skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the difficulty lies in the multiple meanings of 'programmer.'

My interest in programming stems from wanting to use them to solve problems, not from theoretical interest in how computers work. Most of my colleagues in the UW engineering department I was in learned just enough Matlab to get the homework done. I learned enough to program a solution to the homework. I originally learned QBasic to program a Mandelbrot-set generator on a 286, because I wanted to generate the Mandelbrot set.

Should a web developer learn machine code? I dunno. You can get pretty far in web development with a good head, some Railscasts and tutorials, and a bit of practice. Maybe the question is "When should a web developer learn machine code?" I think the answer to that question, if he/she is a working web developer, is, "When he/she has to, when it comes up."

For myself, I look at these--let's be frank--esoteric things like machine code, higher-order whatever, compiler-design, and so on and think, "That may be interesting, but I've got work to do and fun to have. I'll wait until I have to know it before I learn it." I've already had to learn about lambdas. Very fun stuff, but also very useful stuff.

Now, should the macho programmer learn machine code? Of course. But the macho programmer should also be manufacturing his own computer chips as well, to better fit with his pure and obviously correct programming methods.
Of course, that depends on how you measure fitness. Highly anaerobic activities will not prepare you well for a marathon, for instance. But they will make you more fit in weight-lifting and anaerobic sports.

Look at the training regimes for Olympic-class athletes in any given sport... they're a pretty good guide, considering the incentives involved.
Which is what I was fishing for, thanks. :)

The problem with moderation on HN (and other sites) is that all you have to do to be upmodded is to assert something firmly enough. It doesn't have to be even remotely true; people will mod it up regardless. Annoying as hell, and potentially destructive to public discourse when it's as blatantly wrong as the grandparent's post was.
I guess this means "moral hazard" can be upgraded from theory to verified to occur in the wild.
RPG PC Games
Kernel 2.6.31 to speed up Linux desktop
It's hard; that's our biggest problem. It's straightforward to tell in a 10 minute conversation how smart someone is, but very hard to tell how determined they are. When we pick wrong it's almost always by misjudging determination.
No? Because insurance companies are too big to fail? And insurance companies never invest in other insurance companies, or funds, or in securitized life insurance?

If insurance company fails these payments will not occur and the securities will become valueless. If these get nearly as pervasive and out of control as mortgage securities did then a big enough failure will cause they same sort of systemic meltdown.
Scott Heiferman of Meetup - The Pursuit of Community
If they're going to implement such a crazy thing, they might as well also block requests that have no referer.
So let's get this straight:

He's complaining about Wordpress and their vulnerabilities when he:

1. hadn't upgraded wordpress in months
2. hadn't performed any backups of his posts

It's hard to be sympathetic to him or TechCrunch. If they're going to use custom features like third-party plugins and specially designed pages, they should have developers on staff to actively work to make sure that their customizations will work after an upgrade. By not doing that they're begging to be attacked.
The deception of history
Build machines / enslave humans. But, yeah one or the other.
Mozilla are doing something similar with their Test Pilot project:

http://labs.mozilla.com/blog/2008/03/introducing-test-pilot/

For privacy reasons, participation is voluntary, but they're promoting it as an easy way for people who don't know how to program and don't have the time to triage bugs to participate in the Firefox project.
Tttthink: political news and commentary
Or it may merely explain why you aren't succeeding, even though you are willful :-)
I learned 6502 in the 80s and did a lot of x86 in the mid 90s and.. I'd say "not anymore." Sure, it's useful to get a feel for it and have some experience with it, but I'm assuming "learn" in this case means a higher level of competency than just a broad understanding of it.

C is about as low as you need to know nowadays. x86 was critical to know in the 90s due to performance issues, but since the majority of software nowadays is running on some sort of VM or pulling heavily on frameworks (CLR, JVM, OS X's frameworks), it's mostly pointless to use x86 in all but the most unusual of projects.

The only reason I'd still advise a basic familiarity with assembler is to rid the notion that C is as low as it gets - you can get totally different results from different C compilers (and even incompatible results in some nasty cases) and it's worth at least knowing there's something underneath there that you can take a basic look at.
An emphatic YES. High level runtimes break, behave oddly, or do things that you wouldn't expect. Understanding how the machine works (and by extension, how the virtual machine works) is key to understanding:

* Why your program behaves the way it does

* Why your performance profile looks the way it does

* Gives you the skills you need to debug inevitable problems in your high level tools.

I highly recommend Write Great Code: Understanding the Machine:

http://www.amazon.com/Write-Great-Code-Understanding-Machine...
"... Should programmers in C++, Haskell, Lisp, Python, etc, know these things? ..."

Learning machine code for programmers is what Latin is to to reading and writing.
Education, psychology and technology: Games lessons
you may be right. But it doesnt change the reality that the destination site gets nearly zero benefit from the referral.
determination is a tricky thing. but i think there's also the ability to 'program yourself' to be determined. this usually means figuring out how to make whatever project you're working on fun -- and figuring out how to make sure the projects you're working on now and in the future are at least related to some long-term interest.

great discussion though. there is probably a 'language' of determination. and more efficient ways of being determined than others. i mean determination etymologically is related to a terminus or boundary. it is literally the ability or quality of getting to a boundary.

so if we infuse the meaning of determination with the idea of getting to a successful terminus -- we're referring to the ability to get the transaction done. in the case of startup space, one has to analyze what are the common set of obstacles that prevent getting the transaction done.

well (1) the manner in which the final terminus needs to be renegotiated as the project changes and competing views about the desired end result are brought into view -- so negotiation of the final result is key. (2) taking advantage of previous solutions, not reinventing the wheel but (3) not using any wheels which are limited or limiting and (4) spending maximum time and energy on the specific product.

but i think the most important thing is to regularly analyze whether or not one is on the optimal path to one's goal (first-round funding, e.g.) and also whether one can make the process of the development so bloody fun that one wants to spend as much time on the project as literally possible.

the most undervalued link in the whole network of the problem space is between the founders and their problem space. i.e., figuring out how to spend as much time as possible in your REPL, with your design diagrams, or otherwise amongst your code.

and now, i am just going to press 'add comment'. but yeah, nice article.
How many people do you know that even know they can do this, let alone know how to do it. Let alone would go through the process of it. Let alone would understand the ramifications for other site interactions.

non event. You and 17 other people might do this.
Can anyone suggest a method or example for improving self-discipline?
Clinical Trial Rule Is Widely Ignored
No, because payroll, marketing, sales and floor-mopping do not help you to become a better programmer in PHP. But knowing some assembly definitely will. Especially if you go so far as to have a look at the paging mechanism and cache structure of the cpus that you are using.
Anyone know what intro class in uni would be a cool intro to low level programming?

I'm experienced with LAMP and bits of C++\java.
I was serious. I have a deep interest in the stock market and fractals both, so an article that brings them together ... well, it's gravy!
I'm in Hoboken, NJ...not too far from NYC.
It might depend on what you produce?
A way to estimate what jacquesm is referring to might be to keep a record of which participants were marginal applicants and which were clearly in. Since you have limited places the in-out divide should be arbitrary. You can just measure only those on the 'in' side of it.

*If you numbered the top applications, you might be able to tease out some interesting conclusions about your ability to tell things in advance.
It might be strenuous to lift one's hands all the time.
I thought the same thing when I first read the comment, but I believe the commenter meant if too many people die, then the insurance companies won't be able to pay out the life insurance policies and thus the investors will lose money.
LOL we will not agree; if your internal theories don't allow for making different decisions at different times we don't have much to talk about.
I agree with you. Many of them should be in jail. The folks from Enron went to jail and they caused much less damage. It wasn't an "accident" -- it was planned.
Google App Engine XMPP Support
Thought about moving this to something like meetup.com ?
I mostly do interval training (when not just doing weights) - I wonder if it is a bad thing - but I just find it so fun and non-boring...
Only decorator syntax happens somewhere around parse-time (which I call import time, but meh).

> completely mask the def that they are applied to.

@decorator reassign to the name of the def. But if there are other refs to that def they do not change and are not "masked". It is no different than assignment. You know that these two are identical, right?

@foo
def bar():
pass

def bar():
pass
bar = foo(bar)

Also this is a perfectly valid decorater that doesn't mask the original func

def deco(func):
# do something terrible clever here
return func

decorator syntax != decorators is my main point. But by conflating the two I can begin to understand your statement.
Amazon: More aggressive than you think. Map of acquisitions & investments
Multiple concurrent threads of execution are fine as a concurrency substrate, so long as you minimize synchronization between threads. They can run on independent cores with no problem.

Threads are crap as a programming model.

Something like Clojure's parallel-friendly constructs has the potential to make an Azul box shine, whilst avoiding programmer error.
I'm partial to Safari 4's Web Inspector. It's what Chrome's Web Inspector is based on, only much more powerful.
It's not the "steal your money" part that worries me, it's the perverse incentives that result in bigger financial payouts the more that people die. Methinks that if this becomes reality, we'll see many more seniors die of mysterious causes...

On the plus side, this could solve both the population and social security problems! :-/
Feast Your Eyes On Snow Leopard’s Beautiful Icons
Pylons.
I worry that it'll lead to something more akin to the French revolution, where the population declares open-season on anyone connected to the financial industry and decides that some heads oughtta roll, literally. IIRC, that didn't work out too well for France.
I live in Brooklyn.
I would suggest you take a second look at the fine video you link to. I watched it to the end.

Notice that at the start of the video, it's mentioned how the entire CDO system exists to generate nominally AAA rated bonds which institutional investors like pension fund have an incentive to buy in order to "demonstrate" (well, actually fake) risk aversion.

The video does a good, detailed dissection of the CDO generation process using math most people can understand but it's important to shorten it an executive summary: Wall Street sold a shell-game to institutional investors who were happy not to look closely at the supposed risk-free yields.

The video gives an excellent demonstration also why there is no reason for a risk-taking Hedge fund to buy a synthetic bond. This is because synthetics only exist to give the illusion of magically lowered risk (equivalently "yield out of thin air"). A risk-taking investor should be financing start-ups or businesses in trouble and a risk-averse investor should be diversified between holding the bonds of large corporations and holding cash. No one should be buying the fiction that combining risky assets creates risk-less assets.
Tim Bray on Music and Money
Aaah, so that's why we need death panels.
A smart enough AI chatbot will outsource this request to a Mechanical Turk service.
World Capitals Of The Future
Worth reading. I don't like the word "determination" because it feels too heavy to me; too much of grim-faced men in it. But I think PG is at least close to the right idea.
Demoscene radio, great coding music.
UI Trends
I agree with all your points. However, the laws are there to protect the "desperate" and to enforce a minimum worth of an employee. In many situations, unpaid internships provide a cost to the employer. The trade-off is that any exceptional interns can become full time employees, already having had most of the training, resulting in a lower initial cost to employment (training, etc.). Even for full-time positions, straight from college hires are not ready to directly contribute. There's a window of time (depending on the job itself) that the college graduate, even having completed an internship, will not be able to meaningfully contribute. Most people who have just completed an internship at the company has this time drastically reduced (I'm not going to give made up statistics, but I've seen it reduce the time by 8 months).

Now, the laws for unpaid internships are actually protecting the interns from non-internships. Based on the description in the blog, what they wanted as an army of people to compile a bunch of information without any direct supervision. This provides no benefit to the interns. They get the benefit of being immersed in corporate culture, but they are not receiving any relevant training or exposure to the field they would supposedly be interning for. This is exactly what the law is to protect against. If I'm a software development firm and get 15 unpaid interns to load servers into a moving van to change data centers, and all they do every day is load the van and unload it, they are directly providing benefit to the company with nothing in return, except they know that DL585's are heavy. Now, if they were part of the transition process, involved with the documenting and preparing for migration of the data center, document each step, what moves when and how, then the cabling/racking and bringup of machines at the new data center, they have suddenly learned some invaluable skills that are not taught in school. The point in the law is to defend against these situations by guaranteeing recompense for the student, whether it's invaluable skills (by guaranteeing they won't be used as free labor), class credit (helps towards degree), or a paycheck.
Agreed not everything in Python is well thought out. Lambdas and .join comes to mind.
Good reading: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/06/self-discipline/
Here you go

http://search1.taobao.com/browse/search_auction.htm?q=%BC%D6...
I think for a lot of people now, Chat and Video player are moving to the web, soon after image editing.

I think it will be a while for Video editing, software development etc... but the direction is clear.

And of course, some things have to exist on the device but can be embedded in the web app.
hehe, funny :)

So, there you go then.

There is a link at the bottom to http://www.webmynd.com/html/hackernews.html

In case you ever want to find a particular HN posting again.
I'm in Queens.
Anyone who has been using wordpress for couple of years, and actually bothers to read the release notes of each version, will tell you that a vast majority of those increment updates are security fixes. Since around 2.7 upgrades are as easy as clicking a button - both for plugins and wordpress core updates.

Instead of playing the "poor me" game, say it the way it is; you failed at keeping your wordpress install up to date and secure and you failed at having a backup.

Smashing magazine got compromised last week and came out straight and admitted their failure on keeping it safe by not upgrading.

This scoobie guy sounds a lot like arrington - no wonder they are best friends.
Central NJ, but the trains make it very easy to get to NYC. PM me... wait, do we have PM on HN?
It's not mine. I'm not sure if they have or not... All invites are sent out through Anyvite.com though.
Let's say I'm someone looking for an internship in the fashion industry. I go intern at fashion company Y. My entire internship is to watch the E! channel and update twitter every time someone has a horrible (in my opinion)outfit. This work has no immediate supervision. I sit in a cubicle, isolated from everyone else. I have a weekly meeting with an employee who takes the number of twitter updates I've made and goes "You should be making more".

At the end of the internship, the intern has gained nothing. They have provided a service to company Y, but received no training, enlightenment or greater understanding of the industry. In fact, based on what they experienced, it is likely the intern would decide to NOT go into the fashion industry because their entire perception of what the job is is now contradictory to what they thought it was before (but the new view is in fact incorrect). The internship had a negative impact on the intern who may have actually enjoyed the industry. Without having paid the intern (class credit, money, real industry experience), all they did was provide a service for the company for free.

(As a side note, I tried to model this close to the blog post, not provide some artificial "it wouldn't happen" type scenario)
we should probably take this off-line, or we'll end up finding the limits on HNs indent algorithm. You don't have an email address in your profile, so I can't mail you directly, mine is j@ww.com , drop me a line if you're interested discussing this further.
I agree. I had a problem with this specific claim by PG:
"Most people would agree it's more admirable to be good at math than memorizing long strings of digits, even though the latter depends more on natural ability."

Surely determination plus the right mnemonics can help anyone memorise long sequences of digits. I would have thought that reasoning creatively, carefully, and abstractly - i.e., mathematics - requires more natural talent, or at least a predisposition, than wanting to memorise digits.
This is the difference between skeptical adults and students who've read Ayn Rand and think they've figured it all out. Well done.
It's also random which kids are willful. It's not simply the firstborn.
If you are going to copy - not borrow - stuff from Yahoo answers you probably should be warned that Yahoo has a small army of lawyers at their disposal who could probably make your life quite miserable if you started copying their information.
tiny wheelbase + forward centre of gravity + unexpected obstacle = faceplant.
Seeing as WordPress requires security updates with genuinely astounding regularity, I'm hesitant to blame the user. WordPress' excessive vulnerability count clearly demonstrates an endemic issue in the software itself.

See also:

http://www.securityfocus.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi?o=0&l=30&...
It seems so tantalizingly close, doesn't it? To replace the revered institutions of higher learning in this country with laptops and Starbucks cards, throwing the gates of prosperity and knowledge wide open for anyone who cares to partake.

But I'm afraid it won't happen for awhile, for several reasons:

1. The technology just isn't there yet. MIT's entire lecture series is not online, far from it. Many of the OCW courses have only notes, no video, and the ones that have video often lack resolution to be able to read the notes on the board. Also, has anyone ever used Blackboard? It's horrible.

2. Not everyone has the tenacity to sit through four years of college classes and really learn something. Even fewer have the dedication to do it on their own, remotely, with no human interaction other than a webcam to guide them.

3. Schools such as MIT serve as a filter and a credibility indicator. They have great professors, of course, but anyone can obtain the raw knowledge they teach. What's harder to obtain on your own is the stamp of approval that you've . PG commented on Dropbox's YC application that was posted on here with his thought process. One of the first items was: "MIT...must be pretty smart." That's the power of a credibility indicator at work.

4. The people that are needed to make this happen are 1) parents, 2) government (for incentives), 3) existing institutions of higher learning, 4) employers (to hire these graduates). All of these groups are likely to have degrees that are granted using the current model, and thus none are likely to want to undermine their own education choices. What's the incentive for them to break with status quo?

5. School isn't just about what you learn...the best schools serve as a kind of bridging ground between childhood and adulthood. Perhaps there are better ways to accomplish this, but some kind of "GED for higher education" hardly seems to be a good solution. I'd rather hire employees who are smart and dedicated than knowledgeable. Most of what they need to know can be taught, but character and raw intelligence can't be, or at least not easily. Getting good enough grades in high school to get into a great school and then doing well in that school indicate both mental aptitude and the perseverance that I want in people who work for me.

These are off the top of my head...I'm sure there are more.
The greasemonkey script for sorting items by age, points, and comments makes it easier for me to find what are likely to be the more interesting discussions.

A small addition is needed to have the script work when viewing older items (you have to add the URL for the subsequent pages. Proof left as an exercise for the reader).

This is very handy since some of the better threads are not on the front page.
It is a very common misconception that GWT requires a java back-end, but it does not:

http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/1.6/FAQ_Server.html#Ho...?
Out in post-industrial Bushwick.
What does VK stand for?
or... another way to look at it. Wordpress releases security updates at astounding frequency without waiting to lump all those security updates in to one large update like most other large software tends to do.

Yes, I admit frequent updates can be a nuisance, but when they are literally spoon feeding you the update process (less than 10 seconds and one click in most cases), its stupidity - really.

See also:
http://www.securityfocus.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi?o=0&l=30&...

Drupal CMS less popular - more vulnerability.
Also, Scala's and LiftWebs similar (but different) actor models.
Scoble's got a new blog on Posterous: http://scobleizer.posterous.com/
Simulating the Sea Slug, 7 neurons
In fact, I wish they had an HTTP callback API so I could just give them push access to update my server automatically. (IE: wordpress blogs have a URI that wordpress.org would post the new version to, when available.) Of course, this would all need to be signed.
This is extraordinarily insightful (and I admire how Paul's writing is getting stronger as he gets more and more comfortable with what he thinks).