skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every few weeks on Hacker News we have the following cycle:

(1) News article! Prevailing view of physics overturned! Etc! Etc! Etc!

(2) Many excited comments!

(3) Much less excited comment, pointing to skeptical remarks by well-known professional physicists (e.g., John Baez, Sean Carroll).

(4) Much to-and-fro. People who once saw a Discovery Channel special on physics now appear to believe that they're in a better position to evaluate the new claims than the people from (3).

Now, points (1) and (2) do sometimes happen, without points (3) and (4).

For instance, the neutrino faster-than-light claims attracted very cautious comment from professionals. In other words, point (3) was absent or rather muted. That's because the people who'd done the experiments were known for being extremely careful, and were, in fact, very cautious in their announcement.

That kind of thing is genuinely exciting, and worth discussion.

Another nice example of an exception is the Alcubierre drive. It satisfied (1) and (2) (or the 1996 equivalent), but (3) was absent, except that professionals noted that the drive required the stress-energy tensor to have some unusual properties, not satisfied by any known substance. Indeed, Alcubierre pointed this out himself.

Again, genuinely exciting, and worth discussion.

But when the professionals are loudly deriding a result, it'd be nice for the amateurs to make a serious attempt to understand why, and not just airily dismiss it.
Pretty strange response, there are lots of things that prove virtual particles are a legitimate model, even for things like generating force:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
Ouch, thats bad :) C12.22 is pretty old, AES didn't even exist yet. It seems that it got an update recently (2011) with the smart grid and smart metering use case in mind. The are now using an EAX called EAX prime [1] put it seems to have it's own issues [2].

[1] http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/BCM/documents/propose...
[2] http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/018.pdf
Hi! I attended MakerSquare last fall.

I had joined the 2nd cohort at MakerSquare in fall of 2013. Prior to MakerSquare, I had tried learning Ruby and JS on my own, through countless books and online tutorials. Having completed a few guides, I realized that my ability to learn "how to code" was hindered simply by my style of learning. Moreover, while I had a good understanding of the basics, I had no idea what the 'best practices' of coding were. After all, if you're going to spend countless hours writing code, you might as well do it the right way, right?

Of the different programs out there, the one thing I would urge others to consider is that MakerSquare places a heavy amount of weight onto prework completed (how much work you've done ahead of time) and community-fit. If you're a solo worker and not a fan of collaborative environments, you may want to consider other programs.

On a regular basis, we worked in teams of 2-5 ppl. The small groups were great for focused learning, and it turns out, the larger groups were great for learning how to collaborate on code with version control (github). Would I have had this opportunity through a self-learn environment? Definitely not.

Long story short, I would 100% recommend this program. As classmates, I had former programmers, retail store workers, a professional photographer and even a former elementary teacher. Out of the program, each of the students were working as professional front-end engineers (junior developers) within a few months of graduating. MakerSquare has a great professional network for helping with placement (96%), and they know how to teach software development.

The classroom environment (the location on Congress ave) was a bit cramped at times. But from what I've heard the class size is now capped at 20, vs. 30 or so when I went through.

All the 'issues' I had (space constraints, less than ideal student:instructor ratio, and focus on advanced concepts (algorithms and data structures) has been completely addressed. According to the instructors, Cohort 7 is operating on a night/day difference of curriculum than what I had. As an example, we didn't really touch data structures and algorithms until week 7 of the program. Today, those two themes are introduced on day 3 of the program.

The biggest difference now is that MakerSquare focuses on making sure you understand the fundamentals of software development. Before you even get to use a framework, (Rails, BackboneJS, AngularJS), you build your own version first. This is so you understand what goes into a framework, how to troubleshoot, and how to customize it to fit your needs.

If you want more perspective of the program, these are their Quora, Google and Yelp links.

http://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-MakerSquare

https://plus.google.com/+MakerSquareAustin/posts

http://www.yelp.com/biz/makersquare-austin-2
At Utah (graduated three months ago) we were required to take one class that used MIPS and another class that used x86 (the compilers class was optional). They were great, and I agree seem pretty essential.
Handling environment data with Ember.js
Yves Behar: Industrial Designer in Silicon Valley
Thanks, emailed
I was part of App Academy's inaugural class, summer 2012, when they taught iOS in 9 weeks instead of RoR in 12. I found them on HN and applied. I didn't enjoy my work anymore and had nothing to lose.

I took it as a summer sabbatical of sorts from my marketing job. When I got back I interviewed for an iOS position at the same company, got it, and spend just under two years learning from an amazing mobile team.

Almost two months ago I left and joined a startup, ironically founded by someone who briefly did App Academy while I was there.

Not only was it incredibly rigorous and tons of fun, it was by far the best career decision I've ever made.
Agreed. We're working on the balancing.
I think this article completely misses the value of Slack. It's IRC made easy. Very easy, and that makes it very valuable. It's like the iPod, which did everything MP3 players already did, but without being a pain in the ass.
Yes, we're completely rewriting the upgrade mechanics.
Please take the "(2011)" off of the title. This is timeless stuff.
When Robots Write Songs
> “If we had waited six months we would have made much more money. If we had waited a year we would have made 10 times more money,” he says. He regrets it now. But at the time, after the dotcom crash, the Nasdaq plummet, and September 11, deals just weren’t happening. All his advisers and investors told him to go for it. It was hard to know what to do.

Oy, hurts to read this. I've been a satisfied Flickr-Pro customer for about five years now, and I'm happy to see the recent cosmetic improvements it's had in the last year...but it sorely needed someone with Butterfield's "mundane" vision to really get the logistics and details right...there was no reason for it to take a backseat to Instagram (though really, it's hard to beat the overall social package that Facebook brings to photos)...The fact that I'm OK with Flickr even though much of its functionality/structure has remained virtually unchanged since 2009 goes to show how fairly solid it is/was.
OnMetal Compute v1 - comes out as $560 per month which is not that expensive at all for a 10 cores instance!
Depends on the software company. And also the problem domain. In a software company that does a lot of customized work, engineers are closer to the front. If the company only incidentally produces software, you're closer to the back. Obviously these are gross generalizations.

I worked with some guys who did highly specialized embedded software development through a small consultancy. These weren't famous or highly pedigreed guys, just good at their niche. Given their billing rates, they probably made double what they would have doing similar work at a device company.
Really sorry about that - we've now disabled this plugin. We were actually having some serious server issues which was making the wrong thing load. Won't be activating it again!
I keep hearing that Rails can be scaled, but how does that explain the fact that Twitter had to switch off of Rails in order to scale?
Go 1.4+ Garbage Collection Plan and Roadmap
I went to the "graduation ceremony" of a NY school's 10 week program about a year and a half ago. (It wasn't GA) A few observations:

* The quality of the "graduates" varied immensely. Some graduates had been programmers before starting the course, and those students were just there to sharpen their skills. Others had no background in programming.

* All of the projects were group projects, so weaker students were able to hide behind stronger students and couldn't actually point at any code that they had been solely responsible for.

* All of the projects had been conceived of by the school, and so were very very limited in ambition and scope. (It took some digging to find this out, the groups were presenting their projects as if they had conceived of them)

* One of the student told me nearly verbatim: "We learned more in 10 weeks than we would have in our first 2 years of a traditional C.S. degree." I told this student that that was preposterous and to please never repeat that sentence again.

* The students had obviously been well prepped on their interviewing techniques and showed alot of enthusiasm and (over)confidence. But the average proficiency level was way below junior programmer status, and for 2/3 of the students I didn't see how they could work without active mentoring.

* I kept in touch with one of the students after graduation, and he said that virtually all of the students received offers . So hey, the demand for programmers is really that high regardless of quality. I couldn't see hiring one of these devs for what seemed (at the time) to be a 70-80k starting salary range, when another 20k would get me a legitimate junior developer. Of course, as I said before there were some quality candidates coming out of the program, but those were only the students who were programmers before embarking on the course.
TL;DNR: don't ask whether or not a bootcamp is worth it; ask whether not you're considering the RIGHT ONE. Bootcamp > online courses.

I went through Fullstack Academy in NYC and received five job offers. (Full disclosure--worked as a teaching fellow at Fullstack shortly afterward, so I was on the payroll.) Had one of the best learning experiences of my life there. Absolutely worth the cost of tuition--there are real tangible pedagogical differences between distance/online learning like One Month Rails or Lynda and a physical classroom. You'll be a stronger coder, by an order of magnitude, from an in-person bootcamp.

The signal-to-noise ratio in the bootcamp space is currently EXTREMELY low. Currently, there are really only two data points prospective students can act on 1) the name-brand value of the first-to-market bootcamps, like App Academy and Hacker School, and 2) testimonials and hiring experiences of former students.

Neither of these data points are reliable. Plenty of students fall through the cracks at the oldest, most well-established bootcamps, and anecdotes (like this one, incidentally) can't represent the average experience.

Even though I had a wonderful, incredibly-high-leverage experience at Fullstack, I've known students who have gone through other bootcamps and have had HORRIBLE experiences--lackadaisical instructors working on side projects, courses exclusively by recent grads of the bootcamp with no industry experience, etc.

If you're considering bootcamps, COLLECT AS MANY SIGNALS ABOUT INSTRUCTION QUALITY AS POSSIBLE. This means speaking to former students, speaking to instructors and co-founders (if they're a bootcamp of any quality, they'll allow prospective students to chat with co-founders), sitting in on classes, visiting the school.

The bootcamp space is lucrative, and becoming increasingly crowded. Before someone comes along with a method of ranking them, DO YOUR RESEARCH.
McSema: A native code to LLVM IR translation framework
Emacs is the obvious answer: it allows keyboard-only operation, has a very flexible frame splitting tool and you may leverage your VI experience by using evil-mode.
There is no replacement of Vim; it is the best thing of its kind. I've been using it since 1994 and wouldn't even think about replacing it.

The current region of the screen you're working in can be split horizontally with Ctrl-W s, and vertically with Ctrl-W v.

Moving among the splits is done using Ctrl-W + movement keys, where movement keys are arrows, or h, j, k, l. Plus undoubtedly in other ways.

There are ways to rotate and rearrange windows themselves, and perform actions that open windows: many familiar actions can be prefixed with Ctrl-W so that they open a new window, such as chasing a tag (Ctrl-]).
Perhaps they lost that technology during the "dark age" between collapse of the Mycenaean culture (i.e. "Homeric" times, although Homer lived much later) and the rise of Classical Greece?
Ten years ago everyone thought the Orange and Rose revolutions were US plots, and Georgia even took US military aid to go to war with Russia.

The US was unquestionably involved in both, not sure why you think otherwise...
Sure, because Russia also has the habit of continued, systematic, shameless terrorizing and murdering innocent citizens of nuclear powers. I wonder why people are so outraged about Ukraine and yet fail to be about drones in Pakistan.
Golang carrier grade telco billing system
I agree - but my article isn't about what works or doesn't. It's about getting ideas to test. In fact, as I mentioned in the article, what works for one site definitely might not work for yours - so testing is always the answer. Having said that, I think that it's good to look at what the successful startups are doing to get ideas for testing.
Outage blocks access to money for Simple banking customers
> This is also a case against bare metal, since a server running one container per socket may actually be faster than spreading the workload across sockets due to the reduced cross-traffic.

I'm sorry this doesn't preclude a well designed system on bare metal with multiple sockets being performant. As an example often I've pinned workers to cpu's to keep network buffers on the same core as the worker thread for low latency high through-put network applications. I would say the idea of a container per socket might make it "easier" to isolate applications not designed or deployed with this factor in mind but it isn't an indicator against bare metal.
I agree but in the short term some people are going to be freezing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_European_energy_s...

You don't want to be living in Finland and rely on natural gas for example. (To be honest I don't know how much and how Finland is using its natural gas)
Unfortunately, our host had serious issues the moment the article trended on HackerNews... very bad timing! We've actually moved server quickly so it should soon be back to normal.
Was Snowden charged with a crime? Upon what basis did the US government revoke his passport?
Google and Barnes and Noble Partner to Take on Amazon
Their statements about Windows being more secure than Linux were also pretty hilarious.
> Immigration can't be effectively regulated by any means available to a moderately democratic state.

That's debatable. But lets assume it for the sake of argument.

> Should immigrants receive the BLS? If yes, you go broke. If no, the immigrants are essentially second-class citizens who have to work for an extremely low wage (because they would have to pay indirectly for the BLS).

I think this claim is overly simplistic; also, I think there are several categories to consider,that I think you've failed to distinguish:

(1) Naturalized citizens should certainly receive whatever universal or guaranteed income is adopted, but immigrants don't become naturalized citizens immediately.

(2) Legal immigrants (the number and characteristics of whom a democratic state can effectively regulate), who are not citizens, probably should be eligible for the support [1] as well, but may be admitted on criteria that include having means of support that make it less likely that immigrant will be a recipient (in a GMI scheme) or net recipient (in a BI scheme).

(3) Non-immigrant, but legally-present workers, visitors, etc. should not generally be eligible for the support. In the case of non-immigrant economic admission categories, adequate support means should be part of the conditions for admission. There may be some exceptions to this (note [1] again may apply to these exceptions) or some categories of non-immigrant admits that are qualified for alternative, status-specific support.

(4) Those illegally present probably should not be eligible for the benefits, but may be eligible for some kind of normalization of status process after which they would become legal immigrants who might be eligible for benefits (to which note [1] would apply again). This normalization process might include up-front payment of a fine for those with means, or commitment to income contingent future payment of the fine with nominal interest, and might even include limitations on benefit eligibility for some period even beyond what regular legal immigrants might face, or commitments to repay any benefits claimed during a certain transitional period on an income-contingent basis. (In general, payment for normalization -- or payment for above-quota legal immigration -- makes sense for individuals who are not personally barred, since limits on levels of such immigration are a cost-of-immigration control measure, and its better for people who want to immigrate to bear the costs then for society to bear the costs of inefficiently trying to keep them out, and then also bearing the costs of them coming in anyway.)

[1] As productivity advances and if the basic support improves to provide more than a very minimal floor, its not entirely unreasonable that non-citizens might recieve less than the full support level, however, possibly based on a sliding scale based on residency; in theoretical terms, in a rent on the commons model, this represents a kind of "vesting" process where the immigrant doesn't become a full "owner" until they are naturalized; in practical terms it provides basic social support but reduces the immediate immigration incentive.
A "programmer", like a "painter" or a "carpenter", describes the medium of the work, not the quality of it. I think a lot of people confuse the two.
Well, Shopify is built in rails and its scaling extremely well. Rails can be scaled!
Would you want every workstation to have direct access to the cluster - ok I get for loading data it might be useful but IN that case surely you would have special purpose nodes for that
If that is the right interpretation of the question, then the question lacks a reason for wanting a replacement.

"I like Vim; it is fast, runs on many platforms and I've been using it for development since university. I know that it can split windows horizontally and vertically. But for some inexplicable reason, I want to replace it: is there something else that can split windows horizontally and vertically?"

It kind of "does not compute", you see?
There doesn't seem to be an expressly specified code around voting, and I suspect that this might be a deliberate attempt to let the community decide out of unspoken consensus. When concern about the basis of a vote is expressed, it's often made clear that the grounds for up voting and down voting are not symmetrical. I can't decide if I think that they should be or if it doesn't matter.

I'd really like to see a list of controversial posts (many votes in both direction) to determine whether they are mostly matters of agreement/disagreement or if there is usually some less personal ground (e.g. expressing a factually wrong but popularly held belief, differing opinions on what adds to the discussion or not etc.)
> Not really, Turks came to that territory much later

Good point. However, I think geography would create a rivalry between whoever occupies the region that is currently Greece and whoever is in Asia Minor.
It totally depends on your learning style and also on the school. The quality of schools vary a lot (see http://www.switchup.org for reviews) so it's important to do your research.

The purpose of these schools is to force you to immerse in a learning environment for about 10 weeks - which will help you go up the learning curve. There are also some cheaper schools you should consider, also on www.switchup.org. Talk to alums, instructors, and read as much online before committing to anything!

Happy to chat more if you want to shoot me an email at jonathan@switchup.org.
Google and Barnes and Noble Unite to Take On Amazon for Same Day Delivery
Of Frameworks And Religion
I speculate that Android is starting to worry about Firefox OS, so they are starting to address the ultra cheap smartphone market. However, I'm bullish on Firefox OS winning this market simply because it will always be able to undercut on price. You just need fewer resources to run Firefox OS, so you will always be able to sell cheaper phones.
This isn't a centrally planned economy, its a centrally planned expense. Once you know how many people you need to provide for, how much it costs is simple multiplication. Mass manufacturing and predictable consumption will help reduce costs even further.

Basic Income is harder, how much do I pay to prevent people suffering? Will people still die if I provide 10k$ how about 20k$? What if they're really bad at decision making and gamble it away or get robbed?
> The decision in .Net to not map database NULL to programming language null.

What specific API in the .Net framework does this (or doesn't do this)? Definitely hasn't been my experience but I am using Entity Framework so...

It goes so far as to mark null-able database types as (bool?) (nullable bool) which is super helpful and you can use == null for comparisons.
For the record, "guaranteed minimum income" typically labels a different policy than "basic income" - where in the former the government pays you N-M when you make M<N. I don't know that this is what was being proposed; the term is fairly frequently misapplied to basic income.

For the record, I favor a (reasonably sized) basic income, and would object to a minimum income.
I think that's a great idea. Yes, anonymity is required so people can speak freely without fear of retribution. But you have to also consider what it's like to be the recipient of those anonymous actions...

People care about this community, and they're sharing their opinions in good faith -- they're putting themselves out there. So I think a downvote should require at least an equal commitment -- maybe a downvote with an
(anonymous?) comment of explanation....

Maybe the downvote-with-comment could also be downvoted (with that new downvote affecting the karma of the original anonymous down-voter?)
> At $7 per user per month, the paid version of Slack is expensive.

Really? $7 per user per month sounds very cheap for business software, considering how much you're already paying that user in salary and benefits.
Oak Island Money Pit: Unsolved Mystery
Google Averages 130 Applicants to Make One Hire
I have a feeling the agreement the fine fellow who authored the article agreed to just such a possibility.
Yes. Unfortunately, that's likely to be a similarity here.
Snowden was charged with two violations of the Espionage Act and theft of government property.

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NEWS/A_U.S.%20new...
Yeah, I read his/her post a few times to try to figure out if (s)he had any experience and wasn't sure, and not seeing anyone mentioning Hacker School, I thought it'd add to the discussion.

Since (s)he doesn't specify his/her level of experience, I thought it'd be worth bringing up.