skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I want to go from 0 to iOS Developer
Hi guys, I am currently a self-employed graphic designer / video editor / marketer consulting for various companies. I have been doing this for years.

So, if I have what I think is a great app idea (I have several actually) but don't really know much about coding except what I learned in QBasic when I was in high school a long time ago, where would y'all suggest I start learning how to make apps for iOS? (I don't have an android or know much at all about it)

I've heard of treehouse and codeacademy to start from nothing, but I'm wondering if you guys could suggest something better?
is terrible, this idea
It is a game, and you can very likely get flagged.

Earning $200k, then paying yourself $15k, and then giving yourself 'dividends' of $150k will very likely trigger an audit. Your 'pay' needs to be considered 'reasonable' for the type of work you do.

You might very well do this for a few years, but if you get audited, you'll get fined for this. Make a better estimate - if someone doing similar work in your region might be earning $75k, so pay yourself in that range, then dividend the rest.
> The idea that UTF-8 and UTF-16 are equivalent in practice is a complete fantasy,

Except that most obscure of details that they represent the same characters.

> Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora all default to UTF-8, and have for several years now. You're going to have to name names,

In the room where I'm sitting now I have Debian, OpenBSD and Arch systems. All of these defaulted to Latin-1 when I installed them, in the current decade.

> I can write Java code without ever thinking about UTF-16

Patently false. A char in java is 16 bits. String.length() and String.charAt() use utf-16 units, meaning surrogate pairs are double-counted.

> As for your ad hominem arguments about "attitude" and "maturity", I could do without them, thanks.

I am sorry, sometimes I am blunt and overstated about these characterizations, but it really did seem like the shoe fits. You seem to have an impulsive defense of UTF-8 and an inability to see that there might be merits or tradeoffs in an alternative. Throughout all of this, I am not saying that UTF-8 is a bad encoding, I am just saying it's goofy to "attack" UTF-16 for being different.
I've always been confused by games that seem designed to primarily cause pain for the loser(s) rather than pleasure for the winners.

I realize that in most games, losing is painful to some degree and winning is pleasurable to some degree. But in games like this, it seems that more pain is generated for the losers than pleasure for the winners. It seems like playing is a net losing proposition.

I feel similarly about bets where the prize is not an exchange of value but rather that the loser has to perform an embarrassing or painful act. While this may cause some pleasure for some types of winners, it seems like the net effect is negative.
I respectfullly disagree. If ever there was a use-case for a NoSQL storage solution, web crawling certainly seems to be it. I've used Elasticsearch for indexing and Cassandra for storage, performance was more than good enough for our use-cases. It was easy to scale, as well.
I've mined bitcoins, and have made a reasonable profit (~20ish BTC or so?). I mined in the GPU days, and while I currently run a small ASIC miner (BFL Jalapeno), it will likely barely be profitable.

The considerable risks and costs of getting into modern ASIC mining make it pretty unattractive at the moment. Until that changes, I'd advise anyone with a profit motive against investing a lot in BTC mining.

If you're confident that Bitcoin will go much higher, and are willing to wait a long while for it to happen, maybe it still could be worth considering. If you just like the idea of Bitcoin, getting a little ASIC miner for fun is entirely respectable. On the grand scale of things, bitcoin is still just a curiousity, and it doesn't hurt to dabble.
I, for one, am suspicious. Gwern's posting of old articles from his site (which are nonetheless articulate, intelligent, and interesting) makes me think that this is step 437 of a 21352 part plan that ends with him as Emperor of the Moon, laughing as he abuses the escape from Earth's gravity well to extract utility via threat of kinetic bombardment.

To paraphrase Arthur Weasley: "Never trust anyone if you can't see where they keep their utility function."
Right, so mining asteroids from Mars won't take as much raw energy, but it will take good long-range space robotics. And patience.
Haskell Resources
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX -- $20k or less

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX -- $20-$50k

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX -- $50k-$80k

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX -- $80-$120k

XXXXXXXXXXXXX -- $120-$150k

XXXXXXXXXXXX -- $150k-$200k

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX -- $200k or more

XXXX -- $300k or more
I wouldn't, the majority would
How to get hired as mature self-taught ex-freelancer?
(Ok, take two without attachment) Hi, I'm a self-taught, 39 year old Python web/database coder, now looking to get into a full time position after 8 years of freelancing. My problem (I think?) is that I'm not what is considered a catch to the stereotypical founder: no CS degree, been working on regular Python+SQL projects, not young. I know I'm competent, I've been inhaling CS and coding books for years and have taught myself some tricky stuff like microcontroller assembly and real-time audio/midi app development in C. But maybe I don't know how to properly present myself to people who might be interested in someone like me, or know who those people might be. I hope there are some companies who are actually impressed that someone has had to do all the running-a-business stuff in addition to coding, and has experience being completely responsible for the clients and the bottom line? Any one have thoughts on what kind of places those might be or what to stress in applying?
As a side note, I have on countless nights been coding in my sleep. Sometimes I'll wake up realizing there is a bug in yesterday's code or having gained some insight on a new concept. Other times I wake up and wonder why I was trying to code an app to cook me ramen noodles.
Yeah. That is my favorite as well. In fact I created my own version with sidebar at http://bootmystrap.com/ to sell.

I find that Twitter Bootstrap is probably not the best framework when you are designing single page apps but it works.
"How much do you have to spend on hardware to keep up with network difficulty these days?"

Financing will be your problem. Anyone else can buy that hardware and your profit (if any) is baked into the cake when you set the cost of renting that money and/or however you want to account for opportunity costs.

Or another way to put it is it's highly unlikely your financing cost (cost of the money traded to get the miners) is precisely zero, and when you factor it in, things get sketchier.
When you say centrally stored, who do you want to store it? I use LastPass, and the LastPass company stores backups. I previously used KeePass but had to manage the backups myself (Dropbox in my case).
So this is what sociopaths do in their spare time. Note to self: auto-reject anything with this person's name attached to it, forever.
I would advise you learn some cutting edge tech, become good at that, and then people will be begging you for work.
Off topic: this site is painful to use on mobile with Javascript off.
From what I understand the USB type hardware isn't profitable.

You could see much better financial gains buying coins and hoping for the best or investing is something else.
That's debatable, as you can write the code in such way that it does not trigger allocations in a specific situation where it might be critical.

Having used Native Oberon in the 90's, I became convinced that system programming languages with GC are possible.

Latest versions of AOS even had video players with good framerate written in Active Oberon, with some Assembly snippets.

However, in the Oberon family, besides NEW, the other implicit memory allocations are only triggered by string manipulation and starting tasks, if I recall correctly.
>In a 2010 article, Stanford law professor Mark Lemley, who is known for his careful statistical analysis of patent cases (and is cited amazingly often by the Supreme Court), noted that the win rate for patent owners in the Eastern District was 40%

That statistic is meaningless without the base rate, which turns out to be 32.5%. I'd also point out that there's something very weaselly about Lemley saying the district "is not in the top five", when what he really means is "it's the sixth most". It's technically true, but looking at N and saying "greater than N - 1" is a way of increasing the rhetorical impact of a figure without actually lying about it. It implies that N could fall anywhere over that threshold, when in fact you've picked the threshold right under N.

Perhaps a more objective way to say it would be to say that the Eastern District of Texas's patent win rate is in the 81st percentile.
that sounds illegal.
So the roots of the current real state bust may be found in the invincible Armada in the 1600s(BTW nobody in Spain put it that name, and that episode wasn't the end of the war, which didn't end so badly to Spain). Yeah, great analysis, thank you. Trafalgar didn't appeal to you?

The reasons of Spanish underdevelopment during the past centuries are several and have been studied thoroughly and have nothing to do with "being lazy" as you seem to suggest.

I detest how every news that involves Spain is linked to the current crisis. Just 5 years ago Spain was a model of economic growth and progress and we lived at the same Time Zone.
Huh, that's interesting. Perhaps computing simply took the path of least resistance to express itself in society (for better or worse).
I spent a couple of weeks in the south of Spain, working... and not everyone actually napped, but everyone certainly took off from about 1-4 pm, or 2-5 depending. A friend of mine doing an MBA in Madrid also talked about a similar gap in the schedule. I'm not Spanish though, I'd love to know about regional/industry differences.

The siesta is alive and kicking in Mexico as well -- a friend of mine who's a well-to-do lawyer in Mexico City, his whole firm takes off 3 hours an afternoon as well, and he explained it's a pretty normal thing to do -- particularly so you can have lunch with your family. Of course, doubling your daily commute has its own problems...
> What have we become?

A nation of thieves. Actually, seems we started that way.
That helps, but in some domains, it's 100% unacceptable. For example, kernels or more intense, high-end video games. And can you tell Go's GC not to run for a period of time? I thought that it could stop the world at any time.

Don't get me wrong, I do 90% of my coding in a garbage-collected language. But any mandatory GC does limit your domain.
Yes, that lesson plan is outrageous. But no, it's not outrageous that lessons plans exist and are shared in general.
If the legal issues are not a big deal, one big competitor will be a low fee, price stable, zero coin like system underwritten by a commercial entity.

Commercial backing will be more interesting to many consumers than the network of miners.
Agreed, I'm an Irish native who left for Scotland a few years ago. Frankly I'd be mega-surprised if there is a dynamic fast-paced IT industry in Ireland. I'd love to be proven wrong if someone else can chime in.
GH/s per watt is everything. I'm pretty sure you're looking at the Sapphire USB miners. These are almost certainly not worth it. If you got 38 of these for free and had free power and started mining tomorrow, you would have perhaps $1500 worth of BTC a year from now.

Assuming you're buying and powering them yourself, you're paying around $1000 and $200 bucks in electricity. It's a fairly risky investment that will likely net you at most $300 on a $1200 outlay.

To summarize your purchase: 132 MH/s/watt for ~$1000

If you want to make a better risky investment, you might look into pre-ordering into one of the newer process ASICs, like Butterfly Labs' Monarch:

http://www.butterflylabs.com/monarch/

This purchase: 1.71GH/s/watt for $4680

The problem is you're pretty late in the game, so it's really hard to predict what the difficulty rate will look like in even a few months.

It's possible that your USB miners will be worthless in a few months due to the mass in flux of newer ASICs. It's also possible that so many people will be purchasing newer ASIC miners that ALL mining will become entirely unprofitable.

And all of this assumes the relative stability of the BTC/USD exchange rate. :)
These guys need to be investing in hierarchical deterministic wallets (BIP0032 and BIP0039). That would take away all their private key issues.
How's your block diagramming compared to theirs? draw.io caught my eye because I occasionally need to do stuff like this ( http://i.imgur.com/xs5gyDe.png ). I normally use SmartDraw, which isn't free, and draw.io looks like an interesting alternative.

CircuitLab looks more like a (nicely done!) online version of LTSpice, which wouldn't be as well-suited for block diagrams.
Even if those lab computers have GPUs, at current difficulty, whoever is paying the power bills is almost certainly paying more for the incremental electricity-use than the value of coins you're collecting.

So if you're doing this "now", you're not really making money from 'mining', but from theft. The mining is just obscuring the theft enough to allow it to continue. Perhaps there's some copper wiring or tubing on premises you could also take and resell while they're not looking?
These look good, thanks for this free service.
I missed the HackerNews meet in London - will there be any more related events?
I wasn’t suggesting there aren’t any engineers in Spain. But to compare the Netherlands and Spain using the chart you cited:

Students who graduated in 2010 in the fields of mathematics, science and technology:

The Netherlands: 15,000, on a population of 17 million. At that time, the country had 985 thousand people between the ages of 20 and 24. The percentage of 2010 graduates in STEM fields is 1.5% of that group.

Spain: 25,000, on a population of 47 million. At that time, the country had 3,34 million people between the ages of 20 and 24. The percentage of 2010 graduates in STEM fields is 0.75% of that group.

So, relatively, twice as many Dutchmen graduate in STEM fields than Spaniards and it’s certainly not a new trend. I think it’s safe to say that, relatively, the Netherlands has at least twice as many people who graduated in STEM fields.

Of course, my mention of engineers were just an example. The Netherlands is tiny, Spain is 11 times larger in area. That’s one of the reasons why the Netherlands has a far smaller group of agricultural workers. However, despite it being cramped, the Netherlands has more than half of the GDP Spain has.
Or the dumbest, because you dont pick something that is more difficult than its need to be.. well designed languages should help you to focus on the problem domain
with little effort possible.. not on the language itself and its caveats..

Languages, as means to create programs that express some sort of logic, must get out of your way.. So i dont think its smart to pick a language because its hard, unless its for create new sorts of mind games and puzzles, and not by the sake of the final objective that is coding itself.. to create programs
Humans are competitive. The actual prize in such games is often the satisfaction of being the biggest dork in the group (this is often unrelated to winning/losing.)
Screen sharing that works for Linux
Hi! I am from Portugal too and I would love to work in another country but the problem for me is my English is lacking. How good was your English when you lwft?
This is good news for diabetics, although I find it pretty depressing that something like a quarter of the US population needs something like this in the first place.
If those aren't computers that you personally own, please be careful to get the proper authorization and cover your ass. This reminds me of the David McOwen case from a decade ago: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1782050.stm
This will probably work just about as well as D.A.R.E. did to convince Californians to not take drugs.
The 20-step program to ramen profitability
Expertly developed & tested by CoinMKT - https://www.coinmkt.com/

1. Hack for 4 months.

2. Set a launch date.

3. Miss launch date.

4. Pick new launch date - tell relevant blogs & forums about new launch date.

5. Miss new launch date, but they still write posts about it.

6. Piss a lot of people off.

7. Put a countdown timer to launch on homepage, no sleeping for the next 3 days.

8. Argue over launching with bugs.

9. Launch anyway - at 3am on a Saturday morning to minimize the support queue.

10. A few tweets & forum comments - suddenly you have 200 signups by 5am

11. And the support queue has about 200 emails as well.

12. Spend the next 3 days trying to keep support queue under 400 emails.

13. Fix bugs.

14. Fix more bugs.

15. Users are placing trades, this is good.

16. User finds trade bug and exploits, now your book is all jacked up.

17. Luckily user is a nice guy and returns the funds. Bug is fixed.

18. Third party service provider that has been hooking you up calls, you're overloading them, they want to get paid now.

19. Another third party service provider calls, they want to get paid too.

20. Book is steady, bugs are few, trades are growing.

Deep breath.
Add it all up (usb hubs, power bricks included too) and put the numbers into the calculator on the genesis block.

http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/

The 330MH/s miners were profitable if you bought them a few months ago but with the rising difficulty of the network, they don't seem likely to break even.

A more likely profitable venture would be to use the same money and buy into bitcoins. Secure your wallet and sit on it in hopes the price rises.
> I am speaking from an idealist point of view,

The government point of view of schools is hardly ideal. There are plenty of examples of those in power in government using the schools to push their own agenda.

Not only that, even the notion of a common curriculum can be injustice. One good for one group of people can be injustice for another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_assimilation_of_Native...
It should be noted that this appears to be a highly accurate insulin pump. That's a far cry from an artificial pancreas. If you have the death sentence known as "pancreatic cancer" you can't get your pancreas removed and have this take its place for example. Not saying it isn't important for diabetics, but let's not get carried away.
It looks like you comment may have been cut off, it sounds good. I'd say go for it, see if you can develop a community around!
I find the scheme abominable because corporations are attempting to mold the unconscious minds of elementary school students to morally support specific political policies (viz. copyright). And they're using public education as the distribution method for their propaganda.
Definitely, or a consortium of backers.

I could also see USGov offering a FedCoin (guaranteed redemption for USD) or TBillCoin (instantly tradable, divisible, interest-bearing USGov debt as currency).

They might even be able to cook up something that's more anonymous than Bitcoin (ZeroCoin-like) most of the time, but deanonymizable sfter some 'CoinCourt' due process legal proceedings. (Think ClipperChip/key-escrow, but for cryptocurrency.)
I can't mention the specific degree because it would probably let the firm know who I am but I did not major in math, most of my knowledge of statistics, calculus, number theory, was self-learned out of curiosity.
Yes they could do more to help but at least they are doing more than Google.
You read my mind. I was thinking of HPMOR when I wrote the comment.
I disagree:

- Ruby isn't UTF8-only, but Rails is.

- Unless I'm building a site that caters to CJK languages where Han unification is unacceptable, I'm not going to need to deal with non-unicode text. In 4 years of Rails development, I never set $KCODE to anything except 'UTF8'.

- Any solution to the Han unification problem is almost certainly going to happen within Unicode, or at least in some Unicode private-use area that can be encoded using UTF-8.

- As a last resort, it's still easier to use something like "surrogateescape"/"UTF-8b" to pass arbitrary bytes through the system than it is to support multiple text encodings at every single place where text is handled.
These are very quick and easy to use for an MVP.
indeed you are in the right country, but working for the "wrong" country. Try to get US customers.
While that might be the future, I was more describing how things are today.

Just a week ago, one of the largest public transport companies in Sweden got hit by a DDOS attack. Their website, ticket system, and other areas was effected for several days. It was presented in the news as a major cyber attack, likely originating from organized crimes in countries far far away.

And then a website for 16 year olds "crackers" in Sweden came forth... I still see news articles lagging behind, still describing how government should deal with this "new" threat. All from secret police to anti-terrorist equipment, and I doubt that the military is that far behind in getting a piece of the increased budget pie.
Oh, that's easy: because I'm submitting them. More interesting is why I'm submitting them: I've long waffled on whether I should routinely submit my stuff to HN because while one or two submissions did well, most of my submissions sank without a trace. The obvious thing to do in this situation is to test it out systematically, so for the past few days (and until such time as I get bored with it or run out), I've been submitting 3 links a day: 1 link to a good gwern.net article, and 2 links to non-gwern.net articles which I liked a lot.
> Don't terms like "probable" and "my hypothesis" pretty obviously make this a statement of opinion, and therefore immune to libel claims?

Quite possibly. But who wants to spend the legal fees to test that? Pragmatically, it's better to stay reasonably far away from the edge of that particular cliff, lest one be propelled over the edge by a random gust of wind (or a well-placed push).
It's possible to find pleasure in the suffering of others - in this context not huge suffering so no need to be guilty over enjoying it.

As to lose/lose bets, one advantage is minimal cost. If I bet someone £1 then sure I might win a pound, but I also might lose a pound. If I bet someone an embarrassing act, I'm not risking any money. (Not just the case with money, but the point is that for the winner of the bet to get a net gain it means the loser has a tangible loss, whereas doing something embarrassing you aren't really losing anything.)
Students Find Ways To Hack School-Issued iPads Within A Week
How would we enforce a separation of corporation and the state? From what I know, the separation of the Church and the state is to stop the government from interfering with matters of the Church.

We don't even have a mechanism to restrict the Church from interfering with the state besides taking away a privilege of tax-exempt status. I am not restriction is a bad idea. I am just not sure how it is achievable.
Going long long on time_t
Ugh.. Sensationalist headline of the day.

Article headline: we have an artificial pancreas

Article body: we do not have an artificial pancreas. we have a new pump with some incremental feature improvements over our last model.
What is the theoretical limit of information density?