skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just turned 20, and I've ruined the best opportunity I could ask for.
Any advice is greatly appreciated. I'm a third-semester university student, and finals are hitting me, along with the sickening realization that I have fucked up big time: I'm on the verge of flunking out of college.

I started programming when I was 13, enamored with the world of video games and forums and the internet. Since then, I've amassed a string of unfinished projects, ranging from a DHTML text RPG to a Node.js CMS. Almost 2 years ago I started planning what would become my LLC, a user experience-conscious software development company. My goal was to develop a new forum software to bring change to an area of the internet that had seemed stagnant for a decade. I was not the only one with the idea--right as my design for the product was solidifying and I was ready to start development in full, Jeff Atwood announced Discourse.[1] I eventually dropped the idea of building the forums and decided to move on. The forums became just another unfinished project.

I learn, tinker, and design endlessly. I know how to learn and I know I can be a great programmer. And yet I still treat school like I'm 13. I came into college with 31 credit hours through my high school classes. My first semester was a breeze, and I got an easy 3.33 GPA. After that, I slacked off big time. I decided I could pass the tests without going to class. I decided I could pass the class without doing homework. I got stuck on the law of diminishing returns and my GPA plummeted last semester, and this semester doesn't look good either.

Do I plead for grace to stay another semester and clean up my act? Or should I withdraw now and begin building up a portfolio and finding that business I can start? I'll have to work a side job, and I won't have a lot of money. I don't want money, though. I just want to build something that is a meaningful experience for someone else.

Where do I go from here?

[1] http://www.discourse.org/about/
Maybe so, but the person writing this article isn't a practitioner of hard sciences, she's a journalist.
I've read about it being in some car(s) maybe a decade ago. Haven't heard about it since. Probably not something users want.
Four Steps Process to Enhance the US PISA Test Results as PTUC
Teachers Are The Pioneers Who Address Educational And Social Issues Including Poverty. They Must Be Further Enabled, Consulted And Supported.
The Sales office is located in Prague, with a small Dev department. Most R&D is in St. Petersburg and in Munich.
It is really nice to get a coherent, human view from inside the security and intelligence community. To the best of my knowledge, the article reads as an honest and true account of security service culture of integrity and professionalism. Kudos to him, and kudos to his colleagues as well for their restraint and their service.

I am pleased to see him hint at the exposure and vulnerability of the general public to surveillance by third parties, when he describes of the ongoing battle to dominate electronic systems, being waged by various nation-states and criminal gangs around the world. (I refuse to use that horribly juvenile construction "cyber-war").

However, we still have some way to go before we fully confront the magnitude of the problem, and are able to formulate a sensible and coherent response.

Our military forces and security services are rightly part of our response to this vulnerability, but they cannot be the only tool that we deploy. Societies that lean to heavily on their armed forces and security services quickly feel the negative effects of their reliance, no matter how well-intentioned, well-disciplined and professional the servicemen and servicewomen may be.

Civil society needs to step up to the plate also. The problem is difficult, and the response needs to be multifaceted and broad. As engineers, we need to make our systems more secure and more trustworthy - and we need to make tools for the creation of secure and trustworthy systems ubiquitous.

For example, I am writing software for advanced driver assistance systems & autonomous vehicles -- I need to think very very carefully about how I can make my software secure and robust from attack; I need to educate my colleagues about the risky environment that we will be operating in, and together, we need to come up with standards and processes to help us ensure that the software we create minimises the risk posed by malicious actors.
Bitcoin Fees
We are working on an interview with Andrei Ivanov, JetBrains Chief Operating Officer, that will likely answer this. For the time being, JetBrains was founded in 2000 in Prague by three software developers: Sergey Dmitriev, Valentin Kipiatkov, Eugene Belyaev. The headquarters and international sales office has remaining in Prague while the company continues to grow.

In total there are 8 JetBrains offices, in addition to remote workers: http://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/
This is what the wikipedia says about Pavel[0]:

>Durov holds libertarian economic and political views and says he is a vegetarian and identifies as a Taoist. He published anarcho-capitalist manifestos describing his ideas on improving Russia. On his 27th birthday, he donated a million dollars to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Well, I think I'd rather trust them than Google or Facebook, after all, you've got to trust somebody.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov#Personal_life
Node does offer a lot of advantages beyond just many concurrent connections... A single language paradigm for client and server is big... the exact same language/structure/models for client and server communications and validation is pretty big. Many client-side tools utilize node.js these days as well.

In general node.js combined with npm bring a lot less friction to development than other languages. Using node to create shim services for a front end communicating through to different backands is brain dead simple as well. In fact there's been a few times that creating a service in node.js to communicate with an ill-defined backend was so much easier in node compared to the static language the main application was working in it was a no brainer.

Utility scripts in JS can also be pretty useful.. any kind of stream manipulations work well in node.js too.

This doesn't even mention that JSON (current data transmission structure du jour) is native to the environment. And storage systems like MongoDB (couch, rethinkdb and others) is really transparent to node.

I couldn't even begin to all list the advantages, but here are a few.. the event loop system, libuv library bindings internal to node.js, language singularity, the npm system and over 40k modules...
Alternet is an upstanding source without any bias and is an example of flawless journalism in this age where every media outlet is a propaganda machine.
hhariri writes, "The Sales office is located in Prague, with a small Dev department. Most R&D is in St. Petersburg and in Munich."
> Telegram is decentralized!

Great. Then...

> Telegram servers are spread worldwide for security and speed.

So this is what they mean by decentralized....

> As a result, Telegram is the fastest and most secure messaging system in the world

And this has exist for how many years?

I can probably say everything except private message, google hangout or Facebook chat is already doing it. They have some of the top-notch security, network and distributed system developers and they have their own cable delivering more volume than your new service can combine together. and if I want true privateness? I'd one-time pad everything. in reality, I guess PGP is good enough.
> Do you blame the scalpel for being too sharp, or the surgeon for handling it incorrectly?

None of the above, if anything I'd blame people for being mere tools.
Some of them are pretty blatant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLzMVMPd_4Y

"Don't believe me? Bing it!"
I don't understand, how is this thing on top of hacker news, while it's being deconstructed like it's a toy ?
On the other hand, sports performance is easier to measure than professional, white-collar job performance. If they ever start measuring every stat about your daily job performance, then what you say would be true. Otherwise, I don't see how they will even determine who is performing worse, let alone weed them out.
Other countries are doing wholesale spying too and analogues to NSLs exist elsewhere, albeit without a gag orders, e.g. RIPA in the UK.
There isn't any specific reason, really. It's a matter of preference, and they can be used interchangeably (which wasn't always the case) nowadays.
New Volvo cars to get ground-breaking safety tech
Go Advent Day 16 - Coconut: a pure Go blogging engine
RMDB?
Oh .. just a few video arcade games you might have heard of .. Defender, Joust .. Juno First .. and so on .. so, actually quite a few games machines use the 6809 cpu ..
Piracetam was first synthesized in 1964 and has been studied ever since. Don't worry, it's safe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam#History
I'm no Franzen fan, but I think the title's a bit harsh.
Is committing tired more dangerous than committing tipsy?
They are -- I know a couple people that have had them installed.
make sure to check out their structure definition language:

http://core.telegram.org/mtproto/TL-dependent

look like a great parody to me? can't tell if they are serious with these 'dependent types'
Hoe doe je aan gevelreiniging voor een lange levensduur?
Have you tried the app? I've moved my top-5 chats from WhatsApp just because of speed! The messages are sent really fast. But if you know any other messenger apps for iOS, which are just about so fast, I'll definitely give them a try.

Anyway yep, these marketing stuff is a bit too dubious, but what should they write?

* is rather fast, faster than some applications

* can self-destruct, but sometimes can not (Ha!)

* etc

That's not the thing that happens in real world nowadays.
I'm no economist, but isn't that congruent with how similar things like Gold are treated?
A journalist for a magazine focused on presenting hard sciences to the masses.
I didn't try to imply that it was difficult to find the performance problem. It's an observation on something else: Haskell is often mentioned for its equational reasoning. I find it interesting that correct equational reasoning in this case lead to a correct program, but one with absymal performance.

It'd be interesting to think how one could encode performance characteristics into equations.
Here is AppGratis real story
The link isn't for https://telegram.org/.
I love this post.

Today most of game programmers just ask for a bigger GPU.
I installed the "Mindful Browsing" plugin for safari 3 months ago (it delays you accessing a 'blocked' site for 10 seconds). The only blocked site is reddit, as I would frequently find myself typing it in without thinking after opening a new tab. I haven't been to reddit in 3 months, and i don't miss it - HN usually curates what I'm interested in.

As for HN, I just check it twice a day, and refuse to go more than 2 pages in! If I find myself using it more frequently, then ill probably use the anti-procrastination functionality in my account settings.
What about timestamps from that logic ? I think there, hour is the most important datum, then month, then day, as you state it. Minutes come after that. Year is not that relevant, and seconds are very secondary. So, my comment is written at 11-12-16:59-2013:10 GMT+1. Not very readable for sure, but much more practical ;)
icc -fno-alias -Wall -std=c99 -finline-functions -Ofast -march=native loop-optimization.c -o loop

http://pastebin.com/qjEPy6Y0

Late night here in California. Good night!
We've just begun to explore rivers
> I feel that JS is sort of a second class citizen to most back-end developers.

I'm not what one might consider a back-end developer (or a web developer at all, for that matter), but the overgrowth of web tools in the web 2.0 aftermath has made web tools somewhat hard to ignore as of late, so I had to sporadically develop what can be considered back-end code. Even front-end, which I have done grudgingly.

To me, JS -- and in fact the whole web environment -- is a second-class citizen. I come from a vastly different background (embedded and systems programming), and the fact that people manage to write anything useful with today's web technologies is astounding. I honestly admire the craftiness of web developers, although I have very few good words to say about pretty much anything else that comes out of their hands.

I cannot help seeing them as second-class citizens because:

1. They are simply tools made for different purpose. HTML is there to annotate the structure of some content, CSS is to annotate its appearance, JS is for some limited interaction. What people managed to build with these limited tools, compared to the crap we were writing the last time when I seriously touched web programming (let's just say that PHP wasn't yet popular when that happened), is astounding, but I cannot help wondering if the web wouldn't be a lot better if people had actually stopped to think about better tools for a moment. Every time I see yet another awesome demonstration of a JS game, my initial enthusiasm is chased away by the realization that thirty years later, people are still enthusiastic about stuff you could make on an Amiga, were it not for the gazillion cycles wasted between the hundreds of abstraction layers involved in painting a pixel and for the latency involved with pretty much every I/O operation.

2. It's shaggy. Dear God, it's shaggy, full of barely-documented hacks. If you want your webpage to have a drop-down menu, there's a thousand something.js packages that help you do that, but all of them have their own quirks, their own issues with styling, their own little manner of use and so on. It reminds me of writing X11 applications using nothing but Xlib, when everyone was using their own menu widget that worked in a slightly different manner from every other application. The Unix desktop was not too fun to use back then, and the fact that people not only consider that kind of behaviour to be OK now, but actually want it, is beyond comprehension to me. It doesn't help that a large portion of the community seems to struggle with even the most basic programming concepts, which makes reading source code or documentation a very unpleasant experience.

3. The tooling is terrible (but this one is becomming less and less of a grievance).
I don't blame them; you can't buy much with bitcoins, everyone treats it as an asset whose value is entirely determined by the current exchange rate / buy/sell prices, and that exchange rate is so unstable, no sane bank would want to offer services for it.
Yes, anybody who wants definitely has remote 0days - they're available on the market, you simply buy them. Of course, they might 'expire' at any point, but there's a whole industry that's finding (or making?) new ones and selling them to be exploited, not fixed.
Gotta love the names..Krunk mode and Balmer mode. Who woulda thunk of that..oh no one except a drunkard. :-)
My Personal API
The advantage of using yyyy-mm-dd, beside the fact it is a standard, is that it is unambiguous. When I read a date like 12-11-2013, I don't know if we're talking about the 12th of november as we French correctly write it, or about the 11th of december as those bloody arrogant US American incorrectly do.

But 2013-11-12 is non-ambiguous since (I guess) nobody uses a yyyy-dd-mm format.
It must be quite funny to be in a company where almost nobody communicate in his native language. I've seen some russian language messages in youtrack followed by a stern response to write in english in public places.

The trick is always the same, when you use english as the common language in your company, you immediately give a strong communication power to native english speakers, they always look so confident when they speak. They look more professional by not doing mistakes, by using a wide vocabulary and by mastering the corporate lingo. That's a place where Europe could innovate: finding a third way between using English that completely obliterate non-native speakers in arguments and using hundred of translators, one for each couple of languages.
Pretty sure that's been a warning for a long long time in most compilers. They require you to wrap the assignment to suppress it, that is:
if ( (foo=bar) )

Anyho, it really depends on what your -W level is set to. It's good practice to use "-Wall"
Great story, thanks for this; it's a refreshing change from bitcoin and VC chatter.
...and if you'd like to create yours, this makes it really easy: http://github.com/azer/personal-api
Nice move by Google..

As per their official statement, it is still to early for Google to enter in robotics market but it will be huge market for sure!
If my experience is anything to go by, I assume that they went to Russia to take advantage of the high availability of smart and importantly mathematically-inclined developers.

That's important for a company who are building tools that lean heavily on compilers/compiler techniques..
I do this often, it helps to break the habitual cycle.
I got no sense of what the app really does until i saw the video.... at the bottom.

Please make more examples at the beginning of the site, i don't want to search or scroll to find what the app DO.
A lot of comments but they done seem to be of high quality.
> If you bother to pay attention what FB DB engineers say you will know that they have their arms shoulder deep into the innards of the database itself, I/O stack, all that jazz.

Most of us can't afford that, and want something that's pretty good out of the box. I've used Mysql a number of times, but it always seems to have more gotchas for what I need to do with it than Mysql.
I am sorry buy BOA's analysis was just as much mindless speculation as the comments by the Winklevii (if not more)..
it was originally meant to be snowden... but you are right, it can apply to the pope... i'd never thought of what he does as 'enlightening' but i guess it could be construed as such by those he is there for... :)
Well, there's "completely unable to find work" and there's "unable to find good enough work to make the move worthwhile" - especially if your salary (or lifelong dreams) depend on you using your unusual specialist skills.

Let's say I'm an expert in discovering new drugs, and my partner is a dancer for a professional ballet company.

For me to take a job that ended her professional career (or vice-versa) the payoff would have to be huge.
Except if it is http://www.jsbin.com/ :)

But I feel exactly like you.
So that's where our license fees are going...
> you've got to trust somebody.

Better the devil you know?
You're almost there.

You've realised you have a problem, you know that most HN articles aren't helping. The next step is to practice acting the way you want to. (This is a really useful life skill in other areas too).

Consciouslly look down the list of HN stories and deliberately think about each one for five seconds. Ask yourself "Will this story add anything to my knowledge?"

If it will, then open it. If it won't then make a decision to not open it.

Note the ones that you opened which turned out to add nothing, so that you can make a better decision next time.

Practising this a few times will start to turn it into a habit, and then an instinct. If you need help to start with then write on a post-it note "Does it add anything new?" and stick it on your monitor, but once you've been doing it for a while it should come naturally.

Add a note to your calendar (or whatever you use for future tasks) for three days from now, a week from now, two weeks from now, and a month from now, reminding yourself to check that that this habit is working for you.

The _vital_ part here is embedding mindfulness - making a _conscious_ decision about what you do, rather than simply mindlessly clicking on things in search of a hit.
Sure, if by "fairly recent" you mean at least more than twenty years ago:

http://gcc.gnu.org/viewcvs/gcc?view=revision&revision=1853
> I can probably say everything except private message, google hangout or Facebook chat is already doing it. They have some of the top-notch security, network and distributed system developers

... and they are based in US of NSA - no thanks.
It was a guess on the reason, I guess I am wrong, but my point is still valid in general.
- Browser plugin : block 'useless' sites entirely (for me, that's reddit, boingboing and a few others). I can check these out on my tablet at home, but not on my work PC

- HN noprocrast. I have this set to 30 mins max, refreshing after 8 hours. Which allows me 1 visit per day, which I can make the most of - rather than my previous must-check-every-5-minutes.

As soon as I couldn't just flick to [random website] I found I was able to concentrate longer on the real tasks at hand.
> I'm wondering if, rather than transform yourself into a
> magical-unicorn designer/hacker - it might be better to
> get solid at development, solid at design, but aim to
> only get good enough that you can manage people who are
> better at you in those areas?

Depends on your definition of "better". The market clearly treats the three skills (dev, design, management) as separate things, so really you don't even need to be "solid" in more than one if you define "better" as "above average salary". If you define "better" as "can move the project forward without finding another person to help", then becoming a "superhero" is what you should do.

Note that "we're still figuring out what this product is" stage startups really hope to find these "superhero" types, as they can litterally breathe life into a product by themselves. Larger companies can't depend on hiring people with all skill sets, as they're too rare.
> Don't commit when you're drunk

That's a valid premise for whatever you do in life, not only Git.
There is. Search in app store for "telegram". There is also the source available on their website.

EDIT: Oeps, sorry.
How to track phonecalls
Learn more about call analytics and call tracking
Systems and institutions can be evil even if every single human involved in them are upstanding citizens of good conscience. I think the general consensus of critics is that most NSA employees are decent human beings who (misguidedly) believe in their mission.

http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-...
Securing DNS and Web Servers
5 Top Tips to Improving Business Efficiency
"The fact is, we're not collecting everybody's email, we're not collecting everybody's phone things, we're not listening to that."

Uh... http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

How easy it has become for them to lie.
Brilliant text, this line really resonates with me: "Every moron can pick up CSS and PHP; apparently, every moron did pick them up."
Looks amazing. I'm really glad to see Jetbrains do well, they're one of my favourite companies. They deserve their success, their products are fantastic.
Absolutely, in most parts of the world, these days.

Essentially, it comes down to two things -- what are taxes paid in (they don't want a 10th of your apples or cattle these days) and what final settlement is enforced by law in contract disputes. Even if you have a contract stating I owe you 4 pork bellies or chunks of gold or bitcoins, if we end up in a court of law, they'll only enforce settlement in currency.

So yeah this comes as no surprise. People can (depending on jurisdiction and subject to details and scale and taxability etc) by and large "barter" in other media of exchange all they want, especially on a small peer-to-peer scale. Just don't expect too much legal protection / contract enforcement in anything other than legal tender. ;)
Tesla Launches Chinese Site As It Prepares To Sell In China
Interesting - thanks for sharing that. It highlights the disconnect between the theoretically correct solution and the practical one.