skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There has been progress in SE though, the world is asking for more software and larger more complex systems to be written.

The progress in software engineering seems to be in finding good practices and giving them names, when they have names one can write papers about them where their usage in actual projects is analysed.

Example: there was a time when object orientation had not been coined as a term. Now that we have it we can move to the next step and explore variations on it. We can teach it, we can make languages adapted for it.

(I'm not holding up object orientation itself as an example of progress here (or the opposite), but the concept of giving a practice a name and exploring it.)

It's a great advantage if one can talk about 'unit tests' and a new hired person knows about it. People were writing what qualified as unit tests before the name existed, but now that we have a name we can write books about it, discuss problems in doing it, etc.

I'm sure bridge building and other engineering efforts have had much of the same development in their infancy. Clever individuals were doing successful things without thinking much about it they worked what they had, others needed to talk about it and books were written... and now we know arch bridges, suspension bridges.
Not exactly; python already has a PYTHONPATH which acts (sort of) like java's classpath.
I'm starting to think Randall Munroe was right about piracy: I'd rather be a criminal and know the media I have is under my control than stay legal and have someone reach out and quietly delete (or, in the future, modify) the data on my machine.

Also: I'd rather buy a physical book than either of those.
You only need to be able to calculate what a user has done when the user views the comment. You can imagine storing each vote as a hash of (voter, comment, direction). Then when rendering the page, you calculate all possible hashes on the page and look for hits. If the comment count per page isn't too large, it won't take that long. It's fairly intensive and probably not worth it for a site like this, but possible. It would also screw up any offline voting-rings detection.

Edit: should have clarified that by user I meant a hash of name and password, so it's infeasible to calculate offline.
"20 years ago we wrote lisp on emacs, and we still do."

but we write Java on eclipse ;-). IDEs have made a lot of progress in languages most people use in their day to day work.
Why chips in passports and ID cards are a stupid idea
Myths about Financing Start-ups that Hurt Entrepreneurs
> it takes 2641 kcal/day for chinese person to weigh 65 kg while it takes 1989 kcal/day for united states person.

There's no magic going on here:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cars%20per%20capita...
You can go to the bathroom whenever you want at Microsoft
Could it be that your friends where not that motivated to begin with?
Great points.

What I was trying to get through in the GP post was more that the changes we've seen in software are evolutionary and incremental. I can't really think of any revolutionary breakthroughs in software for the last 20 years.

As you point out that doesn't mean that progress hasn't been made, and we haven't been walking further down the road of enlightenment. It's just that we've been taking one step at a time down a straight road without many surprises.
I disagree. Former classmates often share quite a bit. There's likely a slightly greater level of trust and accountability than with a total stranger, and there's a good chance it'll be easy to find a topic of conversation to start with. I also know that I, personally, would be more likely to do a small favor for a former classmate than a complete stranger. For example, if I knew via facebook that one of my former classmates was an Erlang programmer, and one of my other friends was looking to hire one, I might try and hook them up. I wouldn't bother to go looking for random stranger Erlang programmers.

Being former classmates isn't like being close family, but it doesn't mean absolutely nothing either. It's a minor but significant reason why you might want to connect with someone using facebook. A similar minor but significant reason might be that you just met at a party last week and seemed to get along really well.

And again, the point is that there's usually nothing to get creeped out about. If you'd rather focus on new friends and forget old ones that's fine, but an old connection isn't absolutely nothing.

Incidentally, I consider the word "creepy" to have more of a threatening connotation than simply annoying and unpleasant. An old, dark, abandoned house is creepy, you don't know what's inside and it might be threatening. A guy is creepy when he doesn't know a girl but stares at her for 20 minutes at the bar then follows her home. Reconnecting with old classmates who have fallen out of touch is not creepy, at least not by default.
> hallucinogens are the one exception

After training myself to remember at least one dream whenever I sleep, a few hours of REM is more than enough hallucinating each day. Some might say it is better to be hallucinating while running about the real world, but I prefer the ability to instantly wake up out of a 'bad trip'.
I remember a thread long ago where a user complained that someone had systematically downvoted all his old comments. PG confirmed that it was one user that had done all the downvoting, and as a direct result voting on comments older than x hours was disabled.

So yes, PG can see what you voted. I'm pretty sure he won't use it against you though ;-)
I've seen similar behaviour, but if I reload the page the score is correct. So it seems to be a client side problem which isn't that big of a deal.
not to be a dick to the true self taught gurus out there, but maybe IE wouldn't be such a pile of crap if the principle software developer wasn't someone who learned CS reading books on the bus. :p
Sampa: From Birth to Death (A Startup's Journey)
Why can't the hardcoded "#!.../python" lines be fixed with find+sed? I'm not sure I understand exactly what he's trying to do.
Go. There's great talks during the day - usually at least one of the talks per time slot will look interesting - and there's pretty wild parties at night. The first time I went, I didn't meet anyone - I went with a few friends and we kept to ourselves - but despite that it was still a blast.

You'll learn quite a bit one way or another.
I read the title and laughed. I laughed because I worked at a major U.S. bank, and if you went to the bathroom during an unscheduled break, people wondered where you were.
Going to a Trade Show (2004)
This is a horrible, horrible title. The author states that counting calories is "broadly correct", but that food labels show inaccurate calorie counts, and miss some other factors.

The problem with a title like this is that it's easy for people who are ignorant to just read the headline, and get the wrong idea.

I know obese people who think that chocolate can't make them fat because it's "low-fat" chocolate. I know of other people who say "I've tried everything, but I can't lose wait", who still drink a lot of sugary pop every day.

Broadly speaking (haha!), you get fat when you take in too much energy, and don't expend enough.
> If you haven't smoked, don't. If you have, great.

Hm...

> But if you start smoking because of an online poll, you should reassess your decision making process.

What if you don't because of an online comment?
Some people do have anxiety, and I agree that it's extremely negative, but a lot of people don't. (I do get panicky, which is why I don't smoke, but my friends don't).

My whole point is that if you do get too anxious and freak out with it, DON'T DO IT! Lots of people don't get those effects, and would like those who do to stay out of their business!
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As a wrestler, it's great for diffusing simple high-school fights. I fondly remember someone throwing a sucker punch at me in the locker room, and I used his momentum and a Greco-Roman throw to put him hard head-first into the ground.

That said, in real life, wrestling sucks for fights, because you never know when the other guy has a knife. Weapons change everything. Run away.
What I find striking is that someone working at a gas station, and with apparently no formal CS education, could get hired and eventually become a lead developer, at Microsoft. Google would never hire someone like Zeke (they might have in the past, but not current Google); without a degree from a "top-tier school", you don't even get past the first steps of the interview process.

Say what you will about IE (Zeke is apparently lead on the project), Microsoft actually does have a lot of good software developers working there. I can't imagine someone would rise to a lead role on a major product like IE without being pretty damned good. And, there probably is something to hiring really passionate people over someone with a lot of qualification who could take it or leave it...companies like Google that weed out first based on school and grades, might just be missing out on a huge class of talent.

I can think of a few well-known examples of this (jwz, most of the 8-bit game developers, John Carmack, etc.). Not to say the guy responsible for IE is necessarily in that class...but, nonetheless, there's an awful lot of great developers who never went to a good school for CS.
Ask HN: Social Media Solution for Exhibitions
Hey Guys, Can anyone suggest a social media or any other kind of solution for the large exhibitions which can make life of visitor's easier? For e.g. Twitter updates showing on a large screens about various brands showing the exhibition.

I can think of one such solution any other ideas?
That 'tis brilliant! Put that online!
It works, but it's not sustainable. You can't go through life counting calories. I also used the Hacker's Diet for a time back in 2003/2004. I lost about 60 pounds, and then over the next 4 or 5 years, proceeded to put 40 of them back on.

This year I've re-lost those 40 pounds, and am working on losing another 40, not by counting calories or otherwise trying to find low cal versions of everything (hard to do anyway now that I'm in Norway), but by being more conscious about what I eat (trying to eat more fruits, veggies, and whole grains, while eating fewer processed foods and sugars) and exercising regularly, which is much easier to do. Well, the exercise part still sucks, but I remind myself that once I get to the weight I want to be at, I only have to go enough to maintain that weight.
I'm looking to obtain a card to ingest for minor arthritis.
Wikipedia papers -- idea to improve wikipedia and higher ed
like vitamin A, Vitamin E is fat-soluble. But an overdose of vitamin A can kill you.

In contrast there is no LD50 level defined for vitamin E IIRC. There are anecdotal descriptions of unpleasant side-effects (e.g., diarrhea) but these are vague and may be the result of consuming a large amount of oil at one time (vitamin E is usually taken in oil solution), without ramping up the daily dosage slowly. To the best of my knowledge no one has ever died or suffered permanent ill effects from taking vitamin E.

Vitamin D is also fat-soluble but much less toxic than vitamin A. You may have had your doctor recently test your blood for vitamin D levels. If you test low (and most do) you may be given a prescription of vitamin D of 50,000 units twice a week for 10 weeks or so. As recently as two years ago many doctors would have become alarmed should you tell them you took a vitamin D dose higher than 400 units/day. Obviously something has changed: vitamin D has proven to be much less toxic and far more efficacious than rumour and folklore medicine has said it was:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-07-13-vitamin-d-tes...

The revised recommendations for vitamin D were slow in coming. I had for years seen rickets in otherwise well-nourished children resulting from parents slathering sunscreen on their offspring before every outing. Nieces and nephews were affected by the overzealous recommendations of the American Academy of Dermatology. After all this time vitamin D proves to be a keystone ingredient to preventing cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, indeed most diseases.

My point is that, just because a vitamin is "fat-soluble" doesn't mean that megadoses will hurt you. Most of the lore associated with the term is from vitamin A's history.

If you get a serious sunburn or burn take a big dose of vitamin E. It will help and, unlike CBLC102, it is cheap and readily available _today_.

If you fear nuclear terrorism then my recommendation is to buy a bottle of vitamin E and put it on your kitchen shelf. Next time a nuclear bomb goes off in your neighborhood take a mouthful and run like hell.
I think you make a big mistake with your comment.

There's nothing wrong with self-taught. Many great scientists and inventors have been self-taught (eg Michael Faraday).

Also, I'm the opposite of his guy. I went to Oxford. Studied mathematics and computer science and stayed and got a doctorate. I would suck at leading IE development.

As a hiring manager I look at what people can do, and then I look at their education. I do this becausesome of the best engineers I've worked with majored in non-CS/EE.

BTW I am hiring Java developers in London.
A close friend of mine starting learning to program in the mailroom of a software company. He was the one in charge of boxing software and sending it out. The job offered a lot of downtime, so he taught himself enough to program.

He became one of their developers and the lead developer at multiple other firms, including two he co-founded with me.

I should add that while he hasn't finished his "top tier" undergrad degree, he's very close.

He got hired at Google relatively recently (~2 years back) and is rising through the ranks.
Lots of people are self-taught programmers. But there is a difference between people who taught themselves out of interest and those who taught themselves as a career move.
IE is stagnant because Microsoft's only strategic incentive to make IE better is so that it isn't too much worse than any other browser. It really wouldn't matter if they had the best team of developers in the world.
The situation here is entirely within Amazon's control. All they have to do to get to B is do it.
Will Chromosome Y Go Bye-Bye?  Is the End of Men Imminent?
Very nice account, I enjoyed reading it.

You mention that the bullies you had to put up with used to carry knives. Did weight lifting really help against bullies pulling a knife on you? I'd say it takes more specialized training to be able to face a knife wielding opponent.
You know you're allowed to address me, right? Since I'm, you know, a user on the site?

I would have argued this position no matter what company had done it, because I think it's the right of the company. Mind you, if certain other companies has done this my stance would have been more along the lines of "They're allowed to do it, but they're assholes." Amazon, on the other hand, has never once done something to violate my trust. So when they do it, my reaction is "They're allowed to do it, and I can understand what made them do it."
But see, I do trust Amazon, and I trust that if they got hacked they would fix their systems. I trust Amazon to handle my data more than I'd trust a doctor to handle my house.
If you give somebody drugs that they aren't prescribed to take, the drugs are not legal to have, even if they were purchased in a legal sale.
Again, having loads of information doesn't necessarily imply it is relevant. We know loads more about chess now, does that make people smarter about life in general?
The legal questions are complicated and IANAL, but morally they had no right to remove something that was rightfully purchased and in use from people who had done no wrong.

But why not? Morally it would have been wrong to allow a leak of something that wasn't rightfully theirs when they had such a simple system set up to fix it all. It would have been wrong if they hadn't emailed every person who owned the book. It would have been wrong if they hadn't offered a refund. But they did, and they did. Amazon's been transparent about all of this.

Any penalties (if proper) to be born should have been born by and only by Amazon.

And they bore it, offered a refund, and sent out an apology. What sort of punishment do you expect them to have suffered otherwise? "Amazon must hang its head and look guilty cos it did a bad thing"?

But to go off on that tangent, no one should have the ability or right to delete anything or deliver any form of "punishment" without a judge being involved, and once it got to that point then simply deleting the files wouldn't be nearly enough.

I said on a separate thread of comments that I don't hold a very firm belief in ownership of data, unless there's money involved. In this case, Amazon gave me the data, encoded to work on their hardware, so I hold that they have the right to do whatever they want with the content on it so long as they don't take my money needlessly. They didn't.
He got hired at Google relatively recently (~2 years back) and is rising through the ranks.

It's my understanding that that's about the point in time when the hiring bar started rising, and the focus on top-tier schools became prominent, at Google. My information could be colored by the people I talk to (who are mostly on the OSO side of Google rather than engineering), but as far as I know, it's been a definite trend. I also know several people who left Google over the past two years, either to go back to school or to pursue other interests, but now very likely wouldn't get a job there due to the changing hiring policies.
Coding the Tweet, Redux - Coding the Wheel
I self-published, since I was in high school at the time. I'd rather not say the title here, since I'd like this account to remain semi-anonymous, but if you'd like I'll gladly mail you a link to the book online.
Google would never hire someone like Zeke (they might have in the past, but not current Google); without a degree from a "top-tier school"

If this is true, this is disempowering to Google for 2 reasons:

1. Many potential superstars simply never get the opportunity to go to a "top-tier school".

2. In applicability to real world requirements, the difference between a "top-tier school" and a second level school is negligible. That is, if there was a scale of what was important from 1 to 100, with 100 as a total super star, then a top-tier school would make you a 10 instead of a 9. Big deal.
I don't think the two can be compared. A hallucination is nothing at all like a dream, no matter how vivid the dream is.
I did exactly that at first; the problem is that it shouldn't need to be done, and additionally, other things (such as .pth files) can also include hardcoded paths.
I was self-taught, and started working 20 hours a week after school writing C for Merrill Lynch when I was 16. I got bored in my mid-twenties and finally went to college full-time, but not for CS: I double-majored in philosophy and the history of math and science and double-minored in comparative literature and classics. I returned to my career four years later and I'd like to think I contribute just as much to my team as those with formal CS training.

I guess that's because I was learning CS by reading books in my parents' basement instead of on a bus, right?
Steven Frank doesn't want to write iPhone apps
I knew I would catch shit for this comment because by and large CS can't be learned any way other than on your own. the field changes too fast for the schools to keep up. being a software developer is an exercise in being a lifelong student.

I couldn't resist though. after all the hundreds of hours I've spent dealing with IE related issues, the lead dev learned CS on the bus. It's just too poetic.
Only if I assume the doctor knows what's good for me and Amazon doesn't. I think that in this case, Amazon does and that they've been perfectly genteel about the entire situation.
It's sad, the Panic quality would sit well on the iPhone.

However, he's oddly ignoring his ability to push people to his iTunes Store page from his existing web sites and via his existing customer base.
"Lots of people are self-taught programmers."

Ultimately, everybody is a self-taught programmer. I can't teach you how to program any more than I can teach you how to walk. Programming is one of those things you have to do in order to learn.
New Way to Exploit Linux
Can Facebook help apps get iPhone distribution?
Her principal called her into his office to say that you'd have a good influence on her? I'm going to assume that's an egotistical embellishment, and not an indication that the whole story is fabricated. :-)
Downvoting on old comments was disabled. You can still upvote them though.
Microsoft had a very strong interest in dominating the browser market, and then crippling the web, so as to maintain their comfortable, high margin, desktop software business for a few more years. IE performed admirably for those goals. They extended the life of the desktop model for about seven more years, and gave themselves more runway to figure out this whole Internet thing. I kinda suspect they forgot that that was the point of those shenanigans, as they seem to have just now started trying to grasp the web; or maybe that's just how long it takes to turn a ship the size of Microsoft around.
Apple won't like anyone else pushing apps, but anyone can generate a link and lead people to their content on the iTunes Store. As an example, our app is at http://itunes.com/apps/luckycal.

But, it'd be trivial for Facebook to set up a config option during app setup on their site asking for the URL of the iPhone application. I'm guessing they'd want to make sure it was using FBConnect and so getting into that directory might require a step of human intervention.

Second, I think that there's another path. Do you remember when the iPhone first came out and the story line was that you were supposed to write web apps? And that those would "just work" on the iPhone? It sounds silly now, especially referencing the iPhone, but FB apps are web apps.

In fact, for our iPhone application, we chose to build a very "thin" client component and then sublaunch Mobile Safari so we could take advantage of server-side work and rendering. I believe it works pretty well, but you're welcome to see for yourself: http://itunes.com/apps/luckycal

Since FB Apps are just web apps, the apps 'tab' on the Facebook iPhone application could launch the mobile version of the FB Apps the user has installed -- ideally shrunk down and optimized for the handheld screen. In fact, you could use a WebUI view to keep it within the Facebook iPhone application and maintain the user experience. The sublaunch could deal with handing over the credentials and perhaps some other information (geolocation comes to mind). I'd be happy to port what we've done into that environment.

The practical upshot would be that existing FBApps would have a place on the iPhone with little additional work for Facebook.
Belgian Tax Watchdogs Tracking Facebook, Netlog Updates