skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> He is a terrible, terrible coder.

I've had an idea brewing in my head for quite some time, and while I still don't quite have the words to express it completely, it more or less boils down to this:

There isn't necessarily a correlation between being a good programmer and shipping a successful product.

Now of course we can argue over the definition of "good programmer" and "successful product".

I started as a hobby programmer in my childhood and teens, then went to college, and since then have written code for various companies. For several of the earlier years (including college), I had this wide-eyed fantasy of the brilliant, beautiful code that I would work on once I became a "Real Programmer" (whatever that means).

My hopes and ambitions shattered once I got into the workplace and discovered some of the slop that I had to maintain. Then for a few years I was on a crusade to banish all ugly code from whatever project I happened to be working on at the time.

Lately I've realized that having pristine, elegant code is NOT the goal. The goal is to ship software that people actually use. I don't really know much about the internals of minecraft, but I do know that nearly half of the teenagers in my neighbourhood spend hours and hours playing minecraft.

I have to admit that I'm still an idealist at heart, and of course the best situation would be to have a project that is both externally successful and well-designed (making it simple to fix bugs and add new features and such), but I'm constantly having to remind myself to stop trying to get everything perfect and just write code.
As a 31-year-old systems architect and software developer who dropped out of university: I realized that I had to choose between a degree I would enjoy that would be useless in getting me a job, and a degree that I would hate that would be useless in getting me a job. I wasn't cut out for EE or CS, and I didn't have the math marks to get in (and I didn't realize at the time that a lot of my problem was ADD-related). So… I left.

In the end, I lucked my way through a succession of jobs, due in part to the fact that my chosen career, systems admin, doesn't really have a university career path leading to it, so my personal experience was worth as much as anyone else's.

My recommendation: do lots of projects, contribute to open-source, put a bunch of personal projects up on github (and do them right; document them well and write good code), and apply to forward-thinking companies (startups, etc.). Show that you can do the work and no company worth their salt will care too much about how you learned it.
Incomplete fix to CVE-2013-0155 (Unsafe Query Generation Risk)
Notch's code is worth $150 million dollars. What's the going rate for "a damn" these days?
Recycling A Brand: Social Media Breathes New Life Into Iconic Ball Brand
> My college experience (non-technical bachelors) was just a joke

I'm sorry for you. My college experience was very valuable to me (not for the diploma, nobody cares about my diploma, least of all me). I learned a great deal about how to solve problems, how to figure out what was important, how to separate truth from crap, how to learn, and the confidence that I can do it.

Caltech's honor system has also been very formative for me and I've applied it since then with considerable success.

The more I hear about other peoples' college experiences, the more I appreciate how lucky I was to wind up at Caltech.
I think It's because the branch target is a memory access, so the dcache causes the execution pipe to stall on the load. In the tight loop with a call, the branch target is a call and there is time enough to pull from dcache before the load data is needed. I suspect that the i7 can't pull data from dcache immediately the jne instruction, so you get a hiccup. Try adding a second noop in to tightloop as the target for jne.
http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/
That's an excellent resource for modern OpenGL, I have links for a few others at home that I can't recall off the top of my head.
Fear of Starting
How about something with a hardware keyboard. Really sad to see those have disappeared from the market.
That makes sense. I guess it isn't one field per say - the media was for computer security, but the rest is all about helping entrepreneurs.
Thank you for helping rational behavior continue.

It's not all bad everywhere though. When he was in elementary school, we were asked to come in and pick our son up one day. Apparently he claimed that he was going to "blow up the building and kill everyone." The principal understood that as a 7 year-old he was probably kidding, but had to make a point that the behavior was unacceptable so he had to leave for the rest of the day. No police being called, no lockdown, no suspension. Just go home and talk to your parents and come back the next day.

(And a bit later, I realized the reason the phrase sounded so familiar is because he heard it in a movie ("Deck the Halls") we had watched a week earlier.)

On the other hand, when a bomb threat was found in the High School in the same district, the entire school district was locked down, kids in the HS evacuated, bomb disposal teams called in and the kid responsible tossed in jail for making threats of terrorism.

Point being is that some school districts do take care to have a measured response to these things.
I think the best answer is to take the size of the parent and child strings into account. If the parent is 1M and the child is just a few bytes then make a copy so the parent can be freed up. Otherwise use the old behavior.
Kumu Networks - Santa Clara, CA - http://kumunetworks.com/

Kumu Networks is revolutionizing the way wireless systems are built using an innovative full-duplex wireless design that its founders developed as a research project at Stanford. Wireless full-duplex allows a radio to transmit and receive signals at the same time using a single frequency channel. Kumu's patent pending full-duplex technology changes the basic assumptions on which current wireless radios are built, allowing for improved performance and reduced complexity across a variety of wireless devices and markets.

We're looking for well-rounded systems programmers with a strong embedded systems, C, Linux, and networking background. Fluency in Python and Git are big pluses. In addition, we're looking for software engineers with a background in cellular stacks, and algorithms scientists with a background in optimization. See more information on open positions here: http://www.jobscore.com/jobs/kumunetworks.

Apply on jobscore or email resumes and/or questions to jobs@kumunetworks.com. Please mention Hacker News!

This is a well-funded technology startup with a small team, a highly cross-disciplinary environment (algorithms, mixed-signal, RF, digital hardware, and FPGA engineers), and a very concrete mission!
Show HN: Author Rank
You're omitting the likelihood that your applicant pool is tainted by compensation that's not inline with what your desired candidates want. (Note: this is not the same as what comp firms tell you is the 85th percentile or whatever.) (I know, you're "generous" for the market, which also claims a talent shortage and may have the same problem.)

But...approaching the edge case, do you think you would see more qualified candidates in your applicant pool if you advertised & offered a $1m/year package for the positions? Have you tried advertising the positions at double (or triple) the compensation to see if that changes matters? If you didn't test this, how do you know that the applicant pool has nothing to do with what you're willing to pay?

I'm here in Atlanta, and I can cite examples of people leaving for SF because their expected compensation goes up by a triple-digit percentage (sigh, candidates ignore costs but that's a different story). This effect changes the applicant pool in SF, perhaps boosting comp by 100%+ would work for your company locally? Certainly poaching talented employees gets easier when you offer a raise of $100k to join your firm.

Put another way: why would employment be different from other supply/demand markets where price matters, even if the price being asked is potentially distasteful to the buyer (see TSLA, AMZN, TWTR, FB, NYC apartments, or the flavor of your choice)?
can you elaborate on what's so terrible about his coding style?
Please send me bitcoins :)
16fxEqXfzWqGCUd6EmuPVhv7nxzv24UWb7
Yes, I have just tried and it does not work.
That's Nehalem u-arch, which (unlike Sandy Bridge and Haswell), does not have a u-op cache. So that's an interesting data point.
This proposed new method seems way over complicated to me.
Really? I had no issues reading it and completely understood the content.
Is the 18 u-op limit still the case for Haswell?
It's also far more valuable to teach your kids to save for their own college. A few years of odd jobs, paper delivery, whatever will make them appreciate that money isn't infinite. My parents didn't (and couldn't) afford to pay for my college, and thanks to that I knew that every year I stayed would be another ten grand in debt I would have to pay off. That led to me leaving university after a pointless year and going into the workforce. As I suspected, it was the best education-related decision I'd made.

That said, be careful. Student loans offices generally make the assumption that parents will contribute towards their kids' education; if the current status quo does remain at that point (and I hope it doesn't) they may find themselves unable to afford college because they'll be told that you'll be paying for half of it.
CVE-2013-6271: Remove Device Locks from Android Phone
Cyber Monday Sales at Record as Amazon, EBay Win Shoppers
I don't follow what you're asking for. Since you got a really cheap initial price, you feel that you should get a cheap upgrade price?
UI Designer plugin for AppCode is available in early preview
I have had success debugging iOS Safari layout issues with https://github.com/google/ios-webkit-debug-proxy. It claims to support Linux, but I have only used it on a Mac. Could be worth a shot.
Not quite (we've been meaning to ship this for awhile now), but we were definitely delighted by the timing of your comment. :)
It previously wasn't clear that is how substring operated. In fact the Javadoc didn't even mention it. "new string" is rather misleading here.

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/String.ht...

Not documenting it in the Javadoc kind of makes sense since it is an implementation specific detail whether substring returns a view onto the original char array or not. However, it is certainly surprising that what is apparently a 2 character string could be taking up gigabytes of ram.

It's the kind of behaviour that it would be useful to express and be able to choose via the API. e.g. make people write .substring(n).view() or .substring(n).copy() or similar.
I don't see why you're upset. Think globally. Millions of users are paying for the bands you like that they'll never listen to.
>>Most EU countries

>Here in Switzerland

The last time I checked Switzerland was not in the EU.
Not necessarily. FIDO fixes this.

http://www.fidoalliance.org/user-experience.html
Sir_Cmpwn's assessment of Notch was harsh, but not wrong.

Notch isn't in the same league as a John Carmack, for example. The most recent release of Minecraft saw massive changes to the underbelly of the game, all of which is being done by Mojang staff other than Notch. The game does have a ton of warts, especially where modding is involved, which can be traced to some of Notch's technical decisions.

Does that mean that Notch is a bad person? A fool? No, neither. Notch had a vision for Minecraft, followed it, and because of that work is now a very rich man who can afford to play with whatever technology he wishes. I wish I was like Notch.

Let's not shoot the messenger here.
No. But if the site gets hacked, I failed. If I asked users for their credits cards and stored it in a publicly accessible plain text file or in a secure system that still gets hacked the end result is still the same. My users are having unauthorized payments coming off their credit cards. I've failed.

Maybe I can sleep better at night if I didn't go storing them in plain text and I can make up excuses easier, but I still failed. Regardless of how likely any breach was, I failed. My customers have probably jumped ship.

If I store it in plain text and I never get hacked, then I've succeeded. I'm more likely to succeed the more security I add, but if it gets stolen then it doesn't matter anymore. Basically I'm trying to imply that success or failure is a boolean based on real world results and does not depend on the amount of effort placed into the security. The security can influence the result, but once the result occurs the security I used or did not use is irrelevant.

So skimping on security is always a terrible idea. If you know of a way to increase security, then you should increase it. If you offer a bug bounty to improve security, make sure you give a reward for any possible breach that could cause you to get hacked, regardless of whose 'fault' the vulnerability is. If someone can social engineer your developer, then pay out the bounty. Maybe it won't happen next time because now the developer has learned something.
I'd just like to point out to all the downers out there: the pricing on this service is easily justified if you compare it to the cost of having to drive all the way to a Fedex facility, wait in line behind other similarly inconvenienced human beings, and drive all the way back. Even if you work for minimum wage, the cost of gas plus the value of your time far exceeds the $7 delivery fee.

I'm pretty excited to try this out!
Isn't this basically what the Arabian Nights book is?

1001 stories and poems to read before bed.
I've always wondered about the reputed benefit of learning to think critically from a liberal arts education.

For example, with engineering, an airplane built from your design flies or does not. There's no pretending it flies when it doesn't. Reality cannot be fooled, so one is forced to learn to think critically.

But with liberal arts, the same person can argue both points of view with equal facility - how does one tell which is correct? What good is being able to criticize without a mechanism for determining the correct way? Or even a better way?
Couldn't agree more. Notch his success has nothing to do with being good at programming. It's about being creative and able to create good game play.

Because he programmed game play routines a lot and dealt with everything involved (i.e graphic rendering and such) more than the average Joe it looks like he is a good programmer because he just shakes it out live on some streaming website. Those concepts are language-agnostic and you can remember them.
Could this be due to throttling down as per heat? First benchmark would cause more heat to be generated, thus throttling down going on?
How We Built Our Backend on Akka and Scala
As amusing as your wordplay might be, the point being made is that Notch's coding skill should not be idolized or used as a reference for writing good code. A tangible consequence of his inability is that Minecraft takes up far more resources than it reasonably should and is very difficult to maintain, which has been echoed by several Mojang devs who have since picked it up.
My gut tells me that there are a lot of well-regarded programmers with an education in Philosophy.
Stay away from NeHe tutorials, they are badly written and really old. Pretty much everything they cover is deprecated and done in otherwise old fashioned ways.

This is a big problem with OpenGL tutorials in general, a lot of them cover old stuff that shouldn't be used any more.

The entire OpenGL fixed function pipeline is deprecated, replaced by programmable shader pipeline. It's a lot more work to get simple stuff done with shaders but it pays off in the end.

If you're looking to write a game (and not an engine) it may be a good idea to get an engine and not write "raw" OpenGL at all.
Any source on the specific length of time after drinking one should avoid paracetamol?
Ask HN: How could tech fix elections?
I know it's more complicated than that. Tech alone is not sufficient, but it can at least help.
I'm planning to start an open-source project to build an app for the brazilian elections (held in October).

My early ideas are:
(a) List of candidates (duh) with parties, voting history, wealth, media coverage, etc. All sortable and comparable

(b) Quizzes to suggest candidates based on the respondend opinions

(c) Some sort of social integration to know which candidates yout friends support

In Brazil we have multiple strong parties (at least 5) and some 20 or so smaller parties that together will "churn" some 20k candidates. Our voting system makes the total pool of candidates for a voter to be in the hundreds; an app that could (just as pandora does) recommend new candidates and ideas could be useful. Filter the signal from the noise.

So, what would YOU want on an app to help you vote? Suggestions on functionalities and architecture?

Thanks folks.
Very few folks are idolizing him for his code correctness, but for his ability to prototype and ship.

I've worked with developers like Notch. I like them because they can create rapidly iterate apps/sites/ideas that normal people/users understand and critique. Then developers like me come in and polish the turds under the covers so we can ship and maintain.

He's not writing SQLite or Space Shuttle code, it's a amusement.
"What it's like to fail": David Raether giving signed copies of his memoir
This change is going to destroy the performance of a lot of apps that have not been modified in years.... There are lots of programs that might substring every word in a large block of text...

Letting a programmer use too much memory and have to learn why, and when to copy is much better than drastically changing the runtime characteristics of many existing programs. Not copying is way more efficient, you just need to be in the know-

There are even solution that can do both like conditional copying or keeping track of the parent and doing a conditional copy if needed at GC time.
"I said he can't code worth a damn"

Go and get developers at various companies. Not necessarily game companies, get someone that is payed a salary for "coding".

Give them some rough specifications (for example, a simple maze, simple lighting) and ask for Dart/WebGL to be used, and a timeframe of one month.

See what happens.

Based on my experience, 5% of developers may present something like it.

So, ok, Notch may produce spaguetti code, bugs, etc, but he's probably in that top 5% of developers. (Which is also debatable because someone may be good at, let's say, web development but couldn't code a game to save their lives)
Yes, but the (theoretical) only limiting factor on the market in a hundred years will be the cost of transaction fees. Which will be the cost of energy to maintain it. Theoretically a transaction fee will be the same regardless of amount of bitcoins in the transaction.
I strongly disagree. In the Australian system everyone gets a higher education loan from the government(with interest locked to the inflation rate and repayment only required if and when taxable income passes a certain threshold), and yet our tuition rates are much lower than in the US.

For example, I just finished a Bachelors degree in a STEM field at a relatively middle of the road university and my total education debt comes out just short of $30k.
Firefox OS: Telecom Italia begins selling One Touch Fire
Yeah, I don't understand why the JDK dev did not take this approach.

Even better, they can add a new API that allows developers specify the implementation that fits better. Something like String.substr(..., boolean allocateSpace) that defaults to the original behavior of substr.
In some fields, and at some levels of mastery, yes, feedback may not be necessary. If someone is truly at the top of their craft, pushing the bounds, with no superiors or peers, feedback could be destructive. I posit that most people aren't at this level, and those who think they are probably aren't. Even so, contemplation would probably be a good idea, but that's probably already happening in those cases anyway.
While I took mostly STEM classes in college, I did also take a couple accounting classes. If you don't know the basics of double entry bookkeeping and the jargon that goes with it, you're a bit crippled when working in any sort of business.
I'm a physicist, so very much not a biologist or epidemiologist. You should definitely take what follows with a pound of two of salt.

You are correct, of course. I might have tried to say too much in a single sentence, I did say "likely make it less agressive" because that's what usually happens with the flu (even true for the 1918 Spanish flu). Of course, this is not a requirement, and you have the example of Smallpox with a 30% mortality rate and an R0=B/v in your notation of around 5 (flu is usually ~1.2-1.5).

There's usually a problem in terms of notation and confusion when moving from "intra-host" populations to "inter-host" populations. Starting with intra-host, a "good" quasi-species argument for why this is likely is:

If you assume that mortality is one of the dimensions of the high dimensional "genetic vector" space and person to person transmissibility another, by randomly exploring the space through mutations and reproducing the mutations that produce more offspring you are likely to move away from the "high mortality" area unless that's somehow important for viral survival. Any virus that is able to keep the host alive for longer with have more time to explore it's genetic space for longer to find the region where it is able to spread more easily and will also likely generate hosts with higher viral load leading to easier inter-host transmission. Or, as you say,

a disease that kills more slowly, or kills less, will spread more.

It's not easy to talk about these things just considering Beta because Beta hides many factors, such has number of contacts, probability of exposing another person to the virus, host viral load (which affects how many virions a person is in contact with), etc...

A simpler and perhaps not completely correct way of saying this is that "it's hard to spread if you kill your host too quickly" because you have less time to generate a high viral load, less generations between transmissions to look for beneficial mutations, etc...

As an extreme example, you have HIV which has a generation time of a few hours and a huge mutation rate, so each few hours your immune system has to deal with a "new" virus until it can no longer cope. As I've heard several people say, HIV wins the war by losing every battle.
Data Visualization and D3.js Newsletter - Issue 55
No, he isn't. He's saying that he's sad that people only care about how people are willing to pay for awesome convenience and not something more interesting.
Blockbuster: who needs hits?
The Peak+ isn't available. It seems like they have canceled it, unfortunately. If you read the forums then a few people with pre-orders have had them bumped to the Revolution.

I'm sure the GP guys are doing their best - they seem to have more updates for the Keon and Peak than ZTE does for the not-so-Open, that's for sure - but all hype and no products available is not a good way to go about things.
Well, said. Have you written any more on this subject?
Let me give an example:

Say I pay $10/month and only listen to 2 artists, each with .001% market share. IMO, each one should get $3.50 from my pool of subscription money. Using their current scheme, each would get $0.00007 while Lady GaGa would get $0.30 when I didn't even listen to Poker Face.
I don't understand. $50K being asked by professors and PhD students? They certainly enjoy funds orders of magnitude more. $50K is like two YC startups' seed money.

Why do they want it? Can't they self-fund it? Or do they just want other people to share the glory? Isn't the equipment shown in the video worth as much, or probably more?