skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This would rather much be like a carpentry shop owner lamenting "why don't either electric circular saws OR handsaws work to make my mediocre workforce produce beautiful furniture without all of this wasted wood?"

First of all, creating beautiful furniture takes LOTS of time, as it rests in attention to detail and an uncompromising position towards quality. When you're uncompromising about quality, you require yourself to throw out, to waste, things that are of lesser quality.

Second of all, beginner, poorly trained, and dispassionate employees are never going to produce beautiful furniture. Mostly because of the above: they either lack the ability or the caring to have the attention to detail necessary to do great work.

And the best carpenters aren't going to come work for you unless you're willing to make it worth their time. Coming to work for you means they will have to do a lot more work in a much less comfortable environment than they are used to. Because the best carpenters have their own shop, their own tools, and work on their own time, because they love it. Going anywhere that is not their own setup is automatically worse for them.

It's the same thing in software: great software takes patience, it takes time, and it takes money to convince the best programmers that they should be spending their time on you rather than on themselves.

But at no point does any of that mean that, because Tool X can't magically turn your mediocre working into a stellar one, that means that Tool X is not worth studying. That is completely, 100% backwards. The master practitioner studies all tools, even the ones he or she doesn't like, at the very least to understand what is wrong with them and why they don't produce the results they want. A master carpenter might prefer a hand saw over an electric one because the electric saw chips the corners of the board too easily, or something. But he doesn't know that unless he's studied the electric saw.

You can't have "an absence of methodology" any more than a wood shop can have "an absence of tools". It has to be there. But they all have their pros and cons, and non of them has a pro that includes "makes men out of mice."
i am one of 10 children (7 girls including myself and 3 boys). 100% of us went into STEM. what's more, we are Latino so growing up in a thoroughly geeky environment was, well, unique.

in high school i found safety in geeky societies like Academic Decathlon. i went to a science/engineering university and dropped out to work in tech. and as much as i love my work, i have always been aware (sometimes acutely) of being one of the only women in the room.

i'd be lying if it didn't chap my hide sometimes. i have skills commonly found among the male population (i am an entrepreneur, i know how to code) but it's a lonely existence. i still look like a woman, wear heels and makeup for the fun of it when i want to, and am relatively short! my point is, i stand out from the norm and people are constantly being surprised by me/my abilities. which means i have to do a lot of explaining and seeking out of mentors, rather than spending that time thriving in the simple assumption that i am precisely where i am supposed to be.

men have that. the really self-reflective ones realize that.

the awesome thing is, the women in my family have not only been fighting the good fight in STEM, they are passing the baton. each one of my nieces--all 8 of them--is encouraged to build, tear apart, and reconstruct stuff. these kids have to be torn away from Minecraft, unglued from their laptops and iPads. i teach girls how to code and do graphic design in my free time, and one of my favorite questions is: "When is the Maker Faire? When is the Maker Faire!" with sparkly eyes.

my experience in tech hasn't been like @HedgeMage's. although i didn't start coding until later in my career, i have always been a hacker and the dirty little secret is that girls just aren't encouraged to hack.

some of us are born that way, however. and that's a pretty amazing way to be on the inside, regardless of how we look or are treated on the outside.
Right, I do think clang is a godsend. Finally reasonable error messages, modern compiler technology, you can interface it with tools for "intellisense" and syntax highlighting in many editors, ...

I have the "pleasure" to work with something called ROOT, which is a data analysis toolkit for particle physics. One major component is the C++ interpreter CINT. Now you can imagine a C++ interpreter is a very bad thing. Subtle differences in execution, scripts that are almost valid C++ code but not quite, etc.. ROOT tried to offload some parsing to GCC via GCC-XML, but IIRC that didn't work so well, and GCC-XML was also doomed for political reasons (RMS didn't want a stable interface to the internals of GCC, so that nobody could interface it with closed-source code). With the new version of ROOT however, they are moving to a clang based interpreter, which means much less bizarre bugs due to corner cases of C++.

(originally by Masaharu Goto, which lead to the saying "Masaharu Goto Considered Harmful"... I don't mean to offend that guy though)
Too pragmatic. Where are the meetings?!
Show HN: I redesigned Microsoft Employee Badge
I think it's a rather fun PR stunt, don't get too hung up on how useful it actually is ;)
Crowdfunding a homeless guy to get back home
Interestingly most acquisitions (generally, not specific to Google or tech) don't work out and managing growth on that scale is a significant challenge in itself.

I work for a highly acquisitive company and while we're no Google, I can tell you, as often as not the whole thing is a damn mess which does little but drive staff turnover. The theoretical synergies are great but for the most part they're very hard to realise and the hard work starts with the purchase rather than ends with it.

The occasional crazy / interesting acquisition I think is a good sign but I'm not sure that it's a list you want to be top of.
This idea that a software engineer picks a language as his "favourite" and becomes a "Ruby developer" or a "JavaScript developer" ever since is completely misguided, and I'm sad to see it cherished further in this article.

Languages are tools, and tools should be picked depending on the project: its application domain, performance requirements, availability of libraries for important subproblems that have been identified, target platform, etc., there are lots of very concrete factors to look into. Completely ignoring those factors in favour of choosing your "favourite" or one of just 2 languages you happen to like, is going to have suboptimal results. A good engineer knows a lot about programming languages in general (what is taught in a university "Programming languages" course), has basic experience with a huge number of languages, and picks the programming language for the project based on this knowledge, based on research and on prototyping, that's how I see it.

I recommend looking back at Marvin Minsky's 1970 Turing Award lecture "Form and Content in Computer Science". Little has changed since:

The trouble with computer science today is an obsessive concern with form instead of content.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/TuringLecture/Turing...
That's probably different in the Welsh valleys.
The new keyword is SDN I guess - software-defined network. A lot of what was the standard in networking and hardware domain is migrating to software now. Especially when you're running many dynamic virtual hosts, you may want to move the tricky networking parts into easy to redefine software configuration on the host itself.

This idea will get only more popular soon. Of course there are also products that allow you driving the physical boxes remotely - like openflow. I think the mix of those technologies will get quite important in the future. I'm not sure if that's what the GP meant though.
Loved the "Clarity is kinfuhgjno"
I'll have to dig into that when I've more time. It doesn't change the main thrust of the above - that plurality voting does a poor job picking the "candidate most ranked first" in the presence of strategic voting, because you're picking the candidate most ranked first amongst votes cast which - in strategic ballots - will typically not match the candidate ranked first among voter preferences.
>But when you find such a thing, like women asking for promotions less, why not learn from it and ask for a promotion?

Women are socialized to not ask for what they want from a young age. Many do not realize they can even ask for the things they want. Society tends to view women and men differently when they ask.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/jobs/06pre.html

> The messages girls receive — from parents and teachers, from books they read, from movies and television shows they watch, and from behavior of the adults around them — can be so powerful that as women they may not even understand that their reluctance to ask for what they want is a learned behavior, and one that can be unlearned.

>More recent research that I conducted with two colleagues, Hannah Bowles and Lei Lai, points to another reason that women don’t ask: They face a much chillier reaction — from men and from women — when they do negotiate for what they want.

>Behavior that can lead a man to be seen as ambitious or a go-getter can brand a woman as too pushy and aggressive. She may be called rude names, receive negative evaluations based solely on her personal style instead of her work and find herself closed out of networks or opportunities from which she might benefit. My boss was pleased that I asked him for what I wanted. A lot of women aren’t so lucky.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/womensmedia/2012/07/02/nice-girl...

http://www.ncrw.org/LiteratureReviews/Gender-Negotiation

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ncmr.12022/abstra...

>Can you point to the study that shows that?

I have linked to many that you already refuse to read.

Here's some:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/201...

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/uploads/006/923/Adolph,%...

http://www.newsweek.com/why-parents-may-cause-gender-differe...

http://www.nature.com/scitable/content/chapter-9-workplace-b...

http://naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-08/ns_slee.html

>What if there are natural reasons?

We can't know that because society treats baby girls different from baby boys at birth.

Go take an anthropology class and learn about socialization. Nobody grew up in a bubble.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialization
> I can't intuit a significant bias, so I may well be wrong here

Assume you have a deck of 3 cards. If you switch any 2 cards 3 times, you end up with 27 possibilities. But there are 3! (= 6) permutations. Obviously 27 isn't evenly divisible by 6, so some permutations are represented more than others.

It's not as big an issue, but it is an issue, and it's a mistake many people are likely to make.
There goes my morning, thanks.

Actually, this will keep me busy during builds.
Project Management Lessons from an Amateur Magician
Have JetBrains said anything about possibly addressing these issues? Besides the "ew" factor of using anything labeled "Oracle," Oracle Java has been a right royal pain to install and keep up to date ever since they pulled it out of the various distro repositories. (They provide an RPM for downloading, but not a DEB, which makes life even more fun for Debian/Ubuntu/etc. people like me.)

OpenJDK on the other hand is in the repos, and is supposed to be the official Java reference implementation these days anyway (right?), so it seems like at some point it would be good for JetBrains' products to play nice with it...
It literally just opens up a new tab and shows you the git blame for the highlighted lines. Actually pretty handy.
Where would those 6 confirmations come from ?
Stop spreading FUD. The MSB rules only apply to exchanges incorporated or physically located in the US, including its outlying territories. They don't apply to foreign exchanges, i.e., MtGox or most other current major BTC exchanges.

Foreign services stopped dealing with US residents because last year new FBAR and FATCA compliance rules went into effect, requiring US taxpayers to provide more information about their foreign assets, and the US signed numerous new agreements with most major nations to share data about U.S. account-holders (agreements under which either nation could demand specified information about account-holders in the other nation as if they were domestic institutions) Many European banks stopped doing business with Americans because it was a paperwork nightmare to deal with the compliance.
Because Software is inherently complex, one of the most complex things that Humans can try and make. And whenever we successfully make something easier, we push the borders out so that Software is always stretching to the limits of the complexity we can handle. Ultimately, its just hard. Sometimes methodologies help, but there is No Silver Bullet.
> As a musician and a scientist, I wonder if music and art are better analogies than science? And what if we had the luxury to teach some things in school just because they're interesting and fun? Isn't that why most of us learned programming?

I agree that Computer Science is not a science. It does contain elements of science, but on the whole it is an inter-disciplinary subject.

Rather than compare programming to music or art, I would compare it to craft. The difference being that programming is mostly done with a practical end-use in mind. It's more like being a stone mason or a goldsmith.
"it's in the config file" school of UX. :)
Do I seriously have to type slower to make it between things? This is awful.

I'm sure most experienced typers use muscle memory to type words quickly. This entire game is counter intuitive and unproductive for teaching typing since it forces you to think about typing letter for letter and not word for word.

An interesting and difficult game maybe, but it is almost useless as a typing tutor.
>It's just JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript.

No it's not. Because JavaScript the language is so bare-bones, you need to supplement language deficiencies with frameworks and libraries. So you go and pick from a menu of Backbone/Marionette, Angular, ExtJS, Ember, Kendo, jQuery or etc. - some of them work together, some of them don't. Most of those get you part of the way there, you may still need to pull in things like require.js to manage imports. Or, instead of raw JS, you go with TypedScript, or Dart, or CoffeeScript, or whatever, and then put a framework on top of those. You're still not done, because that gets you the JS part, usually you complement it with a CSS framework (like bootstrap) and a SASS framework. In the end, you have a hodgepodge of frameworks of libraries, that plug JS holes, and functionally look and feel different.

So no, it's not simply JavaScript everywhere.
No, but I will try it again once I get a new laptop. It might also have been an issue of Java versions / Ubuntu versions / Fontconfig settings.

I already noticed a big difference, roughly comparing PyCharm when it first came out, and the new experimental Android SDK a few months ago - both based on JetBrains code, the latter was much more polished.
Some thoughts on CAPSLOCK remapping:

After using vi / vim since 1986, I finally remapped CAPSLOCK to CTRL at the operating system level. It's made a world of difference, and not just for vi. It easily unlocks all the EMACS style cursor movements like ctrl+A, ctrl+E, etc.

Yeah, I know you can do it with the CTRL key in the lower left. But if you move from Mac laptop with Fn key in lower left, to an external keyboard with no Fn, you're gonna have a bad time.

But here's another reason why I advocate this approach. Remember vi was written by Bill Joy back in the 1970s. Back then, the early terminals had the control key right there next to the A. In fact, the CAPSLOCK was to the left of that!

I was recently at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View where you can see some of these early terminals. A lot of us know the Happy Hacker Keyboard, with the control key at it's rightful place. But to see it on the old terminals, it's a pretty good archeological insight into why it just feels right.

Plus, WHO USES THE CAPS LOCK KEY ANYWAY EXCEPT FOR SHOUTING IN FORUMS?
I think that's one aspect of the problem, but the migration from make-do to mathematically rigorous code can be equally fraught with peril. While the code itself can be made predictable, and easy to reason around, the time estimates and project planning often cannot. There is never enough time to factor out all of the commonality, remove all of the unnecessary use of state, codify all the assumptions into data types, etc., so you have to pick your battles.

A programmer needs intuition of what the biggest, most effective improvements are on the code base, which allow them to get the most work done. They also need some ability to guess how much time it will take, so that they don't miss deadlines. No amount of static type analysis will fix that.
> I know tumblr likes to use the word "trigger" for just about everything

>> (...) that usage has to do with triggering reactions that stem from actual PTSD, not that the images themselves can induce it.

>>> And yet, that's exactly what people are doing here.

And I agree that that is silly, was that unclear? Or are you saying that images cannot trigger reactions? I know that for me, looking at images from a time/place of trauma can take me back -- but luckily I've never encountered a trauma severe enough to result in PTSD.

Friends that have seem to be quite easily shocked by related images (say a picture of an abusing spouse) -- and while PTSD is treatable (and therefore no-one is doomed to avoid certain images forever) that doesn't mean that there aren't periods after an incident it might be painful (and maybe counter to recovery) to be faced with certain images?

> that doesn't mean we can't try to empathize with those that have experienced terrible things either

>> Please, continue to lecture someone with diagnosed PTSD about being nice to people with PTSD.

I didn't say be nice (although I think it is good to be nice to people), I said empathize.
Converting Network Addresses in Factor
I just added the example output, https://github.com/jbrooksuk/node-summary#example

Thanks!
I think the idea can work and I like that you are going with a clean layout, but I would definitely work on cleaning up your images so that they are not pixelated. Also, there is no content valuable to the user above the fold. This may cause a large bounce rate.

One the deals page, it's not clear what deal the 'Get This Deal' banner gets you.
There's jvm for .net: http://www.ikvm.net/ and .net (clr) for jvm: http://xmlvm.org/clr2jvm/
I went to this conference last year and it was a blast, great speakers - folks from Heroku, Wordpress, Hadoop, ... people who obviously know how to scale :) - great people, and such a great venue !
You've basically described cookie clicker.
I'm interested in learning more about this. Does anybody have any thoughts?
I think that, by intentionally posting unlikeable things, he guarantees himself 100% spam likes. On something that's actually likeable, these spam likes might be contained to a reasonably small proportion of likes.
But what is the size of this shadow population of click farm users on Facebook? For these countries with large click farms to be the largest contingent of likes on big pages like David Beckham suggests they are not small enough to be manageable...
I also don't know Facebook's revenue distribution well enough to gauge the business implications. Is it tilted towards small businesses that have serious trouble weeding out spam? Or is it concentrated with the large corporations that can garner large enough real audiences to ignore the spam?
Assuming I won't be the only one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
Because thats a job for kill.
There's a difference between secretive and secret. The NSA existence is no secret.
And if you build ACID on top of mongodb, then you lose the benefits of NoSQL. Not to mention the immense difficulty of building ACID into your business logic...

It makes sense to use mongodb for commenting system where nobody cares if you lose a comment or certain comments are written before others.

But no competent architect would use mongodb for financial/currency transactions.

If coinbase did use mongodb, it will be inevitable they will have transactional issues. The more popular coinbase gets, the more transactions they process, the more issues they'll have. I don't envy the poor souls that have to track down these kinds of issues...
You were aware. Should I have assumed everyone else is too? I agree that this justification is weak, especially considering evidence that these dogs also respond to handlers' cues, but some folks are likely to be ignorant of the current law of the land. It was a statement of fact, not an argument in support of the law's interpretation.
Given X amount of money paid per person as a in premium and Y number of people paying those premiums, we should have XY available to spend on healthcare. That is a hard cap on healthcare spending.

While we can afford to maintain* 11 individuals in the world. There reaches a point where over that entire population, we need to triage the medical issues in that population into the people whose issues maximize human-hours-lived given the X*Y healthcare dollars available to spend treating those issues. Maybe it's not the first person that requires treatment costing a million dollars we need to triage, but you eventually will run out of money if you don't triage because we simply don't pay unlimited premiums to meet the unlimited demand for healthcare.

The issue about overpopulation is a red herring, and in this case isn't just of function of helping people live longer. Many countries once they reach a level of prosperity stop having children at the necessary replacement rate of 2.1 children per couple once that society becomes affluent. The dropping replacement rate often correlates with societies ability to spend more money on helping their population live longer through spending on medical treatment.
How Your Startup's Sector Affects Your Ability to Raise a Series A
Saying goodbye to Internet in Turkey
Sean, I recently taught 16 high school juniors and seniors vim through two means:

- www.vim-adventurs.com. I negotiated an educational discount and rewarded kids points based on the number of levels they completed. A few of the kids actually completed all 14 levels. What teacher assigns game homework? I can say all 16 are using vim on a daily basis for Python with zero complaints. At least to me.

- vimtutor. We spent an hour on this one. It's an app that comes with vi. It really just launches vim with a text file that teaches you the basics.
That's about 1/8000th of the RAM in my laptop. Is 1020 KB really such a big deal?
I didn't down-vote you but I would venture that it's this comment "Wordpress seems like a PITA to work with" Sounds like you don't have any actual experience with WordPress which means it's probably not fair for you to say it's a "pain in the ass" when you're favoring the platform you use simply because it's the one familiar to you. Also it doesn't seem as though you have exp with Ghost either. HNers are a harsh audience.
Typo: it's http://www.vim-adventures.com

Yeah, it's $25 but well worth it. You will get stuck. Use his Facebook page for hints.
> Computer science is a branch of applied mathematics; not a physical science

I would disagree. Whilst CS did originally branch from mathematics, nowadays it is an interdisciplinary subject and to call it a branch of applied maths would exclude huge areas of CS such as HCI.
your CLI program in 2014 isn't very interesting to anyone else. Web and iOS applications are,

Web and iOS things are a dime a dozen, no offence. The only thing that matters is learning and having fun, and doing things your way. You can easily steer your learning towards marketable skills when the time comes.