skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
33 years since I started, and virtually nothing has changed in programming. In the graphics arts, yes. In the UIs, yes. I've seen a lot of fads loudly explode onto the scene and quietly blow away. But recursion is still recursion, picket fence bugs are still picket fence bugs. There are some new algorithms, most of which I never use of course. Fundamentally 30 years ago I spent most of my time designing, defining, and screwing around with the contents of data structures, and nothing has changed since then other than the technologies, all of which are pretty simple and easier to pick up, each time I pick them up.

I'm not yet 60 but WRT "Do you find it more difficult to grasp with age or does it get easier?" OMG you have no idea how much it gets easier. Unbelievably so. Think about it for a second, nothing's ever really inherently new on the biz side, its all a remake of something else, and most of the tech side is the same other than adding more zeros to various specs. And I figured out how it works and how to debug it and when it breaks, last time around, and nothing has really fundamentally changed this time around other than some specs that are irrelevant or simple to work with. All I need to do is pattern match it now and I'll have the answer instantly compared to people who never experienced the same thing last time around. Also its much like learning foreign languages or math, in that the more you learn, the more you learn how YOU best learn, so the easier it is to learn. Trust me, kids, learning your 6th language is unimaginably easier than learning your 3rd.

There is a lot of self selection bias. If the lifespan of a poor programmer is 3 years, not even long enough to graduate, and a tolerable programmer is 10 years, well, if you're doing this as an old guy, you might actually know one or two things about programming.

I'm not a very good carpenter, but I can wield a saw on occasion, and things have changed in carpentry, but not much. Another interesting example is cars, both driving and repair, where the frosting has changed but the cake is pretty much the same. Another similarity in both fields is there are loud subcultures taking great joy in reminiscing and refusal to learn about the new frosting and complaining about today's cake flavor, blah blah blah.

One very curious aspect of computing is I can do everything at home, very slowly, compared to what I can do at work. I don't need to wait for the boss to give me permission to play with Scala at home. Or Clojure. And I started using Scala at work because I had fun at home (other than the compile times, and getting pissed off about arbitrary size limits of case classes, and ... oh wait I keep telling myself I like Scala, every rose has its thorns I guess) Anyway my first major a long time ago was ChemEng and its hard/impossible to fool around at home with the same stuff as the lab at work, so its actually kind of unusual to be so "free" in computing, compared to other vocations. I could see life being pretty rough as a 60 year old chemist, but not so bad as a programmer.
This is not a collision rate. Collision is when two plain text gives the same hash.
Mailr: an open-source webmail client with Gmail-like conversations
That is kind of my point, though. Rush hour traffic around here is 60-70, not 55. Why keep targeting 55 in the designs?
> It will attempt to surround the implant and expel it. Depending on the size this may or may not work (this is what happens to splinters of wood that get into your body, for example)

Very cool. I had a splinter sink into my finger once, and abandoned the project of getting it out. Sure enough, it eventually emerged on its own; in my memory it was coated with a thin layer of some clear substance.

> Always keep in mind that the immune system wins against bacteria not because it's better or smarter, but because it has 80kg of cells working logistics for it

I weigh less than 80 kilograms. What's that g stand for?
I don't think innovators have any dilemma. Most scientist would rather go for fame than money, or at least that's the feeling I get from the ones I know in person.

It's more like the "manager's dilemma".
That's one of my main pet peeves about fantasy novels. The only author I know who has introduced long term changes in a fantasy world is Brandon Sanderson in his fantasy series Mistborn.
I think making longer and more complicated token is enough.
It's not too late as long as they're still in business. Market share changes happen so rapidly in these industries. You can lose a huge chunk of market share in two or three years, but you can gain it back just as quickly. For a long time it looked like Apple was going to be dominant in the smartphone market even though Android had already started to show up on handsets. But very very quickly the cell phone industry in its entirety adopted Android - because of its low price and lack of licensing restrictions - and it outgrew the iPhone in terms of market share very rapidly. Same thing could happen with Microsoft.

Of course, then there's BlackBerry...

I'd be a bit worried if I were Apple. They are still making money hand over fist - and the market is big enough that you can be extremely profitable even if you aren't dominant in market share. But having to compete with one free operating system is hard enough. Now they will have to compete with two. It's like a replay of the OS wars in the 80s and 90s. Things could change quickly.
Viewing on Chromium, and I can't see a single difference in the 10 styles that have "perspective" in the name. Am I just being dense?
For me this is not about whether it is too late or not, but what is the underlying motive? We can agree that these recent changes and releases are superficially good but what is the long term impact? Is this just another ploy to lock people into their office/cloud platform and/or tooling because they've decided that the operating system game is over?

This gift horse deserves a good look in the mouth.
Doctors are going to be very quick to put you on drugs. After taking the various drugs, talk therapy, etc..

As quaint as it may sound, diet and exercise (the only supplement to that I take is phosphatidylserine now) can really make a difference.

I'm not saying don't do the drugs (especially if your a severe case), but (at least my experience) the drugs are not necessarily as effective as things you can do without all the hassle/expense of prescription drugs.
I don't see that in the article anywhere (^F doctor ^F Petersburg).

I also don't sense any specifically anti-Russian sentiment. I think the references to Russia are to contrast the lack of presence in SF despite a claim to have one, or the lack of corroboration for the claimed references. I imagine the tone of the article would be the same if it was France or South Africa or Malaysia.
It's already bad enough that people put dropbox links in their e-mails, negating the value of long-term e-mail archiving.

It's extremely useful to be able to go back in time and have full conversation history, including associated resources.
I think 'ars is saying that these are "personalized" email addresses: there is a separate one for each person from whom 'ars wants to receive email. Assuming these addresses aren't easily guessable/enumerable, and aren't on any lists stolen from or sold by service providers, the spammer must have have gotten them somewhere else.
I was part of a startup when I was 20 and I knew nothing. I didn't understand business, I didn't understand money, I didn't understand value, and I barely knew how to develop software in a competent manor. When I was 20 it was still okay to sleep on a couch for months because I saved $80, I could barely comprehend how insignificant $80 is to a company. I was making something cool that I wanted and the fact that the company wanted it too was neat and frankly lucky. Given another ten years of just living your knowledge of how the world works will grow considerably. Maybe you do become a little more risk averse, but you definitely become a lot less stupid. When you are 20 you have a very hard time judging how good an idea is so one is as good as another. Given enough 20 year olds one is bound to be lucky :) When you are 30 you should be able to toss out many ideas most of which are just bad which is why I would expect them to fail less.
(If you haven't read all the books, don't read this comment.)

There's also magic in general. Until relatively recently, societies could accomplish a great deal through magical means, from road-building to instantaneous long-distance communication. For much of the six thousand years, there was probably no reason to focus on scientific and technological advances when you could just use magic.

Things apparently changed with the near-extinction of the dragons. Dragons apparently somehow boost magic - it almost disappeared without them, and now it's coming back with them.

In the books, Marwyn the Mage (a maester) claims that the maesters were responsible for the death of the dragons, because they couldn't build the world they wanted with magic, prophecy, and dragons around - suggesting that the maesters want a world of science and technology, perhaps with them as the gatekeepers. Lady Dustin also suggests that the maesters are much more political than they pretend.
Last I checked, they're still trying to go after open source projects to squeeze patent money from them - so I'd say no, it isn't a "new" company. It just has new PR tactics: "Look at us, we released one open source app - we're basically now a kitten-loving company".
If a company is going to get these vehicles to be market viable, it is Walmart. They are ruthless in terms of cost cutting and they would be the first to cut out "tech for tech sake" if it doesn't give them a ROI.
"Is it too late?" For what outcome?

If you set the bar at "regain their 1990s level dominance", yeah that probably won't ever happen. But so what? Given where they're at, an outcome such as "don't end up another RIM et al" is perfectly reasonable. To put it in context, their odds are better than most startups.

They have a huge amount of cash on hand. The cash cows will throw off billions before they finally dry up. Although they've had a talent drain, that trend is likely to reverse somewhat.
|likely more work than could be completed in Nadella's short tenure.

You are correct. During the build conference there were several mentions of Project Rosyln being a 3-4 year old endeavor.
Colors: A New Anchor CMS Theme
Please do.... but since you didn't, I'll help:

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist,[1] although the general concept is much older.[2] The observation has also been called "Davis' law"[3][4] or just the "journalistic principle".[5]
There's plenty of blame for everyone. Kickstarter/Indiegogo are basically scam incubators: they provide some basic help getting scams off the ground, connecting cons with dupes, and take their cut. The Scam Founders they support get to try out various pitches until they find one that works.
Looks like Amazon WorkSpaces incorporates PCoIP technology from Teradici. http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/details/
Of all the big players in 2014, none are as diversified as Microsoft - they have Windows, XBox, Enterprise, Office, Mobile, Azure - all of which would be huge businesses even on their own. Hence you could argue they are a lot less vulnerable than people assume them to be.
As far as I can tell, the area that you will have the biggest issue in node.js is if your data models are highly relational. Last I checked, there wasn't a robust node.js ORM for SQL data stores. Otherwise don't fret it, just get building.

Also, as long as you're looking at all those options, don't forget about Python/Django.
Can you point to any information regarding this? I have heard nothing about this.
I haven't used hackerone myself, so this is just based on limited observation, but it looks to me like it was automatically disclosed one month after the reporter made the request. Otherwise, I believe it would have said something like "schofield agreed to make this public".
Absolutely correct. Same with PayPal.
How the fuck does obvious crapware get 7x its funding goal while Gooseberry is looking to not reach its goal in the next half month? Is it really just because the Blender Foundation tried to do their campaign on their own site?
Off mass-shell: Pythagoras to the LHC, via Einstein and Feynman
Maybe this is a repetition of that old "POST-only prevents CSRF" myth?
For future reference to add just about anything manually to your google now, you can google search them from any synced chrome. When I'm planning a trip I do it on my desktop and it automatically appears on my phone.
I'd find this to be the most likely scenario, have met lots of Microsoft employees and a surprising number of them were on board with open source + acknowledging mistakes. I'd love to think that it wasn't his performance that drove Ballmer out so much as his mismatch for the actual corporate culture of those beneath him.
Great points - jyap

I would also add that thin clients and schools/college/university would be a great use case.
Again, how are standard components of IQ tests related to hacking ability? Are speed and retention of random items the only or even the most important variables?

How much of the average declines documented in these studies is related to cultural factors (people are allowed to stop using their brains as they get older) as opposed to individual potential?

I don't doubt for a second that certain cognitive functions degrade with age, but we don't know by how much they degrade in those who keep using their brains.

And we don't know how the things that do get better with age, like discerning patterns that only emerge after looking at a lot of instances, affect our ability to solve complex problems.
From the comments, a better YouTube video explaining more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NER9X4_gtYk
Yeah, I thought about that too. As they say, necessity really is the mother of invention...
Also, they are creating new cash cows to replace the old ones. While maybe the windows licenses is no more the big one, now azure is becoming it, Xbox(/devices) division is finally becoming profitable, office license model is being replaced by subscription model very easily, etc etc

Long story short: As you I think they will never become again "monopolist" in a market (and I am happy about this), but I think they will still be one of the main protagonists in it for very long time (and I am happy also about this).
I've learned from programming that cost cutting is always the n-th step in creating a new product. What we are talking about here is pioneering into a new territory. Cost cutting isn't even a question right now.
I'm not sure about a minimum commitment, but I plan on using for a month. I agree, it would be cool to have a trial/test drive.
It will be great to see them expand the offering to other operating systems.
http://tympanus.net/codrops/licensing/
He's talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

Christensen suggests that successful companies can put too much emphasis on customers' current needs, and fail to adopt new technology or business models that will meet customers' unstated or future needs; he argues that such companies will eventually fall behind
meanwhile you're writing this on your osx using macbook pro
It's definitely on the unstable branches. Hecka annoying because it's almost impossible to close Chrome right now without killing the entire process tree.
Unfortunately, if you follow that train of thought to it's logical conclusion, such a place is a contradiction. If everyone wanted to live in a low-density suburban area, these low-density suburban areas have to be built farther and farther away from the city, well more than "a few minutes" drive. To see the fallacy of this you only have to look at places like Toronto, or Atlanta.
Do you have google sync enabled?
In many European countries, they are, as part of a fuel tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax#Europe
Is there any proof that hard drive manufactures actually switched? It's always just repeated as truth. I remember megabytes being all over the place in the days of floppy disks, 1000 * 1000 or 1000 * 1024 or 1024 * 1024. Hardware engineers have always been more likely to use 10^9 (ie megabits) where software developers have always been more likely to use megabytes.
If that law did hold at any time, could it possibly still hold now? I would think that at least some headline writers would be somewhat genre-savvy, and would write headlines specifically to subvert this line of thought. Example:

Is Air Pollution Really Bad for Your Health?
Explain yourself why we "always need a fallback plan" if JS is disabled.

Without saying "screen readers", as they're 90%+ JS enabled these days.
Since this discussion is happening in the US, traditional in the context of US history (and european history) is really all that matters. In that sense, marriage has been between a man and a woman. You can go back quite far and see this scenario hold. Lets not pretend this isn't true.

> People using the power of the state to force their views on others to the detriment of families and children?

This is another framing of the issue that seems absurd to me. Who is denying you anything? You are free to do whatever you please with whomever you please. Your lack of government recognition of marriage does not prevent you from building a life with the person you love. Aside from doctors visits and a few tax breaks and whatnot (which can be handled tangentially to the issue of "marriage"), there isn't really any difference to one's life if government recognizes your relationship or not.

This is the key here. Marriage recognition isn't about you and your partner, its about forcing everyone else to recognize your relationship. This is a cultural battle, not a civil rights one. You want Billy-the-hillbilly in Tennessee to recognize your relationship as just as legitimate as John and Jane's. I get why this is important, and I'm sure I'd feel the same in that position. But this is a personal opinion that people should be entitled to, as far as anyone is entitled to hold stupid/backwards opinions. I don't accept this as a "civil rights" issue, or that the lack of such recognition as being damaging in some way.
Conned?
Installing iOS Integration Testing framework Subliminal using Cocoapods
At time of writing there are three links to tarsnap.com on the front page: this one, scrypt, and spiped. I think that means that you win HN, sir. It's been a good run everyone, time to wind things down.
So you're saying you'd boycott Nazi Germany, but you wouldn't boycott an art gallery that displayed Hitler's paintings?
"Before you start using Google Now on your computer, you’ll need to set it up on iOS or Android first."

So you still need a Google Play or iOS device to get it. I can't set it up on my Kindle Fire, which does a fine job of running Android applications when they're made available outside Google Play.
Office is a major part of this. Practically every workflow on the planet is glued together with emails and excel spreadsheets.
That's not really a license and more of a tl;dr. There's a lot of value in picking an existing license to ensure people know what's up, and also that it can hold up legally if you need it to.

EDIT: To clarify, yes, I know that putting it there makes it "their license", and if I were to use code from their site I would adhere to it. My concern is that, because it's not actively shown when viewing the code itself, and because it's a roll_your_own license, it impacts how comfortable I'd feel taking the code and using it as part of other projects.
Nice video, but I guess this is a first seen also for developers.
That's a sensible policy. Here in Jakarta lanes are mostly for decorative purposes only, but the roads are shared by cars, trucks, autorickshaws, motorcycles, and various forms of human-powered cards (either pushed by a pedestrian or with a mechanism based on a bicycle). It is amazingly chaotic.

But one of the first things you learn is not only to be pedantic about signalling when turning but that you need to claim space because otherwise you are asking for an accident and if you are involved in one as a car driver, it doesn't matter whose fault it is: the motorcyclist/bicyclist loses on the physics and the car driver loses in front of the police (that's one way btw that police corruption protects the poor here).

The space-claiming is key. You do not want to be passed on the left while making a left-hand turn (they drive here the same side as in the UK). That has happened to me a couple of times and it is a major reason I do not listen to the radio while I am driving (with motorcylces that way at least I can hear them). Fortunately I haven't hit anyone yet (knocking on wood).
Why not switch to actual GB like the OS X did. I'm not sure why anybody prefers GiB.
It does sound like they were debating this for quite a while. Eric Lippert used to work on the C# compiler and published a blog post[1] immediately after the announcement:

Since I always knew that open sourcing was a possibility I tried to write my portions of it as cleanly and clearly as possible; hopefully I succeeded.

[1]: http://ericlippert.com/2014/04/03/c-and-vb-are-open-sourced/
Actually in Italy I've always seen km per liter for years and years, let's say all the 80s and 90s ("my car runs 14 km per liter, and yours?" "mine is crap, I can't do more than 10km with a liter of gasoline" and same for auto magazines). I think only recently (new century?) they started using more the "liters per 100km" approach
I guess it would be rather easy to identify an off-duty UPS driver, just by analyzing his/her driving pattern.
Marketing. People who don't normally crowdfund things are finding out about a chance to get a "miracle" device.

Meanwhile, who outside of Reddit, HN and LWN knows about Blender's campaign?
Maybe another more obvious one:

If you get shot in the head at point blank range with a Magnum 44 then is it likely to be life threatening?

:-)
Oh, thanks for clarifying!!!
Whenever something looks odd on Gwern's site, you can check his A/B testing article[0] to see if it's intentional. In this case, it's BeeLine Reader, his newest experiment[1]. The coloring or shading is supposed to help the eye follow the line as it saccades back and forth.

[0]: http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing
[1]: http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#beeline-reader
58, been very active on HN since the beginning, 7 years ago.

My passion and aptitude for hacking are higher than ever!

I struggled all day yesterday, trying to organize parameters to feed an engine to propagate data that would generate code for a new project. Woke up at 4 a.m. with a hypothesis, and built a working prototype before breakfast. What a great day already.

I have written over a million lines of commercial code since 1979, still work serving customers pretty much full time and have enough time left for another 20 to 30 hours per week on personal projects. I have at least one or two more start ups in me, for sure.

If this industry was like it was when I started, before PCs and the internet, and I had to sling COBOL for enterprises, I'd probably be a greeter at Walmart now, planning for social security. But fortunately our world has changed and it's so much more interesting and fun. If I ever do retire, I'll probably still keep building stuff forever.

The 2 best things: software is everywhere and involved in everything now. I can't imagine not finding an interesting application. And perhaps more importantly, things change so fast, there's always something newer and possibly more interesting right around the corner. (I wish I had more time to explore node, go, and some more frameworks, but I'm so busy...)

Between building software, riding my bike, drinking great beer, and getting laid every once in a while, I still feel like 25. I don't want it to ever end.

I think anyone who builds software should feel like I do. I hope most of you do. Prepare for a nice long ride!