skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My advice would be - do not become a "software engineer".

My advice would be - become a solver of other people's problems who happens to know how to develop software.

This may sound like a futile exercise in semantics, but believe me, this subtle little shift in thinking has made all the difference...

In order to escape OP's "boring as shit" programming life and have a ball turning nothing into something, one has to change their perspective: It's not about the code, or the elegance, or us, or what we become; it's about solving our customers' problems. That's it.

It doesn't matter if the solution requires the most elegant algorithm ever conceived or smacking someone on the side of the head; solving the problem is where the rush comes from. The elegant and cool code is the byproduct.

Once OP understands this, he'll be too busy building and solving to rant.
Are Millennials A Lost Generation?
Ask HN: Any start-ups planning enter Turkey's market?
Are there any start-ups here plans to enter Turkish market. I might be very happy to discuss the market for Turkey.
Individual sticks of memory always are powers of 2 because of how multiplexers/demultiplexers work.

Basically there is a bit of circuit where every word of memory connects to a bus. The Mux decides which one of the words is loaded on the bus. A series of wires controls which gate is open.

If there is 1 wire there are two possibilities

0, 1

If there are 2 wires there are four possibilities

00, 01, 10, 11

If there are n wires there are n^2 possibilities.

Not using all the possible words for the number of wires. Example 3 words when using 2 wires would cause there to be inputs that break the state machine the instruction stack is interacting with and make developing for the chip very complicated.

So the number of words that can be pulled is restricted by the capacity of the Mux, which is driven by wires that are either off or on. This causes the powers of 2.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplexer
Only if your screen is large enough that you don't have to scroll down.
I like the idea and the locality of it all, and I like the execution. However, I've been using dragdis for a while now and it solves most of my bookmarking needs in a similar way (though 'cloud' based). Regardless though - this is a very nice solution.
16-month-old article on HN home page for why?
Startups look for workers who want to launch startups themselves
Sorry, but I found the parent's comment much more insightful, lucid and relevant to the point being discussed (why a large majority always seems to prefer free apps over paid ones) than yours.

And the utterly pointless ad hominem attack right at the beginning didn't help either.

You also seem to have mixed up "price" with "cost" at places. For instance I don't quite know what these lines mean:

> a choice between two costs in resources to a choice between a cost of resources and one of no resources (what do you mean by resources? Whose resources?)

> a marginal decrease in cost of $0.10 (the cost of the chocolate is borne by its manufacturer while a consumer pays the price)

I'm sure you have a valid counterpoint in there somewhere, but it's not clear what it is.
> The former camera was not adequate for the photographs i wanted to take; this one is.

Right, but that doesn't necessarily comment on its effectiveness as a tool to assist in learning how to take good photographs.

> An interesting point is that a 40-year-old film camera would also have been adequate, although much less helpful in other ways.

This is more in line with what I'm getting at. There are perfectly good (even great) cameras out there, but there are cameras that are better suited to helping you get up to facilitating the learning process, and others that will hamper it. While perhaps not the most essential component of the learning process, they still kind of matter and are a perfectly reasonable aspect for someone to discuss.
how about checking for racism?

http://www.inc.com/vivek-wadhwa/face-of-success-blacks-in-si...
http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-24.pdf

"According to U.S. Census Bureau data, in 2008, blacks and Hispanics constituted only 1.5% and 4.7% respectively of the Valley’s tech population —well below national tech-population averages of 7.1% and 5.3%. You hardly find any blacks in positions of leadership in Silicon Valley companies. There is at least an unconscious bias."
Your age is absolutely not a hindrance. To my eye, it's not even relevant.

What is relevant is how eager you are to learn the technologies you know you need to pick up in order to be an appealing candidate. Illustrate your eagerness to learn these things by building something personal using them and demonstrable to potential employers.

When I consider candidates that don't have the typical university degree or decided later in life to switch to web development, I am most impressed by those who've dived right in and aren't looking to me to take a gamble on their willingness to be committed to the new discipline they've chosen.

As for specific areas of focus, my advice would be to spend some time learning a modern language that is not necessarily what potential employers might use in real world projects. When I speak to candidates who have picked up Scala, Go, Haskell, or Clojure on their own just out of fun, I feel I'm talking to someone who simply likes the challenge of learning.

That's not to say ignore the more pragmatic languages—those more likely to have jobs in your area.
You can think of it that way until you say, try to take the first n characters of a string and wind up with your string terminated with an orphaned CR without its accompanying LF.

Outside of ANSI terminals, teletypes and and dot matrix printers, they really don't work like that any more. If they did you'd be able to substitute LFCR for CRLF, or use multiple LFs with a single CR to leave multiline gaps - and multiple CRs would be redundant. Try sending a CSV file with LFCR line-endings, or HTTP headers separated by CRCRCRCRLF... see if that works everywhere reliably. Also, CRLF would be an acceptable substitute everywhere for UNIX LF line-endings, but clearly it's not. Fact is, CRLF is a two-byte magic number in a lot of places.
I'm not rich or anything, I'm married with a stay-at-home wife, I'm paying for a house, I'm building my savings, etc. But I do think $100/month is worth it because I don't think I'm using even 10-20% of my max potential, and the value I could create if I were more productive would be more than that. I do have an interesting challenge at work that I think I'm about to really break open...

god I realize how cheesy this sounds. There's really no way to talk about this, talk is very, very cheap in this regard. But thank you so much for your perspective and advice, I will incorporate it into my own persctive best as I can.
Your experience might be different, but I know a lot more people who use Instagram in closed networks than open networks. I would speculate that its growth is tied more closely to closed networks than it is to whether it enables cards in Twitter.
You... managed to completely ignore the 'fast trial settings' in your TL;DR. From the perspective of a law firm, this saves an incredible amount of time and money.
I probably can't help you much there, I think LYAH is pretty good. Are you trying to avoid learning monads, or you want a different approach to learning them? I think this is the best explanation of monads: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad...

GHC itself is a good example project to look at, the base libraries tend to all be pretty idiomatic. Xmonad is a good option too.
I did some experimentation with this sort of technique a few years ago. At first I was amazed at how naive bots actually are, but it makes sense: they're not going to spend the extra effort dealing with edge cases like this when they can just widen their net by hitting more sites. I don't know if things have changed but a few years ago this would have caught most bots.
Some companies hand these out at tech events: http://digiclean.com/

I got one from constant contact & upon reading this story cut it into strips to cover built-in webcams. Has the same stick/come off properties of the 3m stuff I think & it's fully opaque.
If your paid app can't compete against a free app... that's hardly the fault of the user or the app store. It's the fault of the app maker. What you're basically saying is "my app is so easy to make, that someone could make it without even caring to get paid for it".

It's competition. Yes, if someone can recreate your application for free, then your application wasn't as valuable as you think it was, by definition. Make a better app, or turn it into a service that generates revenue past app deployment.

I think many app developers have gotten spoiled by tales of people getting rich off of P.O.S. apps, and expecting that to happen to them. That happened back in the day because there was a scarcity of applications and app developers. That scarcity no longer exists. Most of the easy stuff has been done, and a lot of free versions have been made because, let's face it, most apps really aren't terribly complex.

So, make something big and hard to duplicate. Make it part of a service you provide with recurring charges and give away your app. It's a better model, anyway.
Clojure's core.typed vs Haskell
Apparently geolocation is now to be a form of discrimination we can really get behind!
Codebreaker for M16 murdered after undergoing TSA Search!
Codebreaker for M16 murdered after visiting legal prostitution state!

Seriously, this is (yet another) bit of irresponsible journalism headlines (titulars = British?) from Wired. They're trying hard to be "the finger on the pulse of the wild west world of cyberspace." facepalm.wav
That's a very good point. These 1000 words often get replaced or deleted. I guess that in many creative activities it's painful to edit down, but it usually pays off. Sometimes you don't just delete what you wrote but you rephrase it. I find it much easier to formulate a complex idea when I already have a first version in front of me (even if it's terrible), than to start from nothing.
Yeah, this is something to avoid in general. There are some people who hear "girls" the same way you do, so "guys and girls" translates as "men and women." But there are also some people who hear "girls" to mean, well, girls, so this translates as "men and girls" and sounds very weird. As people get older (say, from 20-year-olds to 30-year-olds), the balance shifts more and more toward the latter and more and more of the women you talk to will think there is something wrong with you if you call them girls, even if you also call men guys.

So yeah -- seeing "girls" in a job ad would make me guess the workplace consisted mostly or solely of young men who weren't used to being around women, and I would only apply if that was what I was looking for. Whether you think that's a problem is up to you. (I happen to think there are good reasons that some women don't like being called girls, even in the "guys and girls" context, but it's sort of beside the point in terms of writing a job ad, right?)
The ‘sell-by’ dates on your groceries are useless. Here’s why.
What Is The Core Function of Your App?
The Steam Controller Just Looks Awesome
Summary: Well, he was an idiot.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchausen_syndrome_by_p...
> Something that asked me every 30 minutes, what the fuck are you doing with your life?

Shut up and take my money. Wait, where's the product?
> If they are unhappy with how much money they are making then they simply need to raise their prices.

That depends on how elastic their pricing / demand is. You can raise prices and see your actual revenue decrease because fewer people use the thing.
Solving the problem should be what you're looking to do. Learning how to solve the problem with the current tools also helps.

edw is right - avoid that "Software Engineer" label. It's a pipe dream of broken promises
Yes but the point of view of the bias is very interesting -- I'm guessing it's from a liberal/left-leaning Israeli, i.e. someone who is caught in the middle of two warring factions who take no prisoners.
French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%"
Best Global Brands 2013
Could you please elaborate on these techniques? I'd be most interested in any relevant papers. Thanks!
I suspect the customer can read this orientation as well.

When the customer perceives that the programmer's goals are aligned with his goals, he will be much more inclined to send that programmer work.

In contrast, the programmer who sees the customer as an ignorant philistine who "doesn't appreciate good design" or "doesn't understand what he needs" will drive customers away.
> Companies that 'actively look to correct that imbalance' make things worse and reinforce stereotypes with token hires.

Looking to correct the balance doesn't mean having some sort of quota for hiring women. It means getting rid of the bias that exists already, not tilting the scales in the other direction.
The dog will help, for sure.
I like this idea. Were you thinking about a browser add on, or a native desktop program?
>App store users download many apps. Multiplying costs over many purchases, even small costs balloon while free is always free

I had not thought about this one. But it is correct and explains the resoning of consumers.
There are a fair number of Lua in browser projects with a variety of techniques. Often game porting uses them.
Couldn't agree more. It's not the users or Apple who are racing the app market to the bottom. It is the developers and the competition amongst them. And it's because creating an app is not that hard. Perhaps designing a great one one and creating and and building a market for it is quite hard. But cloning that exact app [even if it is inferior] and providing it for free or supported with IAP or ads is really not terrifically difficult or time consuming once the idea is proven. It is basically impossible to build a competitive moat.

Games are a bit different given how much art and content is often associated with the production, but users are looking for a fun distraction. Perhaps one should try to build a $2 game with a $50,000 art budget rather than a $500,000 art budget. The users don't really care. It sounds more profitable. Tiny Wings FTW.
Why would I pay for this when it's just 5 extra lines of HTML code for the modal dialog?
The problem with this idea is that the truth lies somewhere in between two distorted extremes. (There's a similar problem with Common Law.) This is one of Chomsky's central points in Manufacturing Consent -- the two parties can argue over -- for example -- Obamacare, when in fact a clear majority of the US population would rather see something like the Canadian healthcare system which is both "more extreme" and off to the side of the "debate".
If you want similar backup capabilities to your own server, check out obnam or bup. Both do de-duplicated remote backups with differing tradeoffs and capabilities in security, efficiency, etc.
Show HN: Tokyo Wind Map
He also flew to the NSA headquarters a couple times a year.

KGB vs NSA, which one is actually active and fully funded right now?
The article is dated May 2012... That counts as 'before this week' in my book.
What Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, Instagram Are Doing to Girls
Does being overweight male with excessive facial and body hair, wearing nothing but underpants counts as black ICE?
You can browse a hundred HN comment threads without seeing anyone call anyone else by their first name. In the rare event that it happens, you'd be hard pressed to find an example where the people didn't already know each other.
Hey visakanv,

If I can show you a viable solution today will you pay me $100 as you claim in your blog post? I have a viable solution for you, but I bet you won't pay.

1 - Sign up for Gmail. It's free.

2 - Open Google Calendar.

3 - Click Create

4 - Add your motivational prompt in the 'Untitle event'
field. For example, the one I'm using is "Ryan, you will die someday. Are you doing exactly what you should be doing right now to reach your goals before you die?

5 - Click the Repeat text box and set it to repeat Daily

6 - Set one pop up reminder and one email reminder.

7 - Click save.

8- Rinse and repeat for every motivational firestarting prompt you need.

9 - send paypal of $100 to ry8881@gmail.com

Good luck,
-ryan
>> We pour all our creativity, time, and passion into creating basically worthless products... we're in the business of making products that provide very little value to people. <<

If you take nothing away from the article but that you've gained some insight.

If you take a way someone's smart phone with a handful of paid apps on it and give them a dumb phone they'll get by just fine. They will lose no significant advantage for either work or personal life.

To drive up the price of something with little value you introduce artificial scarcity. Nintendo does this well. If the Nintendo game platforms were open games would be priced like apps. But Nintendo gives their Seal of Approval to everything that goes on their platforms, and there is a high barrier to entry.

I doubt that the software development community would like that model, either. I'm not even sure it's more profitable. But it does seem to create more valuable software. Nothing on smart phones comes close to the quality and polish of a good Nintendo game.
Title worthy of an "in 2010".
Or instead of a demo, a good preview film showing how the app works. (Like Apple does on it's website, http://www.apple.com/ios/design/ (scroll down). Enough already with the static PNG files.
Happy Customer Experience Day
>logs show kid connected to vpn and show vpn connected to victim

That only works if you know who the kid is to start with.
I follow but disagree. The world's largest and most successful torrent site calls itself The Pirate Bay. There are political "Pirate Parties" in Canada and Sweden. It may have been a pejorative label initially, but file sharers have "owned" the name and made it their own.

That's exactly how language is defined; by popular usage, not by design.
Heroku Database Size Warning: Finding the Problem
Regarding the "specialization is more interesting" - I have the opposite opinion.

11 Years ago I starting in the video games industry, as a graphics-programmer. This meant I lived and breathed graphics-related topics. After about 6 years I could no longer take the tedium. I moved away from graphics into more general programming (in the same company) and found the variation really helped me get through the day. I've now left the games industry and couldn't be happier.

My suggestion is that if you are unhappy in your current programming role, learn some new stuff in your spare time and apply for a new job. At the end of the day, we do stuff that only a small % of the population can do. It's a skill that people are willing to pay you for, and you don't have to go down mines or anything :)
Just as important, how much did the intern learn while building it? Sounds like they got to touch a number of different APIs, libraries, and concepts.
1) my father taught me to code in BASIC, some programmign classes in the college; then books, internet, rtfm, coding for myself (in the beginning) and coding as a paid job
2) when I was 12, in 1985 on a 48kb home-computer hooked to the TV-set
3) quite early
I'm not sure. I was actually imagining it on my phone- it locks my phone and I can't use it until I update whatever's up. Maybe browser add on too, for that same purpose. Maybe something pomodoro-ish but more "involved".

Or maybe a desktop thing, jeez, I have no idea. Sorry I'm not being helpful here. If I knew how to build stuff I suppose I'd try simplistic versions of each and see which felt most natural/optimal.
Student-built ship inspection robot hopes to save maritime industry $$
A team of students from ETH Zurich and ZHdK have developed a prototype for a robotic ship inspection unit that is capable of conducting visual inspections of ship ballasts. Ballast inspection – which involves navigating hard-to-reach spots with no line of sight, often in the presence of intense heat, humidity, and hazardous gases – is normally done by human inspectors, and represents a significant cost to ship-owners who must pay for dry-docking and who face lost income when they cannot operate their ships during the inspection period. Because robotic ship inspection can occur while the ship is in operation, it could significantly reduce dry-dock time. The Ship Inspection Robot (SIR), which was developed in conjunction with Alstom Inspection Robotics and which uses magnetic wheels to navigate the I-beams and other awkward obstacles found inside ship ballast, is relatively compact and does not require any cables for power or communication, and thus offers significant mobility improvements over other robotic ship inspection prototypes. Project leaders anticipate that a per unit production cost could be as low as €4K, enabling shipping companies to operate several units in parallel as an additional time-saving measure.
It lets people of their own free will exercise their judgement to wager on sporting and other events. Unless you think all gambling is by definition unethical for religious reasons, I'd say they were pretty legit.
Or a microphone sampling ambient noise.
Solving an Urban Planning Puzzle with JuMP + Julia
Turning one's passion into a job almost always has this result. Work is never as exciting as doing something for the sake of doing it because work always has a finite list of things that must be done even if you don't want to. It doesn't matter if you're a programmer or a rock star. The routine of having to do something you don't want to do, whether that be write tests or perform the same hit song every day for 20 years, sucks. The trick is to try and find a balance. Do the boring stuff to pay the bills but find/make time to work on something that you actually enjoy. Sure it's not exactly easy to do but once you get out of school/your parents house - that's life.
I am going to go stoic on this and say that if you are successful despite ADHD, then that's you and you just need to accept it.

What troubles me the most is the future. What if this way of being comes up one day? What if people realize? To which, Seneca said: the past is certain, present is short an difficult to catch, the future is uncertain. So, focus on the present, if that's good, then don't worry about the future too much because that will kill your present.

I think Letters to Lucilius is a very good therapy book...
He's not trying to denigrate the amount of work or talent people put into making apps - he's saying that if no-one wants to pay for it (perhaps because they can use any one of a hundred free alternatives) then it is de-facto worthless.
All the time i did not understand why so many developer jump on the App-Train. Most of them did not make money with their apps. But thats another problem.

The real problem is, that everybody try to be cheaper than others and so all developer destroy their own markets.

Why did so many sell a good product for 99 Cent ? CRAZY !

If somebody likes your app and find it usefull, this person will pay more than 99 Cent (ONCE IN HIS LIFE).

Ok, admittedly, it exists millions of todo apps, so you have a special problem with many competitors, but this can't be the reason to be cheap.