skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Objective-C isn't exactly a "post-C++ language". The two languages showed up around the same time in the 80's and have orthogonal object models (in a very concrete sense given the existence of Objective-C++).
What it's like is telling everybody who does any cutting at all that they're doing it wrong because they're not using a sawzall. You are wasting time, and your clients money, by doing your cutting any other way!

But I'm a sushi chef. And my friend here is a child working on a cutting-and-sticking project.

Never mind that! The sawzall would cut 90% quicker and the blade would last five times longer!

This argument is not going to end well.
Genuine question: Is there a big advantage using an editor designed for HTML/CSS/JS? I do all my web work using straight Vim, but maybe I'm being a luddite... What am I missing out on?
there is a deeper issue here, do you trust all the people this guy might tell?

There are people out there that file patents about ideas they know others just filed patents on, with the hopes of scaring them into a settlement or whatnot. (even though the original inventor would likely win the patent, they wont know about a new filing for about a year... at that point the project is far enough along that a similar patent can cause real problems. problems people would gladly pay to make go away.)
AbsurdJS – JavaScript based CSS preprocessor
A new CSS preprocessor written in pure javascript. It's available for nodejs and client-side.
$5000 to incorporate in the US? I paid $80. Also, they're talking about how it is "easy" to fire people... if you give them 3 months of notice? Craziness.
I think that there's probably a difference between approaching potential customers or funders whose businesses are somewhat orthogonal to your own direction and approaching direct competitors or parties who have the competence to 'steal' your ideas.

If I'm working on something similar to you, it's probably a trivial thing to include your ideas in my product. But if I am doing something completely different, the cost of switching track to 'steal' your great idea is probably so high that it's not worth while.

Now of course there may be second order effects or you may misjudge someone else's direction. That's where you have to rely on trust and reputation. But I think that getting ideas out to people who may help and are unlikely to want to compete is essential - external feedback is what's likely to stop you from disappearing down the rabbit hole, so to speak.

I like your last paragraph very much - life becomes a lot simpler when you try to stay around people who act the 'right' way (whatever that may mean to an individual). It takes a lot of mental load off and gives you the freedom to do things of which you can be truly proud.
Your list seems very targeted towards website development and not so much towards a lot of other parts of software engineering. I doubt many software engineers who focus on embedded systems would know much JS or those who focus on trading software, etc.
Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier
No, I think he's referring to C# which runs on a VM.

You couldn't write an operating system, or realtime code in C#.

It's not even in the same league as the other three, and would be better compared to Java.
> The rich and powerful also profit from a society where people are educated and hard-working.

I agree with "hard-working", but how do rich people benefit from everyone being "educated"? I'm inclined to agree if you bring up STEM or Medicine, but not so much about other fields.

> It is just so much easier at the moment for politicians to sustain their careers by pandering to a small group of rich people with the same interests then a large group of normal people with various interests.

Democrats pander just as much, if not more, to poor people and, in general, welfare recipients. Just look at Obama's recent focus on "redistribution", raising taxes and immigration and healthcare reform.

I'd add that, while you seem to suggest that the rich are behaving irresponsibly by concentrating so much wealth in their hands, the poor IMHO are also irresponsible because many of them are chronic welfare recipients, with no plans of getting off that and also voting for people who promise them more free money. One rich guy getting $1bn from the government is as bad as 100000 people getting $10k each.
Nice post Gulnara :) As one of the first people you interviewed back when you had the webcast, I think it's also clear that you have an infectious personality that now pairs well with your new skills. Quite brave too, to not stay in SF and come back to DC when your transitioning into a cs career. Kudos, some more.
What are locomotive/train engineers called in Canada? Like the guy driving the train.
I agree excluding the HTML, CSS and Javascript bit. Lots of great engineers out there that don't ever deal in this bit of software.
Live preview would be one big thing.
Yeah, typing datetime.datetime for everything gets pretty old.

I just remember that datetime is the package, datetime.datetime is the class, and datetime.datetime.now() is a @classmethod that returns instances of that class. I do kinda wish it was datetime.now() for the constructor instead.
In Canada, you can't call yourself an Engineer unless you are a professional engineer.
Maybe a light or dark gray would contrast well and still fit the aesthetic?
What doing web-dev is just edit in vim using Syntastic[1], and a couple other[2][3] useful plugins.

1: https://github.com/scrooloose/syntastic.git

2: https://github.com/pangloss/vim-javascript.git

3: https://github.com/digitaltoad/vim-jade
They've got something in development that may be exactly that. I'm not sure though because it's not out yet:

https://realtime.dwolla.com/
There was a vid floating around where you could edit the js and the browser could see the changes without a browser refresh. They were interacting with the code in realtime via the browser api. Great stuff.

I wish LT had more workflow vids as it tries hard to know hard to be a next gen editor it can be a little difficult to find the cool features.
well the part that worries me is the references to "hate speech". How much restricted speech is there in the EU? The most obvious bugaboo I can think of would be Nazis. Is that at the member level or EU wide?

The idea that popularity has been decided increase risk of going beyond the boundaries of "acceptable" speech is door wide open to abuse. It basically tells any site operator the more popular the more diligent you must be because you should know better
I've met plenty of people who have been happily sitting around, smoking weed and playing video games all the time, and showing no sign of stopping as they barrel into their 40s.
this looks really great. I'm from San Juan PR, we're still trying to convince the public transport board (AMA) to release their GPS data for the bus system.
I specifically say in my post "lets say a web developer".

That is where my area is, I've no idea what I'd want for an embedded developer but I suspect the list is no less complex.
Unfortunately, precedent holds that…

While I can see why lawyers and judges should care about that bit of information, I completely fail to see why the common man should. Bad precedents, destined to be overturned, are created all the time. Even the Supreme Court overturns its own "precedents".

So while I agree that info is not completely useless, it's not actually relevant to the question of what the common man should do, because that doesn't change: he should do what's right and just, regardless of the present position of the state.
Ahh, ok, that makes sense.
Really nice story.
Ask HN: What is your favorite programming interview question?
I'm looking for questions that are interesting from the candidate's perspective, but also provide the interviewer a good sense of the coding abilities of the candidate.
This is interesting, I immediately thought wow this couldn't possibly give you enough training to be a software developer. However, now I'm wondering if most of my college education was worthless.

Seriously maybe this program condensed all the necessary experience into 5 months, while the traditional academic path is poor at creating career coders in 4 years. I would totally believe it. There should be some head to head competitions.
Also the entirety of respected academics in economic, philosophy, and literature. Those guys probably aren't important.
Yes. As other commentors have said, if you are doing out-of-order execution well, the CPU will have many more 'hidden' registers and do register renaming to use them. But this has an interesting interaction with compilers.

Say you have a simple function that is going to add 1 to a bunch of variables. In an ARM-like assembly code, this could be written as:

LDR r1, [r0, #0]
ADD r1, r1, #1
STR r1, [r0, #0]
LDR r1, [r0, #4]
ADD r1, r1, #1
STR r1, [r0, #4]
LDR r1, [r0, #8]
ADD r1, r1, #1
STR r1, [r0, #8]

Now, if your CPU can do OoOE, it can spot that register r1 is used for three independent loads, adds and stores, and can internally use three different registers for them, allowing the operations to be done in parallel. But, equally, the compiler could have written the code as:

LDR r1, [r0, #0]
ADD r1, r1, #1
STR r1, [r0, #0]
LDR r2, [r0, #4]
ADD r2, r2, #1
STR r2, [r0, #4]
LDR r3, [r0, #8]
ADD r3, r3, #1
STR r3, [r0, #8]

Compilers and register renaming are fighting each other. In traditional compiler writing, you try to minimise the register usage and output the first code listing. But if you have plenty of registers, you could output the second code instead, and let the CPU do parallel execution without the need for register renaming.

In other words, once you have enough 'real' registers does it get rid of the need for register renaming? Intel added it to their pentiums to improve existing x86 code, but I wonder if it has that much of a benefit with newer ISAs that have 'enough' registers and properly tuned compilers?
Sounds like bias by anecdote to me. Google+ is a quite well thought-out and executed social network, especially compared to Facebook.
When you do something to gain market share then it's not altruistic.
> If this new feature is so great, people will see it and turn it on, why force it down on the user?

Because they're trying to expand the way they monetize their user base and they suspect that most people won't give a shit either way. So if you're looking to roll out this new thing that you think will be more useful to your customers (advertisers), you want maximum value from your product (users).

So, on by default. A few people will complain and threaten to leave Google services, nothing will come of it, and Google expands the sophistication of it's core money generation platform.
> I don't follow this argument. You are suggesting that the rate of females leaving the major/school is exactly proportional to the grade they get.

The percentage of females normal drops year by year in the CS programs I am familiar with. This does not seem to be happening at Mudd to the degree it does elsewhere. I have not see you put forward how initial acceptance has changed this trend, or that the trend exists at Mudd and they simply start the first year with a high female ratio say 40%-60% male-female.

> I don't believe anyone would quit a school/major because they scored a little bit lower average. This might be possible if they all happened to be near the threshold for failing but I doubt Mudd is this strict.

People do switch majors when they are below average, not always but I would be surprised if this reason is rare. Your argument now requires that the females are below average compared to the males but not so below average that they want to switch majors. I would count this as a minor complexity penalty to your argument.

> Also everyone is well aware of affirmative action, so even if their grades were worse they would not think they would not be able to compete for the same jobs/academic positions.

This by it self does not work at most universities. So what makes Mudd different that this argument works there?
> It solves all the same problems as Basic Income, but with far lower disincentive for work, and at far lower cost.

There is a basic assumption people make that a basic income would result in masses of people lazing about doing nothing just because they can. Canada experimented with a minimum income in the 1970s in a Manitoba town, and here's what happened: http://disinfo.com/2013/02/the-forgotten-history-of-a-canadi...

"Only two segments of Dauphin’s labor force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren’t under as much pressure to support their families."

More sources at Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
But most of those migrants come from other European nations of similar racial homogeneity.
Actually I'd rather not pay for you to travel across the US on a vacation while you pretend that what you're doing will have any measurable impact on bike theft.
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/l37h5s$2gd8$1@digitalmars.com

Back to the 90s URLs.
Welcome Samsung Galaxy Round - Smartphone With Curved Display Screen
"Might as well draw a random squiggle and call it "save""

At this point there's really no reason to replace the floppy with a squiggle or anything else. It is a virtually universally understood defacto standard at this point, so unless there is a super compelling reason to stop (and I can't think of any) we should just keep using it regardless of whether anyone actually uses floppies anymore or not.

That aside, "random squiggles" make terrible icons. There has to be some notable structure to an image for it to have meaning when it is placed alongside other images.

Eg. if you had a "random squiggle" for save and a "random squiggle" for load, even if the squiggles were pretty different and were used consistently, most people would have a very difficult time remembering which is which if they were actually just random squiggles, and not something with a more clear & defined structure.
Benedict Cumberbatch on "The Fifth Estate" and much more
Hi hayksaakian - one of my colleagues just posted this: http://onecyrenus.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/rockin-the-free-w...
That may get old, but what doesn't get old for me is the journey to discover how something can be improved, in structure (to avoid staring at hundreds of lines) or performance.
My fiancee and I are both studying computer science at a large university. She's graduating in late 2014, I'll be in early 2015.

In terms of employment as a developer, sometimes I wonder if we would have been better off attending one of these San Fran developer schools. I wonder though how much of the fundamentals do they learn? Do they ever hear the words "Big-Oh"? Do they know what a binary tree is?

And then I wonder -- does it matter? They're getting $90k offers. Perhaps these things don't matter as much, at least for web development.

So I suppose this is one of the benefits of a traditional path: you're well prepared for many types of development, not just web. The web is pretty cool though. :)

--

Question: if one wanted to teach themselves at home, is there an online curriculum that covers the same topics as these schools do?
The "Jimmy Dean Sausage and Chocolate Chip Pancake on a Stick" line is trending in the office. Good work!
Bruno Mars Treasure Cover Video
Majority of Aflac's revenue is from japanese cancer insurance
Yu(Go)Server
A golang-based minimalistic web server with template support, but no hub caps, no power windows. Possibly a useful reference for those wanting to see how Go handles web applications, templates and unit tests against the same.
There's an emacs mode for that: https://github.com/skeeto/impatient-mode
This was included in a set of visualizations built by members of the Bay Area D3.js User Group.

http://enjalot.github.io/bart/
http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-d3-User-Group/events/13754175...
OneTimeBox Makes Sharing Disposable Files with Groups Easy
There's a lot of comments here that are like "you can't be an Engineer, I spent years getting there. It's not that simple. Grumble grumble grumble... etc..."

We should be welcoming him into our field! But instead we're too focused on the terminology he used.

I think it's fantastic that the author is now in software and programming. Software development is one of the most affordable ways to change the world. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection :D
Hipster Ipsum: Artisanal filler text for your site or project.
When I went there the "Based upon my activity, Google may show my name and profile photo in shared endorsements that appear in ads." box was checked.
Is there solid evidence of an IQ difference between the genders or a general subject, with a biological understanding of why such a difference exists?

I currently have not come across any such solid evidence and biological understanding. Seems unproductive to operate under an understanding far from 50/50 when I do not have solid evidence that I should be.
The idea that Python is a low-level language and that this is why software costs money to maintain is stupid. There isn't a better word to describe this. It's just stupid nonsense.
Just an FYI...

I was recently asked to fix some code for a website that was using paypal so it could use litle.com.

I was told that litle.com was almost half the cost of paypal and without a lot of the things that make paypal obnoxious to merchants, like holding your money on a whim.

Also, the Litle dev people were way more helpful and friendly than what I've seen from paypal in the distant past.
So you write a public review of a business, and then you're upset because Google shows people that review?

I really don't get it. What if your review was the first search result instead? Isn't that the same thing?

If I search for a product on Amazon, it shows me the number of stars for each product, and if I click on that it shows me excerpts of different people's reviews. How is that any different? http://imgur.com/7FC2jfx
This is all nice and dandy (as usual with git tutorials, which I find to focus on what works great), but what about a long-lived feature branch where you need to get the changes from your master branch into your feature branch on a regular basis?
Are you going to merge master into your branch? Are you going to rebase? Whatever choice you make, it's going to be kind of sucky experience, awful merges or a long series of resolving conflicts for each commit replayed on top of the HEAD of your main branch, with random git rebase --skip and "conflicted" files that you edit only to discover that the file actually doesn't contain any conflict.

What about the famous:

+ EMPTY_LINE

- EMPTY_LINE

That for some reason I still get every other day in git diff outputs?

What about deleting a branch? Tough shit son, the branch is not fully merged, BOOYA! Want to pull? BANG, merge bubble. Oh, you decided to be smart about it and to git pull --rebase instead? Nah sister, you've pushed that code before and you're now rewriting the history and screwing with it.

I don't know, it feels like there are no good choices in git, there's no "right way", there's no workflow that guarantees your peace of mind. It's always a fight. And the solutions to those problems are something that I never see in the git tutorials and examples. It feels like informercials, you really want to buy into it and go create branches, engage into interactive rebases and git bisect into nasty bugs but after a few shots at it, it becomes the software equivalent of that exercise bike collecting dust in the basement you pretend not to see on your way to the backup fridge. The one that reminds you how much you suck.

(Most of this tongue in cheek, I think git is great, it's just frustrating sometimes)
So let's blame the victim? If only Lavabit had capitulated then the poor FBI would not have had to escalate their demands. If only the battered wife had just done what her husband wanted, he wouldn't have had to break her nose. The government does not apply the law uniformly. It escalates when it wants to, when it's been embarrassed or slighted. Keep your head down and don't make trouble.
Yes, but the libertarians like her and her work. It doesn't matter that she didn't like them.
can someone create a f*ckgoogle.com so that i can +1?
Let's see

- Two programming languages: JavaScript and a Server Side languages (rails) in 5 months is not impossible.

- HTML/CSS/JS: A couple weeks.

- Databases: A couple days.

- Linux: Learn the commands on the go on these 5 months.

- Git: A night for the basic add/commit/push/pull. Maybe a couple more nights for branching.

- Unit Testing: A couple days at most.

To use an analogy (I deal with lots of business people, analogies help) You could teach someone to lay bricks to a good standard in 5 months, You could not teach them to be a safe civil engineer.

Not really. The average student takes 36 months. A more enthusiastic and invested one can perform better than the average in 5-6 months (in my opinion). Don't forget that the guy has industry experience even if it's not related to the field in question.
The he is a she
I beg to differ. Why should we describe a visual artifact using tools that are suited to describe logic and algorithms? Now, if you are wanting a DSL to describe HOW to make the visual artifact, that's one thing. However, the way art is created is not algorithmic, but rather a try something, visually inspect, and repeat process. Describing how the icon was created is not the main goal. Instead, the goal is simply a visual artifact.
Every damn time with this stupid observation. It's like an unconquerable memetic disease. The term 'Software Engineer' is a single term with its own commonly understood meaning. Commonly understood, except when someone wants to wax pedantic about that other specialized meaning of the word engineer. It is not meant to be part of a series like 'E.E', 'Mech.E.', 'Civ.E.', 'Software Eng.' It is not a case of people trying to specify which subtype of engineer that they are. It's a single term that just happens to be made of two words, and means the same thing as 'Software Developer' (regardless of individuals occasionally trying to post-rationalize it by giving it 'more rigorously architectural' connotations). You might as well argue that 'application windows' aren't windows, because you can't see through them, and they didn't evolve from the other kind of window. Engineering is a fine metaphor for much of what we do with code, data structures, data flows, transformations, and so on. Please, stop the madness.
There is no shortage of online classes for teaching how to code, from Udacity to Coursera to Codecademy to OCW, but what these lack, which I believe to be the most important part of learning effectively, is interaction with teachers, mentors, and other classmates. At times I'm surprised no one seems to be attacking that part of online education.
I got news for you son. 4 years is not a career.

I'm happy you're doing something worthwhile now, and glad you made the switch.
The important thing is to first wait for inspiration. You have to watch a lot of tv to "get ideas."
Also, when you sit down to write, you might notice that you are hungry, or thirsty. You might also notice that your books are in the wrong order. You really have to completely stop what you are writing and go and put the books in the write order and go get a snack.
Also, first log on, and browse the web for a while to get the juices flowing. Check out Facebook, HN, twitter, Google News, Tech Crunch. Just get the juices flowing.
If, by the end of the day, you haven't started writing, well, no problem, you can wait till the weekend.
If you have a trip planned, just do it the next weekend.
At parties, it is important to let people know you are a writer and are working on a project.

Those are the main ways people that I know write books.
It's not a full online curriculum, but the pre-work for the Flatiron school (http://prework.flatironschool.com/) is a pretty solid introduction to the basics.