skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They go to work for companies with the opposite philosophy. Some companies do no or very limited entry-level hiring, because they choose to hire programmers who made their mistakes on someone else's dime.

Yes, some also go into technical management or project management roles, but in my base of anecdata, that was either out of a genuine preference or because they realized they weren't all that good at coding. And of course, some leave the field, but this is by no means an industry where only 1 in 3 entrants has a spot 10 years later if they want one. If you're even halfway decent as a coder, you'll have a chair and the music will keep playing for you as long as you reasonably elect.
That's unusafe in production: unless you have a very short-duration problem it'll retry a few times and then pretend you wanted the process stopped. Something like a down database or NFS server will still require you to restart everything in a cluster outside of upstart.

They should have copied prior art from launchd or some inetd implementations where the delay has a back off mechanism with some configurable min/max limits.
Yep. It still uses a binary format. An ugly fucker of one too. You can have it pipe to a real syslogd, but at that point, I'd rather just have it send to one and get that ugly monstrosity that is systemd out of the way.
Datomic Antipatterns: Conn as a Value
Hmyeah, you're right, he does. But I doubt he would've included Vala if Android apps were typically programmed in it.
I encountered a bug using Chrome. After dying a few times, I encountered this screen, which I can't get past: http://i.imgur.com/yWbm8bq.png

It may frustrate some users and drive them away. I'll leave the tab open if you need me to run some javascript code to tell you the current state of the program. Let me know.

EDIT: Pretty fun. After a few attempts, my high score is 34: http://i.imgur.com/YNaIWI6.png ... It's more of a spelling tutor than a typing tutor, because remembering how to spell words is a huge advantage compared to staring at the words.

Something I should mention: The letter forms are extremely difficult to read. V's look like U's, A's look like R's, and Z's look like 2's.

I think this is a wonderful educational tool. Thank you for creating it.
Can someone link to a better explanation? I'm not really satisfied by this blog post.
Wikipedia vs the Small Screen
I created a boredom killer
One of the hardest games I've ever played, ha.

I got stuck at 2 for a long time, but then finally something clicked and I got all the way to number 5!
That's the nature of practice and constantly attempting, regardless of the outcome. It should be a lesson in getting good at any activity.
Agreed and well-said.
I liked the idea of typescript but after frustration from fundamental issues I was very happy to bin it.

i) Wrapper libraries - Sure you can download them from definitelytyped but in practice I quickly found all sort of incompatibilities and things not working when used on real versions of the wrapped libraries. I had to edit them based on suggestions from forums. They are unversioned community efforts - poor versioning and no package manager is just a nightmare given the dozens of libraries we have to use for modern JS.

ii) Tooling - I thought this was the benefit and tried using it from WebStorm which claimed Typescript support. I found no meaningful intellisense only that it shelled out to the TS compiler in the background with some flakey syntax highlighting. The worst issue was that the compiler could regularly produce totally opaque error messages that were poorly located to the code issue and probably in the wrapper somewhere.

iii) Arbitrary apis - this is what I thought I wouldn't face but it was. Just a single line of code trying to the most basic task of creating an express server took hours of googling for the magic incantation. Most advice referred to the wrong version. It appears there are javascript patterns that typescript wrappers struggle to represent so the authors have to invent new ways of offering an interface. Wrappers don't come with documentation... even if they did, you now have to read both the original and the wrapper documentation. Not cool.

I hope some of this is now fixed but to have unreliable wrappers, no versioning and bad error messages means I am not hurrying back anytime soon.
Secret...hmmm, oh right. That app that only has people from the San Francisco/Bay Area using it.

I like Secret...sorry, is this a puff piece? Because it feels like it. It feels like Secret needs a push, and gee, here they come!
Your computer's already lying to you by piping your audio through crappy speakers. Is the distortion actually going to be worse with a limiter in place?

I really don't understand, why do you think this functionality doesn't belong in the OS or the hardware? To me, you're basically saying that you're OK with giving arbitrary web sites the ability to damage your hardware, since that's effectively what that ends up implying.
Taking branding too literally – I lasered our logo onto a steak (video and pics)
>> The Linux kernel is much more complex and also brings down the whole system when it crashes

> Yeah. And there is nothing good about it.

I beg to differ, and I think a lot of people will disagree with you. Regardless, your snarky remark fails to state any problems with the Linux kernel, or identify what you consider a "good" kernel.
Hacking SXSW – because their schedule sucks
I just don't understand what the fuss is about.

I'm primarily a Windows user (but I run Linux on some of my devices as well). I'm also tend to be quite particular about my UIs getting things right. Saying all that, I've felt next to zero impact in moving from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 feels a bit snappier. Some options have been moved around a bit. That's about it.

I just don't understand all the polemicising. Especially with statements like: "The specifics of what's wrong in Windows 8 don't really matter". They matter to me, because after reading all these articles about how terrible Windows 8 is, I still can't figure out what those specifics are! I would love to be enlightened about what I've been missing (or how I've been using Windows 8 wrong).
The most interesting question to me is what is you guys' experience with seeding app store reviews?

It seems that it definitely worked in that case (any many maybe more we don't know about). Are there some white hat review services, with people that actually download the app? Or is it all just black bot spammer'y?
It has a 1280x800 high-quality IPS screen.
Giving up or moving up | Words of a Nerd
My opinion on "the web will persist and the web will win" is that it's not a won battle. Native apps have always been smoother, giving users a better experience overall. On the contrary, mobile web apps have been bad, and haven't much evolved since we started having mobile devices (laptops don't count :p). I'm pretty sure that the future resides in mobile devices, and they can't rub the web, we'll have to use the alternative: native. At that point nothing stops Apple or facebook to go entirely native and therefore abandoning the web ideology (and the physical web). So I think that the web is a possible future, but nothing is settled yet, we need more groundbreaking ideas from the web to make it a desirable choice of future.
Yes, "loosely", of course. Thanks.)
I suggest you read this very carefully: http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html
When I said the moon I just meant some far fetching projects, not just sending tourists to the moon. However I agree that the Google plus social turn is kind of frivolous and heavy handed, at the same time. I was hoping in the beginning that it was a clever strategy to force open Facebook, but it seems to be not the case after all.
Advanced Linux Programming: /proc
I don't think "hacker" and "programmer" are completely synonymous. The "hacker" attributes that you definitely see in some children - taking apart things (although often failing to put them back together), building things, solving problems - often turn into careers in mechanical engineering, electronics, even sculpture. Programming is just one way of expressing that desire to create and tinker. I don't think all programmers are hackers, and many hackers aren't programmers.
This is definitely interesting, and I might check it out for the couple of times a week that I have to do complicated stages of commits or rebasing.

Generally speaking, though, I love git because I don't have to break out from my normal flow to use it.

My use case is potentially very different since most of my projects under version control are personal / single_committer, but I've saved myself some of the typing by aliasing common git commands to short codes: 'git add' becomes 'ga', 'git commit' == 'gc', 'git push' == 'gp'. That way, committing/pushing a bug I've just fixed becomes `gc -am '$message' && gp`.
A minor correction. Calculus has loads of proofs. The calculus taught to high school and non-math undergrads tends to avoid more than a handful of proofs because most students don't need to know, nor care, about the actual math involved. Indeed, it would likely drive more students away.

I would say that calculus is the first "real math" that students study which is so complicated that they can't really learn the first principles without years of effort. That's why classes teach the most immediately useful parts instead of covering the details. Someone who only studies those basics might even come out thinking that calculus is just a bunch of techniques, without grasping how gorgeous the underlying concepts and abstractions are.

Take geometry as something I think you regard as "real math." How come geometry classes never prove that it's impossible to trisect the angle? Or double the cube? It turns out that compass and straightedge can only produce quadratic constructions, and Wantzel showed that these problems require cubics. This shows just how limited geometry really is, which is partially why students can feel that they have a handle on the entire topic. (Also, few if any secondary schools cover non-Euclidean geometries, or Euclid's book X as it explores incommensurable magnitudes.)

I would also say that trigonometry is the first applied math course that students learn, not calculus.

Let's go to calculus. Take for example the chain rule, D(g∘f)(c) = Dg(f(c))∘Df(c). This is one of those rules everyone learns in Calculus I. Can you prove it? I once could. Here's the start of the proof from my text book:

"The hypothesis implies the c is an interior point of the domain of h = g∘f. (Why?) Let e>0 and d(e, f) be as in Definition 39.2. It follows from Lemma 39.5 that there exists strictly positive numbers g, J such that if |x-c|<=g then f(x) is an element of B and |f(x)-f(c)|<=K |x-c|. For simplicity, we write L_f = D f(c) and L_g = D h(b). By Theorem 21.3 there is a constant M such that |L_s(u)|<=M|u| for all u in R^q. If |x-c|<infimum(g, (1/K) ..."

And so on for another 10 lines of the book.

Do you really want to subject all calculus students to that level of detail? I don't. Who other than a mathematician needs to learn about Lebesgue integration and measure theory, which are even more advanced topics in calculus?

BTW, my undergrad had multivariable and vector calculus as a single Calculus III class, so there were only 3 semesters of calculus before getting into the foundations of calculus. Also, calculus books do have some proofs. For example, every chapter I looked at from http://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-18-001-calculus-online-text... contains a few proofs.
What Mount?
How I Built a $300M Government Contracting Business
Actually, the first time you start IntelliJ, it will walk you through all the plugins per category. If you don't select anything, you will mostly have the same effect.

Of course, the result won't be as light as Sublime text, because it is already a Java IDE :).

Also, I don't really see the point. I start or restart my IDE (IntelliJ) one time a week. So, it's not really the startup time that matters. Once started, IntelliJ is fast on all my machines (including my work iMac, which still has spinning platters).
My biggest concern with systemd has to do with its creator, Lennart Poettering. He created PulseAudio and Avahi. Neither of those are particularly reliable, stable pieces of software. Also, Lennart's opposition to making systemd portable is worrying. The other unixes have it hard enough already.

I don't want to single him out and hate on him. Lennart's probably a nice guy, and he's contributed a lot more to open source than I have. But having the people responsible for PulseAudio involved in the next-generation init sounds like a recipe for disaster.
What the ... I was referring to the fact that you presented "people you know" as a meaningful sample of the population.
Undead lawyers raising from graves to once again protect the IP they were once working on... I'd like to play that game :)
> As to your P.S.: yes, exactly, so you already know you are going to abandoning the desktop.

Oh, hmm, would I guess also really depend on what OS and software is available for it and how open the whole ecosystem is, I mean, something unix-like that you can modify, not something single-closed-source-app-at-a-time-like :)

And if a desktop machine will allow you to stuff many more powerful CPUs and GPUs in it I may keep using one anyway :D
Ask HN: Reddit username bug?
i signed up on Reddit last week (am early arean't i?) - using the username justin_bieber_is_666 which is a 20 characters - here's the problem the Reddit login form for username only accepts 19 characters! - right?

though i know my account exits because i can reset my password (an email will be sent to me saying "...password reset for username: justin_bieber_is_666...")
That's great for going between cities, but useless within them. It also needs something on a smaller scale for people to get from home to work to the shops to home without standing for 30 minutes in the rain and not getting a seat, or for them to get home when drunk at 3am and the trains don't start until 6.
(as in "where the hell is this function?").

Command-shift-a, type some letters. Done :). It's pretty much like Command-shift-p in Sublime Text.
They haven't really talked about funding publicly, but we do know that Pierre Omidyar is involved (there've been stories about him funding them before [1], and on the about page of this site he is listed as "Publisher" for First Look Media [2]).

His net worth is huge ($8.5b as of September 2013, according to Forbes [3]), so he can give them plenty of initial funding, and he's brought in Michael Rosen as CRO, who was previously head of online and mobile sales for AT&T Adworks [4], so advertising seems a very likely answer to the question of how they will make money in the future.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/15/glenn-greenwald-pie...
[2] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/about/
[3] http://www.forbes.com/profile/pierre-omidyar/
[4] http://adage.com/article/media/media-names-michael-rosen-chi...
Within a few years you will probably be able to buy such a drone for $1000 on the internet. Everyone is going to want one.
I also spent a few months deployed in Helmand and Farah provinces in 2008. My platoon didn't go to Kajaki Dam in particular.. we saw a few little signs of what this article talks about everywhere. The guys in the line company that served in Lashkar Gah and Kajaki remarked about how bizarre the history was. I'm blown away.

The whole concept of "Technocracy" interests me to no end. Eisenhower warned not just of the Military Industrial Complex in his famous speech at the end of his presidency - he also warned of the repercussions of state-sponsored research and of those who were conducting it, and for what purposes (check out page 10): http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents...

"..there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

Eisenhower knew that we were learning so, so much about the world. Our ability to reason was, and is, unlocking so many secrets to the nature of nature itself, that there was a never-ending pressure for top-down, ambitious projects - especially just following the dropping of the bomb and the ending of WWII.
2 days sounds about right - thus why all of those jobs are for $500 or less.
Is This The Door Of The Future?
The scariest part no one is talking about is the feature creep. All software eventually dies; systemd will be no different. Some folks hope that happens immediately, some hope we're "stuck" with it for a couple generations, maybe 30 years. Regardless of exactly when, its going to be replaced someday, and massive feature creep seems intentionally designed to make the eventual changeover as painful as possible.

Someday in the future, either 2016 or 2066 someone is going to want to rearchitect the "thing that the kernel starts first" and is going to freak out at the insane feature creep... so you're telling me that I not only have to create something to start services which is no big deal, but also an entire logging system, and a hotplug handler, and a cgroup server, and ... WTF does this blasted thing have an MP3 player, a web server, and an IRC client in it too?

Its an awful design but probably survivable, at least temporarily, and once the flamewars die down a sensible replacement with a good design can be rolled out to replace it. But mid-flamewar with all manner of business / marketing money flying everywhere on all sides is not the ideal blue sky redevelopment time. As much as it pains me to say it, rolling out an init that has almost the worst possible inherent design possible does have some value to the ecosystem as a counterexample, here's what not to do with 2.0. Obviously its replacement will be better, I just hope it doesn't swing too far in the opposite direction as a reaction. The point of this paragraph is the most important thing to do at this time is to lay the seeds for the replacement, while not over-reacting to the disaster of systemd.

So, the replacement for systemd, to be rolled out sometime between 2015 and 2065, should ... (insert feature list here).
On a side note, if you believe in BTC, I cannot remember the last time you could buy it for less than $600 like today.
Securing Your Website's Password Reset System
I think mefi is a little bit different too, as I understand it, the main revenue come from ads on the Ask Metafilter pages. It certainly isn't growing very much, but I don't believe it's actually declining.

I've been away from slashdot for quite a while (I have a 4 digits username there), I checked the beta site, and while it looks a bit bland to me, I don't get why it is such a big deal for the active users. Would love to have pointers that describe exactly what happens/why it's happening now.
I guess this post has some relevance in this thread: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html
Except if you are writing the VM...
> Transactions are malleable. Deal with it.

Clearly MtGox overlooked this and thought it was the obvious way to track a transaction.

Given that they're malleable, what use-case do they have now?
Not if you grew up poor like me and didn't actually have access to a computer. I didn't until I was 12 years old.

>Was four hours of sleep every night good for me? Probably not, but kids can get away with that sort of thing.

No they cannot. Children need sleep, perhaps more than adults. They need sleep for proper development and functioning. They also need more sleep than adults.

http://www.webmd.com/parenting/guide/sleep-children

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-08-12-kid...

http://www.atsjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1164/ajrccm.157.4.9704...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1998....

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/80/5/664.short
A database can afford to fsync to ensure consistency, and
they've been heavily tested to ensure it works properly.
And even then its still possible that the file becomes corrupt, if the OS, or the disk lies about fsync:
https://www.sqlite.org/howtocorrupt.html

Has journald been tested on how well it copes with sudden reboots, kernel panics, powerloss, etc.?

When something goes wrong you usually want to be able to still read your logs to figure out what happened, and you may not even be able to boot the system properly.
Is there any IRC channel for this project?
I don't see that as an example. Many informed users like their "phablets" a lot - anecdote: I'm surrounded by 16 Android users vs 1 iPhone user, all of then have larger screens and like them, and discuss the merits of their phones.

I dislike "phablets" as phones myself, so I use a Nokia phone as a phone (much better phone quality and longer battery life) and have an Android phone as a tablet with 3G.

Also, there are lots of smaller versions of Android phones, the S4 mini might not be what you want but it sells really well over here.
That reminds me of The Typing of the Dead, a "House of the Dead" variant where you had to type words to shoot the zombies instead of pointing a gun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Typing_of_the_Dead

Note that this is an official game and even has the players agents equipped with keyboards instead of guns in the ingame sequences.
> think that kind of research is interesting, but feminists are prone to jumping to conclusions.

I'm afraid researchers in general are far to prone to jumping to conclusions.

> As soon as they see any data that can be interpreted to support the presence of discrimination, the case is closed and no further inquiry is being made.

That's not my experience with such research. On the contrary, there are usually a progression: first look at the statistical data to see if there appear to be differences, and if there are, then try and find out more about those differences, why they are there and if they can and/or should be mitigated.

A lot of the work in classrooms, for instance, first started with documenting classroom settings on video, looking at the amount of time spent with various students and how often one or another group was picked to answer questions etc. This work revealed rather stark differences, much to the surprise of teachers who subjectively thought themselves to not do any sort of differentiation.

Now, explaining those differences is indeed complex. And while I don't think there is any support for the idea that boys are dumber than girls (or vice versa) -- there are indeed studies suggesting that young boys have a harder time learning and concentrating in a quiet "at-the-desk" classroom setting. This then has implications for how one should organize class; in general you don't want noisy students to distract those that are more quiet/more mature -- nor might you want to segregate the classroom too much.

> For example, in the wage gap discussion, I have never seen anybody ask an employer why they pay women less. Who knows, there might be some surprising answers.

That amounts to asking employers why they are breaking the law, which makes it a little tricky. In general there are three important questions here: do women earn the same as men (no); are women paid the same amount for the same work as men (no, but the difference is smaller -- especially now than in the 60s); And: Why?

The answer to why is also a two-part answer: partly women do more of the work that is considered free (or very low wage when people are hired to do it): housework and staying at home with children. Additionally, due to women being overrepresented in careers with lower wages, in a typical family, it makes more economic sense for the woman to stay home with young (and/or sick) children -- which again means the woman might progress slower in her career.

To cut an already too long comment short, have a look at for example:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-06-21/equal-pay-pl...

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/04/09/1839281/on-equal...
Nothing that a couple of aliases can't do...
If you're talking to police, and you don't know who the criminal is that they are trying to find, its you.
I don't get it, what are the mistakes?