skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there are some good points made in this post that apply to business-related activities that developers often remain woefully ignorant about. Freelancing definitely makes you reset your expectations a bit more, whether you work as a full time employee or not.

However, there are a couple of important aspects of professional growth that freelancers can miss out on:

1) Long term ownership of a product/service. Your approach and outlook to writing code changes if you know you have to own/maintain it for a long time. You'll be more thoughtful in your decisions, more mindful of system/customer/team impact, and be critical of the latest, hot technology on HN. All good things, I believe.

2) Team dynamics and leadership, especially within larger teams. Freelancers often work solo, and there's something to be said about learning to work in the scope of a team, both as a contributor and as a leader. While plenty of freelancers can assemble teams and tackle large problems, they often acquire these skills working for a firm at some point in their careers. If you go too early into freelancing before learning these skills, you may never break out of being a one-man band.
I'll let you know when I get there.
Court orders are subject to due process. When you give software permission to access your email contact list, and then permission to send email to everyone on that lost, and you are under a court order that places restrictions on who you are allowed to contact, you don't the get to say "whoops! I didn't realise that all this contacting people stuff might be covered by the don't contact this person court order".
Except for the people they'll lay off as the plants move? It didn't work out wonderfully for the autoplant workers at Flint and Detroit; for some reason, the people didn't get the upgrade you speak of after the plants closed. Weird, huh?
And that is precisely what Tim is saying. He happens to work mostly with the new tool named Go but he does recognize that there are others like Rust and Dart that are also trying to do things better.

But we need to actually move away from using bad tools (and this has happened with PERL) and start using the newer, better tools more often. Every software developer should learn some Erlang (or Elixir), some Clojure, some Go, etc.

If you don't try these tools out and kick the tires for a while, then you end up stuck in the past like all those COBOL programmers.
Mass market coffee.

I have huge respect for what Starbucks does. For decades, most roasters got their start at Starbucks or Tullys.

In the 10 million pounds of beans Starbucks buys every year, there's some percentage that must be awesome. Buying for myself, I'll get seasonals, varietals, vs the blends. Panama, harar, sumatra. Starbucks also sells whole bean light roast for tastes like my gf's, like the blond, which is sometimes available as drip over the counter.

But mostly I buy either Herkimer or Lighthouse. They're indies, who obsess over the product, from purchasing thru roasting thru pulling the shots.

herkimercoffe.com

lighthouseroasters.com
Ask HN: What's your preferred development stack?
Just about every day a new Javascript framework emerges, or a responsive design framework, or a new programming language. Each one has its own hype and various companies jump on and off the bandwagon (GO and Dart comes to mind right away). Trying to keep track and trying to learn them all would drive me nuts. I'm more interested in finding something new, stable and fun to learn. I'm a traditional front-end guy (HTML. CSS, JS), but have started to do more server sided work with Javascript frameworks. I'm also getting into .Net and MVC4. What would you recommend I look at next? Also, any advice would greatly be appreciated as well. This could be links, books, or any resources you think would help.

Thanks in advance for your advice!

Pete
It is refreshing to see this post. As someone who has tried, and not really taken to, all three of those frameworks I sympathize.

Stick with what works for you. Shipping code on your own terms is the end goal. The customer viewing the page does not care one iota what framework you are using.
The font was very comfortable to read on my old 3GS, what type of screen are you reading on? Regarding serif fonts, I've certainly found a new appreciation for them since getting a laptop with a retina screen.
Spotting the Faithful (Mormons can identify other Mormons in photos)
Sleep "Standing"
To be frank, except for games (and even then it's not disagreeable to provide a nice, native UI), I disagree with you quite strongly. As is the usual case, language choice is completely arbitrary, but intentionally aiming for constancy across your narrow range of apps, instead of focusing on working to the platforms strengths is a very dangerous, and damaging approach to take imo.

Although i will say, i do not have a huge host of experience to go from, but this is from the perspective of someone who could potentially be your customer. With two apps at rough feature parity, i would pick the native app every single time, regardless of how nicely you've styled your app, at the end of the day the burden of proof lies on you; to prove the value of your app, if you cannot be bothered to create an appearance and functionality which is native, chances are that if you can't be bothered to do so, you've cut corners elsewhere.

I'm sorry if that comes across as presumptuous, perhaps i completely misunderstood what you're saying, or just jumped to conclusions, if so sorry, if not, i hope got my point across.
Really?

I think that's the legal equivalent of your mom saying "of course he couldn't have committed that murder, he was with me that night, we were watching Netflix."
Watch how fast the miners leave the operator if they disagree with his actions.

It's the hands of the miners.
Practice, try new things, learn more languages.

Check out http://blog.jenniferdewalt.com/post/56319597560/im-learning-....
It's all a matter of the right price. Bank A doesn't own 51% of bitcoin, it has control over 51% of the mining pool. As a rational agent in the bitcoin-only world that's worth SOMETHING but not billions. As a rational agent in the total world it might be worth sacrificing $100mm on the pool if it can cost your competitor $10b.
JFBmarketing at APSense: The key to success is we become what we think about
Thanks! We hope so!
Mrc brings HTML5 offline app capabilities to m-Power software
I saw an image on Facebook yesterday that said "Men with beards are sexy", with the same man in three stages, beard (closer to stubble), moustache and shaved.

It's a thing. I've been told when I don't shave and have a bit of "designer stubble" that I'm more attractive and look older. I get an itchy face though, so it goes.
> Am I allowed to go to businesses and try to pick the locks, look inside, and then report to the business owner that their lock was pickable? Well... yes, but I'd probably be reported to police.

Sometimes these discoveries aren't intentional. Let's say I lean against a door and it's not locked. Well, I never meant to open it up, but since I can't prove I didn't intend to, and since the business can't distinguish people with honorable intentions vs. those without, why risk telling them?

If you tar the helpful with the same brush as the crooks then you shall always learn the hard way from your mistakes.
6 Mobile App Experts Talk About The Industry Trends For 2014
Unfortunately, the title is misleading. It should be titled "Angular, Ember and Backbone are too heavyweight so I created riot.js".
Alternative? There's no visible way that the data is embedded in the ad which is being scanned, none that I can see, so the only way is to have the ad recognized via image comparison. Oh boy. Better, perhaps, but alternative? Nope.
Google Cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?output=search&s...
> Watch how fast the miners leave the operator if they disagree with his actions.

1. They'd have to be aware of the actions of an anonymous pool owner

2. The amount of damage the pool owner can do before people even have the time to start leaving is staggering

> It's the hands of the miners.

You're in denial.
Physical metaphors DO NOT WORK in this scenario. This is not a house or a car or commercial warehouse or anything else... it's a website. There are far too many relevant differences between physical locations and web sites for metaphorical reasoning to work.
Africa is the next eldorado for manufacturing. It has already started.
Algebra, at least in the high-school algebra sense[1], is just really strict rules for communicating points on a (line, plane, etc). It is a bunch of operations for finding an equivalent way of stating the same thing, and some rules for reasoning about those points. For example, finding the roots of a function is nothing more than manipulating a statement until you find out where y = 0.

In a direct use way - any time you program with conditionals you are directly applying boolean algebra. There is no way around it - you have to understand how the basic rules of boolean algebra work. e.g. how does 'not' distribute, how do "AND" and "OR" work, etc. And it certainly helps with simplifying code if you can apply DeMorgan's law or distribute your conditions differently. There is a reason it's called refactoring code - it is just applying the algebra rules (usually the boolean ones) to program flow.

Similarly, but a bit more abstract, string primitive operations are an algebra for working with series of characters. They are equally strict, although not the exact same rules as those for points on a curve. For instance associativity doesn't apply to addition. Multiplication isn't defined for some languages, and there are different ways to define it for other languages (does it distribute, etc). This isn't even that abstract...

Given a string, solve for the character at position x. This is not really different than given a function, solve for the position at x.

Given a function, and value y, solve for x. Its the same as given string, find the indices for a character.

The operations are a bit different, but the reasoning between them is exactly the same: manipulate the givens with the rules that are defined. Use the rules to find properties of the target.

[1] there are other algebras - for example ring theory algebra. It has rules that are different (mostly generalizations of basic algebra rules, but that have weird and non-intuitive results if all you know is basic high-school algebra). This sentence from the wikipedia article explains it well:

"It follows that algebra, instead of being a true branch of mathematics, appears nowadays, to be a collection of branches sharing common methods."
Energy Transition Model is now Open Source
I would love to see this same experiment performed with other factors like different color skin and sex/gender. How better to find actual evidence of hiring bias than with a giant automated freelancing system?
Good point — I think the sales-feel came more from the emotion behind it when I first wrote it.

I didn't intend to say everyone should do it for an entire career, but that it's something important to try at least once because of how much you learn in a short period of time.
To me this is really weird. If a neighbor knocks on your door to tell you that you forgot the keys in the keyhole outside you thank him, you don't call the police...
Lessons from working 6 months on a math problem and failing
> When people program, they (usually) don't do math. And that's it.

I disagree. Whenever you implement an algorithm, you build a proof of correctness in your mind. If you reasoned about your program and are convinced that it handles all corner cases properly, then it would only be a formality to write this proof down. If you can't easily do that, then you can't possibly be certain that your program has no bugs.

In practice, you don't bother with this kind of thing unless you are writing extremely complex algorithms, of course, but that doesn't change the underlying principle.
Sunrise Adds iPad App And Week View In Its Quest To Build The Best Calendar
I'd be afraid of inheriting any codebase that made extensive use of these JS macros.

I will not be doing metaprogramming again any time soon.

I'm doing just fine using composition/iteration and creating better, more fluent APIs.
Multiple Dispatch as Dispatch on Tuples
Good points. What I wanted to point out is that the typical arguments about an agent's incentives to not destroy BTC usually fail to take into account gains outside of the BTC world.
Probably more than are making money shipping software on Android.
It does in swamps. Isn't DC built on one?
Did the robber barons kidnap people from Africa, ship them across the sea in chains and force them to work by whipping them if they didn't? No.

Still, have you ever heard the song "Sixteen Tons?"[1] You might recognize the lines "another day older and deeper in debt" and "I owe my soul to the company store." It's about the life of a coal miner in Kentucky. Those lines refer to a system where the company paid its workers in vouchers that they could use to buy food and clothing from the company store. Prices at the company store were higher than the workers could afford on the wages they received, but since they didn't get cash they didn't have the option to buy elsewhere. So they'd buy on credit and gradually build up a debt to the company that they had no way to pay off.

Is that slavery? Perhaps not technically, since the workers weren't owned by the company and couldn't be sold. But they didn't have many choices, either. They were basically stuck doing a fixed amount of work each day in exchange for food and lodging. Sounds an awful lot like slavery in practice.

[1] Obligator wikipedia link - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons
Does anybody have any experience with selling books like this outside of the software realm? By which I mean publishing beta books as you go or bundling other resources. and charging a premium. It seems to be something that the software community finds acceptable, but does this extend to other fields? Non-fiction or fiction.
>clicky clicky friend request sent to everyone in person b's list

The person with the restraining order has the responsibly to remove that person from their lists. Email, phone, etc, so they don't accidentally press a wrong button, butt dial, etc. I know once or twice I dialed the wrong contact. They also have the responsibility to drive a different way home so they don't go by their house. They didn't take the proper precautions.
By no framework, I think don't use an MVC framework, it does not add value. (I wrote a book on MVC framework). Great is the enemy of good, they are bad for you.

There are non MVC frameworks that focus on UI/DOM/CSS. I based this on Enity/System more w/ events management, I call it module buss. Don't have time to evagelise it ( http://github.com/puppetMaster3/ModuleBU )
Don't use MVC, code is just all over place, there are other patterns. I know this is shocking.
More likely illegal entry, but certainly unlawful either way.
My only question mark from this is matplotlib. I tried it five or six years ago and it seemed clunky to use and install. And worst I couldn't seem to just throw up a plot, I recall there being a lot of settings required. And the plots didn't look good by default you had to fool with fonts, font sizes, etc.

Does anyone know if it's improved a lot since then? Otherwise I'm not seeing how it could hold a candle to R's plotting abilities and ease of use.
It makes perfect sense if the person is likely to kill/harm you in a fit of passion.

If the harasser could get carried away in an argument and start beating, but didn't leave the house planning to kill, then restraining orders can limit the time the harasser is around you and limit the time before they 'blow their cool'. When the harasser breaks the restraining order and comes near you "just to talk, I promise", you can get the police involved straight away, and the harasser can be hauled off before they lose their cool.
I will give you one general advice about getting exceptional at anything which should also apply to programming. When you learn something, try to learn the "why" of it and not just the "what and "how". Once you master the "whys" of a topic, you will realize you have got really good at it already. Challenge yourself and others about conventions and understand why things are done a certain way. What if you try to do it differently ? Does that make sense ? Does it make it better or worse ?

When it comes to programming,learn to break things. In programming, it is easy. Put bad code on purpose and see how and why it breaks ? I remember one of our excellent CS professors who told us that the best way to learn pointers in C/C++ is to write pointers that don't work. Leak some memory. Create null references. I never understood that for a while but now I do.

Oh and the common advice: practice practice, practice. Do the same thing over and over again even if it is repetitive. Again to give you an example, I was really good at Math as a kid and I remember I got even better when one of the teachers gave me a book in which for every topic, there were 50+ questions that were very similar. he wanted me to do all 50 of them. I was like "why cannot I just do 3-4 of each type and move on to next". But again, after doing the 50, I mastered it.

Having said all this, I don't think I am exceptional at most of the things (certainly not programming) but I am so sure that these are some of the actions that makes one exceptional.
Right, but surely it happens, no?
Are you not afraid that people may send each other the .pdf file without paying ?
No shit? Effective people are proactive? And they seek win-win scenarios?

Tell me something I don't know.
Jack Morris did not make it this year, his last on the ballot. Hopefully the veterans committee will see to it he makes it in.
I've heard of other scenarios where the government prevented competition, but they nearly all boil down to the same core: the constituents want X, but some sort of market failure is occurring (or likely to occur) and a temporary market intervention was able to resolve it.
When a company lowers costs, it doesn't cut prices, it increases profits. Luckily cell phones still have some competition, but the TV/Monitor market is price colluded to hell.

Higher wages and better benefits benefit the consumer.
What CES 2014 Is Really About: Your Connected Future
I always assumed anything that pays over 5 or 6% these days has some fundamental problem and I should stay away.

Is that not necessarily the case? Why aren't more people buying good high dividend stocks and pushing the yields down?
not saying that I know anything, but from what I can tell it is time and practice. Don't think that something is "beneath" you, just keep building stuff. Read books, talk to other people that know something. Talk to people who don't. I am not sure if you should ever reach being an exceptional programmer, because there is always more to learn.
Also: depending on the language, try to solve problems without looking up how to solve it, and then compare your solution to other peoples. You may solve the problem, but sometimes you can be quite surprised about how much more someone knows, so they can teach you little things that really deepen your understanding of a language.
Does anyone correlate the 'luck surface area' with that recent discussion on being a sociopath in the workplace. Something along the lines of convincing your coworkers that you're doing more work than you're actually doing. No one can really pinpoint what you do. You just communicate so much that it seems that you're 'in everything'. Just subtract the doing and exponentiate the telling to result in more luck.
The Porn Viewing Habits of Scots
Sure, but you've have to prove it in court. The criminal justice system is used to sorting out claimed alibi's. I'm doubtful you have discovered some novel hack to the justice system.
> many people (millions) in Vietnam are going to experience higher standard of living.

Aren't therefore many people (millions) in China going to experience lower standard of living?
Moot's customers are not the people viewing the discussions; their customer is the developer integrating their code into a website. A framework might be important to them.

If their argument was "We didn't like any of the frameworks so we built moot without one" that'd be great, but they're making the case that all developers would be better off without, and that's pretty damn dubious.
Bitcoin is more of a technology than a currency, as such it does not have to have been a political act to create it.
You don’t need a framework
> That's the same for any language. Especially those that don't just clone the language you already know.

I don't think that's true. Sure, it takes a bit of time to learn a new syntax, a bit more time to learn language-specific concepts. And every language has it's gotchas and quirks. But most languages I've worked with, even javascript ('the good parts'), are ultimately quite consistent and allow you to focus on solving actual problems pretty quickly.

CSS, on the other hand, has tons of quirks that lead to issues that require either annoying trial-and-error to fix, after-the-fact bugfixing for particular devices or browsers, or a deep knowledge of the logic involved.

Back in high school, I loved mathematics and physics, because difficult things felt 'fair'. And figuring them out felt satisfying. On the other hand, I disliked biology and to a lesser degree chemistry, because it seemed like there were gotchas and quirks everywhere that required rote memorization, not understanding. Or at least not at a high school level.

I've only met a handful of people who seemed to really know the fundamentals of css. These people read the specs, but also played a role in the development of new css features. I think there's still a market for 'true' css/html experts. Knowing the exact ins and outs of html and css across browsers and platforms is arcane knowledge, and if you know this you might get away with not being much of a programmer.

It's just really boring.
Coffee Was The Inspiration For The World's First Webcam
Wars and a nanny-state.

Probably before that hits, automation for most of the product. Eventually we will need very few people to produce any part of the product. We will automate resource extraction. Automate resource delivery. Automate resource refinement. Etc.

So this leaves us with a large population that has little point in the current economic system. So we'll get higher unemployment globally. Historically this has lead to wars, either internal or external. Marx/Hegel are right. The haves and the have-nots will duke it out. The have-nots will, like Norther American generals in the civil war, throw bodies at the haves. Eventually coming to a new equilibrium of far fewer have-nots (many are dead) and probably fewer haves. Eventually everything is owned commonly and a new society is birthed based on the idea of self actualization through experimentation.
Following the idea that poor layout make a reader feel bad when reading, I wonder if it would be advantageous to purposefully evoke this feeling when writing hit pieces or about something bad that happened?
> runaway

See "runaway chain reaction".
Not really, because they are moving to higher paying jobs than assembly-line work.