, do so very differently, and tend to be more often at one side or the other of a series of dichotomies. Some talk with their youngsters and participate primarily in dialogue; some primarily talk at their children. Some mainly support the actions of their offspring, and if not, provide reasons why not; others primarily control the actions of their children, and do not explain why. Some ask genuine questions ... others constraint questions ... Some are prompted by what the child says or does; others by their own inner needs and interests ... Some describe a large world in which events happened in the past and will happen in the future; others comment only about the here and now ... Some mothers mediate the environment by endowing stimuli with meaning [and others do not].'

A terrible power, it would seem, lies with the mother to communicate with her child properly or not; to introduce probing questions such as "How?" "Why?" and "What if?" or replace them with a mindless monologue of "What's this?" "Do that"; to communicate a sense of logic and causality, or to leave everything at the dumb level of unaccountability; to introduce a vivid sense of place and time, or to refer only to the here and now; to introduce a "generalized reflection of reality," a conceptual world that will give coherence and meaning to life, and challenge the mind and emotions of the child, or to leave everything at the level of the ungeneralized, the unquestioned, at something almost below the animal level of the perceptual. Children, it would seem, cannot choose the world they will live in - the mental and emotional, any more than the physical world; they are dependent, in the beginning, on what they are introduced to by their mothers.

Truth of the matter is, we are born with an unfinished brain that requires nurturing interaction with other humans and with language to truly develop. What's saddening is that Hilde Schlesinger's research is already decades old; this book is from 1989. We have known this for ages and society still has to catch up.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=clojure%2C%20ruby%20o...
Insurance for startups sounds like a good business model.
Why in Asia more than in other parts of the world? Mitigation of weather-related risks and oportunities should apply to any farmer with enough sophistication.
Just FYI, it looks like an interaction between SublimeVideo and HTTPS Everywhere appears to prevent the video from playing -- unchecking SublimeVideo in the HTTPS Everywhere options seems to fix the problem.
My Nexus 4 paid for itself on Straight Talk within a month by selling my older phone on craigslist. One of the best decisions I have made in a long time.

My wife's Samsung phone is so incredibly foreign to the vanilla Android experience. I have had some recent issues with Google Maps draining my battery, but that was corrected by simply reverting the update. All in all, a great phone. If I destroy it, I can just get a new one for $250. Flops consisted of the wireless battery charge, frictionless glass back that slides, and (original) nubless back that left the speaker against the surface.
"... there’s not much benefit to trying to 'cancel out' a traffic wave by leaving a ton of space in front of you."

What do you mean by a ton of space?. What do you mean by 'not much'?"

The real question we should try to answer is "What is the optimum distance all cars should try to keep between them? And that can't be answered qualitatively, only quantitatively.
I didn't mean to imply that Rails was better than Django. I said that nothing beats it! Each offers some conveniences out of the box that the other doesn't. I wouldn't recommend you switch languages just to get Rails over Django or vice versa.
The reason I bought an ATI card _is_ that it had open-source drivers.
Is there any reason you "have" to use the proprietary driver?
(besides better performance for games, which I assume is not what you are after since you mentioned getting serious work done...)
> Offices showered in natural light. Large windows overlooking a lush green park, playful decor, walls covered in old design projects, sofas in the lounge, shelves full of books on design and marketing. A relaxed culture.

> Nobody had any real idea how programmers function. How we think, how we work, what we need to feel productive. For a long time I was the only programmer on the team.

This isn't pointed only at you (although you triggered it), but really, do we have to use words like "terrible" to describe our lives as developers?

We sit in a comfortable chair, hitting keys on a keyboard and get paid much more than the average American salary. Is that such a huge sacrifice? Unless you're going home with just barely enough to feed yourself, with a beat up body, then your job is not terrible. It may not perfectly fit your sensibilities, but talking like this makes you seem like nothing more than a pampered baby.
It's funny, the process this writer describes - you get frustrated with a company, go off and build your own, and then don't realise that what you've built is just as atrocious to work for..

I feel like many of the people that split off to start their own companies can't really build something better - all they do is reproduce the same bad work environment, but with them in the dictator seat instead of someone else.
Apple has Misunderstood Mobile: The Cheap iPhone
Some people feel sorry when their favorite author dies just like me when Sydney Sheldon died last 2007.
Is there some balance sheet that explains how it cost $327M? Is this some massive contract awarded to some goverment guy's buddy?
I picture the Mars rovers stuck in "Drive" and rolling slowly across the barren landscape...their last command before the shutdown...
Well this is counter to my understanding. As shumway - like PDF.js - is ultimately using the exact same rendering engine and scripting engine via the same interface and in the exact same way as the HTML pages are already exposing, the attack surface just got massively smaller. If there is a jpeg injection bug, its a bug in the browser proper.
Damn, that was unexpected. I must say that his books were pretty awesome.

I especially liked his "Red dawn rising" which is one of the only WWIII books that doesn't go to a nuclear holocaust right away - if you a like to watch politics and have a military interest I recommend you check it out.
I don't see how that's relevant to the article in hand.
In case anyone ever wonders why "disable password logins" is commonly used as a synonym for "use keys", it's because of the config file and the way SSH for Linux works. If you enable both passwords and keys, then either will succeed instead of both being required! This unintuitive result is a rather dire "gotcha" for anyone new to the task.

Personally I would like to have both, in succession, but have not found a way to configure it. This would be simpler than the SSH-to-SSH solution.
That one is at least roughly accurate. It's poorly worded, but the idea it is trying to convey is at least true.
It's amazing how even technical minded folks don't forgive launch day bugs and initial traffic overload.

That said, some of these bugs definitely should have been easily spotted during beta testing.

But I too would like to see an itemization of $327 million.
This is what happens when you think that a programmer's job is to create code - you type and type and type and just get buried in the complexity and things get worse and worse.

A programmer's job is to understand problems. A programmer's job is to think clearly. The code is incidental. If you think clearly about the problems, you will need less code, and gradually things will get simpler - I've seen code-bases that actually shrink as they gain functionality.

The only good thing about programmers who spew code all day without thinking is that they create jobs for good programmers to come and clean up their messes later.
Worked for me https://twitter.com/ColinHugh/status/385419512356413440

Got 4 so far...
Does anyone know which graphics cards Mir is intended to support on release?
I think you're lumping platforms with kernels, they're not interchangeable terms. "Linux" isn't a platform because no one has defined what "Linux" is supposed to be.

Android and Ubuntu can be platforms because someone can say "An Android app does these things" and then point to an SDK. Ubuntu is doing the same thing.

Anyone can take a Linux kernel and then build whatever userspace they want on top of it. Android existing hasn't hurt Linux, it's the dominant mobile OS and is bringing in hardware manufactures to work on the kernel.

Sure user space apps are different as you point out, but that's what happens when you give people Lego blocks, not everyone is going to use the same blocks.
Who are GNU's competitors? I don't see one. If all you want to do is charity work, you may not need to borrow money from investors. But if you need to build something fast/good enough to compete with fierce competitors, you do need the money. If you don't, your competitors will.
KB Homes makes solar panels an option
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2011...
I don't seem to have an issue.
It's actually the opposite. All of the regulations preventing it from going to some guy's buddy mean that only bloated, f'd up bureaucracies can clear the hurdles to land the gig. And in the end, it still helps to have some buddies, of course.
Uruguay here: All designers use Mac OS, developers use Windows or Linux
It's not anything like Lytro, though. From what the article says, it just takes images rapidly and then you choose the one that's most in focus.

Still, being able to focus faster and snap rapid images is a good thing. It makes getting quality pictures easier, especially with kids, who are notoriously blurry.
The Two Basic Facts That Should Be in Every Shutdown Story
Interesting. How did you like the Ember/Rails combo?

Were you using the Rails asset-pipeline to server the Ember app, or did you separate the Ember app (served statically and hitting API)?
What features are they using that html5 doesn't cover?

I'm genuinely curious, as I do a bit of html5/webgl and formerly did a lot of flash/haxe, so I'm wondering what I missed...
thanks for the links. I was aware that they make use of it, just not how much. I recently got a Haswell i7 and was hoping to see more perf; the devs use Intel GPUs as well, and Haswell/Iris have very good OpenCL performance. Maybe their OpenCL work will make a notable difference in future versions.
I never read any of his books but I spent many hours playing the original Rainbow 6 on PC as a kid.
Sounds unreal, anybody have any details justifying it ?
I see port knocking as protection against an 0day sshd exploit instead of protection against brute forcing.

The article didn't really mention that angle.
I've seen a few 12 volt ATX power supplies available -- seems to be a bit more expensive ($200 - $300 range), since they are lower volume (specialty) items. Another option would be to use a smaller inverter like you get for a car (they are around 150 to 400 watts, priced about $30 or so), and have one of them for each device you want to power.

Just remember if you are running 12-volt DC, it requires fairly thick wiring to get the same current as you would with 120 volt AC.
"I keep hearing about problem after problem with MySQL. What's the trick to using it successfully?"

Switching to PostgreSQL.
66 seems young.
Is there anything being done here that looks like it should cost more than 500k ?
... Look over here, I've got a bridge to sell that I think you're going to love...
I devoured his books as a kid and I credit that with having a somewhat realistic view of politics and military. Most of it came from meticulously investigated details but even plots that seemed fantastic (a plane crushing into the Capitol) almost happened later.
Yep, paid apps are dead
4 big leaks in Valve’s plan to enter console war with Steam Machines
To this whole discussion of "Is programming terrible or not?" I have to quote Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crap."

I'm just a newbie (started my programming job 9 months ago) but most of the stuff I do is kinda boring. I try to enjoy myself, and I believe clever people can find ways to enjoy what they're doing. Somedays are just a bore, with crappy documentation, crappy tools, and everything just crashes around you. Other days you find a new and interesting problem. This is when you must set your brain free and tackle that problem like an hungry wolf.

And in the end, it's just my job. I NEED to have a job to have my independence and enjoy some of life's pleasures. But it's just a job. It's a mean to an end. I need a job to buy videogames, go to the movies, travel, enjoy an expensive dinner, etc.

And I like programming. I program at home, making games and scripting stuff. I't just that 90% of software engineering is crap. You just need to wait for and enjoy the other 10%.
In the description of the book the author is pushing, I find this sentence, "A popular trend is to get up at 4am and get some work done before the day’s craziness begins. Others like going to bed at 4am."

Do real, professional programmers work this way? It is romantic to think of hacking away in front of a glowing screen at 3am, but I believe most work gets done during the actual work day. Often hacking at night means you are writing code but not making progress, which seems to be the problem with this "disgruntled developer".

Set a schedule, start working in the morning and stop working in the evening, and your sessions will be much more productive and produce higher quality work than these late night, crazed, caffeine-fueled sessions.
I worked in the trades (carpentry, roofing, ironwork) for years before I switched careers and became a programmer. The biggest adjustment for me was learning not to cringe whenever one of my coworkers goes on a hyper-entitled rant about working conditions or how our codebase and our company is archaic and shitty because we aren't using <insert latest flash in the pan technology here>.
Will this create a scale economy to drive down the cost? Which may end up helping the (not rich) middle class.
There are still far too many companies that use LOC as the benchmark. It's similar to basing productivity based on the number of browser tabs you have open.
I'm terribly sad to hear this. Tom Clancy's "Into the Storm: A Study in Command" was one of the first books outside of the fantasy genre to inspire me as a child. It led to years of creating RTS total conversions based on his work; activity that laid the foundation for the broad range of programming and design skills I have today.
The Perceived Value of Free
I have to borrow p-books from my local library (plus or minus interlibrary loans).

I have no idea why I can't borrow an e-book from a shady .ru site on the internet if I want. Or a perfectly legit site in the .uk

Therefore there seems little reason to charge my physically local library an enormous amount of money other than to encourage piracy in order to discredit ebooks as a technology. Perhaps an alternative plan is to get local libraries out of the e-book business and keep e-books online (presumably tightly centrally controlled)

My local library used to do books, but now its a downscale free internet cafe, complete with vending machine coffee, along with being a homeless shelter and free day care operator. I think they still have about half their books. But in a business that's pivoted almost completely out of books and into daycare and related areas, I don't think the price of books really matters anymore.
I'm a bit surprised that China has produced too many panels. People keep talking about the coming eco-apocalypse from countries like India and China becoming more developed and needing more electricity, and not having the capacity to generate that cleanly.

Chinese mining has a lousy safety record, even for a dangerous industry. (15 people PER DAY dying just from volatile gases, in 2010) Anything that offloads electricity generation from dangerous mining for coal powered stations is a good thing for China. So I'm not sure why they're not just putting these solar panels on every roof.

(http://www.wvcoalmining.com/coal-news/reducing-chinese-coal-...)

(http://www.mining.com/coal-mining-deaths-in-china-lead-to-mo...)

(http://www.scanimetrics.com/condition-monitoring-news/13-equ...)
Most insurance companies have their insurance policies underwritten by a reinsurer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinsurance
>when most programmers hit 25 they have already learned dozens of frameworks, know how to build compilers, machine learning, etc

Really? I have yet to meet one of these 25-year olds.
I'd argue that an optimized curriculum would start to resemble a video game that people would play for fun. To beat a video game takes grit but not conscientiousness in the same way that it's normally framed for learning (where it usually means slogging through boring material and lots of rote memorization or unpleasant repetition).

In v1 of such a curriculum, IQ would reign supreme, but as the sophistication advanced things like creativity, ability to innovate, and mental control/focus would become increasingly important. Things like letting your mind wander just the right amount, knowing which instincts to trust and which to temporarily ignore, etc.

There are very few natural impediments to the progress of thought, so training intended to prepare students for the real world would necessarily deal a lot with optimizing around constraints. The deeper one goes into this line of reasoning, the more education starts to mean what it intuitively means, life skills preparation.

Few jobs today require the level of pure "knowledge work" that an optimized curriculum would prepare a person for, which is why the current system is generally adequate and being skilled at slogging, memorization, and obedience are still so highly valued.
They gave two ways in which Wayland didn't meet their requirements. And your objection to those reasons is...well, I'm not really sure. You just quoted them and aimed for sarcasm as though they were obviously wrong.

If you're wondering what "coherent" means, it's kind of the opposite of your post. Are you saying that their reasons are incorrect? Are you saying you don't understand them? What?
The jobs that have problems that are novel or interesting, are damn hard to get.

I disagree. The monthly Who's Hiring thread here on HN is full of great jobs solving interesting problems. If you find those jobs "damn hard" to get maybe you need to learn some of the in demand skills or build a better portfolio of projects that you've worked on. A github full of open source activity can get you an interesting job quite easily.

A while back I put a very simple entry on an HN contractor thread and started getting two to three job offers a month in my inbox, many from very interesting companies doing interesting things. This was while I was still in college, not actively looking for a job yet. I accepted interview offers from a few of those companies and basically picked and choose who I wanted to work for, which eventually lead to me getting a job at the startup I work for now (storydesk.com) without ever needing to send out a single resume.

Maybe my experience is unusual, but I don't see it as being that difficult to get an interesting job as a software engineer if you leverage a community like HN.
That matrix is impressively green! Thanks for sharing.
It's one thing to, as the founder of a startup, pour in 50 - 60 hours a week into your baby -- but it's another thing to routinely expect your team to do the same. Additionally, crunch-weeks should start to become less frequent as the startup moves from early stages to later stages.

I would argue that the ideal case shouldn't even expect hired work to put in substantially more hours than a "normal" job with an established company (e.g., 40-50 hours) -- hired work should just be expected to be better than the average candidate at those companies, and able to contribute in the team sport of startup creation and growth. If you want to argue for a hidden catch, then yes -- maybe at startups there will be a higher incidence of crunch-weeks where the team will be required to pull longer hours to put out fires -- but this shouldn't be the "norm".

At the end of the week, you're going to need enough time to recuperate and rest. Routinely working 10, 11, 12 hour shifts is just a recipe for burning out yourself and, maybe just as importantly, your team. When you think about it, a ten hour shift is like going to work at 8AM, staying until 7PM (with an hour for lunch) -- then when you factor in getting to work and getting home, you're talking about getting 2 - 3 hours of "free time" each workday, which you can devote to breakfast, dinner, and getting ready for bed. Making that a twelve hour shift just makes it two hours worse.

And if you want to talk about incentives, expecting employees to pour in 60 hours a week is the equivalent of essentially paying them 33% less "per hour" than whatever they're already getting. And 80 means that they're working for half-price. Factoring that in with whatever [potentially] fraction of a percent of equity that the employee will have by the time of acquisition (or, if you're really lucky, IPO) -- and that employee may not even be coming out ahead financially -- and that's assuming that the startup doesn't fail beforehand.

Maybe this means that I'm a shitty startup employee because I don't consider forcing employees to spend 80 hours a week to be the right way to run a company, but I'd rather pass on that particular opportunity and keep my sanity.

Anyways, just my two cents.
What would be more interesting is to see a comparison on take-home pay, that you can actually spend. The numbers don't seem very accurate at all on the site. Furthermore it's sort of beside the point : you're not working for money, you're working for value.

Eu generally has 50%+ tax rates, and a ~20% VAT on anything you want to spend, combining (roughly) to between 60% and 70% of your income disappearing in govt. coffers.

California seems to have slightly under 50% taxation, combined with 4.7% VAT. Which combines to 53-55% taxation.

So US is not just well-paid, but you actually get to keep a bigger part of that. From a $76k pay you could have ~$30k disposable income after rent (outside of SF proper), while the $50k in the EU, you'd be lucky to get $15k disposable income after rent out of that (and that's ignoring that tech stuff is more expensive to start with before the tax even comes into the picture).