skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Rockstars programmers exist

Of course they do. The laws of probability ensure that. People and their traits usually follow a normal ("bell curve") distribution. Some individuals are at +2.5 standard deviations, and some even at +3.0 but they are rare.

Using the table from http://www.mathsisfun.com/data/standard-normal-distribution-... we can get some nice numbers to show just how rare they are.

A +2.5 developer is better than 99.38% of the entire population. (1 in 160)

A +3.0 developer is better than 99.87% of the population. (1 in 770)

That kind of talent can not be easy to find, let alone attract. So relying on getting such stars is gambling against some pretty bad odds. Some companies no doubt have found that they can improve the odds of attracting those off-the-charts developers, but for the rest of us mortals...
How To Make Games for 4Bn People
For simple UML diagrams, I really like http://yuml.me/. It has a simple textual notation, very easy and quick to use and the diagrams looks pretty neat.
When investigating issues, knowledge like that is always going to solve it 10x faster then it would be if you didn't know it by heart.
"iMessage" is a registered trademark of Apple Inc. in the United States and other countries. "iMessage Chat" violates this trademark. Infringement of intellectual property, such as trademarks, is prohibited by the Google Play Developer Terms Of Service. There is nothing arbitrary about this.
I'd prefer someone in this situation find a cheap, young gun abroad and pay them the $500.
FBI has been using drones since 2006
The tool founds it is solvable if the user controls the initial value of a local variable (which is usually not possible)

The initial value of a local variable can be controlled if you can control the final value of a local value in a previously called function that happens to wind up at the same point on the stack, if that local variable is not explicitly initialized.
Did you just equate Linux with OSS?
I seriously doubt OCaml's benefits over Python are so great that they overweigh not being able to hire someone proficient in it.
ugh, postmodern in the title is link bait in one manner, nauseating in another.

If he had replaced "post modernism" with the term "post structuralism" he would have realised he should not write the piece from the get go.
A mix of the two styles would seem most appropriate.
Thanks for the link. I was just poking around the Cython site myself, and it looks like they've come a long way since I last looked into it. It seems that they're getting much closer to full compatibility.

It makes me wonder if we're closing in on the day when Cython gets rolled into Python proper, and you can just "import static-types" to activate optional typing, then add some static typing to your code, and you would get Java performance from your Python code.
For the most part I was an average Joe during school and after graduating. But I was only average because I didn't take school seriously, and I missed out on learning a lot of cool and/or basic things because of that, along with some awesome sounding jobs because I wasn't able to impress the interviewers. I started taking my career more seriously a couple months after graduating when I realized things wouldn't be handed to me anymore and taught myself a lot of things I missed while doing some extra projects. Eventually, and it was a painful wait, I found a junior level job by really impressing my interviewers. They exist and aren't hard to find if you're looking, especially if you're as good as you think you are. Very few companies asked for my gpa before interviewing, if the asked at all.
Please define what you mean by code point and code unit.
I've been playing with docker, mongodb, hipache and meteor app a month ago, and I'd like to say that it was great experience. Here is my collection of scripts of Dockerfiles which allow you to run multiple instances of Meteor app behind hipache reverse proxy. MongoDB data is persisted using docker volumes too. https://github.com/vlebedev/docker-test
Interesting idea! I think "multiset union: might be the most appropriate: http://codepoints.net/U+228E
This is cool.
Unfortunately I think it miss something important: the way to change the rendering style (see for instance http://www.websequencediagrams.com/ ).

Such aesthetic feature is significant IMO,.. I tend to always make my schema myself with Inkscape because most software missed that "post-processing" touch.
> The articles on the story state that he is Greek so I figured I should as well.

I believe you.

> I'm saying the state of Greece's economy, embedded in a global economy, is where we should look.

This is where I think you're jumping the gun. There are insane people everywhere. Sometimes some of them do brutal things. That's a sad fact of life. Implicating his Greek-ness will, I believe, lead to unnecessary bitterness against Greeks.

I'm sure you've come across Grice's Maxim of Relevance. Going by that, I tend to include "Greek" if his being Greek led to some racially motivated action, I'd include "male" if his being male led to some sexually motivated action, etc.
These days, it wouldn't make much difference in terms of bandwidth, since everyone gzips everything on the server side.
> Do you regret the money you've made? =)

I'm not the OP but I do these sort of grinding transitions from one proprietary system to another in project after project.

Yes it pays my salary but it is mind-numbing, soulless work that offers no intellectual stimulation or prospect for technical learning.

So I regret that it is what I have to do to make money.
Securing email transport with postfix using tls policy
C# was excluded for being too slow to start. JVM-based languages would not fare any better.
Free crypted p2p based voice chat
meeet.at is a free web based voice chat for Chrome and FF. You can create custom channels, mute yourself/everybody, set a nickname, kick or ban users and set up a channel password.
Just to clarify: I am not the creator of this app, just came across it while searching how to create simple diagrams and thought it might be helpful sharing it.
Very nice, lots of symbols. I was going to ask if it could do electronic schematics and block diagrams, but then I noticed the "More shapes" menu.

Looks like a much more powerful tool than the equivalent (free) version of Lucid Charts that others are evangelizing.
Ask HN: Do you dream about code?
I had a dream about coding.

There was a new C# keyword 'bargo' which returns the value of the last but one function in the call stack. Someone had refactored all my code to make heavy use of it and I was completely lost.

Does anyone else have dreams about code? How is the code/language/environment in your dreams different from what you use in real life?
Harder to get (new) top people into Canada? Or just because their HR was plain worse?
Odd Perfect Number Search
This is a bug with exams (and if you're in a situation where you need to cram, your study habits), not with spaced repetition. The fact that it's harder to pass exams while using learning strategies that enable long term retention is one of the main reasons for the disparity between academic achievement and actual competence.
Nagios, Sleep Data, and You
Here is another one I just did tonight - I wanted to match IPv4 addresses, but didn't want to validate anything with a leading 0 (specifies octal format, which 99.9999% of the time is not what people want), but I do want to accept a leading 0 if it's the only value (I.E. 3.0.2.1, 0.0.0.0, etc...)

regex_ipv4='^((25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9][0-9]|[0-9])\.){3}(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9][0-9]|[0-9])$'

Gets the job done.

How else would you do it?

You can then build up a library of these, and use them on other projects.
See http://detector.io/DetecTor.html , it's really not too much to read and written well.
Feature request: do not place selected items in the top-left corner as soon as they are selected.

Select the shape, and then place it with a click (is like most diagram software works, and as people is used too).
Another Awesome Touch ID hack This time in Iran
"image of" is just great !! Really scalable figure that can even be used in an e-mail sig :)
Card sharp used infrared contact lenses in Cannes poker scam
As for text acrobatics, I doubt anything can beat LaTeX, which is free as in freedom AND free beer.
true, but the "image of" gives ideas of "two entities related by a link".
Nice.

BTW: I'm not sure about idea of using Docker to store the data.
I definitely picked the term geek on purpose. The term sometimes comes with a stigma outside our own little tech bubble. The stigma seems to put limitations on the perception of what we can do and what we're capable of. To some degree, that's part of what I'm trying to address. You seem to hit that part on the head.

And it's definitely true. Web Development (even if you're considered good) isn't as flashy (I'll use the term loosely) as it sometimes seems from the outside. There are so many ups and downs. What defines us as developers is how we navigate through the downs so we can make it to the next up.
This will do to onscreen keyboards what Wordpress did to onscreen journals.
"Being an alien from Alpha Centauri, and observing the growing collection of programming languages, what do you think people keep designing new ones for? Why do some Urplatians argue for Scheme and other Urplatians for Python?"

Typical mind fallacy. http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/

Most people model other people as just like themselves, plus or minus a diff. The trouble is that they don't understand just how wide-ranging human thoughts and feelings can be, and assume they will understand and be able to model based on the diff, even if the diff is larger than their whole mind.

It's why geeks keep coming up with "intuitively obvious" schemes no-one else can understand, and why engineers are routinely surprised at what actual end users do with their products in user testing.

So people write new languages that suit their personal peculiar ways of thinking. Thankfully, many are quite aware that this is what they are doing and don't claim universality.

This is why Urbit is art: translating numbers and ASCII characters into nonsense syllables that you are actually expected to pronounce and think in suits Yarvin's mind, even as it leaves me thinking "there is such a thing as being too much of a Borges fan". Which is absolutely fine. But this is why Urbit is art (an expression of a unique personal vision), not anything people are actually going to use without similar levels of confusion to the present.

For an example of fully rampant Typical Mind Fallacy in Urbit, see the security document: http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-6-security.html About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually see Yarvin transform into Moldbug and start pontificating on how humans communicating on a network should work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they actually have behaved whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained. The very first thing people will do with the Urbit system is try to mess with its assumptions, in ways that its creators literally could not foresee (due to Typical Mind Fallacy), though they might have been reasonably expected to (given the real world as data).
Jeebus, I jumped the shark by upvoting you after reading only the first three paragraphs (internet attention span, I know), but the last two make me want to double-downvote you. You seriously want government to spend even more, and on funding some people's hobbies FFS? Why not give handouts to, let's say, cabinet makers, to make beautiful furniture for everybody who wants it but doesn't want to pay for it? Talking about cognitive dissonance...
iPad keyboard data entry firm that farms keypresses via HTTP to solve newly discovered cancer systems or other genetic puzzles.

At least give data enterers feedback, WPM, errors. Elderly can do data entry while on a walk to the park, and afford their peppermints.
Mozilla working on Chromecast-like mirroring for Firefox Android browser
There is MS office for mac. Apple's own office solutions are pretty damn good too.
Ballmer thanks Microsoft employees in farewell address
PGPSender.org: disposable mail relay with support for OpenPGP encryption
Could Formula E ever rival Formula 1?
Enabling Always-Available Input with Muscle-Computer Interfaces
Communication in the Design Process
>obviously, force and threats are bad

Dunno about that. Some people don't mind the existence of government to patch some things up.

Force and threats are pretty useful when trying to fix market failures or tragedy of the commons-type situations. Lack of regulations wouldn't suddenly create free markets because consumers aren't always smart , information isn't perfect, sometimes there are only two producers (so there's pricing influence), etc.
Even if Python 3's type conversion semantics has no dark corners, I still have a point.

harshreality argued that, because PHP's implicit type conversion leads to weird behaviour, "PHP doesn't work. End of story."

In that case, nearly every widely used language (with the possible exception of Python 3) "doesn't work. End of story." That's not a very interesting or useful story to tell.
"but I want anyone in the world to be able to check my work exactly."

The problem is not that they can't, the problem is they don't want to. Solve the real problems first before worrying about imaginary ones. (this is one of the main flaws in most of GNU rhetoric, btw, and I say this as someone who 10 years ago made the 'access to source code is a moral right' argument and actually believed it).
I know the mess is in the OS-side but is there any chance we will have some day a DOM API independent of the keyboard layout?

For instance you want to make a game using WSAD keys, well in a french keyboard it's ZSQD... Also in a French keyboard, there some keys which trigger the same keycode so you cannot differenciate them! (I think it was the comma with something else)

If you want to make a software like Blender on the web which have a lot of key shortcuts you are a bit screwed!
In practice, people have found that hiring good programmers is actually easier with certain more obscure languages. Paul Graham, amusingly enough, called this the "Python paradox" because, back in 2004, Python was one of the obscure choices! Oh how things change.

This certainly holds for OCaml as well. The main OCaml company I'm familiar with is Jane Street, and they certainly have no issues finding OCaml programmers. More importantly, many of their programmers come in with no OCaml experience or even no functional programming experience, and yet they have no trouble getting up to speed. In fact, these days they even teach their traders--often complete non-programmers--OCaml. And it works. I don't think I'd ever want to hire somebody incapable of learning a language like OCaml in a reasonable time frame.

So yeah, this is not an issue in the least. If anything, it seems to work out more favorably for the companies using OCaml, Haskel and the like!
I just read about it, Hipache does not supports sticky sessions yet. Sticky Session support is really important for Meteor.

Hope it would be great, If you use HaProxy or Nginx.
Why is the type cover only a marginal improvement? I recently tried a type cover for the first time and was able to hit my typical 100 WPM on typeracer.com. To me, it seemed like a significant improvement over both the on-screen keyboard and even the touch cover.
Is population growth out of control?
So, do you think if these proprietary systems didn't exist, you would be able to do more interesting work, or not have a job at all, or just spend your time on writing scripts that convert file formats between version2.forka of database software x and version48.forkb of software x?

If you find your work mind-numbing, maybe you should have a look at yourself and find other work, rather than blaming others for the problems in your life. (ooh those evil software companies, they make me work a job where I get to sit on my ass in an office all day and still get paid double (/triple/ten times, depending on where you live) the median salary).
"little competition"
i praise the concept of this device and i own a Mac Pro, Macboor Air, iPad and iPhone 4s (now replaced by Android).
Ah yes, the 'I like these people's marketing, they must be good' method of lulling one's cognitive dissonance to sleep.
I guess that is probably the easiest route, but definitely not the only one.

Work on a couple of projects, alone or with friends. Learn new stuff on your own. Be confident. From my experience this works like a charm.
You can attach an event to the window or some other higher-level element and check if event.target is an input field... something along the lines of:

document.body.addEventListener('keydown', function(e) {
if (e.target.tagName !== 'INPUT') doKeyBindings();
}, false);
Can you think of some niches/circumstances where ATS might be worth using?

EDIT: might it be possible to develop ATS programs that are easily called from other languages? ATS seems to have strong ties to C, so maybe one could call ATS code like one calls C code, or call C code that is a thin wrapper around the ATS code? Then you hopefully could have efficient, statically verified (to a high degree) code that can be use by other languages.
Anecdotally, when I worked at a 'startup' and we were about 50 people, the CEO and other founders were always very open and forthcoming about all the details of the organisation.

Once we grew to over a 100, IMHO, a combination of factors inhibited their ability to be that open:

1. we moved to a larger office with multiple stories, which put a little extra cost into simply walking across and asking questions.

2. it was a different sort of challenge communicating a common message across to that many people and they couldn't figure out how to 'scale' the openness.

Eventually I noticed that rumours about salaries and customer nonpayments and layoffs and revenues and profits started up. It was still entirely possible to simply ask the founders about a rumour, but not everyone believed/knew this was possible (especially newer hires) and so untruths would circulate for longer than was healthy.
The way I see it --correct me if I am wrong-- is that Ripple has zero defenses against an attacker controlling many public IPv4 or IPv6 addresses and broadcasting his transactions to effectively control what the consensus is.

IOW, attacker-controlled Ripple nodes can outnumber legitimate Ripple nodes, therefore legit Ripple nodes are forced to accept transactions broadcasted by attacker-controlled nodes.
Apple releases iOS 7.0.2 to fix lock screen security bug
Don't bother making sense of extremist blabbering. I used to try to reason with religious fanatics, people who believed in homeopathics or quackery like ear candles, socialists, etc., on the basis of 'everybody has their right to an opinion' and 'it might be true'. And those two are still true, but the right answer to those two assumptions is 'yes but not all of them are equal', and 'the onus of proof is on those with prima facie extraordinary claims'.

Don't get sucked into arguing on a rational basis with people whose sole method of conviction is appeal to emotion and looking profound through obscurity.
I have been following the progression of Ripple for some time. But I also get the feeling that Ripple is a huge pyramid scheme. To quote the 2 main criticisms from Wikipedia:

1. Ripple Labs will hold half of all the XRP in existence, in the hope that they will gain value

2. Ripple Labs have repeatedly made claims that they would give away 50 billion Ripples (XRP), but have not done so.

So rather than reward early adopters of the currently (with future deflation), like Bitcoin did, Ripple Labs will hold onto 80 billion XRP in hope that its value will increase.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_monetary_system
How about a model that lets you learn in your own time (free) and have the option of taking the class with a co-hort(for a fee).
My main takeaway from the rockstar/ninja programmer thing- many people seem to believe that the average programmer produces net negative value, i.e. causes more problems than they solve.

I'm still uncertain whether I believe this, although I'm sure we all feel like we are carrying the team some days. If it were true, it would mean that firing half of all programmers could be the biggest improvement to the software industry ever seen.
I am fine with closed-source applications. For me, the most important thing is open file formats, protocols and codecs. Open formats, protocols and codecs should not be owned by any company.

Most programs manipulate data in some way. Open formats let you switch from one program to another without losing your data. It opens up opportunities for paid, free or SaaS solutions and users can choose whatever suits them best. For most people, their concern is about their data: what happens if they stop using program x which manipulates their data in a proprietary file format.

PDF is a good example of this - once a proprietary file format, it is now an open standard. There are dozens, if not hundreds of free and paid-for programs that let you create, edit, view or save PDF files. (Some of the Free Software viewers are better than Adobe's bloated Reader software.)

Just imagine what the state of graphics programs might be if Photoshop PSD files or Illustrator ai files were open formats? Or if everyone used a common word-processing or spreadsheet format?
There are some enormous, gaping holes in your list - Sierra, Origin, Microprose, Epic, Apogee (lots of games before Jazz Jackrabbit), iD, Bullfrog (I think was DOS, may have been Win95) and lots more!

Many of the games on http://gog.com/ deserve a mention!
XMLHttpRequest.
Critical thinking and memorization are not intrinsically at odds with each other. Rather, they are separate tools that are powerful when used together. If your critical thinking is strong, it can be used instead of memorization, but relying on this is a crutch, and it hurts you in the long run.

I fell into this trap in math classes all the time. My exams would be covered in work where I would do something like reinventing the chain rule from the definition of the derivative. The definition of the derivative is elegant and obvious in its workings, and therefore easy to remember based on critical thinking. The chain rule commonly useful, but it's a special case, and the end result is opaque. So I wouldn't remember it, and I'd just figure it out from scratch on test day.

As it turned out, that got me plenty far. But my grades would have been better if, having understood how to derive it, I had cached it in long term memory. I would have made fewer mistakes, had less work to check, and more time to check it.

These days the same thing happens when I'm working on a math problem for practical purposes. I don't have a lot of these formulas committed to memory, so instead of spending time on actually solving the problem I have, I have to spend time rebuilding math from scratch.

It's the same basic concept as caching and memoization in programming. It would be a mistake to write every function as a giant look up table to handle each parameter combination. But if your code keeps calling the same expensive pure function with the same parameters, you can greatly speed it up by caching the result.
This is said so often, but it's plain not true. In the late 1990's he was considered much more of a hero than nowadays, as in the first decade of the 21st century people (not coincidentally, imo, after the first dot com bust) people starting to realize that he's just a religious fanatic with no clue on how to effectuate meaningful, practical change.
They're both pretty awful if you've used office on windows for a number of years which is the market they're trying to break into.

iWork is absolutely terrible from experience as well. It's not possible to effectively work with others, the UI is horrid and unproductive and it's completely unmaintained.
Conweets now makes it easier to engage in Twitter Conversations