skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Every sane program out there uses the ★W functions and some insane still use the ★A ones. So it would only be beneficial for new code while all existing code remains the same, with the same encoding bugs if there are any.

Every sane program uses the undifferentiated functions, defines UNICODE so that they map to the ★W functions, and uses TCHAR which defining UNICODE causes to map to a wide char. Older programs don't define UNICODE and often use char (or CHAR) instead of TCHAR. If they would create a different define (e.g. '#define UTF8') which would map to the new UTF8 functions and would define TCHAR as CHAR then anything doing it either way would do the right thing just by defining UTF8 and recompiling. Only programs that explicitly call the ★W functions (which they never should have exposed) wouldn't be "fixed" to use UTF8, but neither would they be broken.

> UTF-8 only on Windows is painful

...because Microsoft hasn't fixed it.

> Usually in those cases you use a library/framework/whatever that handles the platform abstraction or just conform to what's expected.

That's a cop out. You're just deferring to the frameworks, which also shouldn't be using anything other than UTF8, and who may have more difficulty in fixing it because the transition mechanism Microsoft used to unicode is well adaptable to another transition. Not every library you have to use will use the same encoding as the framework and you're back to a huge pain. The only way to fix it is for everything to always use UTF8, and deprecate everything else going forward.
Leadership lessons from The Matrix
That's an interesting thought, but I can't see how it would be, simply because of the sheer number of ways that would be possible. That's kind of like saying, "Here's this working program, how could you break it?"
can you give an example? tia!
Garry Kilworth's story "On the Watchtower at Plataea" involves a group of time travelers, from the story's "present", who push back earlier and earlier into the past... until they can't go any further because another group is coming the other way, from the past (due to the technology involved, each prevents the other from going further in their desired direction).

The "present" group then end up, essentially, in a standoff, watching the other group from a vantage point near an ancient Greek battlefield, and pointing out that they must eventually "lose" because both groups are now essentially in normal time. Which is moving from the past to the "present" from which they left.
Actually "the tweet about us" is the only growth hack for the moment :)

Impatient to see the 90 others. Thanks for sharing.
I build web sites. I would ask that the person complete a series of tasks that involved using Javascript to do a bit a typical DOM manipulations and CSS changes, especially using transitions and whatnot...

...without jQuery.
he didn't mean literally like a class, it was an analogy. x is to y as z is to ...
The variable declaration is hoisted to the top, then is assigned a named function expression `func` so that `func.name === 'func'`.
Useful for proper error messages and stack traces.

Something else I'm missing?
When I teach calculus 1, I usually put a "high discrimination" question at the beginning of every exam. Student performance on that question is usually very well correlated with the exam grade. It helps me quickly assess class performance right at the start of the grading process.

Examples of such questions:

Draw the graph of a function f, continuous on the reals, such that: f(x) > 0 always, f'(x) < 0 always, and f''(x) always has the same sign as x.

The line y=3x-2 is tangent to the graph of y=f(x) at x=4. What is f'(4)?
One more quote to start this off.

I do not bring a weapon. I am the weapon. -- Michael O. Church

I like the overarching theme of what the OP is saying. Good companies provide multiple ways to succeed. Shitty firms provide multiple ways to fail, and only one way to succeed. That's why closed allocation is such a pile of 9/11 nukular buttfail: because it's founded on the idea that a person is only admitted one avenue for success (but there are numerous ways a person might lose face).

Good institutions provide multiple ways for the people within them to succeed. This encourages creativity. Bad companies lay down multiple ways to fail, and only admit one way to succeed. It is known.

I don't think this is only an artifact of company size. I've seen small companies with that negative, embarrassment-averse culture; I've also seen large companies create pockets of the positive, open-allocation type culture.

Hardly a day goes by where I don’t find something in my Twitter feed crowing about how a startup that has hit a bump in the road is ”fu&%@d,” or what an “ash%le” a successful founder is, or what an utterly idiotic idea somebody’s company is.

I am all for product risk and innovation. If someone tries to cure cancer and fails, I'm going to praise her to the moon for trying. On the other hand, moral failure (asshole founders) I cannot support. There is a huge difference between a scientist who tries for 20 years to cure cancer and falls short (but probably delivers a lot of useful research along the way) and an Evan Spiegel, who fails morally. "We're a startup" has been used too many times to justify reckless management and moral bankruptcy. Well I say: fuck that shit.

I am all for removing the stigma against good-faith failure. The problem in the VC-funded startup world is all the bad-faith failure that is out there. When someone gets fired with no severance because his 24-year-old, inexperienced, technically incompetent manager turns out to be a wad, no one should congratulate the company for "taking a risk". Recklessness, the defining trait of the current crop of VC-funded cool kids, is not a virtue.

It seems like there is a movement to replace today’s startup culture of hope and curiosity with one of smug superiority.

That "culture of hope and curiosity" is long gone. Snarky people like me are working our asses off in the effort to bring it back. We do it by taking down the Evan Spiegels and Lucas Duplans of the world. We need to take out the trash so there is some fucking space for the good guys.

Some people would like to turn the technology startup world into one great big company with a degenerative Can’t-Do Culture.

That's VC-istan, not in some future dystopia but right now. With all of the co-funding and note-sharing and collusion, VC has degenerated into a feudal reputation economy that behaves like a large and dysfunctional company where people are too busy padding their resumes and manicuring their reputations to even consider doing anything remotely ballsy. That's exactly what has already happened.
Nice job. It's fun to seem some creative hacking. You could flame bait the title by renaming it to "Why I stopped using E.T. and started using E.T." :-)
I blame consoles primarily, as it seemed the barrier for entry in the PC master race was always high enough to separate at least some of the wheat from the chaff.

It could also be rose coloured glasses, given that my last serious gaming (before coding ate up 12+ hours a day) was 5 years of Diablo II and CS:S followed by 6 years of Guildwars. I got out of all of this before COD/ BF and LOL were huge games.

I can say that I know far more brogamers rocking a PS/Xbox than PC's.
The bears are out today. If the poster had spent the btc in the EU rather than converting back to fiat, it would have been a nice quick experience. If the poster had jumped through the kyc hoops at Coinbase and bought instantly, the USD price changes would not have effected his trade. This post is a new person complaining about the learning curve. The valid point implied here is 'there is friction for new users'.
I type some text - nothing happens. I hit "Submit", nothing happens.

<fx: shrug />

I leave ... Did anyone else make it work?
The Monty Hall problem (or a subtle variant) is also great one to watch people work through. It's a chance to see if people can thing about probability in a sort of asymptotic way.

Basically (if they get stuck), ask them how they would choose if there were actually a 100 doors, but the same rules apply. Obviously, everyone switches. What about 99? 98? ... turns out, 3 doors is the smallest number where the strategy is optimal. But when the number is large, the answer is much more obvious.
How well does the ability to write well correlate with the ability to articulate rules for writing well?

I'd have thought there are a lot of people who can write any quantity of text with impeccably placed commas (and semicolons, when the required tone permits them), but would freeze and stutter and gabble if asked for "a couple of major comma rules".

I'd put myself among their number, if only because it's not clear to me what sort of thing you mean by "comma rules". Descriptions of some situations where it is appropriate to use commas? "Commas are commonly used to separate items in a list when there are more than two such items" or "commas may be used, like this, to surround interpolations -- but for all but the shortest such interpolations you should consider using parentheses or dashes, or restructuring the sentence"? Descriptions of situations where it's inappropriate to use commas? "If you have two things that can function as separate sentences, don't separate them only with a comma; use a full stop or, in some contexts, a semicolon"? Or higher-level fuzzier principles? "Stops of all kind are placed to correspond roughly with pauses in speech and boundaries of grammatical units. The comma is the 'smallest' of stops, and is generally not used where the pause would be long or where the break in grammatical structure is great." Or what?

(I suspect a cultural difference at work here: I think formal analysis of grammar and punctuation may be a bigger deal in the US than it is in the UK.)
My quick-login-purpose Facebook account says I live on the dark side of the moon. I wonder if they will notify SpaceX.
Travel to the future is actually more probable(theoretically possible), I am basing this on a good explanation by Brian Cox(based on Einstein's theory of special relativity).

The basic premise is that to travel to the future an object would need to reach near the speed of light, the closer you get to the speed the further you can travel into the future, but travelling back would not be possible.

A direct quote from Brian Cox "If you go fast, your clock runs slow relative to people who are still. As you approach the speed of light, your clock runs so slow you could come back 10,000 years in the future".
That doesn't seem special:

var foo = function (n) { return foo(n); }; foo(1);

gives back "too much recursion", not "foo is not defined", in both Spidermonkey (Firefox 24) and V8 (node.js 0.10.something).
It's only a QR-Code reader ;) ZBar supports all kind of Barcodes. But this one seems interesting:

https://github.com/EddieLa/BarcodeReader
A function can reference itself without defining the name twice. These both work just fine:

var factorial1 = function(n) { return n < 1 ? 1 : n * factorial1(n-1) }

function factorial2(n) { return n < 1 ? 1 : n * factorial2(n-1) }
I'm pretty sure it is a requirement of the Affordable Care Act. Sending the Social Security number does not mean it will be used as an identifier, but the health insurance company need the number for IRS reporting. They need it:

1)So that the IRS can verify you have health insurance. Technically, this could be done directly from healthcare.gov, but the insurance companies need to report the people who buy insurance off exchange anyway so why duplicate effort.

2)At least in the past few years insurance premiums have been tax deductible for the self-employed, so I imagine the insurance companies report this to the IRS. I am not 100 percent sure this is done, though.

3)Another one I am not 100 percent sure on. The IRS may verify medical expenses paid through an HSA. Having out of pocket totals from the insurance companies may help with this. They may also verify the medical expense tax deduction.
A Modest Proposal: Better Criticism, More Art
the only real sin [...] the only true failure

Failure is not a sin. There may be plenty of reasons why a person chose (or had to take) a different path.
Amen to that! Our project is actually independent of the Homebrew team, but we very much model ourselves on the great work they're doing.
Passengers are much more sensitive to vertical acceleration than horizontal. Repeated 1g swings from -0.5 to 0.5 g would make this thing a vomit comet. Would be interesting to see this analysis done with normal limits for high speed rail design, instead of Elon's chosen 0.5g limit.

Edit: HS2 in Britain, for instance, is being designed with a maximum of around 0.01g vertical acceleration. If Elon's has figured out how to get passengers to handle 50x that much, he could save them a lot of money.
Machine Learning: Analysis of Google Patents on Related Entities
Show HN: I created the first BitTorrent Sync service
Interview with the people behind the Snapchat Hack
The Impractical Jokers Talk About Making Good Web Content
The Late Adopters
But only after Git became wildly popular because of GitHub.
"Bitcoin could never succeed as a currency. It's too unstable"
I thought this title got the point across, before clicking the link, I knew it would lead me to a page that will show me the knowledge on how to remove apps from social platforms.
> Quite a few of the apps I use (iTerm2, ST3, Chrome, Adium, etc.) update themselves periodically. I wonder how Cask deals with that?

Sparkle-based self-updating apps will self-update in place. For apps like that, the current policy is to have a Cask version of 'latest', and letting the apps self update.

I've been doing this for some time and I've found it works out AOK. It's nice to be able to click the "Update & Relaunch" and know I'm not messing anything up. :)
Maybe, but 8.1 killed all of our VS2005 projects. If you are a developer that doesn't want to do upgrades on potentially fragile build files it is not a god send.
It was submitted by a "growth hacker" from the same venture firm that invested in MyPermissions. Better to submit with a link bait title now and have it changed by an admin than to submit with a proper title and never see the front page.
Just because you shouldn't use it as an identifier doesn't mean you don't need that information in the general case.

SSN as identifiers are bad in the case of: non-citizens, babies, and fraud (may have multiple people with the same ID).

However, if you are dealing with government services (especially anything that touches on taxes or benefits) you'll probably need to provide a valid SSN. And then also be prepared to deal with oddball cases too.
I'm in the Baltimore / DC area and looking for startups either in the stealth phase or recently out of this phase to join as a founding member. My background is a mix of technology, primarily cyber security and some development in Python, and business. I'd be open to part time as well, though I'd still need to maintain my current FT position, and remote would also be doable.
Is the Math.random() complaint really true?

Great read anyway. I normally dismiss anything labeled "growth hacking" as snake oil but this was really interesting.
SkyNet.im adds MQTT support to its Internet of Things M2M IM platform.
An excellent point; for example, although I don't have any reason to think RMS himself did this, Emacs 24.4 will have file change notification support across all platforms where it compiles and where such notifications are available.

I grant that's a somewhat overdue feature for Emacs to have (e.g., I've wanted it ever since I set up Dropbox to synchronize my org-mode files across all my boxes), but it's definitely evidence that Emacs isn't lacking of maintenance and improvement.

I wonder: If Emacs rarely gains new features in core, is it because there aren't enough developers doing enough to improve it, or rather because people are having a hard time thinking up new features to add which Emacs doesn't already have?
I had a similar experience, as I'm sure most people with above-average intellect did. But you didn't do that on your own, that's blaming an immature mind for quite the sin it cannot yet comprehend.

The important thing is that you internalized the lesson at some point in your life. As have I. Many never do (just look at the entitled people who complain about worsening conditions on reddit).
I'm glad someone has pointed this out. Perjury is considered a serious crime (remember that Martha Stewart was hounded for simply lying to a Federal agent), and there is no more serious form of perjury than lying before congress.
Interesting. I think the proof of Wilson's theorem is easy enough to be accessible for a non-mathematician - for non-prime n you can find a pair of numbers in the product (n-1)! that are congruent to 0 (mod n), and if n is prime then you pair up numbers in the product with their inverses until you are left with ±1.

But I can't think of a similarly low-level proof of Fermat's Little Theorem. Is there an obvious one I'm missing?
EVGA Tegra Note 7 Android 4.3 Tablet Review
A ZIP archive walkthrough
I've heard from others that the passwords are stored in plaintext and viewable by support too, at least at some ISPs.

Now combine that with the typical user's tendency towards password reuse...
> I wished people would use software based on merits, not on popularity.

This is “your favorite band sucks” for software. For professional tools, popularity is usually directly tied to merits: notice how frequently people say they started with bzr/hg/darcs/etc. and switched to Git because it was faster/safer/better supported/added features they liked? Most of the competitors seemed to think they'd solved one big problem well enough that people would put up with the “minor” warts but in practice those are the things which you notice on a daily basis. Git was the third or fourth DVCS I tried and even fairly early on it was obvious that considerably more care was going into making basic day to day work easier and safer.
> I just want the applications to be copied to my install location and left alone.

If it's a use case that would be useful to people, this is a mode of operation I would definitely be willing to include in the project. Feel free to open an issue (or even better - a PR!) with the idea. :)
I wonder if that could be part of the assessment, to tell if the candidate is likely to verify uncertainties or make assumptions.
The problem with asking Monty Hall in an interview is that ~75% of candidates already know the answer.
Remove the download link.
I don't think this synchronizes installations since the forumla[0] are overwritten with each update. If someone updates one of them the specific version you downloaded elsewhere will not be downloaded again. I definitely understand why homebrew works this way, but the logic for symlinking the applications is all in this extension[1] so this could easily be changed. I agree that symlinks is better for tools typical to homebrew but for this it's not like it symlinks your preference files so you're not actually cleaning up any junk if you uninstall the application through cask, it's the equivalent of just dragged it to the trash. Also the applications will still attempt to update so it's not managing versions that way either.

[0]: https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/tree/master/Casks
[1]: https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/blob/master/lib/cask...
SEEKING WORK (NYC or remote)

I'm an NYC-based full-stack hacker with 5 years experience from start-ups to Google.

My specialty is in backends, building websites, and developer tools (testing, internal tools, continuous integration, you name it). I also love consulting on existing projects if you need an informed perspective. But you know how it is -- in the end, I do whatever needs doing.

Currently, since I work on the side, I'm seeking projects on the order of 10 hours/week or less.

To sum up, I build high-quality solutions and I care most about communication, craft, and professionalism.

Java, Python, PHP, Hadoop, Scheme, HTML and CSS, testing and build systems, big data, tools, robustness, and problem-solving.

yash@yashparghi.com

www.yashparghi.com

http://careers.stackoverflow.com/yash-parghi

http://github.com/yparghi
Careful there, Citizen. You're courting accusations of reactionism with regressionist talk like that.
1 - How to connect to a server using SSH without a password

2 - How would you check if $DATABASE is running and how would you start it if it wasn't. Bonus points: how do you make it start automatically at next reboot

3 - Show me the processes using the most CPU
From the same poll, 1% have lifted a finger to get the required paperwork. and one can assume that not all of that 1% want to head to the USA.

However, given that there are umpteen million people living in Russia, even if a fraction of that 1% did emigrate to the USA that would be quite a significant migration!
For sysadmin/ops jobs, I want to see debugging ability in addition to programming skill.

I usually ask about HTTP and DNS (for web-focused) or Kerberos/AD logins (for user focused).

There are a lot of moving parts to either of these, so a question like: "You type a web address into a browser, it doesn't load" can turn into questions about the DNS resolver process, system and network config, split horizon, time setup, etc.

Basically, I want to know if they have a grasp of how things all go together, and how to test the individual parts that make up the whole.
While praising children for the right thing is important, I don't think that the emphasis should be on praise.

It is much more important that parents make a conscious effort to see the children, try to gauge their emotions, and reflect that in words.

In the book "Your Competent Child" (I can highly recommend that to all parents), Jesper Juul gives an example. A child manages to climb up the back side of a slide, and then calls "look, ma!". Now many parents have the urge to say "Wow, you did that really well", and thus give a reward for the child's hard work.

But climbing up was fun (even if it was also hard work), and by giving a reward we teach the child to crave the reward, not the fun. Instead, one could just say "Yes, I'm looking", or trying to understand the child better, say "Yes, I'm looking. Did you have fun climbing up? And now maybe you're just a tiny bit scared sliding down?".

By simply observing the children, and making it clear that we do, we give value to children themselves, not their intelligence, and not their effort either. IMHO that's a much higher goal.

If at some point their motivation fails, they still feel they have value.

Once again, for anybody who wants to take children seriously, I highly recommend to read Jesper Juul's books. They were a real eye-opener to me.
Now that you mention it, probably so.
> "...heating water and converting it to coffee"

Spot on! What, oh what, would I ever do without my Keurig machine!!!
Intel Architecture Developer Manual Volume 3 in 'Elysium'
Domain names are already a layer of indirection, a friendly way to specify IP addresses. This layer would be a friendly way to specify domain names that are a friendly way to specify IP addresses. And you gain not much else besides the ability to add spaces.

Still, the implementation approach is interesting.
This is one of many reasons why, if a service only supports facebook/linkedin/twitter/gmail/whatever login, I do a Tab Closed; Didn't Read on it.
Heheh ;)
From baby boom to bust: Crashing fertility will transform the Asian family