skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think what your question implies is this: "I learned how to write Javascript in a black box where I'm not solving real world problems, and instead just learned how to print static text."

Programming, like anything, is a tool - you learn the features which might not sound like solutions to problems, and with practice you start crossing your programming mind with normal day to day mind. Let me give you an example.

I got the mega Creative Market Black Friday Photos bundle yesterday. To my surprise, the photos are all separate, so instead of one zip file for me to download, or a "Download All" button, it gave me a list of 100 or so buttons to click to download INDIVIDUALLY. Conveniently (or not), they added a "Save to Dropbox" button to each item, but that doesn't help at all, there's still no "Save all to Dropbox" button.

So after clicking on 5 or 6 items... I started to give up, then suddenly my programming mind jumped in and said to me "hey dude why don't just go into the console and select all the elements and do a `trigger('click')`?" So I jumped into the console, and typed

`$(".start-sync").trigger("click")`

I didn't even bother to check if the site uses jQuery, I just typed it in and it worked!

Now, if you were to jump in and helped them add a "Sync All to Dropbox" button, don't you think that's gonna be really beneficial to a lot of the users?

You might have learned the feature in jQuery to trigger an action, but to actually do something with it to solve a problem you need to not only learn the tools, but also start thinking about problems using your programmer brain.
Why do I still use a desktop for work?

Please re-read my comment; I've already conceded the workplace will remain a desktop/laptop domain for some time, and that I can't predict when that will change, and for the reasons I mentioned. And, as I said, I don't know how the workplace will play out on the desktop and laptop. I bet it will gradually show declining power for Microsoft and increasing market for Apple and various Linux variants (for different reasons).

So, I don't disagree with you. Desktops and laptops will stick around for a long time in some segments, including the workplace. I don't know how long that will last, possibly decades more. But, it doesn't matter; the desktop/laptop is already less important than the phone/table...and Linux won that market. It effectively won "Desktop 2.0".
Hey, thanks for the links. Also, nice job on Velocity. I'm still unconvinced that tweening is the way to go in most animation use cases (basic combinations of slides, fades, etc)

The bottom line is this: Most animation libraries write to the DOM every "frame". That's bad.

If you need complex timing control, nested timelines, hierarchical animations, etc. then a code-based solution will get you those things. However, they come at a cost and that cost is performance.

I think that if you can represent an animation in pure CSS, it will always be faster than implementing it in code, but I'm happy to be proven wrong :)
screwing with command line nonsense to make wifi and audio work reliably on my laptop isn't learning, it's technical masturbation. I want to use my computer to do actual work, not make-work.

This was within the last 12 months on ubuntu and a lenovo laptop, btw.
> after they spend too long looking at StackExchange trying to figure something out.

Why are they on Stack Exchange? If they are installing a Linux distro on a Windows computer, then of course you will have an unpleasant experience. If you want to use Ubuntu the right way without having to butt heads with anything, you buy a system from zareason / thinkpenguin / system76.

You can / will run into the same "searching the Internet" for problems installing Windows on your custom built gaming rig. Driver bugs, config issues, etc. Except for those you will end up digging through yahoo answers or windows help with even more misinformation and bloat.

In the end fundamentally it is not a problem with the Linux desktop. You can use a terminal on Windows as well, but you don't expect to because you bought a Windows computer and expect it to work. The same expectation should be had of prebuilt Ubuntu systems, and I think nowadays it lives up to expectation in my experience.
> Superfast stars would be another sort of “particles,” albeit huge, shining ones

Have I misunderstood the difference between stars and neutrinos my whole life or is the journalist getting creative?
That video is incredibly grating and slow to the point. And the mask just seems to be random faces mixed together, but they did it in such a poor way it just produced random garbage.

This guy seems to be optimizing his mask to fool facial recognition.
Bit of self promotion, but related due to the dataset:

http://deeplearning4j.org/facial-reconstruction-tutorial.htm...

It's pretty neat seeing what a "general" face looks like.
This happens all the time, massive overpriced contracts to gov cronies of what is essentially just a glorified database http://www.vancouversun.com/touch/story.html?id=9840193

http://www.techvibes.com/blog/bc-government-scraps-scrap-89-...
You hit the nail on the head with a huge question, not sure if was on purpose or not but well done.

Your question is much more important than learning code even for a long time. That is a good start. Even super great developers never solve a real problem.

Solving a problem, demonstrating a business model and creating a successful start up are -to my eyes- more and less the same thing and takes years of extraordinary hard work, much more work than people at an office could even imagine.

My advice, watch all these videos are amazingly useful http://startupclass.samaltman.com and try to attach as much as possible to the advices.

Best of the luck! Great start.

Regards.
I just hope that Phoenix sticks it out for the long run. Other Elixir frameworks like Sugar and Dynamo are nearly dead by now.

Secondly, I hope that the original dev team sticks around too. The Erlang web framework - ChicagoBoss - has had its development slowed down ever since Evan Miller stepped down.
Every Lesson Should Be a Hackathon
> but it never fails to boot,

Except when it does. I have a friend who got a virus that deleted the Windows bootloader / ntldr from C:, but hes not as technically literate and lives two states away.

Nothing can fix it. He does not have the technical wherewithal to remove the drive and recover files, there is no way to rewrite those specific files without reformatting the disk, and if the Windows install CD does not fix it (and it did not) you have no resources to try to resolve it.

With Linux, he would have had a live USB on hand, and if it failed to boot he could have reinstalled over his root partition and have all his personal files preserved while effectively resetting the environment.
Google HR disagrees with the the assumption about GPA correlating to ability

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013-...
I can't prove that the pando article is wrong, but I can't prove that this guy is wrong either.

Either way, I'm using I2P instead for my projects.
No compelling reason? you should probably read the docs a bit more. If you don't have any philosophical concerns with systemd, then you will find a lot to love there.
A quarter billion dollars on a provincial software project. This is absolutely mind boggling. Between this and the Presto boondoggle[1] we are probably closing in on a billion dollars being lit on fire in Ontario alone.

[1] http://www.thepost.on.ca/2012/12/13/presto-yet-another-liber...
Actually that's a brilliant answer! I absolutely believe that in order to really succeed in mathematics one must pay their dues in time. You put it exceptionally well.

My thoughts of the day is, would it be possible to mentor people through this process online. I quite often tutor my university age son, his friends, my neighborhood kids, and colleagues in single variable calculus level math. I was looking around and couldn't find a lot of resources online to really teach math. Sure there is text and simple explanation, even some courses like MIT opencourseware and such. But nothing that really replicates the experience of learning math, if that makes sense.

And now, in fact, it does make sense. Because it lacks the mentorship of a university professor. Now the question is, does: is a good University classroom the only way to get that level of mentorship?
Twitter Co-Founder Sells Shares for First Time
True. But my read of the OP is that they learned for the pleasure and interest of it. They want to "solve problems" for the intellectual satisfaction and joy of doing so, not because someone is paying them or anticipating doing so.

We have to master the skills before we get rewarded for them.
Start. Jump in head first. Before you're ready.

I made my first video game when I was 13 years old. I made it because I wanted to make something for a girl I liked. I used Macromedia Flash, learned as I went along, and never lost site of the goal. I had to impress this girl.

Sometimes we are inspired by technology to do things. The reason an engineer might give to building something bizarre: "I'm building this because I can." I think it's better to have the goal in mind first, though of course we may only think of solutions to problems because we also understand the tools we have available to us.

It's easy to solve a problem with programming once you know what problem you want to solve. I don't think anything great is made when you try to come up with a product based purely on technology. It's great that you learned JavaScript, I happen to think programming is a blast! And learning new tools, languages, frameworks, or paradigms are always great for the left side of my brain. But programming has always been the most fun, most rewarding, and easiest when I'm deep into solving a problem. The "how" is straightforward: you Google the error message, you Google the 'how to perform X function with Y language on Z platform', you ask friends and family to test and break your likely fragile baby, you build a business, et cetera.

Try to solve an issue you have. Try to solve someone else's issue. Try to solve an issue many people have. Or, browse GitHub.com, and work on another person's solution.

Did the girl I made that game for ever go out with me? No. But it didn't matter.

I got started.
huh? this is the first release to really require systemd. how could you have been waiting for a fork when one wasn't even necessary until a release that isn't even marked stable yet.
This was only in Ontario, so $18/citizen
> ! is special also, use !! to get !

The exclamation point forces direct addressing in the 6800 assembler. I can't believe I remember that.
My phone is too small -- how many pixels do I need in order for your mJS to render?
I've only got a very small value of "few" to jump into this argument, but let me provide a (slightly hyperbolic) counterpoint: electrical engineers often are crap programmers.

Don't get me wrong, some of the best programmers I've worked with graduated with an EE degree, but they were working as programmers. If you're not, than matters concerning programming require a context switch that often isn't fully made, resulting in a slightly messed up mindset that usually doesn't produce the most optimal results.

This is similar to programmers doing UI/UX, which most of the time doesn't even result in a good UI for programmers, let alone mortal users.

Not saying that this was the case here, though. When you've got some serious hardware constraints, it's easy enough to lowball your ambitions, even though theoretically something more generic could be made. Not every team has a Niklaus Wirth in it.
Wow, this is very impressive. Some people say that anything that can be done in a C-type language will be done in JS between five and ten years later -- this is evidence for that point.

The gameplay feels nice, and it reminds me of Caesar II, if that game is familiar to anyone. That being said, I think the game would benefit from introducing a few objectives.
I love the idea of combining this with the idea of proving code.

Like, "how can I prove my approach 'shuffles' an array?" ... I mean, just because it looks right... doesn't mean it is.
Really useful to remind yourself of this!
Right. That's what's frustrating about WebGL.
it's useful in practice for denoising file names. unfortunately rails doesn't do this at all, and every controller file is something like `app/controllers/foo_controller.rb`. in Python, if you had a file `app/controllers/foo.py` you'd be able to `from app.controllers import foo`, which is more useful and does an equally good job of declaring the file is a controller without having to write `_controller.rb` every time you do anything with a file.
Little from who's perspective?

For Microsoft, it's little -- and most of Microsoft's revenues are from licensing, though principally of software.

For Samsung, with $307 billion in income and $30 billion in profits, it's still a relatively small share of costs.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-12/samsung-invests-in-...
as much as I don't want to quote dhh about anything: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.htm...

in short, since Rails 3 there is no "Rails Way"
Why the West should be worried about Chinese Eugenics (2013)
Sandwich video has done product videos for Slack, Coin, Airbnb, Square, etc. http://sandwichvideo.com
Clarke also predicted genetically engineered chimpanzee slaves, the 'Superchimp' (or 'Simp' for short). Leaving aside the ethical issues this raises, it indicates that he thought that it was more likely that such a creature would be created than intelligent robots.

http://nemaloknig.info/read-88307/
Patent laws have changed. It's now first to file, not first to invent.
Big issue here is the issue that open source has with designers. It's really frustrating to try to get a clear vision executed in the "doocracy" of an OSS project, where developers will often implement features to "scratch an itch".
Cool tangential topic: http://www.onformative.com/lab/googlefaces/

...Reminds of being up at night as a kid, and seeing faces in shadows, patterns on the wall, vvhatever
I think the issue is monorails (monolithic rails apps). If you have a single domain object you're representing that's that complex, you'd done a poor issue of modeling your domain. It doesn't matter if you write the logic in the model or controller, at that point you're just pushing code around -- you need better abstractions.
wonderful news!
If you're interested in languages like this, often called "High-Level Assemblers", you might be interested in L.in.oleum[0], a portable assembler designed to aid the creation of a sequel to the game Noctis IV, or Octo[1], a purpose-built HLA I designed targeting the Chip8 virtual game console.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linoleum_(programming_language)
[1]https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Octo
Finding Faces in Google Maps
> JSON rendering performance is a major concern for most of my Rails apps

I've always wondered why this is the case. Faster JSON libraries don't seem to help. Similar frameworks don't have this problem. It just seems the Rails serialization code is slow in and of itself, it's not what it calls out to. Maybe there's a contention issue somewhere?
"For the special case of the ejection of binary stars, described in Section 6, we employ octuple floating-point precision (~64 digits)."

http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.5022
I just re-read some docs, and I still can't see any compelling reasons. I'm not concerned about booting a few seconds faster (I only reboot my servers once every year at most). Regarding memory footprint: that has never been an issue. Binary logfiles are a disadvantage to me.
For having the chance to keep on trying.
Full article via google: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
I've also been treating RSI in the framework of Mindbody Prescription. I'm still just starting with meditation, but it seems like the main skill it teaches (this post describes it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8670184) is precisely what's good for getting over the RSI(like) problem: the main thing is to understand the 'sensations' aren't something that you need to deal with when they arise, it's okay if they arise—just let them pass. I'd gotten into a way of thinking that if the sensations were there it meant things were going poorly, if not they were going well; while what seems better is, things are okay either way. You don't want to stop the sensations, you want to understand they aren't harmful. I've done a decent survey of meditation literature, and I think a good overview from a number of perspectives would be this one: http://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Guide-Meditation-Inspiration...

Also, I thought this book was better than any of Sarno's for TMS stuff http://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Recovery-Back-Neck-Pain-ebook/dp...

Lemme know if you have other questions or anything.
This. I can not put my words any better than this.

I used to dislike Rails, since it seemed to be too much abstraction that would require time to learn. I now have the same feeling about Phoenix. I could put up a simple web app quickly with Erlang and Cowboy. With Phoenix, I needed to read documents and the source code to figure out what all the imports are doing.
Phoenix is here to stay. My first commit was a year ago, with the goal of web framework to replace all my Ruby work, both for clients and personal projects. Since then, I've spent hundreds of hours on the framework, spoke about it at ElixirConf, and started building prod systems with it. We've also had the pleasure of José Valim joining the phoenix-core team and contributing some really great work. We're just getting started.
Facts are non-negotiable.
Show HN: Morbid Motivation – Chrome Extension, Looking for JavaScript Feedback
This is the first complete JS "program" I've written; I've done debugging before, but I don't think I fully understand the JS way of things yet. I'm wondering if I've goofed in a really basic way?

On the web store : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/morbid-motivation/kjpeibokdagajocicdijpeognkpccphj

On Github : https://github.com/jack-song/MorbidMotivation/blob/master/countdown.js

I'm definitely a beginner so any feedback (even non-JS) would be very greatly appreciated!
The Problem of Offshoring IT
Elixir is great. I just wish its syntax was more appealing; some of the design choices are a little idiosynchratic. Using "do..end" is natural in Ruby for blocks, but Elixir uses it for everything, and it looks pretty odd:

Enum.map [1, 2, 3], fn(x) -> x * 2 end

or:

receive do
{:hello, msg} -> msg
{:world, msg} -> "won't match"
end

The "do" syntax is in fact syntactic sugar for keyword arguments, which is suprising and a little disappointing, especially when you realize that constructs like "if", "case" and "receive" are in fact implemented as functions. Sacrificing syntactic elegance for consistency ("everything is a function") might be clever, but is it an improvement over hard-wiring this stuff into the language as first-class keywords? I personally don't think so.

It's a minor point, and not major enough to make me not use Elixir, but when someone goes this far in putting a nicer skin around Erlang, it's disappointing to find newly-invented blemishes that are as weird as the ones it aimed to smooth over in the first place.
That's not the way it works. First to file vs. invent has to do with two independent inventors creating something and trying to file. If something has already been invented and is publicly available (patented or not), that's prior art and can invalidate the patent.
Which is currently driven up in price by cheap money that has nowhere else to go for safe yields (after the stock collapse in '00 and the real estate collapse of '08).

http://giannini.ucop.edu/media/are-update/files/articles/V15...
The brain and nervous system changes based on it's use and function. Look up neoroplasticity. This is nothing new. A placebo could certainly elicit a change within 8 weeks if participants thought it was helping them cope with stress. If you think dancing clockwise in a circle for ten minutes a day will help you, it probably will. That doesn't mean there is anything useful in the practice.
Who the fuck would pay for that, when WinDirStat, KDirStat, and Grand Perspective are all free, and far more powerful, while still being quite easy to use.

It seems to get mentioned EVERYWHERE, but it offers nothing compelling.
The Power of a Brand.
Yep, aka rcNG: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix01/freenix01/full...
I'm not quite sure I understand what you are saying here. I don't think anyone is saying that you need to understand all the underlying code, but this is just something you should be aware of as you are building network-connected applications. Just like a web developer needs to be aware of CSRF, XSS, etc. Every language that I know of short-circuits string comparisons like this. You should know that you need to seek out a constant-time compare though when comparing hashes or other secrets.

Your sleep hack is probably less secure. I remember reading somewhere that doing random sleep() calls is flawed and doesn't completely mitigate the attack, but does increase the number of requests needed to get a good statistical analysis.
Yes. 1.5, if my mind serves correctly. Later on, LSB tried to do something similar for sysvinit using initscript headers that were interpreted by an external insserv program, but these proved to be far more fragile compared to rcorder(8).
Everyone knows that Python's performance is generally pretty bad, but that seems almost comical to me. How can it take more than 400 cycles just to do a procedure call and return?

There's all the instructions in the interpreter's main loop (which probably contains a bunch of call/returns on its own...), plus the cycles needed to read the instructions it's interpreting (including the manual management of the VM's call stack), then throw in a cache miss or two, and 400 cycles starts looking pretty good for an interpreted language.

I'm of the opinion that if call/return time is taking up a significant portion of the total running time of a program, then the problem is with the program's structure and nothing is going to solve it better than fixing the code itself (e.g. don't break it up into so many little pieces that most of the functions don't do much more than call others; but don't inline too much, since that'll increase cache misses.) All the clever trickery with stack/heap allocation to bring down the overhead is interesting, but it can't ever beat the zero cycles of not doing a call at all. As the saying goes, "the fastest way to do something is to not do it at all."
I always find submissions from that site to be fascinating. I should take the time to read through it on my own.
This isn't quite what most people think. Prior art still invalidates patents. "First to file" is merely the method now used to deal with two or more parties claiming to have invented a thing in secret who show up at the patent office more or less at the same time. Before, there used to be a trial type thing where the inventors presented lab notebooks and evidence to try to prove who was first. It was lengthy and expensive for all involved.

First to file does not mean first to pluck some heretofore unpatented but well known already used technology from the field and run to the patent office.
The other way to look at it is that Haskell allows all of this information which would be otherwise implicitly embedded in the abstractions, style, and conventions of a language to float to the top to a formal, verified type language.

So you can see them as a primary tool to handle the complexity or the driving force for exposing all the complexity in the first place!