skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reiterating austennailred, despite being miles way from ESR or Linus, the "curse of the gifted" is 100% real, but I think it can actually be beneficial in the long run for a certain type of "gifted".

There is one on hand the "gifted" who runs on his own fumes with no other form of external effort. Much like @austennailred notes about his efforts in high school mathematics, this type of "gifted" often suffers from something similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect in the long run --> in other words, a sense of superiority can potentially drive you into believing you are better than you actually are.

This, I believe, can happen when people attempt to pursue things which do not particularly satisfy their innate curiosity or their genuine interests. Sure you can be great at math naturally, but your view of how good you are limited by the population size of those you compare yourself against can leave you damagingly unprepared when you realize that you actually aren't as great as you thought you were.

What makes the "curse of the gifted" the "blessing of the gifted" on the other hand, is when that moment where you realize your own fallibility seems to provide a moment of illumination rather than a sense of dejection.

For me, my first attempts at genuine college level discrete mathematics versus having used basic counting, permutations, probability, number theory principles in the past showed that computer science or at least the mathematics of computer science can be difficult. I had a similar issue in chemistry as well. The difference was even though I was always a strong math and science student, approaching college level chemistry made me just feel inferior and made me drop it. On the other hand, when faced with adversity in mathematics/CS I tended to take the difficulty as a challenge. Rather than drop it, realizing that perhaps there were others who could be better at mathematics, CS in this new environment drove me to pushing myself to a place of intense focus I had had before.

Now this is where I think passion crosses with the concept of the "curse of the gifted" to make it more of a blessing than a curse. When you love something and you know what it feels like to be best, realizing your own shortcomings can sometimes cause you to miss that feeling. Now in order to get back to a place where you "feel gifted" you have to be in love with the work to get there over "the idea of being gifted" and this I think can happen to those who are put in a position where the feeling of "being gifted" is compromised.

Anyway, just my view, first "longer" post I've written on HN but I thought austennailred had a great point and just wanted to comment.

Great piece by both Eric and Linus and crazy to think how 14 years later, we have Git.
Automake will regenerate and rerun the configure script if configure.ac is newer than configure, which is normally only the case if you're either modifying configure.ac or if the files are packaged incorrectly (and automake makes packaging a release correctly easy).
Doing something 'bad' because other people do bad things is not a good explanation.

Why are /you/ doing it? Why do you think it is justified?
I don't think it's really a superhuman deduction. I think if you spent time carefully observing people you're around a lot with the intent of figuring out how they think you'd be able to do something very similar. It's just that most of us (including me) don't do that very often. Most people are reactive about such things rather than proactive.

As far as userids, neither you or I should be making guesses about people based on such things. :-)
Yes! Was surprised this wasn't there and was happy to see someone toss it in the comments :)

Edit: How he got there is a neat, quick read for anyone interested: http://adactio.com/journal/5429/
Double Your Redshift Speed With Sortkeys and Distkeys
Cost of travel is directly proportional to how fast you want to go. You can get by very cheaply if you have no deadlines. Hitch hiking and teaching English classes leisurely can pay your way.

Having deadlines and taking flights, being picky about lodging - this is what costs money while traveling.
I was referring to a trading account at TD Ameritrade. I cannot speak of their banking capabilities nor do I see how it is relevant.
New York Will Adapt Money Transfer Rules for Bitcoin
Well, that depends. If you want to implement a simple `truncate`[0][1] function, then you need to count graphemes

[0] http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/TextHe...
[1] https://github.com/epeli/underscore.string
It's "bane" as in "HN is the addictive bane of my existence".

It's hard to get tone across when talking about one's own experiences. In my case my experience is about having the attribute of high intelligence.

If this was a discussion about being tall instead of being intelligent, and I happened to be very tall, would it change your opinion if my deduction had been that tall people can dunk basketballs more easily than short people and then relayed an experience where I, though I don't play basketball, demonstrated this to a short fanatical basketball fanatic by dunking a ball?

It doesn't mean I'm always right, or that my deductions are always correct. I'm not omniscient. In that anecdote it turns out I was, and it was destructive to my relationship.

Being highly intelligent is like walking around with a bomb in your head. You have to be very careful how you approach other people because your mere existence is hard for them to accept. It's not a good feeling to hurt or scare people by doing what you were born to do.

Just being tall, and doing tall people things, like grabbing something off of a high shelf, is not likely to elicit the same response.

You have to constantly translate the complex interconnected mental world you swim in into a simpler model you can communicate with. When I meet another high-intelligence person, I don't have to do that beyond establishing a common vocabulary. It's a fun thrill to have a conversation with somebody who's mind races along like yours, just like it's fun for a tall person to be around other tall people.

One of the issues with being highly intelligent is that you're right more than most people, which makes it difficult to trust the input of more normal folks. So you end up trusting yourself all the time, which means that when you are wrong, you don't know or recognize it until it explodes spectacularly in your face.
What is they say? If you're not the [paying] customer, you're the product? :)
I was alternating between 4 browsers while reading this. There was zero consistency.

Fun times ahead...
Meet Cody Wilson, creator of the 3D-printed gun
OK. I'm prepared to agree with the headline in principle.

However, here's the deal/problem:

I am willing to encrypt outgoing mail only in cases where I can identify that the recipient are capable of decrypting it (with 0 friction at any stage).

It's (still) more important to me that my e-mail is read by the recipient, than that it's not read by any other party.
Exactly. Which is why I am actively gearing up to switch to Dart and (back to) Python as soon as is even painfully feasible. I am also sick to death of all the socio-political posturing and other narcisspewage surrounding the so-called node/npm "culture".
> If a crash happens it'll probably happen before people realise it, but suddenly there just won't be anyone wanting to buy coins anymore.

Not sure how true this is. Bitcoin has been going through a few major crashes in the past 3 years, yet the demand was still strong after it went down.
This looks great.

You know what's really wacky about government inefficiency?

It's damn near impossible to help, much less fix from the inside.

I've long been convinced that the best/only way to help right along the lines of what these guys are doing - build boxed solutions from the outside.

This is effectively an air-drop of tools which sails in over top of all the petty backbiting, ass covering and general self-serving bullshit that stifles in-house projects.
I assume this is one of them newfangled viral adverts?
CMake has the nice property of being able to generate non-Make build systems, but otherwise is more of just "autotools done differently" rather than "autotools done better". In practice I haven't found it to be any more pleasant to use than autotools.
You should know bitbugs don't like history.
I have three kids and my eldest is 9, I've been looking for something like this the last two summers.

I'll check it out when I get home and come back and provide feedback.
It works but they are a bit slow on merging pull requests. I'm currently using a fork so that CORS can work on Rackspace. I think this sort of issue is why Heroku no longer recommend this approach.
Very cool! I figured I'd give it a shot (I wouldn't have, if it was a browser plugin - I agree with you on the intrusiveness) and then remove it, but I actually really like it. I especially like when you click the `(x) Comments` button how it eases down to the new comment. Thanks!
This was my fear for Parse after FB acquired them. Are there any other interesting competitors to Parse out there?
Google has done more to securely encrypt Internet traffic than any other company in the world. Among other things, they are the pioneering standard-bearer for ECC forward secrecy and for certificate pinning, the two most important Internet encryption advances in the last 10 years.
Hmm, Lucida Console on Windows does not seem to work well with combining glyphs.
tpg user from sydney, routed through SanJose, 4xx ms

--- speedtest-sgp1.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 8998ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 397.643/403.366/419.058/5.814 ms
Probably because a lot of Go users _are_ generics-hating curmudgeons :-) (even though the team aren't)
Password Hashing Competition - new PBKDFs
No problem! At many US high schools, you'll have up to three levels of a class offered: standard, honors (advanced), and Advanced Placement (college level). Some schools may only offer one or two AP classes (depending on student interest), while others may offer dozens[1]. Any AP class must have it's curriculum certified by the College Board to be called "AP" and for the students to be eligible to take the AP Exam for the subject area. A really good way to get college credit; I tested out of an entire semester of college classes via AP exams!

[1] https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/apcourse
Ouch, so any product that relies on StackMob will need to reimplement and deploy its entire backend by May 11th?
Great progress. I think it would be better if you replace those pie charts with bar plots. Better use of the space, much better for comparison.
Most other browsers do this and collect some revenue from it. Either showing just in-house ads (G/M) or sponsored ads from partners (O).
Errors in Go are custom types; your error can be defined as, for example:

type URLError {
url String
}

func (e URLError) Error() String {
return fmt.Sprintf("Invalid URL: %s", e.url)
}

At which point a caller that wants to handle this error can either extract the URL to do fun things with it or just dump the Error() string.
>I don't think that makes any sense. I mean, I literally don't understand what you're trying to say, and none of your assertions seem to be relevant to each other.

Think about it this way: which sex has historically been unequally represented in the most dangerous jobs? And which sex is STILL the only sex that has to sign up for the draft?

And sure they're relevant.
Replacing make with python is a huge step back. The makefile language is simple yet extremely powerful for describing a dependency tree such as that for building an executable from sources. Its perhaps strongest point is that it completely agnostic to what the different steps actually do rather than consist of a predefined set of canned rules/tasks with, if you're lucky, a convoluted way of adding your own using e.g. python (or worse, java). This means that as long as a shell command can turn a set of inputs into an output, describing it takes (usually) just two lines of makefile, one naming the target and prerequisites, one providing the command to perform the transformation. If a particular rule is too complicated for a few shell commands, invoking a separate script (or even a just-built executable) is trivial. Every other system I've looked at needed a comparatively enormous amount of code for adding even the slightest tweak to the built-in rules.

GNU make is actually two different languages coexisting in the same file (the makefile), a declarative language for describing the targets and their dependencies as well as a functional language for the variables/macros. Once you realise this, a whole new world of possibilities opens up. If more people took the time to actually understand proper use of makefiles, perhaps we'd see fewer poorly reinvented wheels.
Ruby and The Romantics cover by: Vania ( Our Day Will Come)
Panicking isn't done when a database operation fails. Returning an error value is. It's just like old-school C. Panics are for programming errors or things like out of memory conditions, not errors in ordinary operation, even when components are failing.
My wife and I just sat down and planned our kids summer camps and would have greatly benefitted from this. For a marketing tip, I'd focus on the mommy blogs, since I'd guess they do 80-90% of the summer camp planning.
Perhaps the person he asked is being prudent as they don't have all of the facts yet.
That was almost certainly ESR's signature.
I agree that it goes both ways.

The ideal behind Bitcoin that I find appealing is its decentralized nature. Stripe lacks this feature so I deny its future viability.
But presumably not in Iceweasel.
What if the sheep want their own?
You could just use Parse. We're not going anywhere.
CloudMine[0] is also a BaaS company (Disclaimer: I work for CloudMine). We're focusing a lot on enterprise and making a robust system that companies can really deploy on.

If you have any thoughts or comments feel free to ask!

[0] https://cloudmine.me/
Kobra – Realtime Collaborative Coding
In fact, raising a gram of water by 1 °C uses one calory, not one Joule. Also, a cubic cm of water weights one gram, and both of those statements are full of caveats and rounding errors.

But a liter is only another name for a cubic decimeter. The liter is older, and used to vary from place to place (and even measure area at some places), but now it on the IS.
Sounds like an opportunity for some of the other backend providers to create a migration guide and import tools!
Reposting my comment on the blog:

I can't comment on which encryption schemes are still strong, but one advantage to using protection for general use is providing strength in numbers. Right now, using Tor or strong encryption is a bright beacon saying "this person has something to hide!" and the NSA et al hone in by default.

If, however, using Tor and strong encryption was the norm, it is easier for those who need it - whistle blowers, dissidents, etc - to hide underneath the regular noise.

edit: keep getting flagged for spam! Perhaps I have the wrong keywords?
/r/AlphaAndBetaUsers – subreddit for getting people to try your product
Haskell exceptions form a hierachy though.
No worries, happy Parse customer, just interested in the space.
It seems you're trying to insult someone who's making an effort to learn some new skills. Not sure what this has to do with the topic at hand.

As to the point of DIY not being hard, getting something working may not be hard. But handling fault tolerance, logging, backup, downtime, etc. is non-trivial. And as mentioned in other comments, this takes time. Even if you're a l33t ub3r h4x0r, that will always be true. For some teams, the DIY investment will make sense, others would rather spend their time building features than dealing with ops.
Maybe it's just the inevitable jealous response, but I felt the same way reading it. The deductive bit in the middle in particular — most people I know just aren't simple or predictable enough to guess their favorite music, car, or food. Decades have been spent trying to understand human behavior; how can one person have enough insight to definitively analyze someone's "limitations and patterns"? Not unless they're an order of magnitude smarter than the general population, which is exceptionally unlikely.

Furthermore, it's kind of weird to talk about intelligence in terms of levels. I know plenty of people who are smarter than me in certain fields, but I don't think I've ever met someone who was objectively smarter than me in every way, to the point where I could separate us into different classes of intelligence. In my experience, the IQ model is flawed: intelligence is much more fluid, and exists on many more axes, than we give it credit for.

There was a Reddit comment I read a while ago — I wish I could find it again! — where the author tried to describe what it would be like to have a Lex Luthor level of genius. You'd be able to effortlessly do anything you wanted. Ideas would immediately come together in your head. Even the most complex branches of science would be as easy as basic algebra. Everyone's problems would seem so simple and naive, but it would make it hard to relate to people. That's kinda what this comment read like to me.

(Sorry if I'm wrong, bane.)
Similarly, 1/10 of one chinese yuan is called a jiao 角, and 1/100 is a fen 分. (Jiao are common in prices; fen are so rare that you could live your life without being aware of them. I would own a big pile of one-jiao coins if I didn't habitually discard them for being near-worthless.) What are stripe amounts denominated in if they're coded CNY?
> Skipping a grade means giving up a full year of education.

Education doesn't stop with schooling.
The power of Emacs is that the configuration file is more than just that. It is code that becomes part of the editor and can replace pretty much any part thereof if the user so desires.
I got a bunch of hot air and puffery and blah blah blah out of it, which is about as good at you can get from an Eric Raymond post.
We saw this coming when they announced that they were acquired by PayPal a couple of months ago, and read this line:

"When asked if StackMob will continue to operate as normal, he said it was too early to tell since the acquisition just closed today." http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/17/paypal-acquires-stackmob-t...

That was dead giveaway that they'd shut it down. We instead chose Parse for a project we were just starting, and it's worked out pretty well (except for the bugs they've been having the past week which don't allow us to create new columns or deploy).
Congratulations on failing fast. Onwards and upwards.
I was thinking of Zorro!
I really like that:

"don't allow likes from someone with more than 5+ likes in their account""

The # of likes by the user is a good proxy for how diluted the quality of the "like" is.

Probability_to_show_ad = constant * num_other_likes

That said, as long as Facebook has a counter-incentive to cleaning it up, we shouldn't expect this change. We need advertisers to revolt in large #'s before the financial incentives make this a priority for FB.
> So you are in awe of her because your metric is your own intelligence which you have already figured out is quite high. And you have proof of that from past experience.

Yeah, I suppose that would be the metric then!

It's fantastic to have somebody, everyday, who constantly challenges me and forces me to exercise my mind.

I would definitely have had trouble with a "trophy" wife...and actually I find that I get along better with men who have highly intelligent wives better than men who have hot trophy wives.
While you are correct that this particular study offers no real evidence in the nature/nurture debate, my understanding of neuroscience is that the existence of early differences in gender-based behavior are so well established in the discipline that to publish on that result is no longer interesting to neuroscientists. What remains at this point is to figure out a mechanism behind that result. So the line of inquiry behind this paper is not so much "whither behavioral differences?" but rather "Given this large body of research over the past 10 years that demonstrates behavioral differences, what can we see in the brain that might be a mechanism for this result?"

If you are not familiar with that earlier body of research establishing behavioral differences, these studies might be a place to start, and then of course you can walk the bibliographies to find more.

http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/dmessinger/c_c/rsrcs/rdgs/e...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571891304...

http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9219513/

http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~dcampb/Campbell.InfantMetaALSex...
It took Java over 8 years to get generics. Be patient. :)
Blockout.io
I am in the same boat (or beat?). Sadly I can't follow you "formally" on HN!
Hulu argues anonymous user numbers that identify unique accounts are not PII
This begs the question of what you're looking to get out of a git/VCS setup. Unless you're forcing everyone to setup their own Gitlab instance, is your CS department looking to offer a handful of students limited experience with a single task? Or are you looking to use VCS to benefit all of your students during the entirety of their time in your program?

The entire idea behind using VCS in education is to enable better/deeper learning. Github lets students jump right into versioning their work and collaborating with classmates/instructors with minimal fuss and zero overhead. Not to mention that exploring Github can help introduce them to the open source community. Plus, they don't have to deal with IT department BS, worrying about when their old work will be deleted, or the myriad of other factors that can impact how students integrate git into their work.

From a departmental perspective, where time and resources are always stretched it's a no-brainer. Besides, at least Github isn't Blackboard. :shudders:
You care about a breach of contract because you're a professional. Honestly he probably wasn't in violation of any contracts in the first place.

No one is being negative because they think doing the right thing for yourself is wrong. It's a matter of common courtesy.

There are a lot of options when you have a crappy boss. The first of which is to actually talk to your boss yourself, and then go over his/her head if they don't respond. If you can't reconcile after that, then feel free to quit, but in my opinion you should do it to someone's face.
I'm not buying this.

First, it's funny that "building great products" is considered a mission. No. That's what a company does to make money. Money is the mission. If you just want to build great stuff, then don't call it a product or don't charge for it. Start a non-profit, build it, then give it away.

Not to be pedantic, but it just feels like the last stop of self-worshiping capitalism when it's considered a mission to build stuff for sale. That's kind of the default with capitalism. The question is, what's the real vision or meaning behind the product/company? What goal is it meant to achieve?

Beyond that, he's making these statements at a time when we are seeing a glut of the most trivial products/services that are not exactly world-changing. In fact, many have decried the lack of meaning and unwillingness to tackle hard problems in SV.

So, it just seems like we're moving the goalposts. SV has become a vision-less, vapid place, that simply seeks the easiest path to making money? No problem. Just redefine the word "meaning" and the word "mission" and voila!
So if you want to set up your own shop you are stuck doing transactions by hand or you have to use a 3rd party like bitpay?

Lol.

The point of bitcoin is being able to do it yourself and not rely on centralized institutions.