skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read it a bit of a joke, not meant maliciously, and yet with a lot of truth to it.

I'm sort of in between "get shit done" and "fix other people's shit" in my work. Because I like to take pride in my work, and because I don't want to leave the full timers with yet more contractor mess, I take care to do my job as well as I can. And I prefer projects where I can be proud of everything I do.

But in the 'trenches' of unsexy work, where my ideals meet reality, neither I nor the full-timers always have the time, money, or expertise to do things right, and are sometimes even forced by management to just get it done.

And I don't always mind. I can be happy with the result because it serves its purpose, and I made both the managers and many customers happy, even though I cringe at the underlying mess we produced. I know it is likely to cause much more work down the road, and I would generally advise against 'ship first, refactor later', but I'm also okay with the idea that I provide work for specialists to fix my mess.

Can I call myself a 'programmer'? Or am I more of a 'code monkey'? Do 'real' programmers thumb their nose at my sometimes shoddy code?

I don't really care. I'm happy with my work, and with my solutions. My aim is to move towards being able to provide full, high-quality solutions, because that makes me happier. But it also makes me happy to creatively solve problems in a way that might be imperfect, or frowned upon by some.

The most important reason for me to provide good, solid, readable code is because I care about the full-timers I meet who don't enjoy fixing my mess, and because I don't want my client to get into trouble later. That's why. It's primarily (but not exclusively) because I work with humans and I don't want to abuse my 'privilege' as a contractor and (relatively) skilled communicator to give other people headaches and crying fits over having to fix my junk. I've seen that happen, and it sucks.

(sorry, not necessarily directing this at you specifically)
They're called Embedded Domain-Specific Languages, Ruby is used quite often for the same purposes.

If you're interested in the subject, then I'd recommend Martin Fowler's excellent book: http://martinfowler.com/books/dsl.html
I turn off all the animations. Everything is good once you do that.
Do you happen to natively speak Russian? I've heard that in Russian the word used for people swimming is the same word used for ships sailing.

In English, swimming specifically refers to the motions living organisms use to move in water. Ships instead are said to "sail", even though most do not use sails for power.
I agree that you need to understand what you are doing and why. I'm not saying that these bits should be treated like magic, just that you should think very carefully before you differ from them by very much.
Reconstructing Facial Images from Neural activity
Extensive example of what Emacs Org-mode can do.
Weekly Ice Links (6)
I haven't read this book yet, so I don't know about "triggered" vs. "enabled," but it seems relevant (came up in a talk about American companies providing deep packet inspection / internet censorship tools to, eg., Iran.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/
It took me a while (I'm a bit slow on hardware stuff) but I think I understand now why the Mill is A Good Thing.

It can be thought of as a design abstraction layer between hardware platform developers and hardware manufacturers (with a few considerations, as mentioned in the video) which allows rapid hardware development in a way that programming languages (as opposed to assembly) allow rapid software development.

I previously thought it was just a new CPU design (like they come along every day...) but now I think they're heading in the right direction here. Rapid development cycles for hardware with a much more approachable function description language.

Need a chip that does what your old chip does but with newer crypto / media codec / random protocol feature? Load up the previous one, write the new functions in (almost) C++, sim it, test it, send it off to the fab, hardware guys apply unicorn spray and bake in a pressure cooker (or something), product. Hopefully it will work something like that.

He mentions hardware in 2 years (maybe). Is this actually on the horizon? I'm excited by the current state of the sim, but the first hardware (and proof of concept) would be great to see!
> When Pfizer or Qualcomm wants to know what impact proposed legislation will have on their business, who do you imagine they ask?

That's exactly the job of in-house counsel. It would be very unusual for a big corporation to turn to "trial lawyers" (i.e. a plaintiff's firm) for advice of any sort. Big companies do not routinely deal with plaintiff's lawyers, for the simple reason that they're usually on the defendant side of litigation.
New Logo for Dungeons and Dragons
DEFCON 22 Needs Gov Spy Backing for Talk
The Origins of The Hacking Jacket

http://www.ahume.co.uk/blog/index.php/the-origins-of-the-hac...
If you get the 50-pack, is it possible to make a Beowulf cluster out of them, using Wifi for the network connections?
10 Funniest Startup Videos
I think this is laziness on the part of employers. Nobody wants to offer training in a new job so they pressure for cookie-cutter grads that they can slot into junior roles.
Many libertarians seem to have issues with 'capitalism' because they argue that our market isn't free enough (if I understand correctly). Pikkety's research, I suppose, can be used within that ideology too. So it might not be just a left-wing thing.
It's done by companies with small barriers to entry - if you wanted to be a startup in the rough diamond world, you'd need billions of dollars in start up capital, and access to a mine that's producing diamonds, which aren't just lying around. Figure billions more to buy a mine. Even then, you might get 3% market share, not enough to meet demand or alter prices in any way.
Yeah, I'm aware of it. I'm not saying that Iran has no potential to do great things - I'm not even sure what that means, but Iran definitely can't make good science simply by willing it, especially if their whole defense R&D efforts were crippled due to sanctions in the last 40 years.
Obviously a response to the DDG redesign.
I have mentioned EDSLs in my comment... and yes they can be found everywhere. Lispers are well known for creating DSLs because of their macro system.
The bound volumes are the authoritative reference in case of discrepancies between the digital and bound versions, but digital versions are available in PDF form: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/boundvolumes.aspx.
Clearly this is the start of a boil-the-frog campaign that will see the "l" drop out of the logo completely as the "g" slides over to take its place. It'll happen so gradually over the course of the next eight months that most users won't even notice.
I know! I can't even find the g and l anymore unless I move my eyes slightly down and to the left, how is this intuitive??
Sam Spurlin wrote an interesting article that really resonated with me, and this article reminded me of it. In particular this bit:

> I think there is an underlying metaphor that we can examine between values and passion. I'm not sure I can go a day without hearing or reading the advice about "finding a passion." I used to be a purveyor of this piece of advice as well. Until I figured out it's basically pointless. The belief that everybody has a particular passion waiting for them somewhere in the world and it just needs to be uncovered like a treasure under a rock is not helpful. Therefore, the dominant activity when trying to uncover or find this passion seems to be flitting from activity to activity, from rock to rock, looking for that elusive passion that will fix all your ills. There's a driving force that if you don't like your situation then you just haven't found your passion yet. I've since decided that this line of thinking is mostly fallacious and that "finding" is the wrong verb to use when describing passion. Instead, we should talk about "developing" passion. The focus is on action and practice. I feel the same way about values. The traditional way of thinking about value places little emphasis on actual action, just like the quest for finding a specific passion. Values shouldn't be discovered but developed over time, like passion. Both of these constructs need a radical overhaul.

It's worth a read: http://samspurlin.com/blog/2012/2/12/values-dont-make-your-l...
Go get a degree: md, jd, MBA.
200k should be enough to take you through school
Buy bitcoin with the rest.
Almost every new vehicle floats arount as a concept, but at the same time almost every concept that floats around the major shows never makes to an actual production vehicle - because even if the people like it, they often are too impractical to make or too expensive for their target market&competition.
That's quite a tortured hypothetical you developed there. In that case, take it to a court and have judge rule on it. Laws are sledgehammers, not scalpels - there's no law that can justly account for outliers without some human oversight, letalone extreme outliers that have likely never happened in the history of humankind.
Absolutely disagree.

I personally learned (as I think many people did) by copying code out of books. Whenever something went wrong, I had to figure out whether it was my typo or the book's typo or my conceptual error or the book's conceptual error. That process helped me to learn a lot, and quickly. If everything went perfect, I got to play some creative game which I loved and gave me a sense of acheivement that helped me to progress.

I no longer do this, because it's not relevant to me at this stage of my learning, but I view that as an important part of my early learning process. If you reflect on your own early learning process, I would be extremely surprised if you didn't copy and paste code. Frankly, you are surely still dependent on other people's code now, you just might call it a 'library' instead.

I agree if you're saying professional developers should avoid copy-paste (there are also legal consequences), but new learners can make great progress by using copy-paste. I would say it's an essential part of studying what other people have done.
My Favorite Teacher (2000)
How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise
>>I would only have a vague idea of how to do a integer => string conversion with base N without googling it. So am I shit?

If you receive a programming task like the above (with a relatively clear specification, very little state to manage, defined domain of the desired function, and the input and output of the function are most likely primitives in your language, your standart library probably have lots of utility functions to work with these primitives), I will expect, that you should be able to do it without googling.

Your solution may not be the most effective/short/clean, but it should work. If you can not do it without googling, well ... yes, I do think you are a shitty (or just out of shape for the moment) programmer.

You will need more programming exercise, in order to know more algorithms and aproaches to solving problems, and/or learn better your language and its standart library.
The banking industry is in the midst of structural change in its operating model
According to the video [1], the MSP430 supports lychees, kiwi, papaya, mango, asian pears, lemons, and strawberries, and a quick Google search does not show anyone getting it to work with a potato. There's nothing stopping you from trying, of course, but these are all fruits and the firmware is not open source, so you may have difficulty getting it to recognize a potato.

[1] Exact link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db6TWl5FSGw&t=38s
Today's reason why Bitbucket is inferior to GitHub
It is actually quite bulky for a wlan capable linux computer, but the smaller ones like http://hackaday.com/2013/08/12/hacking-transcend-wifi-sd-car... don't give you acces to any gpio pins.
I Broke My Phone’s Screen, and It Was Awesome
To be fair, I doubt whoever did this has "pixel adjuster" as their primary job description. Although maybe for some reason it's a highly complex and non-trivial affair at Google.
Thank you for writing this. I'm upvoting the story in hopes that more people read this comment :)
The beauty of Research and what is hindering it
LoopBack, a new Node.js framework by StrongLoop
I would never describe either finding new problems or people telling me what I could do better as frustrating! They are both some of my favourite things to experience!
Worked terribly in Safari on iPhone 4s. No excuse for that at this late day.
What about the 1959 TMRC Dictionary? [1]

> HACKER: one who hacks, or makes them.
> A hacker avoids the standard solution. The hack is
> the basic concept; the hacker is defined in terms of it.

(edit: The article claims that the 1963 usage was the "first", however on reading the linked listserv.linguist.org posting by Fred Shapiro, it appears that it's the first citation that uses "hacker" with negative connotations.)

[1] http://www.gricer.com/tmrc/dictionary1959.html
[2] http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0306B&L=ad...
Life is just parody of itself these days.

Edit: And yes, Yahoo did something similar:

It turns out Mayer herself played a pivotal role, working with Yahoo's design team (and an intern) to design the new logo over the course of a single weekend. "I’m not a pro, but I know enough to be dangerous," Mayer says of her Adobe Illustrator know-how. "We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Yahoo — whimsical, yet sophisticated," she writes. "Modern and fresh, with a nod to our history."

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/5/4696274/yahoo-reveals-its-n...
Pretty similar to other endeavours previously discussed here (like ASETNIOP)
I spent a decade in Albania, starting right after the fall of communism in 1991, and it is (or at least was) true there as well.

People would just throw their trash out of the window of their apartment building, because why not? Never mind that this created a terrible smell and there would be trash right where people walked.

They meticulously cleaned the tiny bits of concrete road in front of their house, but not care about the very dangerous open pothole that would be hidden in a puddle after a little bit of rain. In fact, someone probably took the pothole because it was somehow useful to them.

From what I remember, this changed over time, and people became more aware of the fact that the public space was also their space.

In a way, it's a bit like doing chores because your authoritarian, cold parents force you to. You'll do the minimum, and never do it because you feel it's a good thing to do.

Maybe it's not so much that people don't want to work for the common good, but rather that forcing them too just doesn't work.

Either way, great blog post and it reminded me of my own experiences!
Why are people saying [2008] when the copyright says 2003, and the last revision was in September 2003?
As well as adding my own strong recommedatios for Egan's "Permutation City" and "Diaspora" I would also recommend "Quarantine" - which has a rather splendid idea for mobile apps - "neural mods" that actually augment the brains own congnitive capabilities (including augmenting sensory data for the ultimate in VR).

And there is what one group chooses to do with a very special neural mod...
"Our brains were structured for 5 digits." I would think, if that was the case, we would first optimize our alphabet for 25/20/15/10/5 characters. Then this would be ideal.
Rather than just the single data point of "current oil reserves", you need to take the 1st derivative, and look at the rate of change in current oil reserves over time.

It gives a dramatically different picture.
> the percentage of parts that are actually interchangeable keeps going down further and further

It's sad to see so much people at every scale and in every field buy on OSFA / WORA when it's been empirically demonstrated so many times that it just doesn't work. This is why I'm sad to see the A10 decommissioned: it's a testament to Unix'y "do one thing and do it well, and possibly be so awesome that it may cover a few more unexpected bases along the way".
One of the hallmarks of bad science is overly grand claims paired with aggressive marketing. Bad times are coming for AI again.
From a comment on the article:

"Great article, but with slight historical revisionism: Tekes was established in 1983 and Finnvera was created in 1999, when Nokia was still on its way up. The roots of Finland's national innovation system go back to 1960 and 1970s. Even Nokia's original success is partly attributed to this system. It is incorrect to portray its creation as a response to Nokia's recent troubles."

In other words, it takes sustained long term effort and thinking to promote innovation.
> I'm actually a little shocked HNers think regularly coping and pasting code snippets off the web is ok

I'm not surprised.

Ever observe threads about software engineering? They're profoundly anti-intellectual. HN is not the place to get any sort of engineering advice, I'm afraid. It's tailored towards self-promotion via programming. The difference may seem small, but the motives are quite different: mastery (as a developer) vs getting it done.
This is the very reason why I still hitchhike and love couchsurfing-style initiatives, potluck dinners, and such, and why I encourage younger people to give these things a shot.

It opens you up to so many unique, wonderful (and occasionally scary) situations, and has a way of 'shaking loose' the structures that one inevitably builds up over time.

In fact, I caught myself hitchhiking sometimes just because of how much the people who picked me up seemed to enjoy or need it. I've had people give me their life story, or share something deeply personal that they really wanted to share, or simply enjoy my 'youthful' presence on a long, boring drive. Part of what makes it amazing is that there are so few pre-suppositions in the whole thing. You are likely to never meet the person who just shared his woes again, and sometimes that's exactly why they let themselves talk. But it's also possible that this one connection is the start of a wonderful, lifelong friendship.

I met one of my current best friends through CouchSurfing on the other side of the globe. It was quite likely that we'd never meet again, but instead we ended up spending a few years in the same city, even working together.

(plus, these kinds of thing have way of restoring one's faith in humanity. They're a great counter to the insulating processes that are especially present in Western-European society)
Do note that there can be a difference between copying code from a book (where you have to read each bit of the code and write it down) and simply hitting ctrl-c ctrl-v, in terms of what you learn.
Wow, dude, chill out ... in my opinion, wting did not write anything, that gives you reason to accuse him, that he is an elitist.
He simply pointed out, that you are limiting yourself with the kind of believe, that there is no need to know how to solve simple problems on your own, and give you examples of things that he was able to do, because he did not limit himself in such a way ...
Exactly, writing down the steps should be the first step in automating a process. The order I do the steps are:

1. Write down the directions to do the task
2. Have someone else follow your directions. Any time you need to interrupt them because you missed something add a note or additional step
3. See if any part (or the whole thing) is worth automating
HN is a bit of an echo chamber, unfortunately. Masters don't really tout themselves as that, nor do they self-promote everything they do.

On the other hand, there's plenty of jr. devs who blog about the 'amazing' gains of productivity from switching to Vim...
If they need a diamond they aren't worth your time.
A number of my good friendships would not have existed without Facebook to bridge the gap that a traveling lifestyle created between our initial contact and our later co-existence.

Could we have simply sent letters, or emails? Yes, but we probably wouldn't have done this. Does this benefit offset the negative impact of sites like Facebook? I don't know, and I think it's too early to tell.

But to say these sites are not useful is a bit too extreme a statement, in my opinion. I know many people who happily use social sites just to augment their social lives...
Monty Brewster against SELECT form field bad practices
Working on The Witness, Part 2: Finding and fixing a five-second stall
Is Google going to completely ditch the Navigation Drawer menu on Android?
Wikipedia: We’ve won. Now what?
Oh noes, they're going to steal all of the Kangaroos!!
If she suffers from this affliction, you could offer to donate the money to a well-researched charity as it would do more good there than as a status symbol on her finger. Her response may be illuminating.
Yea, actually I believe this is not true at all.

I learned in an intro to cognitive psychology class that it seems that our brain is wired to recognize sets of 1, 2, and 3 things directly, but that after that we construct the numbers. For instance when we see 5 things it is actually 3+2 that we see. The experiment was based on response time + accurateness when showing people sets of geometrical shapes for very short periods of time, sometimes using the same shape for all elements, sometimes random shapes, and sometimes groups of similar shapes. I don't recall the precise reference though, maybe someone else knows it?

To get back to the keyboard, I would like to see a demo video of someone actually typing something with it. The current video doesn't give any sense of what it is like to use this keyboard, and doesn't make me want to try it at all.
From the linked article "It contains 32MB SDRAM" which would have been pretty awesome in 1994 or so. In other words you could do what I did with linux in '94, which was quite a bit.

Unfortunately given what I do with linux in '14 I checked and per ps on one box and the VSZ of /usr/sbin/sshd is 43792K aka about 44 megs, so you'd be about 12 megs into the swap just to log in. Not that vanilla sshd is the lightest memory process out there.

Of course people did run Beowulf clusters before 2014, you'll have to run some 90s era software given 90s era specs.
Does Linux run on PIC?
As far as I know they do not. Your best option is to contact them: sales@fastmail.fm
How it's made: Online Games
There should be one more step:

6. Make changes to it so that it does the same thing, but in a better way -- faster, smaller/more concise, etc.

I think that being able to do this (correctly) is to truly understand, since then you are "thinking beyond the code" and can see the problem that it solves, not just an implementation that solves it.
If you think that fetchmail is the best program ever written and DK's knowledge and intellect is at the same level as ESR then you deserve this book.
AIXI-mc can also learn everything about anything. And you can download the source code online[1].

1. http://jveness.info/software/default.html
It will be connected to a telco network, right? That's how it knows in what country it is. In Europe it is quite common to cross countries borders and as soon as you get connected to your neighbours telco you get a text welcoming you to the country.
I don't think using Python is significantly more ridiculous than the current practice of either using shell scripts or your own C code to parse form-data and generate HTML. In fact, it's probably a lot less ridiculous.
Some people are paid very well to correct typos, or move text and pictures on a page. You can say it's a bullshit job, or recognize it's a different matter when you're working day in day out on newspapers printing at lots of thousands a day for instance.