skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say that Bob Ross being the running ironic joke of the painting world says a lot more about the painting world than it does about Bob Ross. Every episode I watched contained a man with the calm manner of Mr. Rogers guiding his watchers through the process of creating something, providing them constant reassurance that they possessed the ability to create art and that they weren't making mistakes but merely going through the process of creation.

A quick trip over to reddit will reveal dozens, perhaps hundreds, of posts from people who have followed Bob Ross' methods and create a piece of art that brings them joy and satisfaction despite possibly a lifetime of doubting that they had the ability. In that sense I rank him up there amongst other great teachers who have been able to find methods that allow people to get past the initial stages of self-doubt and embarassment and begin participating in a fulfilling activity. Think "The Inner Game of Tennis" or "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". Anyone who can let the everyman participate in the satisfaction that comes with creating something is pretty darned ok in my books.

I am not sure if Notch quite lives up to that legacy, but it is a comparison that I think anyone should be flattered to receive.
Your takeaway reminds me of this quote from John Carmack:

"Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better."

I wish I followed it more :)
Error: line 2: 'damnit': no denotation

Just kidding. I agree: pace Prof. Dr. Dijkstra, automatic programming is a grand challenge problem and deserves more attention.
I'm crossed about the News Corp. buyout of a large portion of the company. On one hand, I think that this could simply be them spotting something that's on the up, and investing in it, hopefully with a light-handed approach that doesn't involve touching the formula.

The more cynical side of me wonders if Vice going far beyond "mainstream" media and covering important social and international issues is the reason, and News Corp. is grabbing power over it so they can quietly take it's integrity and edge out back and put a bullet into it's skull, because they are a threat to not only the business model, but the very system that News Corp. exists in.
Yes, quebec is ridiculous, but you're only paying 30% in total deductions rather than 50%, total taxation would probably be about 50% in Quebec. This is a good page for figuring out actual tax rates in Canada.

http://www.ey.com/ca/en/services/tax/tax-calculators-2014-pe...

I was speaking more towards corp tax rates which are 19% in Vancouver, personal taxes are bit higher in Canada, but probably cheaper once you factor medical.
Yep, that is what is making this issue distinct from, say, Uber and Lyft pushing the boundaries on regulation.
DOCTOR WHO!? Sold.

I really wish they'd include Unlimited Kindle as part of Prime :-/
Cases like that are fairly straightforward.

Where things really fall apart is using recursion instead of loops. Especially when the time comes to mention tail recursion.
This looks really interesting. Nice to see two somehow similar frameworks being used on each project for similar purposes (Rails vs Flask, Sidekiq vs Celery etc)

These (and workflowable) could potentially integrate nicely with huginn[0]

I'm curious how you avoid being throttled from doing searches by any bot-prevention measures on google etc

Also (for my own purposes, but as a general capability I suppose) would be really awesome to be able to launch reverse image searches on Scumblr.

[0]https://github.com/cantino/huginn
I was thinking of more server to server apis (python/ruby/java/c#)

For the SPA/MVC Javascript crowd (angularjs etc) they basically are already promoting business logic on the front end.
"Local variables can also be stored in registers, but we won't worry about this because registers and usually dedicated to local variables, and by the time our function is called they'll probably be saved on the stack anyway"

This is wrong; you have to take care of registers. The good noews is that an easy way to do this that will work on a broad range of platforms is to store the machine context to a jmp_buf that is on the stack. (You never use this jmp_buf for a longjmp, obviously.)
Typo on the front page: "notice there is a reward if they reurn it".
You're missing another key type of viewer: the person who isn't able to play games at the moment.

I'll often leave a stream on in the background at work, or watch someone playing while I'm rocking my son to sleep.
Background figures into a lot more than employment and voting, for one.

I hadn't considered his current financial situation - I'd be perfectly okay with taking his net worth for damages.

In case it wasn't blatantly fucking obvious, this was a list of ideas, non an exhaustive compendium of possible penalties!

Cynical? It's an assurance that he never ends up in a position to do this again.

I'm opposed to prison for white-collar crimes because I see prison as a place for segregation from society when there is no other option; specifically for violent and dangerous criminals. I don't see how locking this guy up serves any kind of justice other than the poetic type.
Amazon sells actual products to consumers, Google sells consumer data to advertisers. That means Amazon tends to be more responsive to end-users.

As an experiment: Compare trying to get somebody from Google support on the phone vs. Amazon.
VMware Moves to Defuse Software Threats, Plans Hardware
The most important update by far has got to be the new date formats, e.g.: `--date=teatime` and `--date="midnight the 12th of october, anno domini 1979"` just rock.
Things have changed a lot over the years (team, product, etc), but the overall vision hasn't, reinventing how people share information. What's changed the most though is me.

From the start I new that my limitations were the only things holding me back, so the past 4 years has been largely dedicated to reinventing myself into the type of person that could make Tinj successful.

As for the product, we'll be starting a private beta of Curv soon, a simple way to rate videos after watching by drawing how you felt over time. Can check out the demo at http://tinj.com

If anyone is excited about the potential of tinj or curv, email me at mat at tinj. PS - We're hiring. ;)
Yeah it's really live - he's done a lot of work on stuff similar to this so he's probably got a mental checklist of everything that needs to happen. He's pretty good at what he does: making games! Rarely is watching somebody write code entertaining, but he makes it so.
Honestly, there isn't even a need for an actual explanation. Just a simple, "thank you for your time, we decided to move on to other candidates" would be sufficient. It's called courtesy.

What Google is doing here however sounds like a complete and utter cluster-fuck. I mean, this:

>>After finding out I passed the interviews, and Google finished doing my background check, I spent the next two months on an emotional roller-coaster. I spoke to a couple hiring mangers, exchanged many confused and angry emails with friends and colleagues at Google, and had numerous phone calls with my recruiter, whose tone ranged from apologetic to congratulatory. At various times, I was not entirely sure if I was fully rejected, or if the only thing standing between me and a formal job offer was some paper work. Many phone calls with the recruiter (who was very kind and helpful) were required for clarification, but did little to assuage my annoyance as she was not allowed to explain any of the inner workings of the hiring process.

Wow. Just wow.
Warning: The usual WSJ paywall.
Alternative link that does not require log in or sign up to WSJ:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/25/amazon-will-buy-twitch-for-...
It wasn't meant to be dismissive.

To me, Bob Ross's art wasn't so much in painting as it was in creating that synergy of education and relaxation by taking you with him through the joy of creation.

Something in Notch's live streams triggers the same nerves for me.
that's an amazing quote. thanks for sharing!
I wouldn't watch someone else play Fallout 3, but I like watching people play competitive games like Hearthstone and SC2 because I feel like it makes me a better player. In the case of Hearthstone, the difference between watching and playing is minimal - it's basically the same if the streamer makes the play you would, and if not then you learn something (or, occasionally, get to feel clever because they didn't see your superior play).
Very true. However, having a woman in a lead technical role to provide mentorship and inspiration to female developers is very important for encouraging more women to become developers and stay in the industry.
Hm, that's true. I would guess that most people don't use the web that way, though. And this is all about averages, so as long as other people don't use Ghostery, Facebook will still edit your feed based on their behavior. The only solution is to get everyone to use Ghostery :)
>My takeaway is this: Doing something quick and dirty for a first draft and improve it later on often leads to better results in the long run than planing and over-engineering a solution beforehand, because you can start refining details much earlier or throw away bad approaches without investing too much time.

I think it depends on what you're doing, I doubt it works for every project out there.
DrinkMate – Portable Breathalyzer for Android
This seems a bit arrogant in the SV job climate. Google doesn't exactly have the prestige it once did. Yes, it set the current standard most Silicon Valley engineers enjoy, but most see it as large, unwieldy and less prestigious than it used to be. Companies like Twitter and AirBnB seem to be grabbing up the highest end talent and whose names carry some real weight on a resume.

It would behoove Google hiring managers to understand they're not at the top of the heap anymore for the choicest job in SV.
Not bad going for a free glossy magazine that when it started looked for all the world like the bastard offspring of Bizarre Magazine and The Face.
JIT Compilation Without (Much) Assembler in GNU C
Did you read FB posting[1]? Especially this part:

One way is to look at how long people spend reading an
article away from Facebook. If people click on an article
and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked
through to something valuable. If they click through to a
link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests
that they didn’t find something that they wanted. With
this update we will start taking into account whether
people tend to spend time away from Facebook after
clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight
back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them.

[1] http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/08/news-feed-fyi-click-bait...
Request your surveillance footage
Also something like "Argh! This doesn't let me use the mouse... I have to wrestle this" - Notch (Aug 25 2014 19:49 UTC)
I thought of this as well (happy customer) but the economics are a bit different: My understanding is that Canada Post absorbs the cost of mailing keys to the War Amps as a deal it makes to support this charity. I also guess that War Amps pays the cost of actually returning the keys and yet comes out ahead, based on expected rates of keys being lost and found (though perhaps Canada Post subsidizes this part as well).

This service is going to have to cover that cost as well as the cost of returning the lost item.
Completely agreed. We can't question the ethics of applying certain tropes in fictional narratives without also evaluating all the other fictional narrative tropes. Does Payday glorify bank robbery? Does Saints Row glorify gang violence? etc.

Video games are a very expressive medium for narratives, but I've yet to see any conclusive studies showing they actually reinforce any negative values in the people that play them.
I am amused by "Our system is safe and secure because we use: stripe".
Amazon Will Buy Twitch for Over $1B
A simple bash script to manage apache VirtualHost on Ubuntu
But the framework is completely different. In nature, we must have an inductive framework. We will observe phenomena, and name. With computers, we are doing something very different. The framework is deductive, thus we do not name, we define.

With naming, we can be wrong, because of the inherent negative knowledge of our framework. That is, in science, we can only prove with certainty that things aren't the case, not that things are. This is Karl Popper thesis.

With defining, we cannot be wrong about things, we have the ability to have perfect knowledge, so the things we are referring to are defined to be such, we simply cannot be wrong about their identity and structure.
Terrible health care: my friend in Ontario developed terminal brain cancer while waiting six months to see a specialist. We have extremely accessible healthcare, but doctors are overpaid and underworked. As a result, wait times are incredible and often prohibitive. If you have a mental illness or another condition that doesn't require "right this second or you'll die" attention, you may never see a doctor in time.

Terrible taxes: I lose about 35% of my pay check to taxes. I don't mind taxes, especially when they go to improving the accessibility and efficiency of our healthcare, but I do mind them going to militarizing our police force and the pockets of bureaucrats as is often the case.

Terrible culture: Canada is notorious for its lasting and continued racism, notably to native Canadians. Right this minute hundreds of aboriginal women are missing that the RCMP has no interest in investigating. Historically, our police have outright murdered aboriginal people for fun (Neil Stonechild, Dudley George) but it's not limited to that group (Somalia affair, Sammy Yatim).
Sorry, that's wrong.

The D programming language currently uses a conservative garbage collector. Before version 1.0, false pointers were a serious problem. The most common causes of false pointers were:

- ASCII text;

- floating-point values;

- high-entropy (compressed/encrypted) data, e.g. image files.

Just 1 MB of random-ish data is enough to pin down allocations of 16 KB or bigger. And of course, it cascades through any false pointers in any pinned memory blocks, and so on.

In D 1.0, the garbage collector now remembers whether any memory block contains any pointers or not. So, now it can tell whether any memory address either definitely contains no pointers, or may contain pointers. Even so, memory leaks due to false pointers on 32-bit are not unheard of. For personal use, I've had to write a tool to diagnose these memory leaks: https://github.com/CyberShadow/Diamond

Rainer Schuetze is working on improving the precision of the GC from one heap allocation block to one machine word, but there's still work to be done on this.
I had a pretty shite experience with Google applying for internships.

I had gotten through the interview process and told I was being placed with a team and would get a chance to speak to my new manager in November/December. I give her my preferences for placement and I waited until a few months before the summer started and asked my recruiters what was going on, and they said there were very few positions left and they must have flubbed the paperwork. She said she would work hard to get my team sorted out. Nothing for a week. I ask again, she apologizes. Nothing for another week. She apologizes and I finally speak with my manager. It is one of the teams near the bottom of my list of preferences. I had several great offers at the time and was by this point very unenthusiastic. I ask for another team, but am told all placements have been made and that they will try me again in the future.

Now I get calls/emails from Google recruiters every few months, seemingly always a few days after I sign a contract to work elsewhere. Are they intentionally trying to poach me? Anyways, I've had enough of big companies. I'm going to a startup as the 7th engineer that will let me work remotely as I sail around the world. I think I've made the right decision.
I would pour billions into desalination R&D to chase an efficient, non-polluting and economical solution to providing clean water to the world.
Unbounded Robotics to Shut Down Due to Issues with Willow Garage Agreement
I know on Windows you can use AutoHotkey[0] to recreate all your OS X keybindings, but I'm not sure about recreating Windows binds on OS X.

[0] http://www.autohotkey.com/
Thanks. I did flag, but posted because it seemed like one of those pervasive, subtle sexism things. "Hey, it's HN, we're all men here, right?"

I don't doubt that much of HN's audience will find it interesting, but that seemed like something worth bringing up.

Articles about gender politics in the tech industry have to do with hackers' behavior as they go about their hacking. Articles about masculinity itself (or feminine identity, for that matter) I would consider off-topic to begin with, but a discussion of men's fitness in particular on a software industry forum seems like it reinforces the software industry as a boys club.
Why oh why didn't the Times give this story the headline, "You Won't Believe What Facebook Is Doing To Your Timeline"?
You're a solo founder then. FYI: If the catalyst is getting into an incubator/accelerator, please note that bandwagon cofounders brought on after being accepted into YC almost never work out.

Making it into YC isn't impossible if you are. Many startups in the current batch are solo founder companies...Product Hunt, Filecoin, Lawn Love, Craft Coffee, etc. We would not reject a startup based on just ONE dimension or question. So if this is the ONLY thing you're worried about, you're in good shape.
How Citibank and other top brands could be putting you at risk!
We analyzed the top 1000 brands and graded their SSL security. What we found is surprising!
The Swift wish list
>>Fine, but every developer I know works long hours and is squeezed for productivity. Isn't that just the reality of the field?

I don't know any developers who work more than 50 hours a week. Most of them work 40 hours or less, and a lot of them don't even have their work hours tracked.
RaiseYourIQ Brain Training | National University of Ireland
I was thinking of making up vocabulary lists, and creating a "learn physics in English" course.

Guess not...
The idea is nice, I bet it is one of those things people (including myself) will say "Hey I thought of that too" but never did anything with it. You did!

Also, something that holds me back from using your service is that I don't like the design for something like my wallet. It looks a bit sporty so I don't want to stick it on my nice leather wallet or slick laptop. What about creating a few different styles?
All of this comes down to using the wrong tools for how you are programming. If your editor doesn't support the syntax and your debugger doesn't support the framework, you need to use different tools.
Currently violating stripe's ToS
There is a nasty source of "false retention" in conservative, stack-walking GC: pointers themselves! It's not just integer variables (and other data) which "look" like pointers.

Here is the scenario: a local variable in the C program holds the only pointer to a heap object. The object is no longer needed, so the program overwrites it with NULL. Now it is garbage, right? Wrong! The C compiler is optimizing, and has no clue about garbage collection (unlike, say, a proper Lisp compiler). The C compiler performs a data flow analysis and comes to conclusion that "ptr = NULL" is a dead assignment because the variable has no "next use" in the program graph. The assignment is optimized away, and so a memory location, or a register, continue pointing to the object. Sometimes this happens in some top-level function, and so during some long-lived execution of lower level functions, memory is occupied. Only if you're lucky, the memory location or register get reused for something else and so the stale pointer is overwritten.

If you're using infinite lazy lists, and are counting on the prefix of these lists to be garbage-collected, as you extend the tail, spurious retention of the list head is the kiss of death to your program.
There's a really interesting presumption in some of the comments on this post. Namely, that getting the job after an interview is the default outcome, and that any other represents an exceptional condition.

In every place that I have worked, making an offer (and landing the candidate) is the exceptional condition. Each step through the recruiting process (resume submission, one or more phone screens, one or more rounds of interviews, extension of an offer, and negotiation around terms and conditions) results in fewer and fewer candidates. I have no idea what the pass rate for each stage is at a typical high-tech company, but I would guess that it could be between 10% and 15% at best.

In other words, odds are that you are not going to get the job.

Separately, there's no reasonable and legally defensible way to provide official feedback if the interview process results in a no-hire decision. The interview is your chance to put your best foot (brain?) forward. If you got post-interview feedback that said "Your linked-list implementation was O(N3) and we wanted O(N)," or "Several of your responses were not in harmony with the way that we like to build systems" how would you respond, and how would hiring companies and managers handle the situation with any degree of efficiency? You had your chance (the interview) to make the case.
Well. That was decidedly whiny.
That's a pretty compelling argument. I guess it's time to switch.
Can the Facebook tab not tell when it has focus?
None of the usernames he usually uses seem to be registered. He does respond frequently on Reddit. Maybe there's an equivalent thread over there? He seems to be too busy coding to respond to any comments at the moment, though.
In case you're asking this out of curiosity and not rhetorically (which your last sentence makes me think it's the latter..)

I'd say prison should exclude fundamentally non-violent crimes on the part of the person taking the action. People who have to be isolated from society, not because they've done something that violates some law, but because they've proven that they are a clear and present danger to others. Robbers, rapists, murderers, and so on.

I say this because prison has incredibly deleterious effects on the human psyche. As long as our system is about punishment rather than reform, I cannot in good faith condemn someone to that fate unless there is literally no other option to keep them from harming further.

This guy is both older and well off. There are ways to obtain restitution that don't involve having him spend years among violent criminals and ending up more damaged than when he went in.
Maybe it's time for me to quit the VIM/Emacs addiction.
We wrote it ourselves.
I agree. A big part of the valuation of twitch.tv is it's positioning in the market. It doesn't make sense to drastically shock that positioning while locking out a large contingent of users in the process.

If Amazon wanted a similar service to make exclusive to the Kindle ecosystem, it would make much more sense to grow one themselves with deep integration into the kindle line of products. They've done this with a lot of other products and services, and certainly have the capability.

With Twitch, it would seem to make more sense for them to continue to seek partnerships with gaming platforms so that the Twitch.tv brand is increasingly ubiquitous in gaming, and then use that as a relatively extrinsic source of growth.

I could see them locking out strategic players (hint: Google), and making certain events or content exclusive to the Kindle ecosystem, but locking everything down to Kindle doesn't strike me as a viable move.
A Dutch supermarket does this too with the discount card you can attach to your keys (or put in your wallet).

http://www.ah.nl/sleutelservice