skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You didn't just say "highly abstract", you also said "intellectually demanding". You only seem to be addressing the "highly abstract" part now. All of the failure modes you mention sound like failures of intellect to me.

Also, common failure modes of people working as programmers != common failure modes of people trying to become programmers. Even if most people working as programmers understand the abstractions involved well enough to function (and I'm not certain that's actually true), the abstractions may still be too much for many other people.

>In fact excessive or premature abstraction is a widely recognized failure mode of software engineers, and the myth is responsible in good part for that.

Part of really understanding abstractions is knowing when not to use them. And since, as you say, many people have trouble with that, understanding abstractions must be tough.
This is a good way to get started with help from friends and family. Almost everyone already does this in some ways, it's good to have a formal process to protect both parties' interest and the relationships.
Actually, in my opinion, this could actually increase the feeling of impostor syndrome. Because no matter how good you are, there will be many people better than you. So any forum which puts your skills up against a random selection of others skilled in your craft will clearly show how far from the top you are. Unless, of course, you are consistently the best, but then it really stinks for everyone that you beat.
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> Facebook's business model involves very heavy user surveillance.

By surveillance you mean analyzing data their users voluntarily upload to their social network...so they can make money?
Expiring certs and domain names kinda haunt me. It's such a silly task and for most of us we only have to deal with every year or two. Yet if you forget, your site goes completely offline! All the work spent scaling and automating the site and one stupid renewal can undo it all.

I have all manner of alerts for these things, but still I worry about it and check from time to time to make sure nothing is expiring soon.
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I just find comfort in the fact that mid-age adults are just tall children :)
Ever since Facebook bought whatsapp, my partner, family and I have switched to TextSecure, and we've been very happy so far.

If you're concerned about Facebook's record on privacy, TextSecure is the way to go. They recently added data messages, so it's no longer tied to SMS only.

(Note: I'm not affiliated with TextSecure in any way.)
> And my 2nd point was about the feasibility, I still have to hear from the bitcoin crowd what's the solution for day-to-day use of the currency that does not involve a bank-but-we-don't-call-it-a-bank-seriously-it's-not-a-bank.

Bitcoin was designed to be a peer-to-peer payment system where the owner of the private key is the owner of the funds. Unfortunately, building secure hardware and software is very difficult, that's why many people choose to not keep their private key on their device but let a service deal with the security, which is often a bad idea. One secure hardware is cheaply available on the market[1] and two-factor-authentication becomes more widespread, this becomes less of an issue.

http://www.bitcointrezor.com/
Are you sure that "hyperfocus" is a symptom of ADHD?

I'm a developer, depending on how well rested I am I can go into that zone for 12 hours, sure, but I've always been like that since I was a child and if I want I can focus on subjects that don't bring me pleasure at all, it's all a matter of determination (edit: for me).

Observing children at my wife's kindergarten that allegedly have ADHD, it's quite the opposite of being able to hyperfocus. Such children can't focus for 5 minutes on a single thing. Like, if you ask them to draw something, or to play a game, or if you read them a story or whatever, there are children that once past the 5 or 10 minutes mark lose their focus completely and shift their attention to something else, being a constant struggle to win back their attention.

Or maybe these are in fact 2 different disorders? It does take motivation on my part to focus on things that I don't like. Plus I think doctors are too quick to prescribe medication to children, which is my only problem with an ADHD diagnostic - as focus is also a matter of training (i.e. the interest for hearing stories or drawing stuff doesn't develop overnight) and parents, from lack of time, prefer to succumb to giving their children drugs instead of reflecting on their interactions at home.

So you know, I've got a mixed feeling about this - on one hand I've seen children and even grown men that can't focus on anything at all, so I'm sure ADHD is real, on the other hand it's often misdiagnosed and those drugs may in fact do more harm than good in many cases.
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For many things, that's only true as a technicality. Having access to the source code of a complicated piece of software doesn't instantly make it easy, or even remotely feasible, to fix it yourself.

For example, back when I ran a Linux desktop and had problems with my video card or video settings, there wasn't a chance that I could fix it myself. The odds of me being able to do so were roughly equivalent to the odds of being able to fix a broken closed-source video driver by opening the binary up in a hex editor. Technically possible, yes, but not remotely feasible.
This isn't just a "cosmetic" change, it's actually useful; print as a statement can't be used in list comprehensions, and print as a function comes with end= which is a huge time saver.
A few months ago I wrote a C implementation of a lazy "sorted" function, (https://github.com/naftaliharris/lazysort). One of the things you can use it for is computing medians, with the same "sort-then-take-the-middle-element" algorithm that the statistics module uses. Internally, however, what will happen is that the lazy data-structure that results from a call to the lazy "sorted" function will find the middle element with quickselect.

For lists of size 10M, I got a 7.3x speedup vs using the sorted function, and a 1.6x speedup vs using numpy.median. The sorted function was faster up until lists of size 100, presumably due to lower overhead. (The lazily-sorted list data-structure also keeps track of the pivots resulting from partitions, so that later method calls run faster by exploiting the partially-sorted structure that remains from earlier method calls).

Here's a plot of the time to compute the median for these different algorithms, (taken from a paper I wrote that's under review): http://imgur.com/oX1QLnS
Of course, lets fill up the thread with comments about how 5 of (as of this comment) 92 people didn't want to see this on the front page, instead of talking about the link itself.
Disorder is maybe a harsh word, but my issue is that it runs counter to how I want to act.

I want to do x, but I don't do it. It's really hard to explain to someone who doesn't feel the same way. It's not just a procrastination, it's a complete inability to adhere to a rational set of priorities.

For most people task avoidance is due to stress or fear. For me it was simply that it disappeared from my head while I did something else less important. Then later I realized that I didn't do what I wanted to, and tried to understand why.

Parts of the day would disappear into nothing. I wasn't avoiding work, or even procrastinating as many people would view it, I was just unable to see that mental priority list for a time.

Then there's the periods of seeing that mental priority list, but being unable to commit to any single task to the extent that nothing gets done. If there's giant pressure or stress behind something, it could force me to act, but otherwise nothing.

"Hyperfocus" is kind of true in that when you unhinge from that mental priority list you stop feeling the distractions, but the problem is you don't exactly get to choose what you want to focus on. The other problem is, that condition only lasts for a while and then you're left listless and useless. So sure, you can spend a few hours writing responses up on HN instead of working, process all that dopamine superfast, and then sit around trying to remember what you were trying to do when you sat down at your computer in the first place, until some crisis pushes you to action.

You talk about it like it's great, but I think you're misrepresenting it. It doesn't make you an incredibly quick thinker, you don't necessarily "think through every consequence of what you just said before you finish your sentence" what is more realistic is we think through some things unrelated to what was just said, sometimes this might lead to an alternate line of reasoning, a "thinking outside the box". Sometimes it just means you have no idea of what was actually just said because you were thinking about whether when they said they had been working all last night that they maybe got Pizza when they were working last night, and whether they liked anchovies on their pizza because your Dad used to put anchovies on his pizza and you never really liked them. You know, they were so salty, and the little bones got stuck in your teeth. But it's kind of cool that you can eat those little fish almost whole, unlike Tuna, which while it comes in tiny little cans is actually a pretty big fish.
You can start with either people you know well who are willing to hire you or try out odesk.com or elance.com, craigslist can also be an option. The main thing is to Start.
"By signing off from Malaysian airspace at 1.19 a.m. on March 8 with a casual "all right, good night," rather than the crisp radio drill advocated in pilot training, a person now believed to be the co-pilot gave no hint of anything unusual.

Two minutes later, at 1.21 a.m. local time, the transponder - a device identifying jets to ground controllers - was turned off in a move that experts say could reveal a careful sequence."

-Reuters

Turning off the transponder two minutes after communication and turning IMO rules out fire. It would have had to take place in a 2 minute window.
Wow, that is extremely misleading and manipulative, especially with the "I'm from the Ukraine" anecdote.

They're not "partnering with", they're being bought. And as a result, they will owned by a company with zero respect for privacy, located in a country with little respect for privacy and the weakest privacy protections in the Western hemisphere. A company who's very core business model exclusively consists of selling their user's privacy to third parties.

WhatsApp's guarantees are worth exactly zero. At best, they are merely honest intentions, but formulated in such a misleading way that they become untrustworthy from the start.
ok, so where's the .html file for that page?
You and your wife should try going out into the wilderness for a week. Here in New Zealand it's not so common as outdoor activities are so popular, so there's no point to it, however for those of us who never seem to cut ourselves any slack these can totally give your mind the break it needs and let you feel completely rejuvenated.

I've managed to get a few good ideas for side projects I'm truly passionate about that I'd really consider low-hanging-fruit in terms of work vs. satisfaction. Idea's I'd never in a million years think about if I didn't just sit down for a day and just think. And I didn't have to do that, because for most of the day we were strolling through forest, looking at trees and rivers, planning where we'd travel to the next day.

Plus it's pretty great to do this sort of thing with your SO.
They already have locked processors for mobile chips. Try getting a non-bootloader locked Medfield device (tablet, phone…) So does every ARM SoC vendor. Nothing new here, sadly, as I think any device you buy should be yours to modify (and that means unlocking the bootloader.)
He should publish the terms of the sale if he wants us to believe that this privacy stance will be hard to change.
It was a relatively small consulting shop, I worked on some internal projects for them.

My next two were both big co.
Well so far it hasn't happened. In fact it hasn't even reached the point where it might be seriously turned into law. I'd say it's getting the exact level of reaction it deserves, since we keep winning on the issue.

People will get more active when it looks more likely to go before parliament.
RIght, but since their customers are not internal, having a monitor that is not outside of their network would make for a pretty poor uptime monitor.
Agreed. Though I've only played the 3D version twice, my win rate is 50% and i only see it increasing. The 2D version is a little more challenging.. I think I win roughly 25% of the time as luck plays a bigger role (at least with my strategy).
Australia generally ignores most of what happens in parliament feeling they have other things todo which are better as it normally feels like we have elected five year olds to run our country.
I went to http://www.canonical.com/index.html and there was a 404.

Surely there should be something there...
> Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA

I believe you, but I don't believe that Facebook shares your principles.
Full disclosure: I am probably too optimistic re: AI (in 1982 I put an AAAI bumper sticker "Artificial Intelligence: it is For Real" on my car :-)

I think that not only in the USA, but in most developed countries that within 10 years robots will be doing a lot of routine physical jobs like stocking shelves, farming, flipping burgers, etc. Lots of white collar knowledge workers will be partially displaced also.

Preparation: favor jobs like management, very high tech, nursing, etc. that are more difficult to replace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense
Amusing, interesting for history's sake, and possibly useful, but licensing issues would kill it for closed source, and it's not needed for things with permissive licenses because you can already get the source for old versions and run it yourself.
But how often do two passengers use stolen passports to board the plane?
Eye witness testimony is one of the worst pieces of evidence. Add that to the idea that you're required to retain that information since 2011 and it becomes pretty laughable.
No, because Section 101 states that the subject matter of patent is extremely broad, and there is no statutory basis for creating an categorical distinction for software. They may, however, rule in a way that makes it harder to get particular kinds of software patents.
There's also no robots.txt... Odd for a static site don't you think?
I would rewrite this blog post and use "Roy's" real name...he deserves to be shamed.

Edit: I don't mind the downvotes, but as usual I appreciate any reasoning behind them...I don't think what I said was irrelevant? This guy is apparently dangerous and his real name should be exposed.
The particular sentence that most people are reacting to is this:

"But every time a company hires someone who is not a young male, they run the risk that the new hire isn't there to work, rather is there to scam you." http://scripting.com/2014/03/17/royWildstein.html#aIDKIT
You could pretend they were perceived as a threat for Facebook and Facebook just bought the peace of knowing they have no remotely significant threat other than Google+.

Although, knowing Facebook, I have a really hard time just taking this guy's word for it. I won't be installing Whatsapp until it's both free software and has end-to-end encryption. I'll tolerate it being centralized because Facebook/NSA having our metadata would be acceptable while we wait for a better alternative.
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Agreed. I don't see why they list Google Auth and Authy separately when they both support the same TOTP system.
work with people like yourself. there is no benefit to diversity; unless you are a loser.
Learning to overcome disadvantages doesn't cease to make them disadvantages.
They use statuspage.io, a great service, but most people use to manually set the times that the service was out - but I believe they have an API for that as well.

So I think MailGun just didn't indicate the service was unavailable when they put the outage details in.
Upvoted for useful information.

But this makes it even less clear why Apple can't support their own old formats. Because it's too tricky to be worth dedicate developer time?? Or because it's a deliberate policy? This is a fundamental requirement of the software.
Oh please. How utterly patronizing. Even down to the hackneyed "humbled" cliche in the first sentence. Jan Koum and WhatsApp, just take your billions and go buy a yacht. Are you really having fun trying to control the message?

Will people with platforms ever stop using them to spout self-serving bullshit?
Yes, there's nothing you will gain by starting with 2.7. The language is polished, majority of modules are ported (currently from those that matter only twisted and opencv isn't).

If you for some reason have to work on older version (for example RedHat still uses 2.6) knowing Py3 is not really an issue to program there. Of course few nice features are missing, but people seem to talk as if it is a completely different language for some reason. With Python 3 at least you have a nice more consistent language.

If you were learning Java, would you start with JDK 1.3 or the latest one?
Slovak and Czech have it same as Germany/Italy.
Their homepage (https://wit.ai/) says "stream audio to the API, get structured information in return", but the API docs say "send natural language sentences (text) and get structured information (JSON) in return".

That's disappointing since the only problem I ran into with doing home automation via a web application was the speech-to-text, not processing commands once they were in text. A list of regular expressions works quite well for that.

The HTML5 Speech Recognition API in Chrome kinda sucks. It does speech to text well, but reliably keeping the API listening for speech at all has been challenging. Even a bunch of code basically checking "has the webkitSpeechRecognition object borked itself yet? recreate it and restart listening" every two seconds doesn't work reliably.

I'd love a JavaScript API that can listen to the microphone, determine if anything has been spoken (versus silence or background noise), and when something that may be speech is detected, send it to another API endpoint that converts it to text.

Edit: They do take audio input, woo :) Thanks for the correction. https://wit.ai/docs/api#toc_9
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The ethics here are very questionable. Wtf - you just find some dude, based on no real evidence, then you "out" him for something that's not criminal and give the internet trolls his whereabouts? What could be more "yellow press"? I really wish their ass got sued.
If I had to guess this will ultimately turn into something where the seller gets the buyer to do it in app before they part ways. Buyer has a chance to verify the product works with the seller there and seller knows the buyer has validated the exchange before leaving.

Still leaves room for products that appear to work but have some subtle flaw but this issue is still present with craigslist with local sales.
Even then I'm not convinced, without talking to a lawyer, that it would be safe to recreate in a patent-encumbered format.

Regardless of how well patents in general might or might not serve their original purpose, I tend to think that patents that are essentially just locking up data formats do not encourage progress in the way that they are supposed to. I think the US was onto something when it came to copyright and typeface designs, and a similar principle ought to apply to data formats.
I don't hold much value to this theory for now, but it's not totally absurd given how many truthers think 9/11 was run by the US itself. This isn't as bad as that.
A lot of love here for wit.ai, I was thinking about transactional contexts today (NLP conversations)
and if I could support that kind of workflow with wit and 'oh hey there ya go its already in there as states!'.
Great work!
Another option would be to have them "jump".

Up if it moves to an adjacent plane, down if it goes from one extreme to the other.
You can almost randomly press q, up, left and right sometimes until you get 1024 and then start thinking
I wonder what is the economic impact of this error.
"some developers are surprisingly good" must be the weak form of the 10x hypothesis, and to quote someone else on the internet "where there is a strong version and a weak version of a hypothesis, the weak version is usually trivially true". (The strong version is that the weak version is always just trivial and the strong version is never true).
We can only wish that is true, we are all just humans in the end:

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-t...

Also, I vaguely remember a study in 'some journal' that looked at all it's P values[0] and found an alarming number of them parked right at the limit of acceptance (.05), more so than chance could assume. If anyone remembers this study and can provide actual proof (not my terrible memory), I would be very thankful.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value
> Ive actually doesn't know as much about proper design beyond the computing field

That's a heck of a claim from what amounts to an anonymous kid on the internet.
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I downvoted it because people will go to any rhetorical lengths, including "un-defining" the very word intelligence to death, just to believe some people aren't more intelligent than others.

Oh, new rule! We can concede there are "10x" devs, but they have to write shit code! Give me a break.
>Surely you wouldn't prefer a world where the blog you wrote 4 years ago can't be viewed on a new computer?

A counter argument to that, is I'm not sure if I want to live in a world where parsing an HTML document takes over 1,000,000 lines of unparallelizable C. You are sweeping a huge requirement that makes the rendering of that page possible in 2014. Ultimately it takes software to render that information, and the software that does render that, may have an expiration date.
Wow, this is great! I'm sure the playback feature is very useful for interviews -- other coworkers could watch the interview after the fact.

This would be even better with an integrated chat, so you could watch the interviewer & interviewee discuss the code during the replay. Any plans to support that?
If I had to guess, their StatusPage is only reporting on port 25, which wasn't impacted by this.

Disclaimer: I work at Rackspace and sit across the office from most of the MailGun team.
Installed on a fully-updated MacBook Pro Retina. Crashes on startup. Every. single. time.
It certainly is. We're never required to consult any of the colonies when we decide to marry.
Cool idea, and nice write-up, but now I want to find out how the guys hired with the help of this method fare in their jobs!
You'd probably charter a cargo airliner with armed security. And send maybe less than 25 tons of gold per flight.
I use two factor authentication apps on my phone to generate my one time passwords. This works great for me but I always wonder what I will do if I lose my phone.
I've backed up the authenticator apps. I am correct in assuming I can restore the one time password generators from the back-ups? Is there anything else I should do?
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Since the Wit.ai guys gave a shout out on my thread earlier today, I thought I'd return the favor and show off my own implementation of a voice>>text>>comprehension system that I used to make my personal site voice interactive: https://benwasser.com

I'm really glad there's work and advancement being done in this arena and I'm hoping to see more people playing around with it.