skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love this presentation. It led me to read Expert C Programming [1] by Peter Van Der Linden. My knowledge of C had vastly improved after reading that book (and subsequently C++). Even if you're not a C programmer I would recommend the book as the anecdotes alone are worth reading for the questions that it encourages you to ask.

I've since come to believe that reading the specifications and having the attention necessary to delve into these kinds of details and ask the right questions is important for mastery. It seems to me that learning 1 - 2 languages to this level of detail is worthwhile. I've been thinking of cutting back the number of languages I, "know," down to just those for which I am familiar with the specifications and how they're compiled, assembled, etc. Everything else is superficial.

Sometimes all you need is just a cursory knowledge to get something done and the ends justify those means. However if you really love your craft then mastery should be the goal, no? It seems to be the difference between, "getting something working," and, "pushing the boundaries of what is possible."

[1] http://www.amazon.ca/Expert-Programming-Peter-van-Linden/dp/...
Watch the full FRONTLINE documentary here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hunting-the-nightmar...
Gravity propagates at the speed of light, too.
Sure, but they didn't talk about it. I'd say it'll be similar this time round.
You speak as if that's unusual...

If it's not something you can stick on an invoice, it's generally hard to persuade management it's worth doing in my experience.
As far as I know this is no longer true - there's an official firmware image that enables fastboot:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/...

However I've not yet actually tried this on my ZTE Open.
I don't know because of what, but in Ubuntu Chromium uses the VLC plugin automagically.
Did Gary McKinnon actually find proof of a UFO in government computer networks?
Large projects have many gatekeepers (that have feedback, sometimes conflicting), integration issues (I'll get to this one in a second), and scheduling issues (this one seems to be arbitrary based on political deadlines).

Consider the integration issues for this website. Multiple insurance companies, after decades of working in isolation (insurance companies were early to utilize computing), are now expected to bend their offerings into the lowest common denominator between themselves and other companies (so a computer can do analysis on them).

Think about the headache that would be for managers, programmers, and domain experts. All with political taskmasters cracking the whip with unrealistic expectations.

On top of that, bad code means that money might be lost by third parties. This code has high lawsuit potential (no matter how well agreements are written).

My point being, public or private, this project was destined to be a difficult one.

I want to expand on a simple point of government and large corporation programming that might not be obvious to the casual observer. There is a lot of inertia in the system. I've found bugs older than me (in code that runs nightly). I once worked for a company that had code written in the 60s still going (thankfully I wasn't on that project).

Old code isn't going anywhere soon, and trust me, you don't want to deal with it. Even though you can make a career out of it, a lot of effort is needed to make even the smallest changes. I don't care how good a programmer you are, if your tools or environment suck, you're in trouble.

And this is one of those cases where being elite doesn't beat above average with experience. Not even close. I'd much rather the person who can say "We did something similar back in '95, and it caused problems in these places" than the best programmer on the planet. Because for these types of jobs, the best programmer on the planet is usually the person who knows the system best.

Any team of people, no matter how talented, will be spending the majority of their time understanding what is in place.

Note that I haven't gotten into the procurement process, which can turn a difficult project into an impossible one. But that's a problem that also lacks a silver bullet, and is a larger discussion.
Radio waves are EM waves, same as light. They all travel at c.
Fork it and add an issue tracker if you feel it's really necessary. That's the beauty of open source!
I'd go further than laurenstill: this is being done in such a non-transparent way (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6595704 for details, and why the consequences are so bad), with only Verizon being named as part of the "tech 'surge'", that you certainly wouldn't get any up front PR.

It's also inherent in the nature of an emergency fix-it process that unless you've got connections and/or a stunning track record you won't be tapped to help. Heck, imagine all the well and ill intentioned people and orgs who are offering to help right now....

Then look at the primary cause for the debacle, HHS's CMS taking on the role of integrator and integration tester, and constantly changing the requirements, all the way through the last week before launch, which not coincidentally is when they started integration testing. Which of course failed hard, and was ignored.

Until these inexperienced managers of the project are removed from having anything to do with it, it's very unlikely to be successful. Well, maybe over the coming months they'll learn on the job, take techies suggestions they read The Mythical Man Month (something this "surge" is ignoring), etc. ... but for now it's a clusterf--k that I certainly wouldn't want my name attached to.

How much brand damage do you think CGI/CGI Federal is taking now? Why would you want some of that?
Dopplr Alternative
Radio is not sound, it is an electromagnetic wave that travels at the speed of light.
No. San Antonio for jobs throughout Texas.
Freelancer personality types: Good, cheap, or quick. Pick two.
> Effort spent on improving a software rarely goes wasted.

Rarely wasted? Have you seen how many open issues and pull requests on github just languish there forever by unconcerned maintainers? Or projects with a million forks because the maintainer has moved on?

Stating up front that you're not going to even entertain bug reports definitely has an impact on those wishing to improve the software and contribute back. For one, it precludes an entire class of supporters (users who report bugs) from even helping out at all.
One of the best programmers I've ever known and mentor to me is a .Net guy. (I'm not a .Net developer, FYI)

There are fantastic programmers in every language and lousy programmers in every language. Just the way it is.
Cohort Analysis (Custora U)
I think I have to disagree with this one.

A major part of being an effective programmer is the ability to maintain state and call stacks in your head.

Stepping through code is great - as a last resort. But I've found that if I need to run through it with a debugger in order to understand it, it is often overly complex.

As with any generalized rule there are exceptions, but I consider needing to step through code in a debugger to understand its behavior as that exception, not the inverse.
Hilarious. I wonder what the "proper channels" are that are in the official statement. I was one of the people who downloaded this, but after I read the message about needing to wait in line for the privilege, I promptly uninstalled. Blackberry has fallen so fast and hard, it hurts to watch. I owned a 9700 for a log time and was writing apps for it but now I can't even fathom why anybody would think of getting a blackberry device, and after this, I can't imagine anyone wanting to use BBM either. If it weren't for nostalgia, I wouldn't have bothered.
Mark Zuckerberg Was Highest Paid U.S. CEO of 2012
From Zero To Kickstarter In $5k
actually, aside from a few UI issues, i don't really have any complaints with sublimeclang, however, if the time comes that it no longer works with a build of ST3, i'll be more than happy to try and make a fix.
Well done. After a couple of minutes playing with it i see your app has nuggets of subtle UX brilliance. I think my favourite is the eraser and how it responds when you start erasing faster....

Also very alluring marketing.

Best of luck, I hope you do well, you clearly have vision. Your app made me smile.
Well I don't think that is entirely fair. To get to that price you have to take the most expensive mac product, then add tax. I just bought the highest end MacBook pro today with the student discount and it only cost a little over 2k. Which if I wanted another computer of comparable hardware quality (aluminum vs. plastic), screen resolution, and weight and dimensions I would be hard-pressed to find a comparable PC for that much cheaper. And that is disregarding the crappy support of most PC manufacturers. So I wouldn't say their prices for hardware are even that crazy, a MacBook quality laptop that only ran windows or Linux could still sell for 80-90% of the price.
From the title, it almost sounds as if their software is going to be free software. Just giving out proprietary software without charge doesn't make them free (free as in freedom for users).
Redesigning Interactive Voice Response Systems
I had no clue `forego` was actually available. This is incredible.
Spooky TCP
I am in this position right now as I am working on a startup in my free time. I've been coding the backend API in Flask but I am delaying the frontend due to a lack of JS knowledge. There are plenty of jQuery examples but sometimes I have no idea what I am looking at or how the code is flowing. My lack of JS skills will probably introduce security risks into my website.

So I am now forcing myself to start working on some basic JS tutorials and my friend recommended I pick up this book: jQuery: Novice to Ninja: New Kicks And Tricks.
This! Far too often I see worthless comments because people were taught in school "you should comment your code".
One day technology will really have to do something about lightspeed to allow interplanetary quake!
The width of the beam is determined by diffraction, caused by the finite aperture of the laser:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/phyopt/cirapp.htm...
Impressions from our $5m series A financing
That's part of it, but it doesn't speak to why they also made iWork and iLife free.
Something's broken. The map disappears when I click on a pin.
Looks very neat, I'm disappointed that's it's apparently iPad only. I'd love to give it a try next to Sketchbook Ink [0] on my Android devices.

Though, I have to say, I'm growing really weary of dramatic copy that insists on telling me how "beautiful" (4x) everything is.

0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adsk.sketc...
The Top 4 Reasons VCs Bias Technology Startups
Open source doesn't mean will work for free on stuff you desire, that's just a common side benefit.

It just means the source code is 'open' for you or the community to extend as you please. Your comparison to Sublime is apples and oranges.
10 Best Quotes from Linus Torvalds' Keynote at LinuxCon Europe
I don't know about Bill Gates, but this quote from Linus Torvalds sprang to mind:

"I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."

http://lwn.net/Articles/193245/
I think the makes some sense... at first. I would hope that once the project is mature enough the policy would change.
Indeed. I think I stated that you could just build a binary. This could also be released as a binary package (which is likely what would happen if it gains traction). I mean just to get a screenshot this is quite a bit of downloading. Then every time you want an update you have to do the same thing (in the absence of just downloading a binary).
Why It's Essential to Keep Employees in the Loop
It places them in a different directory. So far, this works, but this feature may not be present in future versions of OS X.
I think the point was that mathematics relies on a small set of postulates from which you can derive everything else. Changing a postulate results in a separate system. The same is true in programming languages, but the number of postulates is very large compared to mathematics to the point that their utility is greatly reduced. And also there are so many languages each with its own postulate set that it's really inelegant when compared to mathematics.

Another way to put it is, learning the postulates for langx doesn't provide enough value for many to be worth doing.
I have 2 side projects right now; 1 is extremely niche (a specific type of post-grad student) and 1 is mass market.

The niche project is backed by money and a partner. It's free to the students. As much as it's a niche, we're doing quite well, in our 2nd year and are generally succeeding. We hope to bring some money in by next year.

The 2nd project which is more mass market is not free to the customer. We've struggled with finding a price point; the system has been redesigned multiple times and is currently going through it's 3rd redesign and we're having trouble getting the word out.

To answer your question, I feel both of my side projects are great ideas. The problems are always money related. Money for marketing is what it comes down to and how to market it / convey value.

I act based on gut instinct. If I feel a project is a good idea; i do it, in hopes of making money from it.

Some ideas are good, but aren't realized. They need to be thought out more or the focus changed or ... Those sit in the back of my head till i've figured out an angle.

To me, programming is just time on my end. I can build anything someone wants me to build, front to back (full stack) but wasting time is of no interest to me. If i feel it doesn't extend my experience / resume, if i feel it has no potential to make money or the space is to crowded, I don't do it.

Money isn't everything, but we all need to survive. I (personally) can't spend 6 months building a system if it has no possible return attached to it
I'm not worried about someone stealing my idea. I'm more on the side of putting together a tech incubator/co-working space in my local community. It's gotten quite a bit of traction and the IP lawyer was speaking at an event the we were hosting.

Since he brought up that, "public use" or making the information "Known". The part that was new to me was that the "one year grace period" apparently no longer exists! So, according to him, it was implied that if were working out of open-floorplan co-working ideas that we're pushing, you would have essentially contributed you inventions to the public domain and couldn't file a patent on it (since the 1 year grace period no longer exists).

This information struck me as an important thing that anyone working in a shared workspace should know & that perhaps have already worked out. Hence, reaching out to HN.

Here's the info of the lawyer who did the presentation:
http://www.hctlaw.com/pages/professionals/stephen-c-thomas-e...
Due to the what? It's not up to the application to decide if its data is useful in other applications or not, that's just ... silly lock-in talk. Quite an annoying attitude, if that's representative.

Luckily I a) can't draw and b) don't have an iPad so I'm not a lost customer.
> Sort of defeats the point of open source, no?

No. You are free to implement the feature yourself and submit a patch to the original author - or fork the project if he doesn't want your patches. That is the point of open source.
I wouldn't say the advice on how to pick an employer is the best one.

I have less than a year of experience in any sort of development. I spent most of that time at a non-profit that gave me a lot of freedom to learn. Small but good team that did government contracting, gave a lot of space to learn, and had people focused on staying on top of the web world.

I since switched jobs and am my company's AngularJS expert, solving any frontend problems that stumps my co-workers as well as architecting the frontend structure for new apps.

I think the important take away is to find an employer that gives you the space & opportunity to learn. Then it is up to you to make the most of it.
> It was a stupid prank. The guy should be fired. 6 years in prison is a ridiculous prospect.

6 years in prison is quite excessive, but the punishment should certainly be more than "Oh you're fired." This person intentionally caused a major public disturbance, and should be fined accordingly. Maybe probation.

There's "putting a flaming bag of poop on your neighbor's doorstep" and then there's "delaying flights out of LAX".
Totally understandable. I'm in a similar position myself (though in a completely different space).

If you ever decided the secret was too much to bear and you'd like to get it off your chest you could always drop me an email (in my profile) and we could discuss it :)
If that actually happened, I'd be overjoyed, until then I'm not going to hold my breath.
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/go/

You can click the "View the file list for `go`" link at the bottom of the page to see what it's pulling in.

Looks like, regardless of architecture, it has compiled forms of the packages from the standard library for both i386 and amd64 as well as their source form.
The fragmentation issue in Mac OS X [1] is the hurdle that has been holding me off from writing apps for Macs. According to [1] (published about half a year ago), the Mac OS X market share breakdown:

26.8% Mountain Lion 10.8

28.0% Lion 10.7

35.1% Snow Leopard 10.6

10.0% Leopard 10.5 and Tiger 10.4

If we assume that half of the macs running Snow Leopard (10.6) are pre-2007 and ineligible for 10.9, we have about 72.3% macs that can upgrade to the free Mavericks, which is great news for Mac App developers.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/ad-network-os-x-is-becoming-fragmented-...
It's more than just the size.

If you pull in lots of dependencies, people think "great, now there are a whole bunch of dependencies that I'll need to keep updated, may break my program if they update in the future, may not be available (or available in the appropriate version) on another platform if I switch platforms, etc."

Dependencies have a cost that is more than just size. There's the extra overhead in managing them any time you need to do something beyond the first time installation.

Sure, if dependencies are all appropriately semantically versioned, with proper symbol versioning and sonames in libraries and so on, and you have a proper packaging system which keeps all of those dependencies updated properly, the cognitive overhead is not that high. But people screw these things up all the time; making backwards incompatible changes without incrementing major versions or updating sonames, packaging systems that don't allow you to have two incompatible versions installed at once, etc. And the larger the dependency set, the more likely it is that you'll run into once of these problems.
Never knew. Thanks.
Things Mavericks Broke - Running list of issues and fixes
It is an invalid comparison. That isn't to say that the community doesn't punish Microsoft-related posts, but self-posts are penalized by the algorithm. Specifically, the score is multiplied by .4 if it doesn't contain a URL.

HN's ranking algorithm[1] (as of 2010-10-12):

(= gravity* 1.8 timebase* 120 front-threshold* 1
nourl-factor* .4 lightweight-factor* .17 gag-factor* .1)

(def frontpage-rank (s (o scorefn realscore) (o gravity gravity*))
(* (/ (let base (- (scorefn s) 1)
(if (> base 0) (expt base .8) base))
(expt (/ (+ (item-age s) timebase*) 60) gravity))
(if (no (in s!type 'story 'poll)) .8
(blank s!url) nourl-factor*
(mem 'bury s!keys) .001
(* (contro-factor s)
(if (mem 'gag s!keys)
gag-factor*
(lightweight s)
lightweight-factor*
1)))))

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417
US government releases draft cybersecurity framework
The key is to be qualified for a job, but not walk into the job a total master of all the tech being used. When I was hunting for a mobile job, I was hunting mobile jobs that didn't use objc because I knew it fairly well, but stuff like phonegap. This allowed me to code entirely in javascript and as a result, I got mobile experience which I wanted + JS experience, tech I haven't really used before. Keeps the job exciting, basically getting paid to learn.
McDonalds e-sport burger McNiP dedicated to NiP
Genuine question: why would you want to create a significant numbers of loop contexts? (Your way does sometimes save one pointer dereference, but that's not what you appear to be talking about.)
What Is Market Cap?
Well, turns out there is Federal Helium reserve:

http://www.blm.gov/nm/st/en/prog/energy/helium/federal_heliu...
The author might not have even chosen an inefficient implementation. For smal sets of data, arrays can easily be faster at search and insertion than hash tables, particularly if the hash function or collision resolution scheme is inefficient.

X having a higher growth rate than Y does not mean that Y is unconditionally faster. It means that there exists some problem size n such that Y is faster than X for all problems larger than n. Below that value, all those terms that big-O notation ignores are still significant performance factors.
PubPeer - Public Peer review of scientific papers
Front-End Web Dev Jokes
This is a silly bunch of pedantic twaddle along the lines of "never assume, when you assume you make an ass out of u and me". The tacit assumption is that we're trusting (or not) Bruce Schneier as a source of information in his subject domain, and not as a mental health professional or holder of ladders.

Do you breathe? Wait -- breathe what? Is the sky blue? Which sky? Where? Let's define our terms! Was this message written in English or are you misreading fluent Alienese?
True, though it does look like this is using `cgo` though (for the Qt support?)

Do those dependencies end up statically linked as well? Otherwise you'll need Qt installed. I don't happen to have it on my system, but I'd imagine Qt is quite large compared to the Go development tools.
I stopped reading the article at the "noboy needs dual ethernet" paragraph.
An A-Z of modern office jargon
For the niches that JS fills, a clear language with few pitfalls would be best.

C++ has a different niche. On top of that, everyone acknowledges the warts of C++, but they're largely necessary for either backward compatibility or performance reasons.
Ruby Treats for October
Thanks! I sent my own Kickstarter out for official review just last night (http://planetoz.net/kickstarter) but I'm going to give this a deep read as soon as I can.

Also, who provided that character art in the animated example?
HealthCare.gov pricing feature can be off the mark [video]
My book is one of the case studies (Mastering Modern Payments). If anyone has any questions fire away!
Beat Bill O'Reilly - Buy my book :)
Flask is inherently simpler/smaller than Django. For doing simple/small web sites its a naturally good fit. However, due to its simplicity it needs to be significantly augmented if you intend to build a more complex web app with it.

Augmenting Flask with a data persistence layer, a RESTful API system, a more robust templating system, and any of the other infrastructure tools you'll need (user auth, session management, xss protection, input cleaning/validation, etc.) is quite complicated. If you go through those steps you'll basically just end up with something like what Django gives you right out of the box. Except that Django's components are well integrated with each other and fully tested, and your custom built system won't be.
same here in Chrome and ie
Linux users: I had to install gecko-mediaplayer to watch this latest video.
I have a hard time using word because it always tries to fight what I am trying to do. It is a complicated piece of software that requires quite a bit of time investment to actually understand how everything works.
That was an illustrator from Mino Monsters. We filmed in their office.