skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>How do I learn that?

I had (have?) the same issue. Maybe it's something that experienced programmers take for granted; there is a huge disconnect between writing code and developing software.

I've asked the same question, and received the same answer: get your hands dirty. I agree with the premise, and am working on it. But there's the disconnect. I can write a little Python, but have you ever tried to set up a Python development environment on your computer? I don't understand 95% of what is required.

All that said, I'm way ahead of where I was when I started, a year or so ago. I'll keep plugging away, and recommend doing the same. Hopefully we see a few good replies here to help us out.
> But Bob here is your local government! So the fight necessarily involves you and everyone else who lives in the area.

Which is why I'm not a fan of contracts between A and B, when one of the terms is that A will take money from me and give it to B.
As others have mentioned, you need to practice solving problems with increasing complexity. You can try Project Euler which has lot of mathematical/computer programming problems.
https://projecteuler.net/problems

You can also try daily programmer subreddit
http://www.reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer

If you want to practice with Bioinformatics problems:
http://rosalind.info/problems/list-view/
What if you're an existing customer?
OPEC Policy Ensures U.S. Shale Crash, Russian Tycoon Says
Pick a small, simple project that will force you to learn new things and put pieces together. My favorite starter server project is building a super simple URL shortener. You just need to render a page with a form, accept a POST from that form submission with the URL to shorten, hash the URL, store it in a database, return the hash, and set up a GET that maps your hashes to your URLs by looking up against the database.

The most important thing with beginner projects is scope. Pick MVP versions of things you want to make and build out.
Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Edit: Original seems up again
When did Russia and Israel become part of Europe? The title is a little misleading.
numbering should start at 0.
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...

He also made comments about using Basic. Seems you made the wrong choices...
I've often felt the same way. I've found things just by spending time brainstorming, and keeping it in the back of my mind as I go about my week. You can actually come up with a lot of ideas just by practicing observation of daily tasks you have.

I'd also recommend attending a Startup Weekend or hackathon of some kind and just joining up with a group working on something interesting. Being around the creativity at these can the wheels turning even afterwards
This is a beta product, and we put that up on the docs so people can understand in its current state what it's capable of and what it isn't. One thing we didn't put in the docs is that we can change the target of a new system to an old server's backup. So in the case of your server going up in smoke, you would simply open a uservoice ticket (or email me using my profile info), fire up a new server installed with JARVYS (disabling the cronjob until you're restored), and we'd change the target UUID to that of the new server, allowing you to restore from your old backups.

Soon we will have it where you can simply select any other server from your account to restore from it to any other server on your account, and the docs will be updated with how to do it.
> making desktop environments and regular GUI applications dependent upon it
There are precisely _zero_ applications in the world which depend on systemd. They depend on APIs, and would be happy to use an API by a different application.
The current issue is that systemd is the only one providing these APIs, and no one has done the work to replace it yet. Be patient, or write your own as you do with everything else anyways.

> an intentional and strong lack of portability
He doesn't want the added complexity to support OSs which are over a decade behind. Should Microsoft still support Windows XP?
Seems like some of the BSDs are already planning on forking it anyways, which is precisely what he wanted.

> pushing software into production servers before it is stable and mature
It's been on production servers over at Red Hat for about three years now, and thus quite mature.

> the backroom politics involved in this displacing other competing technologies
I haven't seen any proof of this yet, but feel free to link some beyond him showing why systemd is better. Is he actively poaching OpenRC developers or something? Shit, even the upstart creator admitted systemd was designed better.

> the move to corruptible binary log files
It's just KEY=value. When a log file is corrupt, it's just the particular portion of the entry which is affected, you can still read the others.
Or, just have it forward to the syslog of your choice.

> the assimilation and/or replacement of countless other services that already have more mature and stable implementations
While being maintained under the "systemd" umbrella, only journald is required by systemd. Feel free to ignore the rest if you don't approve.

> The PID1 requirement
This is _absolutely necessary_ for any init system. The very definition of "init" implies it.

> coupling itself tighter with the kernel
There have been zero changes which will _only_ effect systemd.

> the aggressive and hostile attitudes of the lead developers
Mr. P is actually incredibly kind and helpful, you shouldn't only look at the few cases where the peanut gallery pipes up. See: Linux, Theo De Raadt...

> the complete lack of choice being provided from nearly all major distros
It's always been like this, you just haven't noticed. How many other init systems did they have scripts for before? That's right, none.

> Debian dismissing their heritage as a rock-solid, stable, conservative distro
Refer to me mentioning that systemd has been battle tested already, and has the full backing and support from a commercial entity on top of that.

> Further, rc.d really isn't anywhere near as bad as SysVinit
You chose one of the simplest examples possible with Mumble, and it's still needlessly complex. RC still uses a scripting language as a necessity instead of declarative syntax, needs a process watchdog, unique device names, socket activation, etc.
Compare it to systemd:

[Unit]
Description=Mumble Daemon
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/murmurd -fg -ini /etc/murmur.ini

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
The article wasn't horrible. While it doesn't have any takeaways as far as next steps, it does introduce the idea that things actually are complicated. It's the start of a dialogue beyond just pointing at tech companies. It brings up points that need to be considered in what actually is a complicated situation, and that's better than pretty much everything else that has been written about the subject.
http://waltherpragerandphilosophy1.blogspot.ro/2013/02/techn...
Working on an Emacs lisp package docs generator
Hi,

I'm working on a emacs lisp package API documentation generator at the moment, and would like to know if there's a need for this kind of things in the Emacs community.

Have a look what it does generator:

Source codebase: https://github.com/tonini/alchemist.el Generated docs: http://bit.ly/ELISP-DOCS

I know that emacs serves an AMAZING documentation functionality, so that wasn't the reason to play around with this kind of generator. But sometimes I would like to have a look into an package/API before installing it and use it.

I appreciate any kind of feedback.

Cheers
Since the site seems to be down, I'll mention that there was an article on Medium covering this artists' work a few days ago: https://medium.com/matter/this-is-what-your-face-looks-like-...

Seems like what he did was take Umass' Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, combine all the faces together and generate a composite rendering. Hardly a representation of "What your face looks like to Facebook".

Articles like this do little to advance the discussion of the real concerns around facial recognition other than scare folks into an Orwellian vision of the future a la Hollywood and Minority Report.

In addition to the work that the NTIA is doing around setting privacy standards for facial recognition applications (http://www.ntia.doc.gov/other-publication/2014/privacy-multi...) there are a lot of companies using the technology for good, but it is very difficult to get as much press and attention for those types of positive stories.

For example, my own company, (http://www.kairos.com) is working with some very brave and passionate guys at HelpingFaceless.com in India who are using facial recognition to help combat the growing problem of child trafficking and enslavement in India.

See more about their story here: http://social.yourstory.com/2014/07/helping-faceless/
This does pose the question whether these mask work in real life. I bet their software uses the fact that they can control the lightning and picture quality. Creating a direct copy of a face seems easier for real life purposes anyway.

Other than demonstrating the flaws of current facial recognition algorithms there does not seem to be any use for this.

Anyway, pretty cool use of evolutionary algorithms and nice pictures.
I would love to see openresty in there too.
wow thanks this is awesome
Unfinished Business movie trailer
Trailblazer looks interesting, and there are a lot of good ideas in here. One issue I have with it after reading the documentation is that the code is organized around "Concepts" and at the core of each Concept appears to be a single Model. All of the Form, Presenter, and other Operation objects live within a Model's namespace where often the @model is implicit. This works well if your business logic only applies to CRUD operations on individual Models, but in reality that is rarely the case.

I tend to use a service object abstraction based around concerns, or "business stories". My service objects map to specific scenarios or pieces of business logic that often utilize multiple underlying Models and/or other entities (eg. third party interactions services).

It wasn't clear to me whether such a scenario is discouraged with Trailblazer, or maybe not even possible.
Thanks for this. I'd never heard of him, but after a bit of googling, reading and mentally going through my house, I can see that this stuff works. Cheers codyb.
So if I stop getting paychecks, the government will pay for my food and housing? Sign me up. Then who will be left to work?
I think you're definitely missing out a bit if you don't know anything about low-level stuff. If you've never programmed in C or something like it. I'm a compiler writer, ant it seems to me people who have only ever used high-level programming languages have pretty poor intuitions about the cost of the language features they use.

This being said, I think there there are many more programmers today than there were in the 1980s. So while there is a smaller proportion of programmers doing low-level stuff, there are still many programmers with low-level work experience. I'm doing a PhD in compiler design and I've been approached by several major companies. I think I've been approached 8 or 9 times now. There is still quite a bit of demand for low-level expertise. Low-level coding isn't going to disappear, and luckily for us, the internet allows us to archive all of this knowledge like never before.
The Best Ecommerce
> It would not surprise me if the easiest places to live have identical demographics and characteristics as the hardest places to live.

I think a big part of the problem is that the article explicitly uses "demographics and characteristics" to determine difficulty of living, so the above statement is false by definition. I think you do make a good point though, unfortunately, I'm not sure how to phrase it any better.
Excellent question for a Friday. Coding is like welding, how do you find two pieces of metal that need to be joined? Generally the answer is visualize something that could exist, but does not exist, and then fill in the parts that need to be there for it to exist.

What you need at this point are a series of assignments which are self-contained problems with known solutions. The assignment 'create a web server that displays "Hello World"' is an example of one.

Here are some more:

Create a web site that allows a person to identify what would be an 'affordable' mortgage. (or flip it, shows them how much they need to save each month in order to retire). These are both applications of the compound interest / annuity calculation, but built in such a way that you can pick different parameters to see the results. Pick an interest rate, or pick a home value or retirement amount.

The goal of that assignment is to have you create a web site which has a built in formula (logic) which can be manipulated by user entered data.

Next assignment, build a web site that collects data about a particular commodity that changes day to day (could be a stock price, could be oil, unemployment, could be Eve online credits, what ever), then plots that data on a graph. Allow the user to annotate the graph by date with specific events. You will find the d3 library helpful here. Once annotated allow the annotated graph to be shared by URI.

The goal of that assignment is to get you to store data over time, use third party APIs, and provide a way of getting to a particular state based on arguments in a URI.

Now for third assignment, create a market site for three commodities, we'll call them 'stone', 'wood', and 'sheep'. Have a system random number generator periodically generate one or more units of one or more commodities. Simultaneously create a Sudoko board such that the first player to solve the puzzle gets the commodities. In the Market people can buy and sell commodities, the market creates a currency for recording those transactions. Players with a specific quantity of individual commodities can produce a 'product' and that product adds to their 'production' score. Rank all players by the quantity of currency in their account and their production score.

The goal of that assignment is to create a fun market simulation game that echoes some of Settlers of Catan and gives you something fun to put into a Show HN posting.

Bottom line, practice problems. Then when you, or someone you know says, I'm trying to do this ... you can tell them you can do it or not.
After reading GEB this summer, I got hooked on ideas of AI and knowledge representation. Not an AI expert by any standard, but I am reading it right now and enjoying it quite a bit. As mentioned by others in this thread, the book itself is a set of loosely connected ideas. Seems like a good overview of the field of AI.

In addition, Minsky is a great writer, and brings all sorts of examples of developmental psychology that are worth learning about.
> If you have a secure hash function taking some string into a point of elliptic curve E, multiplying said point by the cofactor is also a secure hash function into the relevant subgroup of E.

Fair enough. Though this requires an additional multiplication (at least it's a cheap one). I'm pretty sure some protocols have missed this.
Huh, this is interesting. I've been getting more into Meteor[1] lately, and I see a few things here that mirror my experience there:

* Concept-Driven directories (ie: having your model, views, controller, etc. for everything Comment related in the same directory). Meteor still hasn't figured out what directory structure it wants (you could make up your own and things would still work), but I've seen this in several places.

* having an object for each view (I didn't like this about Meteor at first, but it's really just stripping out logic that would have been in the view and putting it somewhere else. It actually makes it a lot easier to debug layout vs. code errors by having the view be as simple as possible)

* I was going to say use of monads, but a) I'm not sure that's what the "call style" and "run style" actually are, and b) Meteor doesn't really use monads, now that I think about it

I'm sure nothing here is unique to meteor either, but it's interesting to read about stuff like this with the added perspective of another framework.

1. https://www.meteor.com/
On osx, perhaps. On Linux it's still a little rough. Or was last time I tried to use it. That said, I do look forward to using it more. But most importantly, I look forward to the tooling that can be built around it, since it's much easier to treat it as a library than gdb.
These results need to be taken with a big ol' hunk o' salt. The outliers are all teeny tiny counties. #1 ranked Los Alamos county has only 17,000 residents, and last-place Clay county has 21,000. The bigger the county, the more likely it is to simply regress to the mean.

Actually, the most interesting result is that Los Angeles county, which with ~10M people is the most populous in the U.S., is not closer to the middle than it is.
random oracle - the random thing is what throws me...
Ask HN: Best way for selling my webapplication
I'm selling my multilangual application for member management because i have to few paying members (haven't put any work on promotion though). I think a lot of people are in my boat :)

Options (according to how i see it):

- Source code tutorial for Asp.Net MVC (multilangual, paying and a self designed role system )

- Codecanyon ( but asp.Net mvc is not that popular there)

- Sideprojectors (is a one-time sell, can i get enough money for it there, to limit my time wasted/unpayed?)

Does anyone have any experience with this? What would your advice be?
Programming languages are a tool. Problem solving is a skill.
For the ones surprised by Go's performance, remember that Martini in known to be slow as it uses heavily reflexion.
Martini is slow, try again with Negroni which is the new lib by the author of Martini.
You are assuming I am comparing nuclear to coal, or coal to nuclear...

You must be reading some pretty rosy estimates on nuclear energy compared to renewables if you think the costs make nuclear look good. And by costs I include dollars (the wastage of such having an impact on all our wellbeing as well by diverting from better solutions).
What Women Want, According to the Designers of Women's Wearables
Martini is not a good reflection on Go's performance (no pun intended). If you want a Go benchmark of a minimalistic framework, use Gorilla mux or even Beego
Just because it's not your fault doesn't mean it's not your responsibility to fix it. Homelessness is an issue to correct by the people who live near it.
There's a demo on: http://www.ledenboek.be/EN/Account/Login?Demo=True

If anyone would be interested, you can fill in the form on http://goo.gl/forms/ejom4J7dSo (application was created in Dutch, some small parts aren't translated yet)
Black Friday Is Tech Friday
I don't really understand how it would reduce processing time, could you elaborate?

The main implications seem to be for neuroscience, as far as I can tell. Backprop is considered biologically implausible because it requires either bidirectional communication over synapses (which doesn't happen) or weight sharing between neurons. But this allows the forward and backward connections to be decoupled (i.e. they are different synapses).

This is really interesting stuff, my first reaction was "why does this even work?" I think I still don't really fully understand what's going on.
> Countless politicians at every level of government have tried to find a solution.[0] In the end, they all failed.

You can lead a horse to water...

As long as people insist on believing that the earth is 6000 years old, that lowering taxes on rich people is going to make their own lives better, and that the best way to preserve freedom and peace is unfettered access to firearms, there is only so much you can do for them. At the end of the day you simply can't help someone who steadfastly refuses to help themselves.
My understanding is that wildlife has been returning in some form or another, since shortly after the accident.

Someone, I could have sworn BBC but all that's coming up in searches now is PBS, did a documentary about wildlife in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. I could have sworn it was about the wolves in the exclusion zone but touched on many topics.

If I recall correctly, the iron curtain itself actually helped wildlife somewhat by creating a strip of land across many European countries (where the fence itself was constructed) that wildlife was documented using as a highway for travel now that the fence has been torn down and that strip is largely left alone.

Fascinating stuff, both for the nuclear explosion, and the subsequent impact on surrounding wildlife.

Edit: I think this is the one that I saw. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iap7wXlMFIQ
http://www.opentaiga.com/welcome/healthcare

It's ON.
The bible belt continues to have some of the worst (or hardest) places to live in US. If find this very interesting, as many in this area continue to shun higher education in favor of strict adherence to the bible.
Node.js - create a landing page (boilerplate)
That's an outdated version of a bad book. That statement is completely false. Notice how as racket's type system improved, he continued to update the book to be more and more pro-types and removed more and more the deliberate FUD like that?

>There is one type system (with types such as int, double and even function types) at the level of the program

Yes, that is the only type system.

>and a different type system, defined solely by lengths of bitstrings, at the level of execution

That is not a type system. By definition type systems are at the program level. Data classification occurs at the level of execution, and such a system exists in virtually every language whether it has a type system or not.
I guess "hard" is subjective. I was guessing the hardest place might be rural Alaska where you have no electric power or water unless you provide it yourself, and you have to spend most of the short summer cutting firewood so you don't freeze to death over the winter, and growing vegetables, fishing, and hunting so you don't starve.
DreamWorks Home 3D movie in theaters March 27th, 2015
I think the answer might be that for now it's mathematical interest but no one really knows what it might or might not turn into. I think the more of these sextuplet, twin etc. primes that we discover the closer it may be bringing us to developing a grand theory of primes and solving difficult problems like the twin prime conjecture and whatever else is out there. And if we could do that then that would be where the practical ramifications would start to possibly emerge. So for now I see it as just more data that might or might not help spark something in the mind(s) of some mathematical genius(es) one day.

I am in no way an expert and this is just amateur speculation but I wanted to write it anyways because I was (am) wondering the same thing.
I wonder how koa would fare.
based on what you wrote, i would say the next goal is to write a twitter clone.

write something that takes user input, stores in a database, and represents it later on.

CRUD (create read update destroy)

many webapps could be categorized as a CRUD app, or start as a CRUD app. if you've only gotten as far as "hello world" then i'd consider this a worthy "next target"
Ask HN: What can we do at Facebook to help inspire young hackers?
All ideas are welcome. I'll be around to answer any questions you might have for me as well. The reason I posted here is because I felt everyone here remembers what it was like to be the only hacker among your friends as a kid.
The Making Of: ROM City Rampage