skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There is no excuse to teach/use/promote any of the propriety software in schools.

Of course there is, especially for vocational schools. If you're targeting a career, you want to learn the software that is most often used in that job capacity, so you can put that on your resume and improve your chances for landing a job.

It's somewhat different for primary and secondary schools. Generally these schools do not teach individual programs. Instead they teach concepts, and use the program as learning aids. From that perspective, the most important thing the software can do is to just work, and then get out of the way. It's more important that students learn mathematics, than it is for the educational programs to be open source.

> If people not force-feed Excel, Word, Photoshop, Matlab etc. during their education days still want to use that for convenience later in their career - let them. Just give them real choice by educating them with open tools.

The vast majority of Excel, Word, and Photoshop users cannot directly benefit from open-ness, because they are not programmers. Matlab may be an exception.
> He's empirically wrong because I've worked with 10x developers.

I believe you meant "He's anecdotally wrong because I've worked with 10x developers."

To be empirically wrong, you'd have to contradict it with some empirical rather than anecdotal evidence.
> You still have classes, objects, functions, mutable data and low-level access to the OS, all with an easy and concise syntax, but you gain type checking, much better data structures and a huge amount of speed for no additional effort. Why aren’t more people using it?

I think it is a community issue actually. Not the language. It is just not converging. Just think of how many distinct OCaml code styles you have seen. Some use hardcore math notation, some not; some use recursions everywhere; some use imperative syntax; some use pseudo-OOP approach. Some even try to fork the language syntax. And a result. Well. Even with the language itself providing easy and concise syntax, ocaml code is not very readable. And not very popular.
Allow me to retort: Fabrice Bellard, Linus Torvalds, John Carmack.
How sad. One defective format limits another great format.
FWIW UTF-8 allows multiple encodings of any particular integers. Decoders should reject non-minimal encodings (they are a security risk, as it becomes possible to smuggle ASCII payload in a non-ASCII form which blindsides some security systems) but don't always do so. And of course if you don't decode UTF-8 data at any point and don't validate it either, you're still fucked.
Surprisingly Few NSA Workers Have Been Caught Spying on Their Exes
Computing has a nice analogy in lasers. When lasers (and masers) were first built it was extremely hard to make one. Lots of engineering and design went into getting something to properly lase. Then, over time it became easier once the principles were understood. Later still it was realized that given the right conditions you could get a very large number of substances to lase, some of them even accidental.

In the long turn it will possibly be found that it is harder to have tech of any sufficient complexity that can not be used for general purpose computation than stuff that can be used that way. To find another computer inside an existing computer that was placed there accidentally is perhaps less of a surprise if you look at it that way.

Other candidates: sufficiently large chunks of a network, hydraulics systems, power infrastructure, biological systems.
Or indeed Claude Shannon.
> This is why normalization methods exist

Not all (base, combining+) have a precomposed version, so no that doesn't work.
When Microsoft was confident, many years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EcLdwYqwko
There's a way of formalizing this, so we don't have to rely on the imprecise and loaded word "faith": Bayesian probability, e.g. as described on http://lesswrong.com. See also http://rationality.org.
Formal Methods of Software Design: an online course by Eric Hehner
According to a friend of mine that was in IT at DIA, staff in TS/SCI shops get caught surfing for porn from classified networks. (!!) This is a career-ender for the unfortunate caught individual, yet it happens regularly.
Pause/break not working in Firefox 24.0 on Windows x64 8.
If you do some heavy processing with your text, the triviality of decoding UTF-8 (or anything else) to codepoints is no issue compared to the complexity of actually processing text. If you think UTF-32 makes it (significantly) easier to do text processing, you're not processing text you're destroying it.
Of course it's possible to write non-working code in a typed language. But with a good type system you don't have to write the code in a way that can be wrong (or at least, that can be wrong in a way that unit tests would help with - if you've misunderstood the requirements then nothing can save you).
I don't know about you, but I'm sure that there could be some benefit from practicing something like that with diligence.
Thanks! I'm getting it as far as I can and validating it with people along the way. The goal is to show some traction in order to attract the right developer.
r@google.com ...
We'll sign the out of band letters with their signing key to prove it's aut- wait. Chicken and egg problem.
Isn't Cython a solution that frequently requires significant code changes (refactoring to C-like code) beyond adding typing?
You don't show how O(1) random access is useful here. You show a standard length-prefixed stream encoding.
The challenge is on pricing - bring it to 128 GB and add a keyboard, and it comes to $1128. For $999 you can get a Macbook Air with 128 GB storage, keyboard, 4 GB Ram.

I agree the Surface product looks great - I just don't know who really needs the functionality of a highly portable laptop that wouldn't just get an Air instead. Possible exceptions would be people who can use the stylus or want the Microsoft applications/games.
If they were using UTF-8, wouldn't just one version of function suffice ? That is, instead of using a shim, just determine which version to call based on the encoding.
It really depends on who is administering the first pass questionnaire and how they have been prepared. When I was doing hiring, a dedicated recruiting team was tasked with doing this first round, which we called "prescreen questions". I spent a lot of time briefing the people talking to candidates for my team on how to interpret the answers, and I encouraged them to keep detailed notes so we could audit what candidates were saying and needed to adjust something. I personally reviewed every prescreen result to make sure we didn't pass on someone who could provide more than the straight forward answer. However, we found that prescreens were most effective when the answers were straight forward and there was only one way to interpret the question (that is, for prescreens, non-essay answers are preferred).
Elon Musk Accuses Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Of Blocking SpaceX
Anecdotal evidence is empirical evidence. It's just not very convincing because it doesn't come with any information about how common experiences like those are, or what confounding factors might be at play.

Now, in this case, confounding factors probably aren't a problem, but if 10x developers are one in a million or one in a billion, an anecdote about how someone, somewhere actually met one once isn't very helpful to the rest of us.
suggestion: add to console echo when pressed something in your demo
Fashism, an Ashton Kutcher-backed social fashion startup, shuts down
Yes, and the application asserts if it is ignored by telling the kernel, so the kernel can fast path the ignored signals.
Er, anyone care to say what the link points to...?

[Given the comments so far, I'm certainly not going to look! oO;]
That's actually a pretty good idea (and I am being serious). These firms are always looking for good engineers (I didn't say "experienced") and have a hard time finding ones. This is especially true for smaller companies that don't have very strict hiring process.

If a guy walks in my company's lobby to ask if we are looking for engineers, I'll certainly give him an interview.
How much of a music theory background did you have before you started making those cards? What do you think is the minimum someone needs to know to be able to benefit from making such a deck?
I totally agree. I'll add that Joe should first ask his friends working at tech jobs if their companies are hiring. "this candidate is respected by someone we employ and know is good" is actually the most important criteria for the decision maker. I was hired that way.
Engineering was six before the unpopular e-commerce pivot. Two left soon after pivot, one left a bit after. Three remaining stuck around through the period where the CEO was shopping the company hoping that they could keep working together and with the well-regarded product manager.

It was a high functioning team. Heartbreaking to see it cast to the wind.
The Return of OMNI Magazine...
What an appalling Gish gallop. Well, as usual, the only thing to do is point out the first wrong thing. Conveniently, everything you said was wrong, so I can just pick the first clear statement you made: you can rotate text within a table.
True online as well, by the way.

The kicker is that this plays really really well with established companies. Pretend you're hypothetically a Cisco Routers consultancy. Parachuting into a random company and solving their Cisco Routers problems requires a very experienced consultant, both in terms of technical mastery and in terms of soft skills like interfacing well with clients' technical staff, dealing with political problems where you have imperfect background of who the key players/concerns are, and generic client relations.

Presenting about Cisco Routers (after the presentation has been substantially pre-written) and talking about them intelligently in response to audience questions requires a more limited, and far less expensive, skill-set.

This allows operating consultancies to do training offerings using more junior staff than they use for their consulting offerings, but to sell them at rates and quantities pegged to their consulting reputation rather than at the rate/quantity suggested by the person who will be tasked with delivery. And customers will often be quite thrilled, because training existing employees is often far, far cheaper than hiring pre-existing experts on the open market.

(There exist many other ways to do it. Pure-play training companies exist, for example, and there are companies which focus on synchronous online training, asynchronous online training, hybridized models, etc etc.)
> A fundamental weakness in the free software argument is that it lacks a solid, broadly applicable proposal for remunerating the effort of software engineers.

This is the main reason why after a period on my life, where I was a strong FOSS advocate, nowadays I don't care that much what license a software has. I was anyway already living from coding, before discovering the FSF back in 1994.

It is easy to be a FOSS advocate when still living at the parent's home or as an university student. The problem starts when you want to make a living out of it.

That is why in the end, most desktop software is closed source and the majority of FOSS friendly companies that sell software, have moved it behind a SaaS paywall.

Still one can see how few people are willing to support FOSS developers, when looking at how much money they donate, or how quick someone comes up with a fork when money is asked for.
XOXO Talk Notes
"I wonder if, in practice, so many of these frustrations would have been alleviated if we, as an industry, had adopted the "impractical" view of insisting on using only free software."

We'd live in a world with a lot less software and where computing was restricted to hobbyists. Propietary software exists for a reason, and its not because the world is run by the selfish and evil.

I love free software, too, but the thing to remember, and this is true for any discipline -- a massive amount of people will support something because they have the incentive to get money from it. A lot of people love programming, but a lot of people love money even more, and if the geniuses who went to Harvard and Stanford and UC Berkeley decided that they could make much more money in biotechnology or surgery, then that's one less Microsoft or Google in the world that's bad for us users. If these people loved programming more than money, their software wouldn't be proprietary. It's much much easier to make money off proprietary software than free software. Yes, there is dual-licensing and support and donations, but ultimately you cannot directly and legally charge users, your biggest market, to use your program; this logic is supported by some evidence: recently Red Hat reached a billion dollar valuation, making it the most valuable company to be majorly devoted to free software. That's amazing. Bill Gates on his own is worth $56B, though.

I think most people, and most people encompasses the people that make the proprietary software that we rely on most, look for money first and idealism next. We'd have RMS's work and some of the early MIT and UCB hacker's work without the incentive of money, but to get so far as multibillion dollar companies that produce programs 99% of us are reliant on? Impossible without the incentive of money.
The secret is that there is no secret. The more time you spend on generating ideas, the better you will be at it-- just like any other skill.
Create diagrams in the browser
Their ecosystem has made me £527,000 in the last 5 years. Does that make me $pongle?

It's just childish.
In his defense, the author makes the following disclaimer:

"As before, note that I’m a beginner in these languages."
Are you smelling the famous peninsula Trichloroethylene plume? Some people describe it as unbaked cookie dough:

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=88
or maybe they did but their friends were not interested.
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Pity...go to any job board, you'll see 50 of them needed on any given day

Those aren't the "rock stars" hiring companies are talking about. They don't need & couldn't afford Linus.

Rock star is just a label they slap onto the job description.
Barriers to market entry are a kind of vendor lock-in. We are locked in.
This, as device, is brilliant. Like it or not most PCs (or work machines) are powered by Windows so it's much easier for one to use a Windows Tablet /Laptop. If I was in the market, I'd forget iPad and Android and buy this, as an extension of my PC. If it can do everything iPad can, why would I buy a device with a new operating system, with it's limitations and where I can't use my existing apps? The need to easily type is vastly underrated IMO. This can also serve as a laptop replacement, at least temporarily, something iPad cannot.

Microsoft can easily mark it down to barely make any profit on it for quite a while, the screen resolution and tech behind it will be a non-issue soon, so it's just the ecosystem. For Windows users it makes perfect sense to stick with Windows.
This is such nice work that I hesitate to bring up a minor point of coding style... But the use of names_with_underscores looks out of place in JavaScript.

JavaScript code traditionally uses PascalCaseNames for constructors and camelCaseNames for variables, properties, and methods. You do see UPPERCASE_NAMES_WITH_UNDERSCORES used sometimes for "constants", but that's about it.

Of course, names_with_underscores work just as well as any other names, and some people use them in their own JavaScript code, but I think libraries should follow the traditional native conventions of their language.

It would be like releasing a Ruby library that used camelCaseNames for its method names. It would work, but many Ruby developers would feel that those names were a bit out of place in a language where method names customarily use underscores.

Mentioning it here basically just as a reminder for other library developers: "When in Rome..."
It seems to me that it is more important to speak out against the use of “gay” as an insult and to denounce those who do so as homophobic.
> GIMP is a study in bad GUI design

Whenever I've asked people to provide concrete examples of this, their issue has been that they expect the UI to be a 1:1 clone of whatever application they're used to (usually Photoshop) and so they don't know how to do some things, or can't operate smoothly enough as they haven't taken the time to grow muscle memory comparable to what they have with Photoshop.

I'm not a big fan of GIMP, but I want to scream of frustration on the occassion that I have to work with Photoshop (which I don't know well at all).
> Who is going to want to major in CS in the future if they know that the odds of getting an entry-level job in their field when they graduate are getting worse and worse?

All the college students are taking these as internships. Then, if they like the job, they work there.
Actually no. Microsoft at least (this thread mainly targets them) doesn't lock you into any file formats. Why?

a) I've always been able to export/extract data at will.

b) All their protocols and formats are specified openly here: http://www.microsoft.com/openspecifications/en/us/default.as...
Collaboration overhead. If you replace 10 average programmers with 1 good programmer he doesn't need 10x productivity to match the combined productivity of 10 programmers (which is not a sum). On top of that, programming productivity is also a qualitative measure that goes beyond feature X working correctly. One person can code it in such a way that every time it needs changing it's easy to work with - thus saves uncountable hours in the future.

Not all men are created equal - I don't see why anyone would rail against that. Some people are stronger than you, some people are better coders than you - it's OK. Compare yourself with last year's you instead.
I just want to second that this book is great. Ignore any negative inclination you feel because it's called fan fiction. It's fanfiction the way John Gardner's Grendel is Beowulf fanfiction.
You can think of it as two separate instructions, CR to move horizontally to the beginning of the line, and LF to move down by one line.
I don't think the language gets to decide the coding style. Only the programmer gets to do that.

Especially if you program in multiple language it can be jarring to switch styles for each language.
I disagree strongly. I created a software company, I have an amazing team, I know a little about this.

Rockstars programmers exist and they do because they can do machines do work for them, instead of having five people do the work the can do the code 5x to 100x or 1000x faster.

They could automate almost everything, even coding(creating new languages when needed specially for the task) and debugging itself, creating testing code, making failures very hard to happen.

A normal programmer will create new problems, not solve it. She will put mechanisms in place in order for the company to depend on her. She could not be faster but she could certainly make the others to slow down to her level. Beware is she gets to manage Rockstars, she will do everything to put others down, pointing fingers. They are experts excuse makers.

If you look at all big software accomplishments you will discover a very small team of incredible rockstar developers.

What this man is saying is that you need a team, no divas. But who says that Rockstars can't create teams?

One thing you can't do of course is putting Rockstars at the orders of some mediocre person or even argue when you don't know what you are talking about(you need to do your homework first). It is not comfortable.

What this person is saying is that he fears managing a team of people smarter than him, so he just prefers having people that are "normal".
It's selectively adding C-like type declarations to Python code speed up the slow bits. C code is then generated and compiled into a Python extension module. This is similar to adding type information to Common Lisp code to allow the compiler to optimise it.

http://docs.cython.org/src/quickstart/cythonize.html
How can we protect the namespace of an object in Javascript?
Wow, that's quite the story. I'm glad to see you got through it with your sanity intact.

I also like to hear about the tough times that people have in web development. Too many stories here are along the lines of...

ASK HN: I'm making (insert figure for annual per capita GDP of emerging market household) monthly (if not weekly) - how can I get more free time for my start-up?

First world problems.

Web development isn't terribly hard. It's not easy, but that argument is pointless because the stuff we do in our editor certainly isn't the hardest part. The hard part is dealing with clients and managing the business.

We see so many articles here and in the media pumping people up talking about the lack of developers and how they can basically write their own paychecks. Meanwhile, good developers in the Philippines might make $800 / month. A good developer (but bad business manager) freelancing in the U.S. might not make much more than that (as you

I think web development probably looks much like the rest of the economy. The top 1% are fantastically successful. The top 10% is probably doing pretty well. The last 90% are probably struggling.

About the article. Perhaps you picked the title just to be catchy, but aren't you already a pro? As web developers, are we just geeks? Are our clients picking us up because we are geeks that they have to deal with? Or are we actually pro's who are creating value for them?
Windows user here who spends a lot of the time on the command line. PuTTY is good enough.

I'm actually in the process of writing a Metro terminal app which will hopefully fill the void here.
There would be no need for the 16-bit versions if they had used UTF-8. The same function signatures would work for ASCII, ISO-8859, or UTF-8.
I like articles like this one, but this doesn't really bode well for 0install.
Facebook Profile Pictures Vulnerability?
Hello,

I tried emailing Facebook regarding this issue, they never replied.

The problem is, if your current profile picture is set to public (which is the default when you update your picture), then anyone can go through your profile pictures album.

Way around it is to set your current profile picture to friends only.
The success of Surface Pro largely depends on other people's failure. Nexus 10 is $399 with 2560x1600 display. Many decent Windows 8 laptops are selling at $600. MacBook Air weights 2.4 pounds vs Surface Pro 2 pounds. Technically, it is feasible to build a lightweight laptop with high-res touch display. It would be more functional than Surface Pro (larger display, real keyboard) and cheaper than Surface Pro + keyboard. As a business user, a great laptop is still better choice than SPro.

If Surface is super successful, PC OEMs would fail a big time, which is not good news for Microsoft either.
It has a dock which is where it wins for me. Oh and as you say, applications. OSX sucks for productivity apps.
it's a page displaying an elongated black thing with a face, which tracks the position of your mouse cursor. Wiggling the mouse cursor causes it to wave, much like wiggling one end of a rope. Wiggling above a certain fierceness threshold causes music to play and a psychedelic color scheme to flash. You're not missing much.
Is it meant to work with all the keys? Chrome 29:

> Open page

> Don't touch anything

> Type

this is a test

> Now you've moved down three times.
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.. so, even after the increase the total whole engineering team equity was 0.6% ? Disregarding everything else, this fact alone doesn't seem particularly ok.
We don't see the code point space run out anytime soon this time, even with questionable additions like Emoji. It took us 20 years to get to the current state and character encoding rate has slowed down significantly since the early days (mostly because most things are covered already).