skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some remarks:

+ There's a traditional sequence in skilled trades of apprentice -> journeyman -> master. A contemporary trade probably throws student on the front end and perhaps renames apprentice to 'intern'.

What separates a student from an apprentice/intern is the type of problems they work on. The same idea distinguishes the journeyman from the apprentice except that the journeyman is expected to successfully solve the problems they work on. Etc for the master.

What I am getting at is that there is a range of expertise and that what marks someone as an expert is the sort of problems they solve. But it's critical to realize that the context in which they solve those problems matters. This week thousands of students will be writing quicksort code. In 1960 it was the stuff of ...well CA Hoare probably was an expert programmer in an absolute sense, and perhaps a new journeyman among those who were programmers. Here again, context matters when talking about expertise...the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind and all that.

+ It's not really clear what you mean by 'expertise'. An expert AI programmer is someone who has solved expert level problems - one in an academic setting earns a credential. In a vocational setting it's going to take several.

But in both settings the context is years, not hours per day.

+ Sure you're free to define what it means to be an expert. Regardless of what definition you choose, the question remains, what does an expert do that you aren't doing? This isn't a question of research. It's not a question of methodology. It's a question of personal opinion - that is, what activities would you have to do to meet your definition of an expert. Maybe that's working at Google. Maybe it's earning a phd. Maybe it's writing a replacement for HotSpot.

+ Once you know what sort of problems you need to solve to move toward being an expert, perhaps just trying to solve some of those problems is the place to start. I.e. what sort of problems does an apprentice or journeyman tackle?

Good luck.
Earlier on his blog:

How to design an elliptic-curve signature system — There are many choices of elliptic-curve signature systems. The standard choice, ECDSA, is reasonable if you don't care about simplicity, speed, and security.

He goes on to demonstrate his point in minute details.
Yeah, I'll bet my money on Bayer, Merck, and Pfizer, thank you very much.
I'd rather work with a cranky trolling yet competent and accomplished programmer, then a sweet talking dip tard. In my experience incompetence is directly proportional to the amount of pleasantries one uses in discourse.
What do you hope to gain by telling him this?
Those certainly exist and are used frequently in systems that require very high performance encryption, but what DJB is trying to do is ubiquitize encryption capability. A massive first step was taken when AES instructions were added to Intel CPUs, but more could be done. The advantage of having it be ubiquitous in the CPU is overall cost is reduced and the ability to utilize encryption in more and more places is increased since users aren't stuck waiting.
Ah, cool. I'd had some friends that were EMTs, and one of their big complaints was onlookers getting annoyed that they weren't running over to the people they were supposed to be helping.

Similarly, listening to an EMT describe with exasperation that no, they are not going to go provide aid within range of a suspected person who's armed and dangerous; let the cops secure the scene first.
Wow! My eyes popped out for a second when I saw my name there in the README. I wrote an alternative router for Rails (https://github.com/stevegraham/rails/pull/1) because I wanted to be able to generate links to parent and child resources automatically by reflecting on the routing table. I think this would be a useful feature for Hypermedia APIs. I'm currently working on implementing this in a project called Restafarian (https://github.com/stevegraham/restafarian/blob/master/examp...). I couldn't see a way to do this with Journey (The existing Rails router) which is a deterministic finite state automaton, so I wrote one using a modified trie structure where the nodes also have a reference to their parent. It also happened to be a bit faster, which was a nice bonus, but it looks like they've made some changes to bring it to nearly the same performance characteristics.
I think <chongil> has it right.

In the case of religion, you're confusing a transparent and rarely-invoked justification with the actual reasons for the WoD. In the case of politics, you're confusing the mechanism for prohibition with the actual reasons.
there's not limit for creativity.Programming is about creative.
Look around your and pick one problem and create a project to solve it. Ask people around your ,it is good or not.
I suggest you to take part time in non computer department and see how /anything can be improved via software you make/build.
One thing I've always wondered: what would street dealers do if they couldn't make money selling crack anymore? I somehow doubt they'd give up and get a job at McDonald's.

Legalizing drugs might therefore lead to an increase in robberies, muggings, kidnappings, sex trafficking, etc as these former dealers need to find new ways to support themselves. Thoughts?
Crypto coprocessors have been available for many years. I have one of these in my ancient router:

http://soekris.com/products/vpn14x1.html

I doubt they will ever become ubiquitous. For most people CPU crypto will always be good enough and saving a few dollars is more important. Otherwise you would already own one.
Jack Horner: Shape-shifting dinosaurs [video]
Chickens share a lot of DNA with Tyrannosaurus Rex. They used to eat us. Now we eat them. One of the great ironies of evolution.
The rapid improvement of technology (even forty years ago) really impresses me, especially considering that commercially available handheld calculators were only available eight years prior (and were very expensive.) (I'm a vintage calculator collector.)
What's wrong with "In my opinion that wouldn't work unless you had like $10 million in funding - because of X, Y and Z".
When testing a new writing app, I tend to write a stream of consciousness kind of thing. Here's what I wrote to test the app. "This is an experiemnt with Earnets. I'm not quite sure how this works. This is another sentence. The word count is notn being updatineed ... oh I ejust realized the stupid logic of this application. Cool app, bruh."
Just ask yourself one question: what did all the bootleggers do after alcohol prohibition was dropped? Exactly. There's a sort of twinge of classism (or even racism) in your comment, by the way.

The assumption that people who participate in a normal capitalist marketplace are inherently criminals is just silly. They do what they do because it's a bustling marketplace. Period.
Busted Exoplanet-Hunting Kepler Space Telescope Gets a New Mission
AT&T Is Close To Announcing DirecTV Purchase, Say Sources
I imagine this would only be more expensive in die area and cost, because you'd duplicate existing circuits. For example, one of djb's suggestions is to reuse the existing floating-point unit for crypto: to make small changes, exposing the functionality of the internal, 53-bit integer multiplier that's a component of the 64-bit floating point multiplier. There's already eight of these in each core (with AVX, since 2011), costing a formidable number of transistors. Creating a new crypto unit, either in the CPU or a coprocessor, would duplicate much of them.

As djb emphasizes in the article, if it's too expensive it might not make sense for Intel to implement it.
You don't have to tell him his idea sucks. Just go over the process of what he will have to do in order to succeed. Maybe once he understands the grind of starting a successful business, he will realize how much work and effort it really takes to start a startup.
Please don't use autotools, this is a prime example of why you shouldn't use autotools as the whole of autotools within the project is larger than the project, an alternative is a simple shell configure to check in env. A few other issues that I don't understand is why you made strndiff / strdiff, str_repeat, str_split it is the same as strncmp / strcmp, strcpy, strtok you just duplicated libc for some reason.
I guess OP doesn't want to gain anything, but just wants to help his friend by giving him honest feedback about his work, at the same time doesn't want to put it out in a way that might sound discouraging or rude.
ok got it. jeez with the down votes!
You don't. You can give your input with the known challenges, but you don't tell him to stop doing the idea. People learn by failing and your best friend's idea may never work, but what he learns from that and what spawns from that might work.

I remember specifically when a company pitched their idea that it would never work, and 3 years later the business is doing really well.

The only way you can really tell your best friend to stop, is if you have direct experience in what he is trying to build and have succeeded.

Your friend will learn the hard way and that's the best learning that there is.
solving this problem was part of REBOL's dream.i really wish it had been properly open-sourced from day one and built up a good community and momentum around it; it was a very promising language.
But the whole point is that the money not spent in the war on drugs would then be re-directed to control other criminal activities. I'd rather gangs go into white-collar crime than violent crimes.

The Mafia, Yakuza and the Hong Kong triads have in large measure done away from street crime and moved to more economic-oriented crimes such as buying legitimate companies and fiddling with their accounts to illegally import and sell goods, avoid taxes, peddle in corruption, gambling, ...
Yes, it is a legitimate policy choice. In general, FedGov has sharply limited constitutional authority to force the states to carry out its wishes in the case of enforcing federal criminal laws. The precedent that comes to mind is Printz v. US, where SCOTUS struck down a FedGov law requiring that local police check the backgrounds of Americans who wanted to buy a firearm through a licensed dealer.

And obviously in the case of marijuana legalization, states like Colorado are already engaging in quasi-nullification: they're thumbing their nose at FedGov despite a federal law saying that mere possession of pot is a crime.

This is why FedGov tries to tie its mandates on states to funding, like speed limits and drinking ages. Remember Real ID was not a direct mandate on the states but a carrot-and-stick approach to nationalized drivers licenses (or, you could argue, a uniform national ID).
I wrote the trie implementation referenced in the benchmarks. I didn't do it for speed, I did it because I couldn't add the router functionality I needed using the existing underlying implementation.
A few thoughts:

1. Is he asking for your feedback? Founders are forever hearing "that will never work, you should go back to your job." If he's not soliciting your feedback, consider deciding not to pile on.

2. Conversely, if he is asking, give it to him straight. People have a tendency to think "this will never work" while saying things like, "wow, that's cool!" Don't be that guy. He won't appreciate it when he thinks back to the years of time wasted.

3. If you do give feedback, focus on concrete and constructive building blocks, not your value judgments. "How will you solve the chicken and egg problem?" is a far more useful phrasing than "Your latest idea will never work." For bonus points, brainstorm solutions with him. This is harder and more time-consuming, but more helpful for your friend.

4. Remember that the most successful ideas are often the most counterintuitive. Twitter is my favorite example here, but honestly it applies to most huge tech companies. Keep an open mind through the process.

Good luck! Entrepreneurs can seem schizophrenic, balancing logical considerations with the desire to do something extraordinary and contrarian. But helping him navigate this is what makes you a good friend. :)
I think shot glasses are optimized to be put into various configurations, such as matrices and triangular matrices: http://www.likecool.com/Home/Accessories/Billiards%20Shot%20...
The same thing that would happen to any country or state that decided to stop participating in the war on drugs.

They would be sanctioned and heckled by other city governments.

They may even have their drug enforcement programs carried out by other governments, like when Canada sat back for years while Marc Emery sold Marijuana seeds worldwide.

The DEA basically coughed and the RCMP had Emery arrested on the spot and extradited to the U.S.A. to face charges in a country he was not even a resident of.[0]

I am sure there was a bit more to it than that. The USA probably insinuated some very strong consequences for Canada if they didn't turn him over. But that's entirely speculation.

Marc Emery aka "the prince of pot" remains incarcerated in the U.S.A. to this day.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Emery#2005_arrest_and_extr...
FYI, my comment was a nebulous reference to "Steel Beach" by John Varley, about a future space civilization where dinosaurs had been cloned and were raised as game meat.

No sense of humor around here, looks like. The fact is, if we could revive dinosaurs, they would become game meat. What other purpose would they serve? To strip a forest in a day? To hunt and kill all the mammals?

As for the fundamental question of whether we should revive ancient species, the answer is "Of course!" To clone an animal using fully sequenced DNA would be an amazing achievement, and the programmed behavior in the DNA would be fascinating to study.

Of course, it's much more likely and scientifically feasible that we could clone more recent species such as Neanderthals which according to at least one scientist might be achievable today, or in the very near future. But dinosaurs are what capture people's imagination, and the bigger, the better.
Is there a US-based not-for-profit that sends money to LibreSSL? (Yes, this is a little round-about, but a tax benefit is nice.)
First, you ask if he wants your honest opinion. No one likes unsolicited critism.

Second, what makes you qualified to say his idea sucks? Many people in history were told their idea sucked.

Next...sometimes it's good to let people fail. It builds character. We learn by making mistakes.

But if you feel like you must give criticism...don't simply say it sucks. That's just as useless as saying it's wonderful. If you don't like his idea, say what you don't like about it AND give a suggestion about how to make it better.

The bottom line: your opinion is just one of many and a suggestion is always better than a criticism. Especially when he's your friend.
I realized the drug war was a farce when I was a teenager watching the evening news with my parents.

They ran a story about arresting a Colombian drug lord and raiding his mansion. Immediately following was a commercial break which featured August Busch talking about some charity his brewery was sponsoring.

And it hit me: one drug lord gets a small army sent after him and another drug lord is allowed to operate openly and even accepted as an upstanding member of the community. What is the difference between the two?

Of course the key difference is: when the drug is legal, it's far more profitable and easier to run above board, even with the burden of taxes and regulations. Why run a complicated network of smugglers and violent enforcers, running the risk of extended jail time, when you can just maintain a distribution network and pay for advertising? I'm sure Pablo Escobar would have gladly given up his thuggish ways in exchange for decent shelf placement in retail establishments and ads featuring "Escobar's Finest Blend. Don't settle for imitations!"
> It was not long ago when black holes were described as having infinite density and zero volume. Few discoveries and math formulas later, turns out they far more likely stop collapsing at the size of their Schwarzschild radius.

Reference please? This does not sound like a good description of the current best scientific theory on black holes.
I have a friend who always has these crazy business ideas. A bunch of them could work, to be honest. He has a bright mind, but he never actually builds anything. He wants others to work for him and do the technical stuff. Whenever we talk about his projects, I'm completely honest with him as to what kinds of problems he might need to solve before even getting a chance at growing a business. He likes the input, as I have a more rigorous scientific education than him.

So the point is, depending on your relation with your friend, you might simply be honest with him.
Solar Roadways is funding – and why you should care
Agree, maybe my thinking is petty but that term seems to devalue the craft. It should go away.
Cool, nice work! I didn't actually look at the benchmark and was just making (perhaps poor) assumptions. I'd imagine it does come with a nice little performance boost though?
So You’re Not Desirable
> People didn't build real applications in Hypercard.

Remarkably, they did! Wikipedia:

>A number of commercial software products were created in HyperCard, most notably the original version of the interactive game narrative Myst, the Voyager Company's Expanded Books, and multimedia CD-ROMs of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony CD-ROM, the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, and the Voyager MacBeth.

It's true that Hypercard was not an ideal platform for development. Apparently, Myst developers had trouble making the high resolution images load quickly on machines of the time.
tl;dr Acqui-hires are are turning into just hires. Companies just want the talent from failed start ups. The acquirer lowballs cost of buying out equity and but keeps high retention comp to employees. In short term this is good for start up employees, but writer argues this will hurt seed ecosystem because investors don't like being burned.
It's hard to comment without actually knowing the guys idea, and seeing as you're a new account it's hard to say whether you really know what you're talking about either. I've had the displeasure of working with some very negative and arrogant people in the past who failed to see good in any idea that wasn't one of their own. Not saying you're one of those people, just saying.
"Your idea sucks."

What kind of a friend are you if you can't tell him/her straight that his idea sucks?
Whenever someone comes to me with a great idea I kindly refer them 4 articles for studying.

Learn HTML, CSS, JS, and Michael Hartls book on Rails.

80% of them will give up when they realize I'm not going to do the work for them. 19% will spend a week on codecadamy before giving up.
The final 1% are so motivated that it is no longer relevant what they do in life. They will be successful. Period.
As I said, Hypercard was like Flash -- so it's not surprising that all these commercial products are sort of point-n-click multimedia projects. But you couldn't, for example, build an email application in Hypercard. You could, however, build one in Visual Basic.
When I set out to learn Python, I'd had passing experience with Visual Basic, PHP, Javascript and even a bit of Scheme. I understood what programming was all about, but I hadn't yet overcome the initial struggling to translate the logical flow that I had in mind into code.

Now, almost a decade later, I'm still writing Python. Sure, I write my share of Javascript like most people, but Python is my first and true love.

Python is shallow. There isn't a lot to it - once you understand how magic methods work, you're pretty much at the point where reading the source of the implementation is the next step in understanding.

It wasn't long before I found myself learning the specifics of C data types in order to understand exactly how Python types worked.

In short, my contention is that someone who wants to become a better programmer will become a better programmer regardless of their preferred language.
I have much more to lose than gain. I failed in my first startup and spent 2 years and most of my life savings. We're trained in business very similarly (prior to my first startup) so I know how he's thinking about the business model and I see a ton of risks that he just wouldn't realize until he has gone through it on his own.

I want him to leverage everything I've learned, everything I've failed at so he increases his odds of success but want to do it in a constructive and appropriate way not to damage my friendship.
I want to know more about the "digitized monkey brains."
I don't know, what did the low level bootleggers and enforcers do after prohibition ended? If I was one, I'd have moved on to similar work in narcotics and prostitution.

People choose to risk jail time and physical harm to make mediocre money as a street dealer because they have no better options. Most of them don't even have high school diplomas, what else are they going to do? If we don't do anything other than eliminate the black market for drugs their next best option is still going to be some sort of crime.
I find it unnecessary to always include the caveat "establishes ... unless the person is lying". In particular:

1) this is not a contentious discussion wherein someone might be tempted to fake credentials/experience in order to "win" one side of the argument (low reward)

2) HN is the sort of place where you tend to run into people with various types of experience, which also means people who fake credentials/experience have a hard time passing themselves off as legitimate (high risk)

3) the commenter in question has an established HN profile, which is evidence (though not proof) that he says generally correct and worthwhile things. It seems unlikely that he'd spend as long as he has cultivating his profile/comment history and then suddenly decide to make up a bogus firefighter story for no reason.

4) In the highly likely event that the guy isn't lying, my statement stands: including "source: I'm [job]" is a useful statement because it establishes the context and scope of the observations being made, particularly the type of experience and the degree to which it relates to the article in question. It's not, as you suppose, a comment designed to "win" or "shut down" discussion; it's a way to provide readers with information that helps them understand the perspective being shared and helps them understand what types of questions different people in the discussion might be best suited to answer.
I disagree - when it comes to drug policy, politicians always pontificate about enforcing bans & leaving them in place, which in the US originate strongly with Protestantism & believing that austerity is the solution to various vices seen in society. The Prohibition era is a perfect example of that, and that attitude has never left US politics, which is fraught with religion driving political agenda.
> You will always have the nagging guilt of passing by the janitor, whose job exists because cleaning bathrooms is dirty and time-consuming, and wondering why your work has more value than theirs.

I wouldn't necessarily say that it does. Janitorial service contracts can be lucrative.
Yes, there are a ton of tools that help us software engineers, but to put together a software it still takes a ton of expertise to piece it together. Let's talk about Finance, are traders not provided with excellent tools? Are analyst not provided with Factset or Bloomberg to give them insights? The whole world works like that, not just software development.
"Hmmm. That's an interesting idea. But how are you going to solve [this gaping problem]?"
"Big Data is any thing which is crash Excel." - @DEVOPS_BORAT
Once again, I entirely agree. I personally wish browsers could run a sand-boxed Python implementation, with some sort of DOM interface. Think `import dom`. Ideally browser's would agree on a hard set of standards ahead of time, so things like jQuery would be unnecessary (even though jQuery is about the only good thing involving JavaScript).
Lines on the Road