skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I have 6 months. What should I do?
I'm an senior undergrad student at a top school in India. I have an offer from a top company in India. I'll be totally free during my upcoming semester. I'm not sure if I should spend time on competitive programming and improve my algorithm skills or work on a startup. I have a SaaS idea that I'd like to work on. Which one do you think will payoff better later? I'm not able concentrate on either of these as I keep swinging between them. Any reasoning would be much appreciated. Thanks!
20 days away from the 1.0.0-alpha; it'll be at least 12 more weeks before the actual 1.0.0 release.
Preferred learning medium is very context sensitive for me too: why are you enquiring.
It's 20 days until the 1.0 alpha -- from the timeline in that blog post, stable would be March 30 at the earliest.
Your symptoms looks similar to a winter itch: http://www.eczema.net/xerotic-eczema/
Thanks for your comment. Each of our hacks are relevant to the role you are applying for. This allows you to get an insight into what you would be doing on a day-to-day basis at the role instead of completing generic tests. Hope that makes sense
Definitely reading. Videos take too long to extract information from. This is especially true if it is a topic I'm somewhat familiar with. I can just skim while reading until I hit something I'm unfamiliar with or if I find I'm confused later I can just go back and reread. This is much more difficult to do with a video.
How to Do Autocomplete in Rails Using Redis
I actually just encountered this yesterday on a project. It had a disclaimer that said something like "This project isn't abandoned, we just maintain 0 bugs in the bug tracker. It's stable and ready for use, and if we get a bug report we'll fix it as soon as possible"
Reading, but with direct examples (formulae, code, screenshots etc).
Forex Pay Master Robot
In my case i prefer Text tutorials with copy/past able code scripts
I prefer to learn from short, focused articles, tutorials, book chapters or answers.

Nonetheless, I've learned a lot of interesting concepts from video lectures like "Software as a Service" by Armando Fox and David Patterson, and "Functional Programming Principles in Scala" by Martin Odersky. But when I need to apply those concepts I will look for written matterial, like "Engineering Software as a Service: An Agile Approach Using Cloud Computing" by Fox and Patterson (covering the subject matter of their video lectures), or "The Neophyte's Guide to Scala" by Daniel Westheide, explaining particular topics about how to write idiomatic code in Scala.
If 1. is true the rest of your post is redundant
Don't do either. Go and see places you've never seen before. The reasons are two fold; this is probably the last time in your life you will have the opportunity and it will benefit you later on as you'll be able see how other people live and perhaps be able to empathise more easily with other points of view.
I don't remember which language this is [1], but I read about some tribal language that did not have any words for relative direction. If you were facing North and I wanted to warn you to watch out for a snake approaching from your left, I'd have to tell you to look out for the snake coming from the West.

[1] googling turned up this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_direction#Cultures_not...
Books. Definitely. And printed books at that. You can't scan a video quickly for relevant content (I don't mean digitally scan, I mean look at quickly), and it's easier to flick through a book than an e-book/pdf.
"A rendering of the visible spectrum on a grey background" image from Wikipedia with added English and Russian colour range names:

http://i.imgur.com/XnmMRQ6.png

Original:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rendered_Spectrum.png
Definitely reading. For programming stuff, you can't skip around videos, you can't copy/paste and you have to watch the author tabbing between windows, typing commands and waiting for things to happen (like compilation).
Users shouldn't have access to the filesystem. The usability issues are too significant even for competent users.
A good laugh/example: http://xkcd.com/1459/
Does removing the runtime have any effect on the current effort to get Rust working on Emscripten?
All depends on what are really willing to do? If you have some spare money that can supports you for a while, why don't you run after your dreams. You can try to build a MVP, apply some local incubation center, try to convince people for funding your product. It will provide you a lot of experience even though you cannot make it.
Again, it depends what you want from life.
Reading. But videos are occasionally useful if there is something tricky with the user interface. I think I needed a video to help me link objects in Xcode the first time I used it.
The equivalent cost of shipping from a brick-n-mortar store that's five minutes away is almost surely more than 15 minutes of your time (could easily be 30 minutes) and, if you drive, $2-4 at the IRS/GSA rates.

For me, avoiding that 15-20 minutes of annoyance is well-worth calculating and paying a tip. (Agree that that's a negative, but it's relatively small negative.)
I actually do both, Simultaneously.
Put a lecture on one screen, read up and google things on the other.
Yes, you have it pictured correctly. Also, here is an image of the type of net I am talking about: http://www.amazon.com/Mosquito-Bed-Net-Hanging-Ring/dp/B0035...

I don't accurately remember the time of day that I would find them (it was about a decade back). My vague memory is that it was in the morning, after waking up.
> Farming becoming economic is a great sign to me.

So will you go be a farmer?

The answer is no, because farmers are getting fucked. Consumers too - food inflation has been off-the-scale (and that money hasn't been going to farmers). Playing dice against PhDs with algorithms is a sure loss.
Does the Elf contribute to the surveillance state?
This looks to me to be an important and very promising change. I don't know how much they've had to compromise, but making this easily callable in from C (and hence, easily callable from other languages with C interop) makes it simple to embed rust in other languages and applications.

For example, I'd been looking at doing Rust development for Android; currently native (i.e. C/C++ apps) on Android get run through a Java wrapper; starting a Rust process with the Rust runtime active is incredibly complex. With this change, it should be trivial to have a basic Android activity that just calls a Rust main() and have everything go from there.
Reading - especially reading concise articles on a focused problem domain, and on the other hand, reading actual code. I think over the years I've gotten a sense for recognizing good, readable code.
As the man in the back row, I am not convinced. He reduces the need to save languages to the need to save cultures and leaves it at that, implicitly assuming the latter to be an axiom. To me it's even more obviously false. Plus, he completely fails to consider the downsides of people speaking different languages which are enormous (as pointed out in the Old Testament). Yes, I realize a person can speak more than one language. And I am all for preserving for the sake of understanding. But using humans as storage devices sounds a little selfish coming from a linguist.
Linux process states
Thanks! But, let's just say, the conditions I'm in, I can't afford to spend time on anything else other than shaping my career. What would your advise be?
Turns out this is a really, really trivial problem to solve in hardware. Delegating it to their peripheral microcontroller is not a hardware solution, it's just the same software nonsense.

Security is hard in software because from the undecidable halting problem it immediately follows that any non-trivial property of software (such as "does the micro firmware turn the LED on when the camera is on") can also not be decided.

There is no halting problem in hardware. But I hear they have very, very cheap switches nowadays that could easily control the power to the camera and a parallel LED.
None of the above : I'd rather have one on one tutoring.
Git thee behind me, Git client bug
I've just finished my first online course, in Python. I'm not new to programming but was completely new to Python.

I find the spoken word helps me with engagement, so listening to someone talk through something helped me to maintain focus.

In this case the Coursera course website allowed me to do listen to the whole lecture course at 1.5x speed - as part of the screen shows the work area with the code/slides at all times it was also easy to skip on once I'd grasped the point being made or when all I was doing was scanning over a new syntax and I felt I didn't need to listen (at higher speeds the software didn't make the audio clear enough). Similarly I could easily scan the video if I wanted to review something. The lectures followed a book, but I never used the book - in part because it was online rather than a proper book and bizarrely I don't really like reading long texts on a screen.

Before this I've only ever done formalised education using books. Though I've learnt to throw pots (on a pottery wheel) largely from watching YouTube videos.

My intent here is not to disagree but to add some complexion.
Show HN: Brainvo is a smart recruitment platform
Hello Hacker News community, I want to share with you my first startup: http://brainvo.com

I made a short video to show the main features of Brainvo:

http://youtu.be/qY0-jdhkCGs

Brainvo is a new platform to organize the process of Recruitment that lets you create a job posting for free, and we will suggest the most suitable candidates.

In addition we aim to reduce the times of job interviews and we will help you to discover if a candidate is not suitable for your needs as early as possible.

You can access personal data and job preferences of candidates and define questions that they must answer when applying.

Brainvo will also help you organize your candidates since you can write a private feedback of persons interviewed and access anytime to the list of people who applied in any of your jobs.

We launched the application this week and we would be very grateful if you are one of the first to try our services, this just going to take a few minutes.

Android/iPhone apps are coming soon!

I will really appreciate any feedback or suggestion.

Thank you very much!
Mariano - http://brainvo.com
Reading. Much easier to adjust pace to match my understanding, and referring back to the material is far saner. Inevitably any time I learn from a video, I find myself scrolling the slider back and forth hunting for the key piece of info I want to rewatch.
Most of the time reading for the reasons others have stated(scannable, copy examples, etc). That said, there are times where I read something a number of times and the concept still doesn't click. In those instances a short video of just that specific concept is great. Short, hyper-specific screencasts are useful where exhaustive videos are not as much (to me).
Books, especially the kind with exercises at the _end_ of each chapter/section.
It's easy to laugh off those freaks, I did it too before I became one.

TL,DR: OCD behaviors are boosted by physiological stress, we can redesign our world for less stress, and there is in fact a big risk that medicine doesn't help you in non-emergencies situation.

I relate the Morgellons story to candida as you can see people on curezone talking about it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candida_albicans). People on this board sound as desillusional as in the story, looking at their poops for hours and trying all kind of enemas and diets in giant waves of pseudoscience. It's also the same notion that something wrong is hidden in you, an evil invisible root cause.

---

Long story short, after years of various strange affections on an otherwise healthy body, I found information online on candida. Symptoms matched to a point and so I spent some time on blogs and boards and eventually landed on curezone. I ended up looking at my poop like so many others there. Doubt really is infectious, everything becomes blurry and so I started watching for the tell-tell sign of candida, just in case. Still surprised that I ended up doing this.

After a few weeks (months?) I realized I was getting OCD with that and needed to move on to a better obsession. Doctors had also told me that it didn't make any sense and everything on the net was just BS. My problems were somatic and so I found a better obsession.

The funny thing is that years later, after symptoms got worse, a stool test did diagnose me with candida along with other parasites that I had gotten as a kid in Africa. I got cured and never felt better since then. It did change my life. I still feel that I was a loony when I try to auto-diagnose - it was just a coincidence that candida was involved, my method was all wrong. Candida is not visible to the naked eye, and there's next to no chance to auto-diagnose and auto-cure from it without coaching.

I take from this that our medicine system is designed around emergencies and clear symptoms and does not deal with many new "blurry" pathologies born out from stressful lifestyles. Challenges:

- those guys (and I) need care designed around empathy, listening and being coached into healthier lifestyles. There's next to no offer for that. Psychiatrists and mental specialists are siloed into talking and/or meds. There are real physiological and practical aspects that need to be added and followed up for it to be effective.

- I was lucky to be able to afford a holistic nutritionist working with leading labs to perform expensive stool tests that finally helped me. Including treatment, it cost me above £1500, 0% supported by healthcare (it was in the UK, would have been the same in France or anywhere else, I bet). For most, most doctors are still siloed in their discipline and provide neither empathy nor a convincing bridge between info found online and their own expertise.

- our lifestyles are inducing high level of physiological stress that our human organisms can't deal with. Work, food, cities, that goes way beyond medicine: redesigning all those things to limit stress levels is _the_ opportunity for our generation.
I really hate it when I am searching for some quick info and I am forced to endure a 20 minute video out of which only 20 seconds were what I was looking for. At least with a written article you can skip through to the part you need.
I wish there was a window manager such as this but where you could put the application into full screen mode. So have two programs running in full screen mode side by side. Sublime and others (iterm) look so much less distracting without their window frames.
depends. i mostly learn by doing. like cars/physical things, i get some tools out, and go to work. might take a while, but i always get there and usually learn a lot in the process.

same with computer stuff, although then there's a lot of looking at examples as well
Hi Guys,

I am a final year student at King's College London and are working with two other students on hackajob. We all have experience working within the recruitment sector and decided to work on hackajob to try and solve a few fundamental problems with the current hiring process.

We launched our first beta this week and are still in our very early stages. There are still some main features missing but we would love to hear your feedback, both positive and negative. We are trying to disrupt the recruitment market by using a matchmaking algorithm to find specific roles for you. After you have seen your relevant roles, you can then hack each job. To hack a job means to complete a short hack that is relevant to what you will be doing on a day-to-day basis. We are very passionate about this relevance as it is a great opportunity for developers and engineers to find out more specifics about the roles as opposed to standard job ads.

We have had over 1,500 developers and engineers sign up so far and have some very innovative companies willing to try us out. Please get in touch with any feedback you have.

Thanks,

Mark
>Williams countered that Apple has tracked the weekly hours of over one million workers within its supply chain, and that its suppliers have achieved an average of 93 per cent compliance with the 60-hour workweek limit this year.

60 hour workweeks... plus "93% compliance" is not exactly reassuring.
I get your point, but I wouldn't exactly decribe bash as "simple" (or even "good"). If it was, we wouldn't have seen modern attempts to approach this mess, such as dash.
This is interesting, but I don't feel it is significant.

Names of colors, at least in English, do not typically imply a complete range of color, but major points on the spectrum. We have hundreds of words for different shades of colors, and pseudo-words like, "Yellowish-green". Painters will know the different between Cerulean blue and Cobalt blue, and Wikipedia has a whole category of shades of blue, with varying English names.

If we need to limit ourselves to a 1st grade vocabulary to make a point about our language, it isn't a very strong point.
Interesting. The project page says that it "champions privacy" but I can't really see any details on how they plan to do that. There don't really seem to be any privacy-specific features mentioned.

A very brief look at the source code turns up mention of lobobrowser, a Java project that seems to have stalled about 5 years ago...

http://lobobrowser.org/
Reading - because I can go at my own pace. Videos are like tl;dw.
Remixing two of the famous Rosling bubble graphics
I prefer both.. that is a nice video along with an accurate transcription and code samples directly below it. It's the best of both worlds..

example: http://railscasts.com/episodes/222-rack-in-rails-3

^ that's the kind of thing I'd whip out the plastic for any day of the week
:)
Videos have several advantages for some kinds of tasks. Also less spam (eHow etc). For example, to learn how to shuffle a deck of cards, I would go directly to Youtube. Or how to clean a car. Or how to do a margarita. I would watch several videos about the subject and see what each guy does differently. Stuff that post on eHow would miss.

This guy is showing how to write a game from scratch, by recording his screen and face for 2 hours per day. https://www.youtube.com/user/handmadeheroarchive

It would be very hard to to learn that amount of tricks and details from a text.
Definitely reading and videos for design stuff or when I want to discover a new tool.
I'd love for this to actually make a difference, but I doubt it. The NSA has redefined the language around wiretapping just as the military has redefined the language around war and the CIA has redefined the language around torture. I'm sure everything that has happened was legal.

The question is: if all of these crimes are legal and those with the power to ban them have no interest in doing so, what's left? And how long will it be until that happens?
The fact that this is written in Java knocks it noteworthiness down tenfold.
This is probably a better link, for those of us (like me) who had never heard of Nuitka: http://nuitka.net/pages/overview.html
The biggest question I have about this is how they managed to register the fortunecook.ie domain knowing the hoops you have to jump through to get an IE domain in the first place
For those using HomeBrew on OSX: brew update; brew upgrade git;

Then, make sure that HomeBrew versions are taking precedence: echo export PATH='/usr/local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile
Does anyone know if this makes using Rust code on an Arduino easier? There's [https://github.com/jensnockert/dueboot] which only works on the Due, not the Uno.
How do you read HTML? Parser or RegEx?
The URL is 'toyota-embraces-fuel-cell-cars-for-post-gasoline-future' so the title was changed later, probably to get more people to click.
Other than that a good article in my opinion.
I was wondering that myself. I remember it being given as the main blocker when someone asked about Emscripten, but that was over a year ago and a lot has changed since.
Reading for the most part, although videos work if they have the 1.5x speed enabled. This way I can watch it faster.
Thread Local Storage in Java
Still limited by lack of an LLVM backend for AVR, doesn't make it any easier or harder.
Programming and configurations: reading, particularly on the same machine where I'm following along with my own working code so I can copy/paste samples, and skip around.

UI/Tools: video, especially when several tools are being used together in a somewhat complex workflow.
The story of Cnut and the waves isn't supposed to show the King's hubris at trying to turn back the waves but rather his humility in accepting that, despite being an incredibly powerful man, his powers were nothing in comparison to the divine:

'Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.'

I have no idea why I'm replying of course, the tone of the rest of your comment is wilfully and unnecessarily confrontational. Or, in other words, you're just being an asshole.
You should consider using Guzzle as the base HTTP client.
Optimize your liquor cabinet using data from three world-class bars
Ultimately we are not you. What might be best for us might not be the right thing for you.

So accept that you might take the wrong path, it will certainly not be the last time it happens to you ;-)
I prefer bashing it out myself with a mentor within arms reach: "Hey, when you're free..."

But of the two given options, it's reading, because it's much easier to reread an important bit than to go back in a video.
> Though I've learnt to throw pots (on a pottery wheel) largely from watching YouTube videos.

Something like that I could see making sense. Still pictures might not give you as good an idea of what's going on as continuous video.
That's unfortunate. I just checked on firefox on my mac and I do notice a slight lag if I try to flick through slides quickly. I'm not sure what you're referring to by scrollbars though. Can you give any more detail? Feel free to email me (see my profile).
The Amazonian Piraha tribe have "to the river", "to the jungle", "up the river" and "down the river" rather than directions.
The Open Bay: Now Anyone Can Run a Pirate Bay ‘Copy’
Are Enterprises Migrating to AngularJS?
Videos for getting a broad overview of a topic.

Reading for looking for something specific.
Which license should you use to publish your Data or Code?
- Focussed on privacy, how?

- So, it's a browser, got some screenshots? What's the ACID test score?

- What rendering engine does it run on?

- Privacy, but no https?

- It's an evolution of the Lobo project apparently?
Write once debug everywhere.

I just can't take java software seriously these days. Sorry. It's not you, it's me.
I would have said reading, until I realized that some things can be made more explicit in the video. But in most cases, it is by reading. Specific examples were I liked videos explaining something better (or perhaps as good as the book) are: Unix System Calls (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHu7qI1gDPA) and Suffix Trees (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLsrPsFHPcQ). A lot depends upon how much effort has been put into making of a video. Codeschool's guide (https://gist.github.com/olivierlacan/4062929) is a great start.

One issue I see with books/articles is typos. Not many technical book writers are diligent about typos and outright mistakes and coming up with updates for a book is perhaps hard. I become especially infuriated and it stalls my progress when a particular concept/paragraph written in the book is either wrong or I am confused about it and the author is not immediately reachable for clarification. Same might be true with videos, but many videos are live talks and such mistakes are rarer in those settings.