skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Horrifying story that will change absolutely nothing. The government isn't willing to back away from the power (even after it became known) and people aren't upset enough in mass to actually do things about it - things that would probably be done in vain for some time. And changing the minds of many people in the 'innocent people have nothing to hide' I find to have a general delusion, believing the government (or at least the law) is mostly infallible.

It is not a new pattern, either. Look back to what we (americans) did to each other in the 50's (are You a communist? Do you act like one?). Had we had the tech then to spy like now, we'd have done so. Which means that despite the sensational news stories, I find almost apathy from normal people I meet - the paranoid has known for years (don't talk on that cell phone, they can listen in on those easily... does anyone remember this attitude?). Privacy intrusions simply exist. They are. You aren't escaping them. It might make one angry, but there is nothing people feel they can do about it. I personally disagree, but also feel the path to balance in this area is an uncomfortable one.
Hopefully they reject this mail, not simply discard it.
I find hard to read such comments and think that they are valuable contributions anymore.

First of all, Pulseaudio was not the biggest success, true, but can't someone learn from their mistakes? Both are also living, moving software products that continue to improve, as you said, "development marred with huge number of bugs that ruined audio on Linux until recently" - key words: "until recently".

Secondly, about the technical aspects:

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ -> "The systemd for Administrators Blog Series"

Lennard Poettering said it better than I ever will.
Oh sorry, didn't mean to sound snarky. It was a genuine question. I was just wondering how reading HN had an impact on my parent poster in terms of "computer words" or coding skills that he didn't understand before.
It's time to stop joking about IE like that. IE 11 is a fine Web browser these days. Yes, it took them a while to catch back up, but they have and they're a genuinely modern browser today. Firefox is still a better browser, for a good number of reasons, not the least of which is Mozilla's mission to put users and the health of the Internet first, but Microsoft engineers working on IE for the last few years deserve more credit than they're getting. Shouldn't we be cheering for them to build the best they can instead of insulting them?
Task manager for hackers
> The beauty of the world and the morality of what happens in it are utterly orthogonal. You're conflating those things

He's right to conflate these things. Suffering is not beautiful.
The Computational Complexity of Machine Learning
> Because Upstart does not use cgroups, it can not kill all of a services children (just that service), and so zombie services might be problematic.

from my (very limited) experience with upstart, even the upstart scripts themselves can get into a unrecoverable zombie state[1], where the only workaround is to do one of the following 1) reboot ; 2) run some crazy-ass script[2] that forks processes until the right pid is grabbed to then kill it ; 3) rename the upstart script

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/10433...
[2] https://gist.github.com/mitsuhiko/d55199e9b1ad7fc65504
Catcher in the Rye is an adult book written for juveniles, and I mean that in the best possible way. It is about profound realization we all have at some point that adults are not the grown-ups we think them to be, but rather - as I've heard expressed well recently - adults are merely big children that have left the sandbox. Or in Holden's words, phonies.

I think this still is a profound and powerful book for anyone reading it at the appropriate point in their life, usually the last year or two of high school. If you are familiar with post-war American culture of the 1950's, then you can also appreciate on a literary and historical level its counter-cultural message.

But otherwise, if you're encountering Catcher in the Rye for the first time having already become a grown-up adult, I wouldn't expect much of it.
Britain detained someone for nine hours to question him over material he arguably shouldn't have had in his possession. He's now suing through the British courts for wrongful arrest, and he return of the allegedly infringing material.

Turkey is responsible for about 1/5 of known jailed journalists worldwide[1] and routinely jails them for many years. It deported a journalist for criticizing the Prime Minister - "a blunt assault on Erdogan's honor" - yesterday
[1]https://www.cpj.org/imprisoned/2013.php#turkey
Is it just me? Wouldn't most people prefer that the premise posed in the title be elucidated in one or two paragraphs? Why is that article channeling Tolstoy? It could be longer than War and Peace.

I just skimmed it. AFAICT some guy redesigned the Ebay front page as a skunkworks project.
I like this idea, but perhaps it'd be better to rate limit to say 1 crush a day
There's multiple books with Perfume as/in the title. Are you referring to Das Parfum?
A few years ago, I went to a tech demo/hackathon thing. Somebody had some neat experiments with preloading pages speculatively based on user behaviour

The coolest approach given was when a user types in the search box, kick off the request for the full results page if they move their mouse on a motion curve towards one of the results, with some machine learned data on how people move their mouse: Not quite in a straight line, and with some acceleration.
Epic book, totally recommended.
5-10 years is a very long period. To me: JavaScript looks exciting, current trends clearly show the rise of JS.

However, just a decade ago, a large majority of Internet used JS primarily for form validation, which was sad. A lot of web developers were not comfortable leaving their code open for the visitors to see.

I personally believe JS will continue to soar but I also believe that nobody can answer this question perfectly as nobody knows the future.

In any case, if you spend a lot of time learning any language very well, the time required to learning another language after that, decreases substantially.
Why Most Apps Fail: Onboarding's Dirty Secret
This is actually a very good response. There are new technologies sprouting up continuously but only a few survive. However, the older ones have already shown resilience and will likely survive a long time (C/C++ and Java were mentioned).
Flappy Bird creator to take down game
How Louis CK And The Hare Krishnas Can Make You A Better Entrepreneur
I don't think it's more true in the US. It's easier to get into the best universities in the US than it is in the UK. If you manage to make it, (for the most part) no one cares who your parents or grand parents were. In the UK these things matter to the point of absurdity. In the UK, the system was rigged centuries ago; here in the US our rigged system is still very much in its infancy, relatively speaking of course.
I have not, will give it a try, thanks. You read my mind though, always liked Hex Workshop. Favorite is the 2.54 release, but it sadly doesn't run on Vista+ (can't open files.)

Screenshots don't look promising, but it's all about the available settings. Ghex and Bless would base column count on the window size, and wouldn't remember your window geometry between runs. So every single run I had to resize the window to hold 16 columns so that my addresses on the left were predictable.

Ghex would re-display its 800x480 number converter every time it was opened, with no way to leave it off for good. I've used those things exactly zero times in the 15 years I've been reverse engineering things. I don't know why every hex editor loves them so much. How often are people really editing files full of nothing but IEEE754 float values?

Both lacked side-by-side editing, which thankfully it looks like wxHexEditor has. As long as it has a fixed-column count setting and strong "compare files" features, I think this will do nicely, thanks.
Why would he do remove it??
I'm in agreement here. The engineers that will lose out are the ones that think that by learning the latest and greatest frameworks and libraries, they are somehow improving in their mastery.

This is, in fact, stamp collecting. Fewer and fewer engineers feel comfortable doing the basics. Implementing a raw custom data structure, writing a new parser, twiddling bits on a wire, debugging segmentation faults. The new-age programmer is in reality, a scripter who learns hundreds of different ways to do more or less the same thing.

There is no steamroller, but there is stagnation.
Surprised / pleased that I'm a quarter of the way there (well, 24/100).

Didn't expect quite that much young adult literature - Harry Potter, Limony Snickett, Golden Compass, The Giver (plus Lord of the Rings). All major film franchises (well, The Giver under production).

Was amazed to see The Phantom Tollbooth. One of my favourite books of all time, though I haven't read it since I was a child and honestly have never met another person who'd heard of it!
So distributions chose to bundle Pulseaudio before it was sufficiently stable, and this is all Lennart's fault and he must forever burn in hell with no way to ever, ever fix or improve things?

The Lennart hate is ridiculous. This time, even Linux kernel hackers think systemd is a good idea. What are your credentials?
You should create backup every month...
400 USD/hour is a great rate anywhere in the world, even the most expensive cities.

But abcd_f's comment is right about one-off 4-hour projects vs. long-term contracting. Non-billable time overhead spent on finding clients, negotiating contracts, mentally switching projects, or just sitting idle can negate the benefits of a high hourly rate.
That was found largely incompatible with the Fundamental Rights charter:

http://www.privacysurgeon.org/blog/incision/europes-controve...

Also the whole point of having Courts grant permission for stuff is to be a check on the executive and legislative's power. Whether that worked well in Turkey or not is a whole different issue. But I'm guessing they wouldn't bother to pass this law if it didn't.
Also worth a look is redshift (in the repo's as gtk-redshift if you want a a graphical control) which is basically f.lux but works better on Linux (in my experience).

I don't know if all the stuff about blue colour curves and stuff is accurate but what I do like is that it reduces the "staring into a lamp" feeling you get when the sun goes down (and in the UK at this time of the year that is pretty early).
On http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html Gabriel talks about the difficulty he had in deciding whether worse really is better and that he wrote various documents taking opposing positions
Stranger in a Strange Land was a bit too predictable for my taste although it was an entertaining read to some degree - but I found Dune much more interesting and worthy of praise.

First time I tried to read Catcher in the Rye I found it dull and didn't get far, but the second time I got into it and really enjoyed it. I ended up feeling a lot of sympathy for the main character.
Correct. Most of people who are statistically upper class (meaning '1%') are living in much pricier places so they don't really feel so upper.
Exactly. I don't expect Upstart or even SysV init (in the configuration as provided by distributions) to work well inside Docker either.

For an example how you should build a Docker container, take a look at http://phusion.github.io/baseimage-docker/
Nobody is denying that, but you are misunderstanding his argument.

There is a difference between a ponzi scheme collapsing from lack of new "suckers" vs pulling the plug on the site. I think what he is trying to say is that there were plenty of suckers left, and the loss now feels artificial.

Somebody is going to pay though. I'm sure (I hope in this community) everyone knows that.
Learn basics - concepts of programming. 90% of developers use imperative (procedural) and structured (OOP) paradigms. But the world of the programming is not so close. There is a lot of other interesting and applicable paradigms, including declarative (functional and logic programming), metaprogramming, semantic, and many more.

Learning only programming language (PL) people are limited to scope of that language. Learning paradigms (better in terms of one of PL) you gain knowledges which are "portable" between PLs of the paradigm. You will have a boost when switching PL of the same paradigm: learn PL faster, looking into PL's features and not its basics.

I recommend to check out before you choose what to learn: Lisp dialects like Closure, CL, etc; Ruby; Go / Rust; Java.
> - and if you love it then you will pick up new technologies out of sheer intellectual curiosity.

I like learning new concepts. I don't like learning things that are kind of the same as the what I'm already used to, lacks 5% of what I had in the 'previous' technology, adds 5% of what that other 20 year old technology did (and did better) that I already know, and "learning it" is more about rote learning and getting used to corner cases than it is about gaining a new perspective.

I don't know the ratio of this type of learning to the more perspective-shifting type of learning.
In the past, when I was younger, I was addicted to numerous games including WoW, FFXII, C&C, Counter-Strike, TFC. But one day whilst playing WoW I thought "Why am I here grinding levels in a game? I should be grinding levels in life.".

I uninstalled everything and made a conscious decision to grind by learning and living. Sure, I still zone out with video games from time to time but I start to get uncomfortable after an hour and stop, very casual. For me, I realised I was wasting my life and it was making me unhappy.

[Edit: Typos]
Thanks. It's a complete mystery why people think that a website set up to trade playing cards can act like a bank. And completely unsurprising that it finds itself embroiled in all these hilarious situations.
Yes, it also struck me that way.

As an offtopic aside, the Mars day/year slide ( http://style.org/visualized/images/weightofrain_34.jpg ) made me think we should really build a "second home" (or vacation house, or mountain cabin).

Perhaps mountain cabin is the appropriate metaphor. It's another 70 million km up the Sun's gravity well. If we take solar energy supply as a feasibility criterion, it's 43% of what we get on Earth. (Data courtesy of
http://idahoptv.org/ntti/nttilessons/lessons2000/lau1.html )
Yes, Süskind's.
To be fair, it did take me 15 minutes to write my first RPM. Documentation is pretty good.

Writing my first Debian package, on the other hand, took me a day. Documentation is horrible. All tutorials are outdated. All the documents throw tons of jargon at me and just expect that I understand them. The tooling consists of 300 different tools with a lot of overlapping functionality, mostly for historical and backward-compatibility reasons. Debuilder, pbuilder, dpkg-buildpackage, debhelper, cbbs.... what? Learning all this stuf was a nightmare, while RPM was pretty straightforward.

Furthermore, Debian packaging tools don't have a preprocessor. It seems they really expect me to repackage my app separately for every distribution version. RPM on the other hand has a builtin preprocessor so that I can customize my specfile on a per-distribution basis with only a single file and a single tool. I ended up writing my own preprocessor for Debian packages, but something tells me I shouldn't have to.

On the other hand, RPM does not support "Recommended" and "Suggested" dependencies which are very useful. Neither does it support OR statements in dependency specifications. This latter sucks, a lot.
Pubmatic, prepares for IPO
> Too many languages will also force your people to have very shallow knowledge.

I spent the last 10 years learning programming languages and PLT; it's a hobby of mine and I put quite a lot of effort behind it. While I certainly forget some things I learned (I regret not using C on a daily basis and not keeping with C++ advancements), at any given time during those past ten years I was fluent in at least 3-4 languages. Without needing a refresher, right now I can speak and I really know in depth the following languages: JavaScript, OCaml, Erlang, Racket, Python, LiveScript and Pharo Smalltalk. I have about 20 other languages I could become similarly fluent in with a week's effort. It's not shallow knowledge, it's just 10 years of work. There is really nothing to force you not to have deep understanding of many different languages and technologies.

On the professional side - I have quite big system under my care which is mixed Python, JavaScript, Ruby and Erlang, not to mention bits of C, shell scripts and Makefiles and two compile-to-JS languages, some compile-to-CSS and compile-to-HTML languages. The system works - and believe it or not, working on it is a pleasure and using the right tool for the job really feels liberating. It let's me move twice as quickly with twice as good results than I'd get trying to do for example fault tolerant, concurrent backend service in Python instead of Erlang (or quick data mining script in Erlang instead of Python for that matter).

I believe using the right tool for the job is the very definition of professional. Of course, the learning curve is probably steeper for newcomers, but for professionals above a certain level language specifics are rather easy to grok and becoming fluent in a language takes a few weeks tops. Besides, it's not like every team member is required to know every technology used in a project - there's a tech lead for this and I wouldn't want to work with one who can't easily convert iterative algorithms to tail-recursive ones and switch from algol-like to prolog-like to python(-like) syntax on the fly.

Anyway, I know what I know and I know what I do and you're basically saying that these skills are irrelevant and using them would be unprofessional. In short, what I'm saying in response is: bullshit.
Wow! That was a good read. Advaita philosophy, and Karma Siddantha in a nutshell.
Wat zijn de spelregels van black Jack?
It's a classic and iconic piece of computer literature -- it even provided a common phrase used describe certain methodologies ("worse is better").

Not to mention it's quite short and to the point, this is not some academic or over-indulgent blah-blah.

As for the use of the word "worse" it makes perfect sense, and the context is very easy to pick up.

I can't even fathom how one could say it "wanders".
From the trends I see, I'd recommend to become a Javascript expert (not just passing knowledge of jQuery).

Then Node.js and Angular. You should be set for the next 10 years.

Outside enterprise, .NET is sinking into irrelevance. I don't know for Xamarin though.

Edit : fwiw my current job is C# / WPF since 2009. So don't take my comment about .NET irrelevance as mindless Microsoft hatred.
Cyanogen Mod cheats by backing up GMS prior to install.
Well, it's Mojang's right.
This is basically the same thing as saying you can't open source until you're firmly in the lead?
Calling Twitter API 1.1 From Android
Last year Twitter turned of their open APIs. Now you must use OAuth to talk to their servers. Here's how to so from Java for Android. No libraries just source code to use for your own apps.
Looks more like a popularity contest with an unsurprising correlation to recent screen adaptations.

I half expect Justin Bieber's biography to make the list.

Goodreads and Amazon have become as useless as IMDB when it comes to ratings. Both are prime examples of why the "wisdom of the crowds" is bull. Guess Nicholas Carr was right after all.
Nutch/Solr could provide a way to do a crawl, refine parameters, and then feed into a tool to download the actual resources.
The best way to say that is by simply up-voting.

HN would become a much better place if the comments are more insightful and represent the perspective of the person commenting :)
Go, Javascript(angular)
Are they seriously recommending the usage of unsalted md5?

Edit: Oh, the article is from 2009 (I'd say it was bad practice even back then though).
This used to be extremely common as a naturally viral way to harvest email addresses, the prompt was "put in the email addresses of your crushes".

What's your twist that sets it apart from the usual variants? (Sure, building it on top of Facebook could potentially provide some additional benefits, but what are they?)
This is not a wise strategy.

Technologies go through cycles - PHP was hot in 2006, Ruby peaked in 2010, Javascript (and Node.js) is currently hot, and it's quite possible that Go will be hot in 2-3 years.

It's foolish to learn a language under the assumption that it will be relevant for 10 years. If you asked this question in the early 2000s, PHP would be the answer, not Javascript.

The best strategy is to continuously brush up on skills. Experiment and dabble with new languages and frameworks as often as your time allows!
I'm running cyanogenmod without google and many of the apps out there rely on google apis without telling you that they do so (a significant chunk of the apps available on aptoide). Also with some phones that I've had it's been basically impossible to get a gps fix without enabling the 'allow google to track me' option, not that that is particularly relevant, but it is pretty annoying...
I don't think it's quite that settled.

And no, it's not just about the OS stack. It says something that MS's new CEO, Satya Nadella, used to run the cloud group.
I've heard that this is a problem with real-life speed-dating as well.
Works ok on nightly for me. I'm just waiting for this to be implemented on Firefox Mobile so I can continue to actually sync between all my machines again.
Counter question: after 6 months of Angular and Rails, what makes you feel you need more experience to use them in a job?
> what did you expect them to do? Include foreign books that their English readers can't read?

I've spotted few translated books in this list, so I don't see why this is a problem.

>And no, just because a non-English book is great and worth reading does not automatically confer that same status onto an English translation based upon that book.

I disagree, I think good translations are pretty much transparent. Substance matters more.
Isn't this more or less prefetch, as implemented by a number of browsers eg chrome? https://developers.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/prerender
Metasploit for Pentesters – VIDEOS for FREE
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Thanks!
I only keep the gmail app around for search, because the way gmail or iphone Mail.app implement IMAP search is not so good.
Sales and marketing - those skills will never go out of style.
I think there's a certain huckster and salesman instinct in successful politicians, a base sense of how to appeal to common values that becomes second nature, no rehearsal required. Lyndon Johnson had it in excess.
> But if you're going to do this trick and you use a code compiler of any sort, you'll need to assign the value of that clientLeft somewhere. Otherwise your compiler will notice it not doing anything and helpfully optimize it away. So your users in production will see your layout bug and you'll never be able to reproduce it in development.

This optimization is only possible if the compiler is able to deduce this as a useless function call. In order to do that, the compiler has to deduce (i) that the result is not used, and (ii) that the function has no side effects. (ii) can be very, very hard to deduce.