skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a degreeless, high school drop out who works for a very large corporation that's not the case. In a time where many are screaming about shortages in skilled IT people, mandating a degree is only going to narrow the already small pool of possible candidates down even further for no explicable gain. Many job advertisements I've seen will say "degree or relative experience", the latter being the key part here.
Foam swords, electronic scoring (54% backed after day one)
These are like laser tag but with swords. Already 54% backed in less than 24 hours.
> Once upon a time, there was this thing called the Model View Controller architecture. It was a product of the Smalltalk community, but then so were Design Patterns and Extreme Programming.

This is obviously trolling.
I really don't understand. Why resign, but rather fix the issues within.
I feel for him - he seems to suffering both mentally and physically. But I have a hard time believing he hasn't legally had to file his taxes for the past 10 years. At the very least, if he really has only had $1k in income (which isn't credible - he's showing $700 of income on that bank statement alone) he would have gotten a few hundo from the EITC - which when you only make $1k is a big deal.
And admitting you didn't file for 10 years isn't going to help him going forward either.
Hate to see someone in pain - but this really looks self-inflicted.
From the python mailing list:

Xah Lee wrote:

> What does a programer who wants to use regex gets out from this piece of motherfking irrevalent drivel?

> Any resume that ever crosses my desk that includes 'Xah Lee' anywhere in the name will be automatically trashed.

-rbt at athop1.ath.vt.edu
The part that makes this different from healthcare options, is that there are usually no or few options. I know where I live I have the choice of timewarner or fios. That's it. If they decide they are slowing down the sites I use, I'm SOL.

I see a future where we are given a list of "premium" supported sites before making ISP decisions. I wonder if well end up with another dimension of price tier where one dimension is speed of service and the other is what major sites support it.
S. Korea unveils first domestically-developed urban maglev train
If you look at Xah's website with the eyes of business owner it could be a problem that that it handles a lot of exotic stuff, that is almost never a subject in a small to medium IT companies, but is written and fostered with great passion and care.

So there might be concerns if he would fit in to company with all its mundane day to day problems.

I think I would be helpful if he could do an internship or some sort of a program, where he can prove his capabilities to do
- "boring" stuff
- follow orders of his boss
- working teams

Once this is approved, he might had better chances.
Yes, those facts among others. If anything these facts imply he "wouldn't have needed" his patents, in order to get funded and build the thing.
Without that never-ending dialog in our heads, we're not really sentient

Stealing from Feynman here (edit, or more accurately his childhood friend Bennie), but most conscious thought is not verbal:

"Thinking is nothing but talking to yourself," said Feynman. "Oh yeah?" said Bennie. "Do you know the crazy shape of a crankshaft in a car? How did you describe it when you were talking to yourself?" http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1079.htm

I don't think that complex language is required for conscious thought, we can reason without language. Complex language is however required for storytelling and storytelling is required to transmit technologies without physically demonstrating them, hence it is required for technological development to spread beyond the limits of "monkey see, monkey do".
I have the same problem with my gaming PC. When I boot it up, I have numerous updates for Windows, Steam, games, etc.
This is probably the only physical book I've purchased in the past several years and felt was a good investment, because of the lack of a decent e-book version. I haven't actually worked my way all the way through it yet; I had started about a year ago, made it about a third of the way through before getting distracted, and now I'm starting it again because it really is the kind of book that you have to build up piece by piece as a reader. I feel like my Web-browsing-Stack-Overflowing approach to reading over the past several years has hurt me and I hope working through GEB can help me get more experience in really working with a text deeply.

I've also found it helpful to consult the MIT OCW video lectures on this book: http://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/humanities-and-social-science...
Started reading this book in mid-February and I'm about halfway through today. Fantastic thinking, and still relevant despite its publication date.
He's got his PayPal email address listed first thing under How to Help.
Also Jon Harrop. There is no doubt he is trolling, but also no doubt he is a very accomplished programmer. (He may disagree he is trolling, but if audience thinks you are trolling, you are.)
No, a fork that responds to motion is not a highly regulated device.
Yes, this is a good strategy. We are even guaranteed to be able to re-acquire the log if we send the reacquire request in time, and there are no new partitions, because in order to reacquire the lock it is possible to send a script that checks if the value matches, and if so, we can extend the expire of the keys. Basically it is possible for the lock holder to reacquire by extending the duration of the previous lock before it expires.
I don't think you can simplify things that far. Shared-nothing is certainly a good architectural goal, and there are many types of distributed systems where it is both highly desirable and achievable. On the other hand, there are many distributed systems (and parallel systems) where coordination is strictly necessary.

Think about implementing something like the TPC-C load on a distributed database. Many parts of that load can be done sharded, with a shared-nothing model. Other parts need some level of coordination, and some need true serializability (which requires significant coordination). The pieces that can be built on shared-nothing primitives should be built on shared-nothing primitives. However, it's not useful to pretend that the pieces that require coordination simply don't exist.

Similarly, immutability is a good goal. An append-only log of immutable data items is often a very good mental model, and frequently a good implementation model, for distributed databases. It isn't universally applicable, though, and may put constraints on the possible supportable operations that add complexity to other parts of the system.
I upvoted you, but I disagree with you.

The Web is built on a system of hacks, but those hacks are usually temporary and we can ultimately ignore most of them eventually. I was writing JavaScript back in '98, it is much easier now (and we have CoffeeScript to make it even easier!). Browser incompatibilities are slowly going away (and we have jQuery to make it even easier!). Things that used to be hard, like organizing an application to take keyboard input and respond to property changes, are now easy with things like Ember (and soon EmberUI will be out of alpha, and common things like searchable selects, buttons, date pickers, etc., will be easier) and other JS frameworks.

I would reword it to "Good Enough For Now", because things do get fixed after the cool kids have kinda hacked around it for a while.
Do not own an ouya, but I have been very pleasantly surprised by both performance of the device and quality of the games on my FireTV. Expect great things going forward.
> Nope, I've carefully looked at MIT's history of grade inflation (the info is online)

Citation? Every source I can find shows that a) they haven't released average GPAs since 2000 and b) from 1950-2000 they inflated grades at or above the average national rate.
Thats what I meant, sorry if the wording was poor.
...que? Elaborate how the majority of the world's press and a fair substantial amount of financial analysts and traders predicting an item is post-rationalizing?

Do you even know what it means?

Post-Rational Purhcasing otherwise known as Buyer's Stockholm Syndrome, is a cognitive bias whereby someone who has purchased an expensive product or service overlooks any faults or defects in order to justify their purchase.

I am not rationalizing anything. I bet with a number of other shorters (estimates were around 30% of the trades were shorts) and I lost.

You need to check your bias at the door I think.
He made a lot of people mad on the internet, enough that nobody is willing to hire him.
I just believe in data and not articles, here is something to check.
http://ibn.gramener.com/live?Muslim=40%25%2B&Muslim=20-40%25
I anything this story tells is how much hacker need to adapt to business as usual. So much for the power to change.
Asymmetrical Symmetry: A brief meditation on the Go aesthetic
The engine for Git push in Azure and for your own server
DNA from skull links Ice Age girl to Native Americans alive today
for example, the right to audit their premises at our convenience and their expense without giving notice.

There is a legit requirement for us to be able to audit, but placing the other conditions on it makes it, at the very least, unreasonable but the "without notice" bit means that if they agree to it we have can disrupt their business at our leisure (since an audit requires their resources to conduct too).

another example is requesting infeasible levels of application logging, insane retention periods, and onerous evidence that they're acting on that information.
Nothing beyond the mainstream, plus I lost. I am not the best place to ask for advice ;-)

Saying that - I didn't sink any money into Mt. Gox so not all bad.
You're confusing copyright with trademarks. Trademarks must be defended if you want to keep them (this is logical: if other people are using them, they are no longer a mark of your trade). That doesn't apply to copyright; it's an entirely automatic process.
That it doesn't bother him is not the problem; that it may bother his potential employers is.

When looking at his site from the point of view of someone who could be interested in hiring him, it certainly leaves a strong impression - but unfortunately, not a positive one.
Nothing you have stated there is untrue.
MOOC Video Production Tips...From 1944
So your post kind of resonates with me, but if I were to boil it down I think your point is "Smart people frequently do dumb things, but that doesn't mean they're not smart". Agreed!

I just think a lot of what we call social skills really comes down to, frankly, giving a shit about the person in front of you.

For exceptionally smart people sometimes this is hard.

Interacting with average people can be mind numbing. I mean the average person is.. well, average. But I think 90% of social skills is finding a way to be interested in the people around you. Finding what's interesting about them. As annoying as the phrase is, I think "if you're bored than you're boring" is pretty much true.

Charismatic people don't have some fundamental gift, for the most part, charismatic people are charismatic because they seem to find a way to be interested in all the people around them. Or at least they can fake it.

Sometimes I think about 18 year old me versus 28 year old me. 18 year old me was undeniably smart, but shy and awkward. 28 year old me is (reasonably) socially skilled. The only particular difference between the two is 18 year old me only really wanted to talk about myself, or things I liked. 18 year old me was a total fucking narcissist. 28 year old me tries to figure out what other people are about, and engage them on their terms. It sounds small, but actually caring about other people is a thing some people have to learn, and it makes most social situations about 200% more interesting.
After you're done reading GEB, I highly recommend moving on to the rarely mentioned "The Mind's I", Hofstadter and Dennett's 1981 collection of essays and stories about self/mind by themselves, Alan Turing, Richard Dawkins, Stanislaw Lem, and others:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind's_I
Is Video Eating The World?
The classic "Leases: an efficient fault-tolerant mechanism for distributed file cache consistency" (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=74870) dating back to 1989 is a good read about these kinds of systems. It makes some interesting observations about the approach, and introduces the need for bounded drift.

I think antirez is saying "skew" here when "drift" would be more appropriate. The safety property appears to refer to the different in rates between clocks, rather than the difference in absolute values. That's a much more reasonable assumption, and is likely to be true even with very bad clock hardware over short periods of time.

Obviously the bounded drift assumption,
If anyone is interested, i just added the MS alternative (it's the engine for Azure, but it's opensource and you can use it yourselve)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7755914
MVC in Web frameworks won by being watered down to almost nothing, repackaged, and sold in a manner that appealed to non/novice/intermediate devs. They were told that if they put their code in these tightly-coupled boxes, then they wouldn't have to worry about all those hard things like design or coupling. Instead, development could almost be a process of coloring by number so that anybody could do it. And they were told it was good design because it was MVC, which is an acronym that smart people talked about long ago, so it must be good. And they were told they were being saved from those other developers who have the gall to do things differently!

I cannot overstate the appeal of a prescribed architecture. This removes some of the essential anxiety a newer developer has when building things by narrowing the available choices. Rather than fret about where to put things, and how much objects should do, they have two neat categories to choose from. The problem is a novice/intermediate dev often knows they should be thinking about the design, but they don't know where to put things, so they waffle about things rather than just putting it somewhere and trusting themselves to fix it when they're wrong.

Combine a prescribed architecture with a relentless marketing campaign that repeatedly tells developers exactly what they want to hear: "blog in 15 minutes!", "design is wankery, just use the framework!", "testing just isn't worth it, it's too hard".

This is anti-intellectualism. It advocates ignoring software engineering principles established over the past few decades, and ignoring design feedback in the name of pragmatism.

Don't entrust your skills to a crappy framework. It will fade, much like the Web.
Hybrid toys: A new era of toys
I just spoke to Xah on the phone. He does want people to donate to his paypal address. He can transfer it to someone to cash it out if needed. He will be making further updates on his site, probably later today to be clear about that. He will be looking into bitcoin also. So feel free to donate, I think at least his contributions to emacs documentation make it worthwhile.
Worse, actually. As I recall, it'd block access to the responsible IRC server until you rebooted the machine. But yes, kind of like that.
Twitter Launches New Mute Option; Facebook's Context Cards
Neither were the first of their kind that I (or millions of others) used.

I'd used both CP/M and Apple DOS before MSDOS - neither were exactly niche products back then. And Altavista was pretty well established as the best search engine before the Google upstart appeared.

As for social media, Myspace had 100 million users in 2006 and wasn't passed in popularity by Facebook until a couple of years later.

All of these things were entrants into well established markets which had (at the time) heavyweight incumbents. They've all become vastly more successful than those incumbents, but that's not because they were inventing or even popularising a concept. These weren't obscure concepts that these people took mainstream, and there have been/will be other hugely successful entrepreneurs in every single one of these areas at some point.
This guy doesn't deserve to have had Silicon Valley turn its collective back on him, and I definitely feel bad for what has happened to him, but I don't think his behavior can be attributed only to bipolar disorder or depression. I also don't see hypomanic grandiosity so much as defeat in his posturing, but that's just me.
Elon Musk: Gigafactory will take battery production 'to another level'
For those might get discouraged when struggling to read this book (of which I am one), don't forget that Hofstadter struggled quite a bit to write it.

So it's not just you.
GM Fined 0.02% of Annual Revenue for Ignition Switch Issues
Is having corporate experience really that much better though?

I mean, obviously working for someone for several years implies some level of competence, but your work is nearly always locked away and you can't show it off.

Ideally you'd want someone who does both; working for someone, which demonstrates the ability to work on a team, while also contributing to open source and making their own content, upon which you can grade their technical skills.

As someone who has worked in the corporate world since graduation, I feel I have little to show that is concrete. It's all hearsay.

I feel I'd be better off if I spent time developing myself outside of work hours so that I can have something visible to the world to be proud of, but frankly with a family to take care of it's a struggle to get the energy to do that. I'd like to have my cake and eat it too. It's a little depressing to me, honestly, but it is what it is.
> I'm not Indian and have no connection to the sub-continent.

I am, so allow me.

1. The RSS is not "violently anti-muslim", despite what you read on teh internets. They have a Muslim wing, so to speak: http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/the-saffron-muslim/...

2. If the "BJP has other policies, which are disturbing", please enlighten us. Just lobbing an attack and walking away doesn't do any good.

3. The US denies visas to all sorts of people; including people like Nelson Mandela. He (Modi) was investigated for the 2002 riots by Supreme Court of India, and given a clean chit.
Lesser severity of unintentional contact with a live conductor could be described as "shocked" (or "electroshocked" if there is potential ambiguity with the emotional state) or "electrotetanized", with the latter reserved for currents strong enough to cause complete muscle seizure (as occurs with a stun gun, for instance).

"Electrocution" is a portmanteau of "electrical execution", which not only implies that the person died, but that it was intentional and sanctioned. Lack of a better word has expanded usage to any death caused by electrical current.
Ah ok, so your primary concern is that the actual production environment should be separated from the build environment. Fair enough.

It's an orthogonal issue w.r.t whether the end user (i.e. the developer) should initiate a deploy by using "git push". Usually this is managed by some kind of CI server than then deploys the artifact. I understand that here the TFA was actually advocating to skip this step.

However, in both cases the size of the repository (which you called the index, which btw I'm not sure is the right name; the index in git is the place where you stage changes in preparation for a commit) could be an issue. My question was more like "did you ever encounter any problems due to the size of the git repository at the build server?"
Does querty not make a bit of sense again, with the advent of touchscreens? If it was designed to minimize key jams, then I would assume that it leads to less ambiguity in what words are being typed.

(And the Amiga was a far superior experience to a Mac. It had colour for starters. )
I'm afraid it's the latter. Cf the 30yo == old loser remark by Mark Z (now 30 himself) - http://www.fastcompany.com/3030612/most-creative-people/mark...
It's still the wrong approach to the problem.

Desktop app UIs were never this painful. Even Swing's.
Does Huffington Post have any quality content? Any time I go to them they seem like the Yahoo Answers of news.
To really compare the two is kind of revisionist in ways. BeOS didn't have a complete production grade network stack at the time (this was pre-BONE.) Or printing (and Apple made their bones on the same thing on the screen being in your printed copy.) Or Multiuser. Or internationalization.

There was a lot of stuff that had to be added to BeOS to make it Apple-class. Nevermind device support and nobody knows what the power foot print was like at the time.

It does seem like there is a space for it though, if it runs on ARM and has some touch, I could see a ton of Raspberry Pi type projects where something like BeOS/Haiku could be really compelling. Seems like it could conceivably be an interesting android like competitor.
I think, newsroom-culturally, the best thing this report illustrates is the complex relationships between the people working on journalism-as-content vs journalism-as-product. This has been a painful issue as print journalist refused to consider the legitimacy of re-examining their distribution product for years due to a belief that their work had inheret value regardless of its promotion, display, or distribution.

The report details specifically how the value of their content is being extracted by organizations with better products who beat them in all three areas.

This is a key point that needs to sink in at the nyt since they have avoided the iterative developement of new products due to an over reliance on inherit value of their content. I think if they simply hire the right talent in data, ux and machine learning they could begin to release a series of technologically exciting products which are powered by their exceptionally high quality content.
Two things to consider:

1) They claim they tested 100 algorithms over 2 years before they settled on one to bring to market. That's pretty much the definition of 'harder than it looks'.

2) This product requires sufficient cheap, powerful, and small accelerometers, processors, batteries, and sensors. All of which have really only come together in the last 4-5 years. Any engineer who made the connection in the 90s might have at most whipped together a prototype before doing the calculations and realizing that that it just wasn't viable.

Conceptually, it's simple. I've personally seen 2 senior year engineering student design projects that more or less do the same concept - do feedback control on the spoon. They even had -ok- looking prototype demos. You could look at their spoon vibrating less, and you could look at their metrics, and see their claims, but then you would really look at it, and think 'man, that 40% reduction in amplitude sure looks sweet, but does it actually do enough?'.

I can straight up tell you that nearly all 'simple' ideas become retarded complicated when they moosh up against a human being (or mother nature...), and 'complicated' ideas become even worse.
See also my previous thread on whether it's currently relevant (in summary, yes, it is, but with a few caveats): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7014299
> This sentence of yours strongly suggest that you think Xah Lee didn't prove he has the chops to earn being outspoken.

I didn't say nor did I suggest this. I'm simply saying that if you're going to walk into a room and act like Linus you'd better have a track record like Linus.

I didn't say Xah Lee does or doesn't, particularly since I noted above that I didn't know much about him. I'm simply pointing out that if that's your style, that's what you need to back it up.
That's just obnoxious and undermines Van Halen's meaningfully safety-oriented gesture.
Welcome to the 7-year technology pause: a theory of punctuated equilibrium in IT
Comment section, 4 months ago:

"If anything tells me HN has gone down the pan, it's that this post didn't take off there. This is gold!"