skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
|In the current study, Jodi Gilman, PhD, Anne Blood, PhD, and Hans Breiter, MD, of Northwestern University and Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare the brains of 18- to 25-year olds who reported smoking marijuana at least once per week with those with little to no history of marijuana use.

Most people who consume marijuana regularly would not admit that information. This is not and cannot be a representative sample. Also correlation causation problems and tiny (20 people) sample size.
I'd also add that as you get older you tend to have more responsibilities like kids or a mortgage, which can be difficult to handle in the unstable world of early stage companies.
you and the author are both just running on anecdotes. I'd love to see a larger data set of satisfaction, working hours, hourly wage, etc.
I'll definitely try this app out. Also, love the title!

Getting hacked? Make an app! Feeling paranoid? Make an app! House getting repossessed? Make an app! Hangover? Make an app!
hmm. "computer" is grouped with "mathematical" jobs. And these people are less likely to come in early and less likely to stay late. Seems reasonable...
I don't know where to start.

Crimea? Always was Russian. Once given as a "present" to Ukraine. Do you doubt that a second referendum would give a different result?
What did the west do in and with Yugoslavia?
What about the NATO expansion towards Russia?
What would the US do if Russia starts fucking around with Mexico?

Read this book and understand the foreign policy of the US and all the conflicts happening near Russia (Georgia, Ukraine etc.)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Grand-Chessboard-Geostrategic-Impe...

Or a little bit information from "the other side"
http://www.vineyardsaker.co.nz/

The EU has nothing to do in Ukraine. And if people want to secede, why not let them?

Instead of the US/EU Freetrade agreement, the EU should have offered the deal to Putin and the problem if Ukraine does the deal with the EU or Russia would have been non-existent. A freetrade zone from Vladivostok to Lisbon would have been created.
Ask HN: Why all the hubub about type casting?
Hey Nerds,

I'm a pretty young-to-average hacker, at 23, and I'm curious to get explanations on why so many job specs stress experience in both static and dynamically typed languages. Now I totally understand that there is a major difference between the two language designs, and you end up doing a lot of different things depending on the language. However, they aren't so mutually exclusive as to say that experience in one doesn't apply to the other. So why do job listings seem to make such a differentiation?

Context: I prefer to script in Javascript and PHP. And I use lots of mixed types. I find it to be the most extendable and convenient. But I also have built apps using Java and Objective C, which are far more strictly typed. And while different, I wouldn't say that I specialize in one or the other, they are just very different.

If you have written a dev spec distinguishing between language typing, what were you trying to do?
The research that is the subject of this article[1] made the rounds a few months ago in the anti-cannabis movement. Here are some excerpts worth repeating:

"Marijuana participants were not excluded if they had used other illegal drugs in the past"

Also, in the 2nd to last paragraph (emphasis mine):

"This preliminary study has several caveats. First, the sample size does not provide power to examine complex interactions such as sex differences. Because this is a cross-sectional study, causation cannot be determined, although marijuana exposure parametrically correlated with structural differences, which suggests the possibility of causation. Longitudinal studies are needed to determine whether marijuana exposure explicitly leads to the differences observed in this study."

Checking out some of the players where the research money came from (National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Counterdrug Technology Assessment Center), it is no wonder the various news articles and the paper itself tried so hard to illustrate some causation. They ended up with a handful of people and some correlative results.

[1] - http://jn.sfn.org/press/April-16-2014-Issue/zns01614005529.p...
Isn't Obama-care supposed to solve the benefits problem?
How many programming questions do you field a day? I think it's probably 3 or 4 for me. I probably bother people 3 or 4 times a day too.

Every one of those conversations happens in someone's office right now, and distracts at most 2 people.

How long does it take for you to get "back in the groove" afterwards? Probably 5-10 minutes for me, more if I was doing something particularly intensive.

Now, lay out me and my ten coworkers in an open floor plan and watch what happens.

There's no way it works.
> If 'cron' suddenly acquired a staff of 40, I would start looking for alternatives.

How accessible is Cron to people?

For the consumer, almost all aspects of computing are becoming ubiquitous: except programming. Tools like those provided by IFTTT are enabling people to do more with their devices.

Someday, programming will also be ubiquitous (it probably won't even be called programming anymore).
Starting a company? Always start with a spreadsheet
What is the alternative to using supernodes in a P2P system?
Yeah, the Valley definitely has "Web Goggles" on at the moment. That's why the "usual suspects" are the usual suspects--it's just what people out here seem to think of when they hear "programmer." It's a bit sad, actually. I moved here expecting the opportunities to be a bit more broad than they seem to be. As a result, I'm considering an attempt to move into the trading/finance space (I've a very analytical/quantitative background related to my prior life in scientific research, but little desire to return to that).
I'm not convinced. I'm in an engineering area but if it's open plan then I'd still be able to see people, hear their (arguably more interesting than sales) conversations, and constantly have to split attention between monitoring the area around me and focusing on whatever problem I'm solving.

An engineer coming into my cube to chat a few minutes ago is what distracted me and now I'm frustrated and browsing HN. It's bad enough in high-walled cubicles; I don't know that I could maintain deep focus for meaningful amounts of time in an open plan.

I put a door on my cubicle recently and being able to mentally expand to fill my space while free from worrying about anybody else has done wonders for my productivity.
Take a look at the docs. MD5 is an option for network transportation of the password - almost the entire world transports it in plain text. It's a "you are doing it wrong if you need this, but it won't hurt if you don't need - so we'll keep it" feature, with the correct recomendation (using SSL) made all around.

Anyway, the password will be stored in plain-text just a few servers away. It has to be. Whatever hash they use, hashing it will be as useless.
Most of the apps that run on my android phone are some of the most clunky and unresponsive applications I have ever had the displeasure to use, so I don't think you can place this blame on web apps.

Still, grumpy old non-web developers love to blame their favorite whipping-boy. If pretending that web dev is an inherently poor quality technology makes you feel better, please carry on. Whatever gets you through your day, man. Just please don't start thinking your thoughts are clever or constructive.
"So what's your definition of capitalism?" - Mutual, voluntary free economic association of trade in commodity, time and subjective value.

The original definition was prior to that, first used by Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in a positive, anti-feudalist sense.

Those two are components of Capitalism, but by no means is is inclusive of the concept of central governance. When banks are centralised, they aren't privately owned.

When the money and currency itself is printed and distributed by a central regime, it isn't private. So when the value itself isn't private, then ownership of capital isn't private.

The terminology to best describe this hybrid of centralised ownership of currency and labor and partial free-markets are better described as 'Corporatism' or to be more brutal an 'Oligarchy'.
IT professionals (as a group) aren't really any different than any other group of workers.
Coolhouse Labs Accelerator Demo Day 1PM ET
It probably does happen. We know about the "parallel construction" thing, telling us that regular law enforcement is seeing some of the gathered data. And they may be acting prejudicially.

But this isn't related to the surveillance thing as such. Criticism of this racism, if it exists, should be targeted at some combination of the prejudice in the police agencies, the leaking of the data that's supposed to be locked in a vault, and at a stretch, the lopsided impact of the laws on various racial groups.
I can create 100% growth by changing my customer base from 1 to 2.

Google can create 0.001% growth by adding another 100,000 customers (made up percentage, you get the idea).

Is 100% > 0.001%? Not by my math.

You know who is changing the world? Some engineer working on optimizing the cache lines on some Intel processor. Her work will, over the life of the chip, save millions to perhaps billions of hours, with similar effects on watts used, time wasted, and so on.

Can that Intel engineer give #s to quantify her impact on the world? Not likely. It doesn't mean that it isn't there, nor that a rational person cannot recognize it.
Yeah, 20 people doesn't make a study, it makes a basis for forming a hypothesis for potentially going after a grant to actually do a study.
"No forward security yet? Hold off on this until it has that."

Ok, but presumably if the only services I "route" through ZT are encrypted (like ssh, or forward-secure HTTPS) then I don't care, right ?
It's important to note that the study itself seems to make no mention of negative effects. Change yes, but not all change is negative. The article casts this as proof that marijuana is bad for you, but the study itself only notes evidence of an effect on brain structure... Not what the change means in real world terms.
You still need to build native versions for every platform your app will ever run on. If you had that, the package manager would be easy.
It is unfortunate that this article gets featured when the author is obviously blowing smoke; it would be great to hear from someone actually in this boat.

The comments there pointed out another article by the same author last year, explaining how he turned down multiple jobs to start his own web design company: http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/09/heres_why_why_more_a...
Yeah I'll be adding a page for that soon.

Right now it's iOS 6+ and Android 4+. It works on windows tablet, but I haven't been able to get my hands on a windows phone.
Also, it works on all modern desktop browsers, IE 10+, with IE 9 support coming soon.

I'll add a page in the docs for this soon.
The specific http issue is already solved by browserify.

http://browserify.org/
The $free alternative of incarceration remains, independent of whether costly alternatives exist.

Alas, human nature is such that making it easy "to get their life back together after committing the 1st crime" decreases the incentive to do so. The main point of sentencing is to discourage recidivism.

I'm concerned about a subculture normalizing crimes, 1st or subsequent. Objecting to punishment with zero consideration of the cause thereof facilitates the underlying problem.
That is a very western-ish view of how things in Russia are. You judge them by your own ideals.

Yes, there might be some pro-russian international media that is not controlled by Kremlin, but most of the time you can trace the money to Russia. We can discuss any specific examples that you want - I'm not claiming knowledge here, but I don't want to do a lot of research for a HN comment. I'll give one example - rt.com.

I mean, you "think" that is a fallacy, but what do you base it on? Do you think things like this don't indicate a thing? http://rsf.org/index2014/en-index2014.php

I'm not claiming there is no pro-russian international media that is not funded by Russia. I am saying it will be difficult to find it.

Imagine all the TV be like Fox News and actually controlled by the Government. You will get closer to Russian reality.

You also have to understand that whatever you read in english, that comes from things like rt.com is adapted to a broader and more intelligent audience and to foreigners. What you get in russian is different.

Disclaimer - I am a lithuanian, I am exposed to lithuanian media which covers things from Ukrainian perspective, sometimes covers news from the Separatist side; I am exposed to western media. Sadly, my russian is quite poor, so I'm not exposed to russian media in russian much.
So Marijuana damages the brain or is a gateway drug or both.
One of the problems with the illegality of cannabis is that research is terrible because of the laws.

I strongly favour legalisation of all drugs. This would allow much better research.

Having said that the knee-jerk denialism that cannabis could possibly cause any harm at all is weird to see on HN.
Huh? The only mention of a checksum also acknowledges it's possible to brute-force reverse it, aka not one-way.
It's a close cousin of what we see in the article.

When the system that rips me off daily offers me the option to get ripped off in a small way to avoid getting ripped off in a big way, I don't feel like I'm really SAVEing.
One thing that is very discounted in the OP is the government. Many very good programmers work in the DOE, DOD, and other 4 to 3 letter named departments. Programmers, like the rest of us, are very diverse people. SOme like the 'fun' you talk of, some really value the stability of a mega corp or the CIA. Some are there only for the problems and their personal interest in them, some are there for their kids and kiss off the desk at 5pm exactly. Some like to paint, some like to go to Burning Man. Programming talent and 'rockstar' status is independent from motivations to do a job I think.

Also, the assertion that most top talent work at mega corps is a statistics issue, as other comments mention. More jobs, as a percentage, are at mega corps and the government. But more companies are under 100 to 50 employees. So, if you look at it from a percent of programmers, you see many more at mega corps. But as a percent of top talent, you see more at small businesses, simply because you can determine the top talent easier at a start-up as there is less debate who the top people are. Other commenters explain this better, sorry.
I seriously do not know how people still manage to work like that.

One of my requirements is a private office. I will not do cubicles, I sure as hell will not do open plans. Office. Period.

I've turned down a few decent offers because of this, and I'm sure I'll turn down more in the future as well.
I have found that whatever peace blocking noise gives you, it is more than offset by the paranoia of being watched or the terror of people sneaking up behind you.
Get a good pair of over ear noise canceling headphones that are light. In-Ear work well but will probably start hurting you ears if you wear them for an extended period of time.
Yeah, my first thought was "Does it work if you're not looking at your hands?" Not a deal breaker though. I could see this combined with some hand mounted sensors to track out-of-view gross movement and just augment with the fine movement when in view.

EDIT: found this in the article: "It possesses greater-than-HD image resolution, color and infrared imagery, and a significantly larger field of view."
What I find is that the people that work for me are much more distracted by FB and the plethora of other web distractions than other developers.
Precision has to come from somewhere.

Having your actual production code read "call the function that does <this>" and the interpreter/compiler looks it up based on NLP of the documentation seems very silly and fragile and hard to debug.

Having an IDE that can look things up for you (whether full NLP or just keywords) in the API reference and give you a sorted-by-relevance list to pick from, seems like a great idea. (Some already look by substring matching what you type anywhere in the method name, rather than just as a prefix of the name. Which is already pretty good.)
"Computer science" tends to be a pretty ambiguously-defined term, largely because it's a pretty awful term. Everything from AS/400 business programming to combinatorial mathematics could be plausibly lumped under "computer science".

My anecdotal experience seems to match jerf's: I can't think of any undergraduate computer science program that appeared to favor math over at least moderately practical topics. But I've also not seen any undergraduate computer science program that appeared to be job training.

A local community college offers an associate's degree in "computer programming", and their graduates strike me as more obviously employable in the real world than area university computer science graduates. They learn skills that are known to be desired by major area employers, and the program seems to carry more of a "this is all about getting a job" sort of attitude.
>I think Merkel deserves at least a little credit for speaking out in public, even if some of it was for the elections.

She doesn't deserve any credit. As soon as she paid a visit to Obama, Germany went back to bending over for the U.S. All of the investigations in Germany were immediately shut down and they abandoned plans to have Snowden testify in court.
the code doesn't fail, the response just differs by client. for the purposes of your example, the "server" is a actually a client. and that's not a problem for the package manager to solve.

if anything, isn't this a great argument for a client/server package manager? you could write a library that knows to use and create a proxy if a specific client type tries to fetch cross domain.
* On top of the direct impact of interruptions and distractions, you'll want to be aware of the way you are seen to react to them.

Pay attention to who the rest of the office does or doesn't attend to when that person decides to convene a huddle or start soapboxing - regardless of the topic

Dutifully working away under your headphones when a ranking person is looking for attention is a great way to end up labeled in a bad way.

* Don't mistake an open floor plan for an open structure. Be careful about who you accept work from / collaborate with / delegate to until you understand the landscape.
Quora discussion on that topic here:

http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-Zapier-and...
Capitalism is the separation of state and economy. When governments set interest rates, print money, tax people and recruit through special interest, it's Corporatism.
IFTTT is at a great spot to bring simple programming & logic to non-programmers who just want to customize how they interact with technology just a little bit. Looks like Yahoo Pipes missed a big opportunity there.

However, the IFTTT homepage and WTF page are still too complicated for a casual visitor. The WTF page throws all these terms like Channels, Triggers, Actions, Ingredients, Recipes, etc instead of focusing on telling the visitor what they can do with IFTTT. The name (If This Then That) is amazing for explaining what IFTTT is. But, beyond that, they seem to be making things look more complicated than they need to be.
I like how the front page has a developer with his RSS reader full-screened not doing any actual work.
I worked at a company that did that. I think there might still have been a productivity loss. All the engineers and programmers got huge studio monitor headphones to shut out the sound of everyone else working. Because of that we all used instant messaging for most our communication even though we were sitting in the same room. We salvaged our productivity by essentially turning ourselves into telecommuters with a commute.

The sales and customer service roles were trying to schedule their calls to minimize the time when two people would be on the phone at the same time, in order to limit background noise.

I don't think the company could have afforded private offices, but I have a hard time believing all of that energy being put into working around the work environment was less expensive than the cost of some high partitions.
That two part documentary should be required viewing. For everyone.
"The fact that we have machines that run these theories is purely a sideline to the theories themselves."

I'm not sure you got my point entirely. If you've got a machine sitting there than can help you, you should use it.

If you're going to write about operating systems, you're an academic fool if you don't also actually take some time to gain some real experience on the very-cheap systems that can help validate that you actually do understand what you're learning about.

If you're going to do AI, you're an academic fool if you don't take the time to implement some of your theories and see how they actually perform. Who cares what someone hypothesizes may work in the field of computer vision if they have no implementation?

And so on and so forth. Even if it is just math, you are an idiot if you pass up the opportunity to implement something to verify your theories.

And the result will be courses, especially at the undergraduate level, that turn out to be useful both for academics, and for programmers who want to learn how to write theoretically grounded code. Which, remarkably, is exactly what we actually have.

You are not benefiting by trying to split academics off from practice. It's a stupid idea and a stupid ideal. It isn't a win for anybody.
How Software Groups Rot: Legacy of the Expert Beginner [2012]
I feel like any startup I could found wouldn't be one I'd find interesting to work at. My former boss was a PhD with decades of expertise in his field. Working for him was an experience I couldn't have made happen myself.
Hrm, I don’t quite like the arrows. C++ lambdas can contain arbitrary code and these arrows always remind me of “pure” functions (in a sense), or at least functions whose main purpose it is to map input arguments to output arguments.

For example, consider something like this relatively common block to do some complex operation on the elements of a vector using some (naive) threading (it might be nicer to first create some lambdas, push them into a queue and then spawn threads to work on that queue, but the syntax is essentially the same):

for(std::size_t i(0); i != somevec.size(); ++i) {
workers.push_back(std::thread([&somevec, i]() mutable { calc(somevec, i); }));
}

That is, we want an anonymous lambda which captures some elements of its environment (by both reference and value, also it’s essentially a closure by now) and call some function on these elements. That lambda doesn’t have any return value and doesn’t take any input arguments. Sure one could throw in an extra lambda somewhere or put an arrow between mutable and {, but I have to admit I don’t see the value.
We do. Heavily. They pay the bulk of all taxes.
While "sweat equity" is a fun ideal, in reality it is not very similar to passive equity. That is in essence what wealth in capitalism is. Income via passive equity.

When one is dependent on "their minds & muscles", what that actually means is that they are forced to work in government approved income activities(nothing illegal) or face imprisonment or death. That doesn't sound much like liberty to me. On the other hand, those with enough passive equity no longer need to work in government approved activities provided by the asset class, and very much do enjoy the benefits of liberty.

That said, it is very obvious to are tied to an ideology(likely because it benefits you a great deal personally), and I won't spend any more time trying to enlighten you.