skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm coming to the end of a computer science degree. While I think I could have reached a similar level of practical knowledge if I had taught myself, there are many aspects that I wouldn't have even known about, or wanted to study, which have actually helped me become a better programmer. Even if on a day-to-day basis I don't think about discrete mathematics, compilers, real-time systems, and other things that I've learnt during my degree, having an appreciation for them, and knowing the theory behind certain things helps me loads.

I remember tasking to a software developer who works in a startup, after dropping out of university in the first semester. He has loads of practical experience, has committed to big open source projects, so clearly knows his stuff. I told him how I thought it was funny that Perl's regular expressions were actually Turing complete.

Everyone on my course who I've told this to has found it very amusing, and it really is quite funny if you know the computer science theory behind regular expressions, but this developer stared at me blankly, clearly not understanding it at all. I thought that was as shame, because although I don't write regular expression engines every day, knowing about the differences between classes of languages has influenced my design decisions in software, security considerations, and more.

You don't need a college degree to work as a developer, and that appears to be more and more true all the time. But it could take you many years to achieve the background knowledge, and you will need to put in a huge amount of effort to learn things yourself that you may find irrelevant or boring at the time, because the pay-off in practical application doesn't come until much later.
A dvd is not a good idea, but I don't think people know about those options (LibreOffice etc), so even a nicely made flyer or postcard with very clear instructions may genuinely make a lot of people very very happy.
Are you sure about that?

It's hard to find benchmarks, but things seem to point in the direction of fastcopy still being faster.

See e.g. http://www.sepago.de/e/helge/2011/05/17/fastcopy-free-file-c... (robocopy comparison at the end)

Would be great to see benchmarks of course! :)
I'm not even sure what your responding to?! In no way am I insinuating that tptacek shouldn't participate here or that his voice isn't extremely valuable. I'm not being facetious when I said I'm glad we're both defending him.

I'm logically one of the last people to defend him here having butted heads with him so much, but in fact I deeply value his presence here.

> How would you feel if you saw someone talking like that about you?

I'd probably agree with them. I'm not a high-school kid afraid of how my peers will see me and neither is tptacek. I've said as much about his communication style to him directly.

I highly doubt that tptacek doesn't have enough self-awareness to know that he's a high maintenance debate partner. There's no reason to paint him as a saint, he's just a guy. A very smart guy, but he has his foibles and flaws, which are far outweighed by his contributions. But to ignore those more difficult parts of his personality does him a disservice by not seeing him in his entirety.

I respect the entire person (as much as I can see through the limited lens of HN) not just the parts I think are praiseworthy.
That page, or at least its title, is another slap in the face of Stallman.
> Either you're insinuating that 'tptacek is a malicious actor, or that he's incompetent.

There is a large area missed called psychological bias. People who has close friends working in highly controversial areas has a tendency to become a bit irrational in the view of the controversy. An attack on the NSA becomes an attack of the friend. If NSA is immoral and wrong, the friends choice of occupation must be wrong, thus the friend must be wrong, thus an attack on NSA is an attack of the friend.
Isn't the Saudi kingdom capable of hitting back in terms of oil supplies?
Ask HN: Using a side project at my day job
I've been working on a side project for a while. My current main job is looking to add this ability into their application, and it seems obvious that we could use some the work that I've already done. It's not anything that's specifically tied to what our company does, it's more of a general-purpose tool that anyone with an app could benefit from.

I'm not interested in charging anyone for anything, but I would like to retain the IP rights to my software. My employment contract is relatively lenient in this regard - anything done on my own time, with my own equipment, unrelated to our business I still have rights to.

Some questions I have:

1. What do I need to watch out for from an IP perspective? If using this means that I spend some work time working on it, would getting something in writing acknowledging that this is my IP be enough?

2. Has anyone done anything like this in the past? How was it receieved by your employer? I don't want to give the impression that I'm planning on quitting and pursuing this anytime soon, and being labeled as a flight risk, but on the other hand I don't want to throw away the rights to something I've spent a lot of time on.
Few Macs are sold with DVD drives these days. I'm pretty sure the vast majority would share the fate of the old AOL CD.
Added in edit below - I do like the write-up and have up-voted it!

Another edit: Did you get the job? Or the next interview?

Another post about an old friend. Note that this version is the more common Tortoise and Hare, rather than the Teleporting Turtle[0] version (also known as Brent's Algorithm[1]) that, under some distributions, can be faster.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1068715

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Brent.27s_algor...
BlackBerry hits the reset button on its core business
If buying a tool for $20 gets the job done just as well and saves the "few hours" of learning how to do it so-called "properly", it seems like the correct decision to me.

Based purely on this one single comment (which isn't much to go on to be fair) I wouldn't be giving someone like you too much broad authority on a project because you lack wise judgement skills in my opinion.

Since you mention laughing at people, you may not be aware of it, or care, but people ("idiot" managers and "idiot" users) might very well laugh at you behind their backs as well. If you lack perspective, the ability to consider issues from the point of view of different stakeholders, you're going to see a lot of idiots around you.
Yes, this. There's also one for chrome. You can set it to have the keepass application pop up a yes/no dialog for every requested password so you will be notified whenever the extention requests the password.
This is actually a pretty good idea, except for the fact that most new Macs don't come with DVD drives these days.
Oh that looks nice! I've been looking for something like this and I have been using MobaXterm, but it's a bit clunky from time to time. Will definitely check it out! Thanks.
As one of the people running this project, let me give a quick response that may help you feel better about it.

I'm a technical person and, like you, my first inclination was to simply get on with it: we'd collect some money, then we'd start the audit. We quickly realized it wasn't _quite_ that simple. For one thing we received a whole lot of money, some of which was literally dumped into a personal bank account by IndieGogo. My collaborator on this project, Kenn White, pointed out that we might very well have to pay taxes on this money if we didn't do something to organize. That's a huge waste of our money /and/ yours. Hence the formation of OCAP as a non-profit and creation of a separate bank account. This has taken us some time, but it's worth it. It also requires that we keep track of donations and demonstrate that they were well spent, which is also a good thing.

I should point out that all this work is a royal pain in the butt, and we are not being paid to do this work. We've funded the filing fees out of our own donations.

Second, we wanted to establish a trustworthy board of technical advisors before we went and started spending the money. This has also been quite a bit of trouble, but it's certainly been worthwhile. The full list will be up on our site shortly, but briefly it includes:

Bruce Schneier, Trevor Perrin, Marcia Hoffman, Moxie Marlinspike, Nate Lawson, Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Runa Sandvik, JP Aumasson and James Denaro. Thomas Ptacek has also been on this board, but decided to recuse himself while iSEC was being considered.

I realize this is a large set of advisors, and getting consensus does take some time: but at the end of the day this audit is all about trust. The goal here is to make sure that everybody feels it was run honestly and in public. These are people we trust to call BS if we cut corners or do something shady.

With respect to reviewing the code, I routinely come across bugs in open crypto projects that should have been detected by 'people gawking at the code'. It turns out that in certain areas -- crypto being one -- you need a hell of a lot of domain expertise to find and kill subtle bugs. The people with that kind of expertise often have other things to do. This audit is an opportunity for us to correct that, at least this one time, for one project.

We hope it won't be the last.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane's_Fighting_Ships

Or if you're lazy you just Google up this Wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_of_t...

The USA has ten active Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. Wikipedia claims that the most recent, the USS George H.W. Bush, was completed in 2009 at a cost of $6.2 billion. A bargain compared to the projected cost of the USS Gerald R. Ford, now under construction with a budget of $15.5 billion.

These numbers are ridiculously overlarge in this context, of course, which is the point. Access to the Windows build toolchain is not even a $10M project. It's not a technical problem. You start by just offering the money to the company. A few million dollars, plus a history of enforcing your TOP SECRET security clearances, plus credible assurances that you're not going to launch a competing product, is probably enough to convince the company to just give you what you want. Quietly, of course. No need to spook the other customers.

If that doesn't work, there's always espionage.
How many languages do you speak? If just one, isn't that a bit limited? Anyway learning languages, moreover if it can be useful in your business, should be a no-brainer. Even only for your personal bettering would be worth it.
My degree was in philosophy (from a good college), but I had to work my way up from being an administrative assistant (at a big engineering firm) into development positions. The starting pay was less, I never reached parity with my engineering degree peers. I went back and got a CS degree after (an MS).

It's important to think about these decisions in terms of your career arc. You're in college now, probably finding the same thing that I did when I started an undergraduate degree in CS, (that it is incredibly easy and plays to the LCD of developers).

I remedied this by switching to a major that challenged me. I grew in areas where I needed to (writing and analytical thought).

You might try taking classes outside of your major too. Stick with the CS major, but try to stretch yourself.

Another great option is to start a side project. You have time, something that is diminishing once you are done with school. College is a great (if expensive) startup incubator, and projects look great on the resume.
A great list overall. One alternative I'd offer: he recommends Github for Windows and Tortoise as Git clients. I've been using SourceTree for Windows (http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/) and it's excellent. They've done a great job maintaining and keeping it up to date.
This really helps you appreciate how fast modern technology really is.
... and she's already expected to pay for dinner. ;-)
There's a great deal of insight there. We have definitely run into trouble because we lacked understanding of the language but, more importantly, we lacked understanding of the laws and regulations involved in operating a business here as well. We're definitely learning the hard way but I believe that we need these experiences to improve the way we operate. Especially since we plan to grow into new markets. Even those outside Latin-America. I can only imagine how many languages I will need to learn fluently to be considered a serious business owner then. :(
The guide, as well as this stunt, is laughable. The comparisons aren't even close to being the same value. And I wonder if Apple could sue the FSF for outright lying: nothing about the Macbook Pro is planned obsolescence. You can use it until the parts wear out. For me, my HDD died and it had been about 7 years so I decided to buy a faster model instead of replacing the HDD but it worked the same up until the end.
Interesting to observe that on the subject of Erlang, a very mature and powerful language, along with its incredible OTP framework, there are maybe ten books published (Armstrong lists six; I'm seeing a few others on Amazon).

Compare that to the entire bookcases that have been written about Java, .NET, Visual Basic, etc.
Absolutely agree, free software has so much to offer and yet here we see it being promoted using the most desperate and ineffective means possible: dressing up in costumes and handing out flyers to people - people who quite likely just had a positive buying experience at an Apple store which offered real products and solutions and not some half thought out nonsense on a piece of paper that only a few geeks are likely to understand.

They need to find another way, because this isn't going to win over anyone, and it may lead some to believe that free software folk are desperate nutcases (which couldn't be further from the truth). There is just no thought or substance to this campaign at all.
Show HN: Vector - A High-Level Programming Language for GPU Computing
Asking the motivation behind a question is often helpful in solving the underlying problem. For example, a junior programmer I was working with once asked me how to store arrays in Postgres. I asked why she wanted to, and a non-answer was the most useful reply: "CREATE TABLE a_many_to_many_b ( a_id BIGINT REFERENCES(a.id), b_id BIGINT REFERENCES(b.id))." (Skipping indices, constraints.)

In any case, I'll ask again - could you lay out your reasoning in more detail? I really can't figure out how you determined this implication of the question, what "the problem" (as you perceive it to be) is or why you believe it was "defensive".
Spacewalkers Begin Crucial Repair On Space Station
Good point. She's also not the Queen of England any more anyway.
Of course it is not OK to ask that. Would it be OK to ask "how many Asian people is there on the team"?
France's Carmat implants its first artificial heart in human
That is certainly one possibility, but I have my doubts regarding the actual effectiveness in convince people to change their minds about their consumer habits.

The thing is: the FSF is supposed to be "nerd Hare Krishnas". They don't - rather, they shouldn't - want to compromise. They are advocating Free Software. Not open source. Not consumer-friendly gadgets. Not "cool things that Apple can't do". They will preach that using anything Apple is wrong, and they are rightfully voicing their views.
You can't forget Python tools for Visual Studio http://pytools.codeplex.com/ !
I'm a Free Software Foundation member. I support their goals. But I would rather the money be put towards developing free software and hardware that is friendly to it than these kinds of campaigns.

The reason that people go into the Apple Store rather than buying a fully free software system is that a MacBook Pro Retina is in an entirely different class than a Lemote Yeeloong (one of the few computers that is able to run free software end to end such that Richard Stallman is willing to run it).

I think that working to provide effective free software alternatives, and partnering with hardware companies that supports that mission, would be far more effective than dressing up in a GNU suit outside the Apple store.
Bluetooth remote control ?
Thank you Microsoft, and so long
So, my Coinbase account was hacked, bitcoin stolen, now what?
I check my email to find a message from Coinbase saying "You just sent 0.136 BTC to 12aW81234567890abcdefg..". I never initiated such a transaction. Obviously, I started freaking out a little bit. I log into my Coinbase account (which I felt had a strong password btw), to find my balance near zero. Just great. Thank goodness I hadn't linked a bank account in Coinbase yet, and that the stolen balance was less than $100, who knows what else may have been stolen. I filed a support ticket with Coinbase just hours after this occurred last night, but no response yet.

I'm distraught over this. A hacker can simply break into your account, steal your bitcoin by sending it off to his own account, and no one has to hold any type of accountability? Is there no way to trace, cancel, or reverse a transaction? Is there anything at all I can do?
The Tale of the Teleporting Turtle (repost)
Polymorphism for beginners
This had to be one of the most depressingly naive perspectives on OSS I've seen on this site. It's really just an issue of trading money for convenience for you? Even granting that you're analysis is 100% correct, it's morally suspect. Your saying that now you've got yours, to hell with all the people who can't afford it or don't have access.

Really, you need to think this through a little more carefully. This is just embarrassing.
I've sort of adopted (independently) a mish-mash

I think when we're not under overbearing management constraints, that's what all good developers do. "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy" and usually no architecture survives first contact with reality (unless you force it to).
At this point I'm only fluent in 1 language; English. I would say I'm conversational in Spanish and introductory in German and Italian. It's actually easier for me to write than it is to speak new languages, oddly enough.
> Win7 + copying is decent enough for most non-lan purposes though.

It's not. If a single file fails on Win7 it cancels the whole operation (how is that possible on an OS released in 2009?! Fixed in Win8 though, that will never be used in corporations though), it fails if the path becomes longer than 255 characters etc.

Robocopy works but I'd much rather use rsync which is not available on Windows unless you use hacked up versions with cygwin.

A good reliable copying tool is sorely missing. Sure, there's all sorts of alternatives but I'm not willing to use it unless it's open source. The other comment on this thread talking about FastCopy got me curious, I'll have to try that (it's open source!).
Show HN: time tracking in Emacs without Org-mode
Yes, the problem i have with the built-in windows search is that I never really know what it's searching and therefore i don't know how exhaustive its results are. Agent ransack has a very precise ui, you know exactly what you're searching for and which folders you're searching in. It's great for when you have to trawl through millions of lines of code across dozens of projects to find the references to a database column to be migrated. I use it depressingly often for that, but it does it really well.
Yeah, I wish I had been reading HN back 1,429 days ago.
Why? No one is forced to use a Mac or a PC. And anyone can learn how to install *ix on their hardware if they choose to.
Thanks for mentioning this, I've been looking for such a tool for a while now. It's open source too (a requirement for me)!
I used F.lux for a long time, but now prefer Redshift[1][2] on OS X and Linux. (I think it has Windows support too, although I haven't tried it.) F.lux seemed to use a lot of CPU considering what it was doing.

[1] Linux: try your package manager or <https://github.com/jonls/redshift/>

[2] OS X fork <https://github.com/geofft/redshift>
I wouldn't work in a team with a suspiciously high % of females. Nothing against female programmers per se, but if a company values my contributions less than a female's simply because I have a penis (which seems to be the case with most so-called "gender equality" programs) then I don't want to work for/with them.

So I'd say yes, it's okay to ask.
Prompted by a recent submission[0], this post talks about both the original Floyd algorithm[1] as well as the Brent optimisation[2]. It also mentions the applicability beyond the explicit linked list, in applications such as integer factoring (Pollard Rho[3]).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6946779

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Tortoise_and_ha...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Brent.27s_algor...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollard%27s_rho_algorithm
Y Combinator on YouTube
I love the idea of FSF and of free software. I'm a scientist and in my circles in particular, I can see the virtues of free software, open source, open access, etc.

I think though that for most people, they don't care about an issue like this unless it causes them a problem, for example it prevents them from doing something that they want to do.

So for example if they couldn't play Katy Perry on their iPhones/iPods because somehow Apple was a closed system and Katy Perry wasn't licensed. If Katy Perry could be played legally, openly, freely, on a non-Apple equivalent (key word here is equivalent) music player, then of COURSE people would flock to the free, open device.

The unfortunate fact is however that we have the opposite situation, where for many free/open software/hardware options, the perception (if not the reality) is that the free/open options are in fact not as "nice"/convenient/easy/glittery/appealing to use as the for pay, closed systems.

The perception (if not the reality) is that the free/open options are lower in quality (quality of experience, if not quality of device/app itself) than the options being touted as evil.

The only way to change this situation is to change the perception, and/or change the reality. The big companies like Apple have enormous amounts of money, talent, and will, to dedicate towards marketing (influencing perception). Same goes for the devices/apps themselves.

If you can show people something that they can do easier, better, cheaper, using free/open options than with Apple options, then they will (naturally) move there. What are some examples?
"island"- first single on the EP from 17 yr old singer songwriter, TUSK
I don't think you know much about crack dealing.
As advocated widely in the FP blogosphere. . . not necessarily as commonly practiced in FP programming culture, or supported by many FP languages.

For example, I strongly prefer F# to its cousin OCaml largely because F# uses nominal typing and OCaml uses structural typing. I've also got some misgivings about being overly reliant on type inference. Both structural typing and advanced type inference are admittedly incredibly convenient. What worries me is that they also seem to be incredibly convenient as ways to obfuscate the programmer's intent w/r/t types and their semantics.
or ^[^o].{1,5}$

198 points
Common understanding of the project... yes that is essential. I've got a tangental role on a project right now where that is NOT happening, and predictably the system is a mess. Each developer is being given task assignments by the lead but nobody really understands the overall architecture, goals, and design of the system. I'm actually not sure the lead does either, it's really one of those "make it up as you go" projects. Sadly it'll ultimately be scrapped and have been a waste of time for everyone involved, except to the extent they can learn some lessons from it.
And if I criticize myself, do I make it harder for myself to change?
are there examples in the non-software/electronics realms where free/open/non-restrictive options have been more widely (or even equally) adopted than closed options?