skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree strongly with that.

First, in all programming helps you become a better programmer, just in the same way as playing the piano makes you a better piano player. Even if you already know how to play the piano, you still need to put in the hours to improve (or even to maintain your skills). The more you program, the more parts of the act become total routine that you don't have to pay any attention to.

Of course programming contests or challenges might not be the optimal thing to do to increase your programming skills. But the comparison isn't to programming something else, it's most likely to somebody wasting time by playing a video game, reading blog posts, watching TV, etc. If a contest acts as a extrinsic motivator for somebody to program something, how can that be a bad thing?

In my experience it's incredibly common for someone learning a new language to lose steam quickly due to not having anything to write. We'll always give the advice of just writing some program they need. But amazingly enough many people just don't think of the world like that. To them a well structured problem set is just what's needed. It'll allow them to learn the new language, and learn something else on the side.

But you're also making the assumption that a coding challenge can't teach you anything useful which is blatantly untrue. I learned a lot about writing efficient data structures for a certain class of problems during the Netflix Prize. Likewise for solving some of the harder ITA software puzzles. I'd known the theory of stack smashing attacks on a very vague level, but having to properly figure out how to do (microcorruption) it was a completely different thing, incredibly fun and helpful. Likewise the Matasano crypto challenges -- learning to crack badly applied crypto made me acutely aware of ways in which I've badly applied crypto in the past.

I'll admit that there's probably nothing of practical value to learn from e.g. doing high level Perl Golf.
I think it was a joke. Jokes don't always come out well on the internet.
[citation needed]? I've not seen any useful IO benchmarks of POWER in a long time, if ever, and they've never been remotely comparable to more commodity systems, since POWER almost always gets used in the huge systems you mention...
This opinion might be unpopular, but I've found over the past decade or so that any reasonably sized tech community seems to have a huge hard-on for Apple. I saw it on Engadget in the early days, reddit as it grew, now HN and so on.

They're a cool company and all but I agree, fortunately things like this have a way of sliding off the HN frontpage fairly quickly.
Iteration is a pretty good way to deal with this, IME. Get it to be serviceable but mediocre ASAP, then continue improving until better marginal benefits can be found elsewhere.
Depending on your definition of 'mass' you can buy them now:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/43702.wss

and

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/s812l-s822l/bro...

I can't stand it how their 'buy now' link for a product with a listed price then links to a 'get a quote' form. If they didn't do stuff like that I might have bought one of their machines instead of the HP that is currently churning away happily (32 cores, 192G of RAM, quite the little beast).
You don't have to apologize. It is difficult to project the correct tone with text and I'd much rather feel a a bit sad and be corrected then to remain ignorant.
Really ? With an SSD you can even go with 2GB of RAM you won't see any difference.
Not everyone is driving at the same time, so Google can use their "magical fairy powers" (also known as statistics / data analysis) to determine how many cars are needed to support a city, maximizing the number of them that are constantly in motion, dropping one passenger and picking another. The ones that are not needed at the time can be stacked tightly in a dedicated multi-storey parking garage.
The EU's Working Time Directive provides a right to work no more than 48hrs per week. In my experience, while I agree that here in the UK it's a little less socialist, I believe it's rare to see excessive hours. Most (anecdotally) office workers work around 40hrs/week; including developers and engineers.
Not judging Herbalife, but some data sources are less reliable than others. (Pershing Square = Bill Ackerman = billion+ short on Hebalife)

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/business/staking-1-billion...
Police Raid “Miniature Pirate Bay” Run on Home Connection
I happen to agree with you. But some of my customers don't, and I'm not going to turn down a customer based on a principle that doesn't hurt my business. By getting it out of the way, we can move onto actually doing cool things together.
5 Books That Will Change Your Life
Yes I got the impression his attitude about evidence-based medicine is similar to that saying about accounting -- that "accounting is the art of looking in the rear view mirror and dragging your ass into the future".

i.e. Accounting isn't worthless. It's necessary, but not sufficient.
I really hope they keep the 13" Macbook Pro around.
The Macbook Air is a fantastic machine but being able to stick a reasonably priced SSD and 16GB of ram into my work 13" MBP has improved my output dramatically.

I wonder how long it will be before Apple prevent after purchase customization at all.
Should have stated that Debian 6 will feature LTS support
On Windows, if Internet Explorer is not your default browser (or possibly if Chrome is your default browser, not sure), Skype uses far more CPU.

Sounds weird, but it definitely made a difference for me.
They do that from time to time; announcements are mostly only for substantial changes.
My first programming language!

ZX Spectrum 48K BASIC back in 1986.
This would only makes sense to me if I could acquire and complete 3 prototypes a month which would be an unlikely outcome with an insane amount of work with little hope of making more.
We Beat SOPA 2 Years Ago. We Need To Do It Again To Preserve Net Neutrality.
Consider all prices to still be +249 because owning one without the extended warranty is at times worthwhile, it can help resale if you sell it within the warranty period
Nick at completionwebstudios.com did the video you see on http://builtFromIdeas.com Highly recommended.
It's probably a diminishing use-case, but I personally still need an ethernet port. There's a surprising number of times when I visit somewhere (offices, universities) and they can't figure out how to get me logged onto the guest wifi, but I can just plug in to the wired network without a problem. Also some hotels have only ethernet, though that's getting less common.
We are all nothing but data-points on a distribution curve.

If you end up just a little bit outside of the very narrow band where the majority of people can be found, welcome to the land of the lost and ignored.

If you are lucky medical science has put a name on that part of the distribution curve and maybe they can help to move you closer to the peak of the distribution curve.

Myself and rest of mankind, please take a note.

Room for improvement: how we treat and interact with other people that didn't have the same luck in the big lottery of life..

Orionblaster, I want you to have better times ahead in your life than what you've seen so far. At least I can offer you my best wishes over the internet.
I'd be interested in seeing a speed comparison with Cloudflare. Cloudflare's DNS is completely free and it's the fastest DNS service I'm aware of.
I still wonder, how well is windows 7 or windows 8.1 supported ?

how fast does xcode runs on it ?
You completely misunderstand memory. 4GB is the bare minimum for Mavericks, any less and even on an SSD you're delving into swap hell. 8GB is really skimpy to have just as an upgrade option, I'm constantly hitting my limits on 16GB (though admittedly my workload isn't typical).
Also this from ElasticSearch: http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/marvel/
I see, it's the movable IP that's the issue. Thanks for the clarification.
There is nothing, there is no problem

SOA invented a problem and then tried to solve it:

You hack together HTTP + JSON and that's it (Roy Fielding... thank you for "REST", but I am not sure what you are saying)

The backend does not give enough to be just working on it... we are all full stack today and the front end is very interesting too.
Only skimmed, but it sounds like it's in a conceptual space near STM and lvish?
"a voice heard often clearly"

That's interesting. I had assumed coming from a RF EE kind of background that it was very much like having a gain control turned way up from a noisy input resulting in peculiar signals being demodulated, but perhaps not so.

For example last night the weather was really awful and at the limit of perception almost asleep (well, I was probably actually asleep) I thought I heard a very unhappy cat meowing outside, so I actually got up and tried to find it, perhaps let it in my dry warm garage to warm up a bit. No cat existed of course.

So under my hypothesis if I had the disease I would hear phantom cats and stuff in general all the time not just once, maybe multiple ones at the same time, and specifically in that situation hear my wife (soundly sleeping like everyone else) telling me loudly and clearly to let the stray cat in to warm up, verbally and clearly and loudly.

However the alternative model, is I'd solely hear the wife telling me to let the stray cat in to warm up, maybe not even hearing the phantom meow.

An individual spurious signal model vs a generally increased noise level model.

A side orthogonal issue might be requiring it to have substantial influence on life. While almost asleep I once thought I barely heard a stray meow outside in the freezing rain so I got up and looked out the windows for a minute has no real influence on my life as an isolated although unusual incident, in comparison, constantly hearing voices loudly tell me peculiar things would have a huge influence on my daily life. So that is interesting too.
They are steady-state right up until a growth business intrudes on their peace and disrupts their industry.

Like our local taxi company basically has a monopoly on the city, and has no real reason to grow. But here comes UberX, a growth startup, throwing around free rides and cheap rates. If the local company loses market share or profits to UberX, they have nowhere else to pick it up.
>Where I need to enable JS I can do it in two clicks

But there's no reliable way of knowing where you need JS.

It's not like every useful component on a site reveals its whole story with JS disabled. There could be a data viz animation that strengthens the topic of an article you're reading. The author refers to "the above visual" but doesn't mention it's an animation (because he assumed everyone would see the animation). All you see is a still image - the fallback to the animation. You aren't aware there's a useful animation showing the schematic of an engine part in motion, for example.

The animation was cool, you totally missed out!

However, if the way you use the web is more about fetching specific content or services from specific places - your favs basically, and you don't like to explore, then if it works for you then I won't judge :)
In some ways, I could say I'm successful. I have a stable source of income, a wife and I can afford to go on holidays.
But, I feel that I'm an NPC. If I didn't exist, the world would be the exact same. When I think back on my twenties, I had a lot of dreams, now all of them have been broken and I settle for less...

Sometimes I feel that I just need to pick myself up together and decide what to do with my life. Find some new dreams I can achieve but instead I just stay in my own mediocrity doing nothing and wondering why nothing changes...

I don't think success necessarily correlates with the amount of wealth you have but it correlates with the amount of self worth you feel and how proud you are of what you did at the end of the day. It's way too easy though to enter a vicious circle where because you failed at something you just stop really trying. Like the author, I tried, I created a business, it failed spectacularly last year due to my own incompetence at managing people and now I'm just there regretting all that I did wrong and thinking that maybe I shouldn't even have tried.

I'm sorry for rambling, I'm probably writing this more for myself than for anyone else. I need to get up, stop pitying myself and find some new dreams to follow instead of just settling for mediocrity.
Windows is supported. I imagine Xcode is almost completely unusable with that CPU and the tiny amount of RAM.
New phones are also not tied to the x86 platform, and generally run software that has been optimized from the start for performance.

There are other considerations too. Phone usage patterns are way different to computer usage patterns. The vast majority of phone usage occurs in small blips of activity during which execution can be optimized for the CPU to race to sleep state as soon as possible. Computers don't have the same usage patterns at all, and have a legacy of first and third party software (on all major platforms) that have not yet been optimized for performance.
So many changes nowadays.. isn't there anything that remains the same, something we can rely on in this chaotic world lol :'(

Anyways, I was hoping the 'zooming' and 'back/forward page swiping animation (on a trackpad)' would be improved, to be more smooth/sexy like it is in Safari on OS X. Unfortunately this hasn't been changed however..
Along those same lines: be careful if you buy an Air at a retail store for a little while. It might be different now, but a few years ago when I got my MBP I waited until the day they were released, called to confirm they were in stock, and when I got to the store they tried to sell me one of the older models that were still in stock.
>BASIC was first successfully used to run programs on the school’s General Electric computer system 50 years ago this week–at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, to be precise.

Sounds like the project deadline was May 1st. Glad software engineering hasn't changed much in 50 years.
I guess this means they won't be announcing Retina MacBook Airs at WWDC in June.
You are joking, of course?
Yes, I suppose the Ethernet is useful. But it doesn't seem worth sacrificing everything else for. Why not just get a USB or Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter?
Yeah, go and buy a thunderbold ethernet cable, they are really cheap and work fantastically.

The only downside is on Linux you have to reboot if you unplug the ethernet, but apparently that's being improved in 3.15.
Do they do something that precludes you from overwriting the boot sector of the VM to install a custom OS?
My wife has the entry level 11in MBA with 2GB RAM. Limited RAM+limited disk space is a problem, even with the SSD.
In some (maybe most?) cases, you can. Bullies look for easy targets. So all you have to do is decide not to be an easy target and ignore any size difference. I told a story of doing that here, and it did work:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7646530

The bully I mentioned above, who took a shotgun to his head? He only stopped bullying me when I threw a basketball into his face (suspension for me, of course). This was after at least a year or 2 of abuse in junior high.

Here's the thing about bullies- the school iteration is only one kind, and you can keep running into them later in life. In all cases you will have to stand up for yourself and fight a bit (perhaps not in actuality, as adults, but it's the same energy source).
My take away is that GitHub has some crazy in leadership AND they had some crazy quit and become disgruntled.

I kind of don't want to cross any of their paths. Too much drama, might have been some sordid stuff but there was definitely a lot of drama. I'll keep my code elsewhere and I'll be wary of all involved.
just to play devil's advocate on this one, you can put 16 GB of memory in it (not from Apple, but by user replacement)
For me, I use a one-hour skype session to talk every potential client "down off the ceiling". We discuss their idea, and then work together to define a scope I can do for $5,000 in 4 weeks (this is the service I offer at http://builtFromIdeas.com )
Bookmarks sidebar button and Add-on toolbar...nope, no one uses those AT ALL. Now I have all that shit in the upper right-hand corner instead of lower left, near Start Menu in Windows and have to use keyboard shortcuts to get to bookmark sidebar, again in Windows. OS X I'm more adept with keyboard shortcuts but monkey trained to use what he's been using last fucking decade in Windows.
The developers actually called it "April 31" because they were supposed to ship in April.
Most European software teams have a strict "no over time" policy that's both respected and enforced. Some company's even turn off the Astrix and e-mail servers at night.

We all know what kind of shit code you produce after working to long, it's not helping anyone if you do that every week.

Engineering should be striving towards excellence, not creating more shit and more work for everyone.
There isn't a retina notebook yet with the kind of battery life the Air has.
Anyone heard if you can upgrade the SSD on these?
Any reason you can't just overwrite .animate and have existing code use it?
Huh, I hadn't seen the Thunderbolt ones. The USB ones are notorious for not really working (they seem to have driver issues). Hopefully the Thunderbolt ones are better?
The Physics of Spider-Man’s Webs
As for many of us I'm sure.

For me, it was GW-BASIC on an XT clone around 1986 as well.
Quote from that email:

> IS NOT A BUG. IT IS A FEATURE. It's not a feature for users like you and me, it's a feature for manufacturers like Samsung and HTC, so they can in turn build devices that carriers can have more control over.

The reason why I switched to Android was precisely the control I have with it, with the primary annoyance I experienced with iOS being that the carrier has to give approval for tethering (amongst other bullshit precisely like this one). This happens for Windows Phone too. Was pleased with Android precisely because it's the only OS in which the feature cannot be turned on/off by the career. Apparently this is no longer true.

A bug BY DESIGN is still a bug.

UPDATED: corrected sentence, iOS is not a carrier :-)
Financial Risk
A Few Notes on Kafka and Jepsen
They could differentiate by making the MBP a lot more powerful than the MBA with things like a high end quad core CPU, up to 32 GB of RAM and a fast Nvidia GPU.

Admittedly the market for high end powerful 13" laptops might not be that big.
I'm in the UK, do 37 hours, home by 4.45 each day, don't let anyone tell you you need to work every hour in the day to succeed.
No Thunderbolt 2 upgrade. I was going to pull the trigger on a couple of these, but I'm not sure now.
Profile your Java Application with VisualVM (Part 1 of 2)
The 13" Retina should persist for some time. That model's entry price is only $100 more than the non-Retina 13" MBP entry price. I don't really see the appeal of the non-Retina version at this point. The Retina display is really great and worth the extra $100, in my opinion, and I think the MBA offers much better value.
Is Xcode so much resource hungry? VS runs nicely on that spec, and I thought VS was the hungriest ide ever
Uploading isn't terrible anymore. No dial-up lines. Not super fast, by any stretch, but it's not an the abomination it used to be.

What kills me, personally, is that I have a fiber line running between two of the major metros in my state underground at the front of my property, and no feasible way to tie into it. Am currently taking suggestions on how to do that.
What definition of success do you use?
Sorry it wasn't interesting.
> as much as I don't like it, advertisers rely on that... it could seriously damage the web if [everyone used adblock]

I understand this. I gave the advertisers a fair shot. I didn't install any adblocking on my phone. I gave them a significant chunk of my limited mobile browsing bandwidth. I understand it's a compromise; I waste my page space and bandwidth, and the websites I like continue to exist.

Then my phone started talking to me about some TV show or some shit in the middle of the office last week. Firefox installed, adblock installed, scorched earth policy. I will never view another ad on mobile.

I'm willing to be reasonable and compromise here, but if they're not holding up their end of the bargain, I'm not going to carry that burden either. If this is the way the web is going to be, then the web needs a new business model and I'm happy to bring it about.
The combination of SSD + absolutely ridiculous efficiency sharing libraries on OS X, means that it's entirely reasonable to be running 25-30 applications simultaneously, including a VMware instance of Windows 7, All the Office Apps, Network Simulators, etc...

While there are obviously users that can use more than 8GB of memory (or heck, even more than 128 GB of memory) it's probably less than 1% of the Mac Using population that requires more than 8 GB of memory, and Apple expects that 1% to use the MBP. I don't think the Air will see more than 8 GB of memory for at least another 5 years.
You couldn't fit all of that in a 13" MBP.
The author suggests Arch Linux for Desktop use. I used Arch for 2 years and liked it. It still runs on my raspberry.

I wouldn't recommend it for any serious work where downtime costs you money though.
There are just too many occasions where Arch renders your Desktop unusable because of an upgrade. You have to pay close attention to the news on the homepage for any system breaking changes (which is kind of ridiculous). And even then a system may occasionally render your system unbootable just because.
I agree. One thing Steve Jobs seemed pretty keen on was a rational, minimal product line.

Allowing the product line to evolve and fit all the little niches crevices is not Apple's style.
I noticed that you used to use the URL bar on top layout as I did. Sadly that is gone now but the Classic Theme add-on will give you the option back.

To me it's just more visually intuitive to have the tab right above the content window, not over all the toolbars. I really can't fathom why the reverse has become the default.
yeah the 2GB part was a bit too much. Especially for Mavericks requirements (I was not aware).

My point is, with an SSD, you can swap, it won't be slow as the good old HDD days. On my workstation with 8GB of RAM and a 512 SSD (MBPr), I often have 8 or more GB swapped, it's not noticeable at all.

The only downside is that yeah, the VM file size will reduce your actual available disk space until you clean it up (reboot).
In Defence of the Unitype
I think for a lot of people the issue is storage. Most don't know the difference between an ssd and a mechanical hard drive and don't want to have to pay an exorbitant sum to get to 500+ gb. They have lots of pictures and music and other things they want to keep around, even if they rarely access them.
I did that with Clojure and it was great. Possibly an unfair metric because it felt as if many of the questions were purposefully built for a functional language.
This app did not make much sense to me because I was sitting at my computer making choices for myself and my non-present roommate. So the related article with useful visual explanation of Sperner's Lemma may be more useful reading if you don't have a quorum of your roommates to work with this morning:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/science/to-divide-the-rent...
OpenPOWER Foundation Unveils First Innovations and Roadmap
This has to be one of the most explicit mentions of "if you're not paying for it, you're the product being sold" I've seen. Normally companies tend to be somewhat more subtle about that kind of thing.
What happens if you don't reboot?
There isn't and really hasn't ever been wireless net neutrality. Carriers used to (and perhaps still do) get at this data through deep packet inspection.

It's discrimination in the "price discrimination" sense.