skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is because I belong to that tiny group of developers who do care about programming languages that I even mention it. But I care a lot more about software in general, and if you look at the industry at large, absolutely no one (for all intents and purposes) cares about any language other than Java, C, C++, JavaScript and C# (plus some Matlab and maybe R, I guess). So I do have some strong opinions, but I put them in perspective. Until IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and a couple of large defense contractors -- all the true big players in software -- put their weight behind one or two "new" languages, all arguments over PL merits are kind of moot. Frankly, I don't blame the big guys for not switching languages just yet. None of the challenger languages have shown such incredible advantages -- in correctness, performance or time to market -- to justify such a costly switch (certainly no world-changing benefits as C and Java offered). In fact, some technical leads in prominent SV companies have told me that their main reason for picking a non-mainstream language wasn't technical: it was to appease their novelty seeking developers. I think there are two languages that might make a real difference -- Clojure and Haskell -- and they are, unfortunately, still far from conclusively proving their case. If Rust makes it to the embedded space, it could prove a real contender, too. In general, most new languages overpromise and underdeliver.
You forgot Clojure

Luke - Java ;
Qui-Gon Jinn - C++
;
Obi-Wan Kenobi - Perl
;
Ki-Adi Mundi - Assembly
;
Mace-Windu - C
;
Count Duku - D
;
Anakin Skywalker - Python
;
Aayala Secura - Haskell
;
Darth Maul - Ocaml
;
Darth Vader - TypeScript
;
The Emperor - C#
;

And while we're codifying Star Wars:
Imperial Trooper - Microsoft Word
Rebel Soldier - MarkDown
Han Solo - Counter Strike
Leia - Matlab (maybe)
Boba/Jango Fett (both of them) - Metasploit
Chewbacca - Worms
C3P0 - Siri
R2D2 - info
Massive discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186730

Recent submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7992179 : 56 minutes ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7992043 : An hour ago

Older submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199220

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6189570
Zookeeper? Not in the same category as MongoDB, of course.
The "surveillance state looking for pressure cooker searches" ended up being complete paranoia and shoddy journalism. Yes, a New York man was visited by the police and questioned by local police regarding his Google searches for "pressure cookers" and "backpacks". It turned out that it was not an Orwellian surveillance state that tracked him down, but rather that the local police were following up when his employer viewed its own network logs, became suspicious and alerted the authorities.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/08/02/michele_ca...
I have to look myself, it's not really what I spend most of my time in, but I heard a talk by Gottfried Schlaug from BIDMC in Boston and he made a few comments, may be useful to pubmed him and see if he's written any reviews or editorials.

tDCS is still an emerging tech, and I think not a lot of people have figured out how to do it. Transcranial magnetic stim has been around a lot longer. I don't think people really know the best way to do that either, but there's more experimental data showing that if you do it via certain methods/paradigms, you get a measurable experimental effect of some sort (usually a muscle jerk measured in the arm, or maybe performance on some standardized cognitive/motor skills test, etc).

The problem is that no one is exactly sure what it does. Most groups do not have an IRB to study this in tissue - getting animal IACUC approval is hard, and in humans, without a good medical reason to go through the cranium, forget about it... (i.e. most of the neurophysiology data we know today, aside from in animals, is from opportunities to record data in surgeries for epilepsy or DBS surgery of Parkinson's disease).

So for lack of a better term, the holy mantra of "neuroplasticity" is involved for a hand-wavy explanation of effect...
According to wrapBootstrap, you also need an extended license for SaaS.

"This license must be purchased if you intend to license, sublicense, redistribute, or resell the final product."

We intentionally made our licenses on par with other marketplaces so there's no confusion for the buyer or the seller.
As an aside the GWB quote was in reference to nation states.
I would be surprised if they actually use 55 mph as the cutoff, I would think they look at driving behavior rather than the legal limits, and the effective max speed in many areas is 60 or 65 mph.

It's also the case that states with a lot of rural roads have speed limits, on undivided highways, higher than 55 mph (Wikipedia seems to be fairly comprehensive on this topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_Stat... ).
A 10x10 micron image of Lionel Messi
Really that should be

TAILS_terms=(word('tails')
and word('linux' or ' USB ' or ' CD'
or 'secure desktop' or ' IRC '
or 'truecrypt' or ' tor '))
or word('Amnesiac Incognito Live System');

because (1) you need to disambiguate the common word 'tails' but surely not the specific name 'Amnesiac Incognito Live System', and (2) you don't want to miss [tails CDROM].

See how important code review is?
Does this have anything to do with thinking, or just the idea that most people are unhappy and want distraction? Is that a surprise given how much of society is devoted to creating distraction?
You probably should be looking for a job rather than attempting to go through Odesk. The problem with making a living on anything but a W2 is that the level of difficulty goes way up. I imagine living in poverty while attempting to run a business is quite common, there is even a term for being modestly profitable - ramen profitable.

Most people in your same position probably don't want to do that. You need someone who can take care of the "running a business" parts. Maybe that isn't so easy these days though, I don't know.

You could do a search for posts by Patio11. He might even pop in as mentioning Odesk is the magical word to summon him. His posts are gold but they assume that you are actually into running a business.

It's hard for me to weigh in on your social issues as I don't have the same problem. You generally get better with practice though. Are there meetups that you can go to? Are there support groups for people who have the same sorts of issues? Maybe you could start out with social events for people who share your traits and then branch out from there.

ETA: I think most important is to be talking to people who share your condition. People who have been able to deal with it. Running a freelance / consulting business is hard enough. It's even more difficult when you add a condition like yours. The market right now (and possibly more so when you first got started) is such that its pretty easy to get development gigs, especially for those willing to work for cheap. That may not last forever though.
When they stop paying you. Seriously, don't waste your time hoping for the best.

*Worked for two startups that couldn't make payroll. CEOs promised money was around the corner so I kept working. The money never came.
Rakudo Perl 6 on the JVM [pdf]
O(m*n) is not the same as O(n^2).
>“It seems that the average person doesn’t seem to be capable of generating a sufficiently interesting train of thought to prevent them from being miserable with themselves.”

Aside from being unnecessarily harsh and condescending, I think this comment is off-base and makes unwarranted assumptions about the nature of boredom.
And this is why I make software :)
The axiom of choice is very interesting. It’s independent of the other (more intuitive axioms), so you can do math with it and with it’s negation. It’s useful to prove some “intuitive” results and some “paradox”, so it’s polemic.

The canonical “paradox” is the Banach–Tarski paradox, but it’s a very strange result and it can be “ignored” as a weird corner case.

I didn’t know this “paradox”. This “paradox” looks more innocent. It’s easy to explain. Most of the steps are easy and intuitive. I have to read this five times to be sure that this has no obvious error, and I’m a mathematician.

This is not a ground braking result that will change math forever, it’s just another example of the polemic state of the axiom of choice. But the article is interesting and I’ll remember this example because it can be useful to discuss the topic with the students.
Interesting that this should appear just as I was looking for a way to generate ARM assembly (small Cortex-M chips) using a Lisp variant. This isn't quite it, but it looks very interesting and is a step in the right direction.
I think we have reached to point where we should admit that a career in software development needs much more learning than what can possibly be achieved at school (regardless of level).

The current state of affairs holds the belief that no CS graduate worth their salt should be ignorant of software engineering methodologies (agile, waterfall, etc), nor specific development processes & tools (source control, peer reviews, unit testing, etc). At the same time it holds the more or less contradictory belief that CS curriculum should be concerned mostly with Computer Science and not mention much of the practical side of software development.

The ideal is that a good program will present the student with multiple opportunities to pick up practical skills on the go. No formal class and no grades, but exposure through lab work. The reality is that this requires everyone involved (students, instructors and various other support roles) to work longer and harder to achieve this tacit expectations.
Show HN: Grapevine, a flow gossip implementation in node.js
Were you a cofounder, though? Sounds like you were an employee.
Cassandra, Zookeeper and Kafka didn't shit the bed.
Always follow lockout tagout procedures! Always!
you could euphemistically call that "electroconvulsive therapy". people bill medicare for that, you know...
C# obviously... do I win anything?
I don't think this is a worthless or uninteresting article - but I think the author is missing the point.

WE are the dragons. Us. Human beings. We're the evolutionary exception, the ultimate apex predator, and so on.
I almost quit my startup too soon.

In February 2009, I quit my job to go full time on my startup in anticipation of closing an angel round. The next week, the financing fell through.

For the next six months, I was teetering on the edge of ramen profitable - with very little ramen and very little revenue growth. I seriously considered quitting, and in retrospect, there was really no compelling evidence indicating that I shouldn't quit.

Today, my company is doing quite well - we are 100% bootstrapped, profitable, high seven figures of revenue, 34 employees, and good continued growth prospects.

Looking back on 2009, I still feel like I should have quit at that point; I got lucky by sticking it out. I got lucky because I found it easier to muster the courage to keep trying than muster the courage to walk away.

I almost quit too soon, and every day I feel incredibly lucky that I didn't.
Slow for me too, it looks like the downloads are linked to another site not served through CloudFront. If they were uploaded to the wiki the downloads should be faster.
You need to find a key channel. By this I mean, 1 reliable mechanism that gets people into your funnel. Examples might be...

- A podcast or blog or email list that talks about your product and your progress on it. ex: Startups for the Rest of Us and Drip app
- a really good viral hook built into the product
- Facebook ad strategy (probably not good for devops product)
- a webinar strategy. (i.e. do a free monthly webinar on DevOps and have calls to action at the end)

Your key channel needs to be able to feed the funnel and end up with enough conversions to get you some compound growth going.

Whether you do it, or someone helps you, doesn't matter. You still need to find that key channel.

I would probably recommend trying a personal blog/podcast + occasional webinars. you might even find a cofounder once you get this going.

The other thing I recommend is what I call "The 2 person test". Find 2 people in your target market, show them the landing page. If at least 1 of them doesn't go "I need that!" then you probably need to work on product/market fit.

good luck!
I have used a portfolio type website since 2003 for my work and experimented with dozens of designs and several SEO setups/ configurations. In 10 years of business I see about 5 jobs a year come in on average as a result of the website. My biggest jobs in fact were from clients who found me in a search. All in all I would say that over the span of time keeping my site updated (code-wise and content-wise) and SEO "conscious" has been very much worth the effort. Especially comsidering that I have yet to use social media tools as a means to attract potential clientele. I should state here that I am established freelance photographer who relies heavily on direct introductions and occasional bouts of cold calling and knocking on doors of potentials with my portfolio in hand. If I relied solely on the website to grow my client base I would have been out of business long ago.
With ircv3 the actual limit is 1024 characters, but it is has to be enabled with the capabilities negotiation extension.
Though it's 512 characters for tags, and 512 for the message.
I'd put it slightly differently: Any theorem that required the axiom of choice for proof has no relevance for physical reality.
You are assuming - big assumption - that the product is not the problem, but a 100% churn rate for 50-60 users makes me suspicious about the product itself.

Then, right off the bat, you have started blaming your co-founder for a failed product launch. This is no good.

Submit a "Show HN:" post with your product, let´s see what you have got and let´s see how HN community can help.
Escriba: Online text editor
Show HN: Transient recovery for locked Nexus devices, mitigates physical attacks
Why is this posted on HN? Political rants should go to FOX news or CNN or something. Not to mention, the article is almost entirely without actual substance. Dope is a very fitting word for it.
I've regretted leaving a startup at the time I did. I was miserable, but probably could've stuck in there for 10 months if I'd seen the liquidity event that was coming.

In my experience, most early founders don't quit because they're discouraged by lack of traction. That's why advisors and investors quit.

Founders quit because of a difference of opinion around product vision and because relationships are just plain broken. One of my colleagues put it this way, "If you look at the people around you and feel sad because you're helping people you hate (who you used to like) win, that's when you need to quit."
Training cost. It is that simple. Same reason a lot (not all) companies are 'downgrading' PCs with Windows 8 back to Windows 7.

Have you ever pushed a major application re-design out to 'normal' users?

Disclaimer: personally, I quite like Gnome Shell running on top of the Gnome 3 libraries and gdm3.
> I find this solution deeply troubling to the intuitive correctness of the axiom of choice.

There are so many unintuitive things about infinite sets that it's strange that it is the only the axiom of choice that the author finds unintuitive in this scenario. In order to use this "unintuitively" successful strategy, each prisoner has to memorize an uncountable[1] set of (countably) infinite sequences.

[1]: The set of all infinite binary sequences is uncountable, but the size of each equivalence class is only countable because the set of all finite binary sequences is countable. Hence there are an uncountable number of equivalence classes.
All trusting trust posts made in the past 9 years should also link to David A. Wheeler's Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling - http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/dissertation/html/whe... (or the poster will be condemned as lazy :-)
And this has to do with computers and technology how?
I love to be surprised like that in interviews, let me tell you. Makes my decision much easier.
Notice that I said, "Miranda was detained under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act", this statement does not contradict your statement.

I am not a lawyer and I am in no way familiar with UK law, but my reading of the law is given below:

tdlr; Section 7 applies people that the officer wishes to determine are terrorists defined in Section 40(1)(b)[1]. It does not require evidence, but the purpose is to determine if the person is, in fact, a terrorist.

[1]: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/40

Section 7 states: "For the purpose of satisfying himself whether there are any persons whom he may wish to question under paragraph 2 an examining officer may—"

Paragraph 2 states: "An examining officer may question a person to whom this paragraph applies for the purpose of determining whether he appears to be a person falling within section 40(1)(b)."

Section 40(1) (b) states: "In this Part “terrorist” means a person who— (a)has committed an offence under any of sections 11, 12, 15 to 18, 54 and 56 to 63, or (b)is or has been concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism."
I know about the time complexity, but my argument points to the CPU architecture and cache/branch prediction efficiency.

KMP has a lot of branching which is more expensive than a simple cache (line) hit, cache REP CMPSx doesn't have any branching, aborts immediately after a mismatch with only a single loop over the starting position, search is also pretty much linear. This is not a Turing machine where it is being executed ;-)

So in theory KMP is faster, in practice for not very large strings I am really not sure... There are plenty of optimal algorithms where the fixed cost is too high for majority of useful cases comparing to less optimal algorithms with very low fixed costs. Does KMP have as much "mechanical sympathy" to overcome specific machine code instructions for most frequent cases?
Not everyone is the CEO/CTO of a startup.
I always thought major reason for the decline was all the other alternatives coming up back then (msn messenger and the likes) and more recently things that aren't really an alternative but steal time anyway (facebook and the likes) ?
The Exceptional Performance of Lil' Exception
Hippy Town Hits It Big
People complain about Unity and Gnome3 because they don't offer workflows that work well for desktops. The Linux community is open to change and new ideas, but when the majority of users are unhappy with something for such a long time then something is clearly wrong.
The poll left out the obvious choice.
Binary.

"Do or do not. There is no try." -Yoda
(and presumably no "except" block either").

Edit: reading the comments it appears someone beat me to the try-except joke.
Odesk is terrible for finding good work. It's better to go through craigslist.
Read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Dip-Extraordinary-Benefits-Knowing-Sti...

It helped me make the decision when i was struggling with my startup. The problem with mindlessly persisting is you are not aware of what you're doing. You need to step back and think about why you're staying in. After that if you still want to go on, you should. Otherwise, no.
Actually, I rather like Unity. However in versions later than 12.04 it breaks LibreOffice mnemonics (Alt-F-A for Save File As... and Alt-I-O-F for Insert Formula) which happens to be 80% of my work-flow.

I gather it is something to do with the way the global menu software works.
A dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186730. You can search for these pretty easily:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=kids+can%27t+use+computers#!/story...
I quit when it stopped being fun. It had gone public and there were a couple of hundred employees. I was in the office on New Year's Day, celebrating the fact that I had been into work every day that year. I was flying somewhere twice a week, and spent all my time talking to lawyers, bankers, accountants and brokers. Customers only when they were threatening lawsuits. Conflict with another cofounder didn't help. My father's passing was one more message.

I started as a creative person, programming. I realized I had to go back to that to be happy. So I typed an email to my cofounders on the spot. Three days later, I was out of there.

I was fortunate to remain good friends with most of my cofounders and key employees. I've had a blast in the succeeding years - making a better income most years and getting to do things I enjoy. Having time for a great wife and kids makes it even better.

It was the best decision I ever made.
Lisp - made with secret alien technology
Terence Tao's comment is very much worth reading. He addresses "is wrong". (It's not that simple.) Our intuition about probability fails us because it involves non-measurable sets, for which probabilities can't be properly assigned. Then, the intuition that "each prisoner has a 50% chance of being right" (based on a "rigid motion" argument in (Z_2)^N, or the space of sequences of {0, 1}) fails us because we don't have a meaningful probability. (We're conditioning on an equivalence class that is similar to a Vitali set; it can neither be assigned a zero nor positive measure, so it's non-measurable.)
they are talking about people who would pay money to avoid the very same shocks. So, let's extend your thought, doesn't sound terribly unpleasant? nor does being alone with your thoughts sound terribly unpleasant. But they measured the two and discovered that being alone with your thoughts is MORE unpleasant.

your insight that various aspects of the experiment make a difference can be a valuable tool in order to go look deeper into the experiment, but you didn't do that. I'm saying apply a little of the rigor you are demanding to your own argument.
Brainfuck he would program.
Worse, because the server doesn't bounce back your own messages, most clients provide no indication that your message was cut off - it appears whole to you, but doesn't arrive in full at others' clients.

Most clients that do attempt to split long texts into multiple messages get one of these wrong:

- They miscalculate the number of bytes available for payload, because they don't check with the server's idea of their hostmask (which can change during the session e.g. due to authentication) to calculate the length of the preamble as seen on the receiving end.

- They count characters and ignore the number of bytes they actually encode to (either in the message or the preamble, or both: there are some networks like the Korean Ozinger that allow Utf-8 nicknames).

KDE's Konversation does both correctly (it also has some other nice visualizations of server/protocol-imposed limits, e.g. when you try to change the channel topic it'll color text past the server limit in red, again taking into account character and formatting code encoding).

Most clients don't even try at all though.
Apple’s iPad Air 2 Images Leaked
You are over analyzing this. The author isn't deriding those with intelligence, he simply said it can sometimes provide a false sense of assurance. He also implied that in a start up, hard work matters more than raw intelligence, but intelligence can provide some advantage.
Select or Die (Selectbox Widget)
The Haskell code checks this implicitly with the use of the Get monad, I believe. In Python, you have to manually tell the code to not reach for bits that aren't there. In Haskell, the concept of a failure state being implicitly dealt with is used all over.

Also, the reason the Python code is a `while True` with an explicit counter and check at the bottom is because Python lacks a do-while loop
Huh, yeah, didn't notice that implementation difference. In the Python code, the longest valid varint is 5 bytes (want the result to fit into int32 I guess?). In this case the bug is not strictly a problem as the Haskell code is used to read varints from trusted inputs only, whereas the Python is designed to read untrusted input. But good catch