skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They practice. And have enough innate natural ability so that the amount of practice time required to achieve competence doesn't exceed the amount of time they actually have.

"Anybody (assuming no other learning disabilities) can become a programmer, and a good one at that.."

I still haven't seen any actual evidence to support this statement, and have seen plenty that does not support it across my career and interaction with many programmers. It should be obvious, I would think, that with all jobs there are some people who are good and some who are not. Why is programming so special that everyone can be 'good'? It's not.

"Those who have no belief will simply not put any effort into learning, and will never progress."

This might sound harsh, but this is fine by me. I like the idea that programmers / doctors / musicians / etc have been and are highly-motivated and dedicated, and weren't molly-coddled throughout their career. If they need to be babied into doing something, they can do something else.
ECB mode

I think this is the worst part, as anyone who has even the slightest bit of knowledge about how to use block ciphers (even if it's just reading Wikipedia articles - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation#... ) would know ECB is seriously weak.
This should be titled, "Why switching jobs is usually a good idea for overworked, underpaid people who have been working for at least a few years at their current job."

But that wouldn't fit on HN.
Show HN: Task timer/less rigid pomodoro for Android
I wouldn't say I enjoy removing unused code, but I definitely feel like I've accomplished something when I do.
Going through the wiki page of Casio FX-702P reminds me how far we've come. Fascinating.
It gives a false sense of security at best. The crypto is broken at a basic level, trivially allowing things like key recovery, denial of service, block copy-pasting...

However, about BitTorrent crypto: `In an interview in 2007, Cohen stated "The so-called ‘encryption’ of BitTorrent traffic isn’t really encryption, it’s obfuscation. It provides no anonymity whatsoever, and only temporarily evades traffic shaping.` [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryption...
I'll wager the management made sure they were looked after, no cost cutting for them until the coffers were bare.
Have you seen https://railslts.com/ ?

> "Rails LTS is a commercially supported fork of Rails 2.3 (and soon Rails 3.2) that continues to receive security patches now that official support has ended."
Chrome also likes to do the "blank out, then redisplay" stunt. Heh, I'd like a "slow connection" mode (maybe triggered by that "tethered" DHCP option on Android hotspots), which disallows custom fonts as well as images.
I thought this was gonna be a riff on the Monty Hall problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
I'm not sure DMCA applies here, as it only bans tools that circumvent technical measures intended to enforce copyright protections. I don't think that Kayak's data is copyrightable (on the basis of Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., which says that mere compilations of public information with no creative aspect aren't considered copyrightable), so DMCA shouldn't apply.

But likewise, IANAL.
I'm interested in why. The linked paper has some fascinating discussion of prior research on the "why" question, but as yet really the only data we have come from correlational studies rather than explanatory ones.

I type a lot (5x-10x?) faster than I can write but I take all my meeting notes by pen (I use a livescribe but it hasn't changed my workflow much). It's clearly faster in terms of retention, comprehension and relevance. But why?

I have noticed that in note taking I have my own idiosyncratic handwriting: primarily joined-up ("cursive"), with many letterforms surviving from my childhood, but with some that are formed in a way that simply seems more natural to me (especially the decenders of y and g) intermixed with some "printed" characters (for example j, as well as almost all the capital letters, to the extent that I use them at all). Definitely not designed for someone else to read again, and even in my case I often have to puzzle out what I had written -- yet still, it has a much better result than typing! I clearly have adapted my writing to reduce its overhead.

Apart from note taking I almost don't write at all: a few hand-printed notes ("don't throw this away") or addresses, and whiteboards of course. These always use separated, printed letters and seem cognitively complex to write (i.e. slow!). Typing is clearly the most effortless.

With my own n of one I have tried taking notes with a wireless keyboard on the table or my lap (so the screen isn't a barrier between me and my interlocutor) but it doesn't help. There presumably is some disjoint mechanism between handwriting and typing, and somehow the handwriting barrier is lower.
comparing this to IPython Notebook is a big stretch and an insult to MATLAB and IPython notebook. There's no way this would have ever come out of PARC, you're exaggerating Davis's work. Also, it's impossible to "look past the religious stuff" - it's part of, all of TempleOS.

To me this is just a crazy guy who's been tinkering with 80s technology while the rest of the world has moved on. I feel bad for him , but I just don't buy the "powerful idea with serious applications"
Ok but self defeating policies are the problem of the employer, she isn't responsible for fixing their company. Perhaps even more reason to get outz
Our jump from the cloud (2012)
Since the SCOTUS decided Alice vs. CLS Bank, I doubt a patent application for an algorithm will get past "pending" state.
The C string theory of everything: God called printf() with a string argument that wasn't null-terminated, and now we're just running on a buffer overflow until the universe segfaults and blinks out of existence.

It's pretty amazing to realize that everything you know is the result of accessing random leftovers in heavenly RAM, but that's what C string theory tells us.
Death and the Present Moment – Sam Harris [video]
That's very modest. I plan to live longer to live forever. I'm not sure why people call it "fear of death". Of course, I'm scared of death, but that's not what makes me want to extend my life - it's the curiosity of how we can advance our civilization and the desire to help personally as much as I can. I want to witness us becoming an interplanetary civilization at least, maybe even interstellar. I want to see AI 50 years from now. I want to see my grand-grand-grand-grand children, and so on. So, let's not focus on the fear, please!
I believe the random number generation failures are much worse. ECB allows detection of duplicate blocks and block shuffling/copy-paste, while poor random number generation allows you to blindly recover entire keys and use them to decrypt or encrypt whatever you want.
Linus Torvalds thinks it's perfectly fine and exactly how /proc/cmdline was intended to be used, but what does he know anyway? If systemd is doing it, it must be wrong.

http://lwn.net/Articles/593677/
Upgrade Git Client to Avoid Vulnerability
Comparing the burn out of making someone elses dreams come true vs your own seems ridiculous to me.
Very short sighted mentality. It assumes that people are cogs and the measurable effect of working with someone is the amount of tangible output. Working with extremely talented developers can fundamentally change your perspective about how you should be building your system / approaching a problem that can have huge future benefits. I would rather work with a genius for 12 months than a cog for 3 years.
I loathe sweet cornbread, but 1 tsp honey didn't make it sweet to the taste and may have helped it get a nice crust. As did cooking it for just 10 minutes on very hot coals of course.

I think next time I'll try with much less (or no) wheat flour.
50% and 100% obviously don't mean anything by themselves.

You can have a minimum of 50% and still have kinds know 10 times more than what a minimum of 100% course has them.
50% of an advanced course is better than 100% of a course for idiots.

It's all about the breadth and deepness of the material, not some arbitrary mark on it, like 50%.
100 Awesome Business Ideas for 2015
Very lovely message
>It seems to be effective, if you measure by "people famous for the right reasons"[1], such as Bezos, Brin, Page and Wales.

Mostly because parents who fork for such schools are already rich and well educated.
16 panels installed, Permitted, micro-inverter tech, with hard mounting rails (through tile), not the easy hangars most people install with cost me out the door 16K$. Then I got a 30% tax rebate from the feds. Everything has 25 year warranty on it from manufacturers.

This is a grid tie system. No batteries. In the city we're not concerned with 100% off grid solutions. PG&E our provider has contracted with me as a power provider. So excess power is banked and credited over a period of 12 months.

Also, the system is easily extensible. I'll be adding another 3KW for another tax write off this year. No additional inspections required as the micro-inverters don't need a central monolithic inverter which need to be increased as the number of panels increases.
"architecture astronomy" is my new funny-yet-insightful phrase of the week. Thanks!
> so increasing your risk of cancer by a few percentage points for a significantly improved shot at an extra few decades

That reasoning only works given a bunch of conditionals which to most people including experts in the relevant fields seem pretty unlikely. Given that, it'd be great to read more about why he believes the things he does rather than what he's doing about his beliefs, as it's impossible to tell if he's got some interesting insight, or is doing something that only makes sense for him, or in fact is doing something that doesn't make sense at all without knowing more.
It sounds like you'd be happier in a product management role than as a programmer.

Kick ass on the code for a couple years (you might find that you enjoy it if you can get out of Java Hell and start doing functional programing) but, from the sounds of it, you'd be happier as a PM. PMs get a bad reputation because 80% (or more) of them are idiots, but the other ~20% can be invaluable for their ability to market technical work, internally and externally.
it was a joke. i am in a place where cost of living is high. may or may not be sf
Geodesic Sphere Tessellation
you work only 8-9 hours a day and have just a 45 minute commute and you're whining about it? For someone in their twenties that makes no sense to me. I'm twice as old as you, work longer hours than you, have a longer commute and manage to raise a daughter and contribute to my github projects when she's asleep. I'm no better than anyone, my point is that you sound so whiny and entitled. If you don't like your job then change it, but you definitely don't sound like someone who would do very well going out alone.
In Emacs,

M-x doctor

will pull up some later incarnation of this program.
Yep. I certainly have tried Craigslist for such, but it does not compare with this audience IMHO.
I worked on two geosynchronous communication satellites built on Ada (late 1980s using the TLD compiler). Both had a maximum of 48KB of ROM and 16KB of RAM. That included attitude control, command, telemetry, thermal/power management, fault manager, and little OS.

Since then, I've done pretty much nothing but C, but I do miss Ada's features from time to time.
Just to add to this: the relevant case law seems to be Bowers v. Baystate Technologies [1], which held that EULA clauses prohibiting reverse engineering are enforceable. I personally think this is a terrible decision, since it also prevents a lot of good uses of reverse engineering (see some examples, like fighting censorship and diagnosing software vulnerabilities, in a recent paper of mine [2]).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowers_v._Baystate_Technologies
[2] https://mice.cs.columbia.edu/getTechreport.php?techreportID=...
I'm a bit confused by this article because Google can't actually answer the complex questions that the librarians have received. Google's "knowledge graph" can answer simple questions, based on scraped Wikipedia data, and the core part of the site (the search engine) presents users with a semi-random set of links, basically telling them to find the answer on someone else's site. It's like a librarian that knows a little bit of info (but not quite enough) who then tells you which part of the library to go to find a book that may or many not have the answer to your question. A site like Quora is better for answering complex questions.

IMHO, the "knowledge graph" actually shows that Google is very poor at determining the implied questions people are asking, and exposed the failures of alogorithmic search in general: http://newslines.org/blog/googles-black-hole/
The Henry Ford of Books (2014)
Where can we pre-order the second edition? Is it available somewhere? This is the kind of book that I'd rather have a real copy.
If somebody joins your company and finds that it isn't a good fit, isn't it preferable for both parties that they leave?

When an employee isn't motivated, both the employee and employer lose.
They would probably stick around if you would promote them and give them equivalent raises of changing a job in that time frame. It's definitely a lot less work!

Many places take a few months to get integrated into the codebase, not a year.
Send a pull request!
I was in your shoes just over a year ago and decided to go with starting my own startup. I thought having started two startups prior with some success would make it easy but I was wrong.

The reality is that the default of any state of any startup is failure. You probably won't understand the magnitude of the problems you'll face until you see them directly. At this point, your ideas are just ideas and you should work on validating them.

There's a lot of ways to go about doing this and it'll really depend on the market you're chasing. It's likely that a combination of customer interviews and sales will let you gauge which of your ideas have promise and which won't. Something that really helped me was thinking about questions VCs ask when they're evaluating a startup. What's your unfair advantage? Why hasn't this worked before and why will it work now? These questions are incredibly important even if you're not interested in raising venture. There's a lot of books and literature on the web so I won't get into this deeply.

You probably noticed that I didn't say writing code. Sometimes writing code is how you should be validating your idea but most of the time it isn't. You should get in that mindset. However, when you need to write code there's a few ways to get over that commute drain:

1.) Wake up earlier and put some time in before you start your day.

2.) Live closer to your job. It'll alleviate a lot of the problems of coming home and not wanting to do more more work.

3.) Write code on the weekends instead.

Also, whatever you do, don't do it alone. I did it alone for the first time and it's awful. Your job is a great place to find future cofounders or employees. Do hackathons with them on the weekends. Tell them your ideas. See what they excited about.

A year later, I'm doing some consulting on the side to pay the bills and getting into a pivot that's finally moving the needle. Even though most of this year was a total failure, I couldn't be happier and I'm glad I did what I did. Feel free to shoot me an email at jr.sunny at gmail dot com if you have any questions or need any help.
but statistics shows that this person will likely leave anyway, the 15% provides only very short term relief from the real reasons why someone wanted to leave in the first place.

if I see someone in this position who works for me, I immediately start looking for their replacement.
I don't think anyone here is trying to tear Davis down. It's just that his writings can reflect poorly on our community as a whole to those who aren't familiar with his circumstances. In the current climate of hit-piece, shoot-first-ask-questions-never outrage journalism, for which the straw man of the out-of-touch privileged techie is a favorite punching bag, you can't be too careful.
Another example of most universities not being able to release quality software that goes over the "basic algorithm" stage :(
Especially if they are working in the same field. I think so, yes.
The random number generator as God concept has been stuck in my head since I first read that Vice article. In games, both tabletop and computer games, the RNG plays the role of God (a mysterious power that can bring good or bad fortune and even life or death). It's interesting how that idea plays out in a schizophrenic mind.
No, you really can't do FP in any language.

"Please let’s not have a discussion about Turing Equivalence. Computer Science “Theory” tells us “there’s no such thing as more powerful.” Perhaps we share the belief that In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is."

Programming paradigms are about how programs are written. If a problem can be solved in one language, it can be solved in every language, but that doesn't mean it can be solved in every paradigm in every language.
Some things it's better NOT to test, rather than create an overengineered mess to facilitate testing.

Sometimes a fuzzbuzz is just a fuzzbuzz. A.k.a: KISS, YAGNI, etc...
It's true at first when you work on your own stuff you have this great level of enthusiasm, but eventually like any other kind of work it becomes a grind. It is my personal opinion that people who are not passionate enough to get started at night when working a 9-5 job, are probably not passionate enough to be self starters completely on their own. But again it's just MY opinion and obviously I would need to know OP personally to make more than a grand generalization.
Might I humbly suggest that you check out some videos of the algo you're trying to implement on YouTube first and then try implementing it w/o looking at (pseudo)code. I gave up my first 2 times and peeked at code, but after those I got the hang of it. Also tuples.
it can also be a big red flag, people who can't stick to something for any length of time are either consistently bad at picking companies to work for, or the companies they pick find they aren't what they had hoped. Either way, it doesn't bode well for the next employer.
Raising Ambitions: The Challenge in Teaching at Community Colleges
Isn't the discussion about extraterrestrial life pretty much entirely speculation?
It's pretty hard to appreciate and comprehend a completely new education system from a HN post. I don't mind it being "ripped apart", mostly because the concerns are legitimate and I omitted information to address those concerns in my original comment. If I addressed every issue initially it would have been a 100k word comment.

EDIT: Also my hatred will not subside. It's been 3 years since I was in that business and my opinion isn't any less absolute. The current system is broken, very broken and it is crazy to me that we continue to support it. Even this thread is an example why change is difficult. An education system is very complex and new idea's are interpreted in the context of the current system, so it makes it very difficult to explain without writing a white paper. And ain't nobody got time for that.
Yes it is quite unbelievable how much bullshit and mis-information the presenter is talking, luckily somebody who actually knows the stuff was in the audience to point out some of the actual requirements of modern desktops.
Actually it does sound like a great system to not know exactly what being suspicious looks like. If the system was very precisely defined it would make it trivial for criminals to avoid suspicion by staying just on one side of a line.
you're twisting it, he's not trying to avoid an early death, he trying to prolong life (creating a 'late' death), big difference
That is an interesting example of a hybrid protection scheme - you get to choose between "software decides", "always protected", and "always unprotected". Given that the jumper is located right next to the flash, I'm inclined to believe this is a true hardware protection; likely the middle pin is connected to the write-enable of the flash, the left pin is connected to a GPIO so the software can control it, and the right pin is connected to a constant voltage to disable any writing via hardware. The open position leaves the pin free to allow writes.
This is bad advice. The right answer is often to change jobs, but the explanation given here is pretty terrible.

If you have a pattern of working significantly less in your first 6 months on a job than later on, then you're making a mistake. That's the time to establish a reputation, figure out what is worth working on, and get a mental map of the organization so that you can actually get things done. It's the hardest time in a job, if you do it right.

If you let the "honeymoon period" blind you and slack in your first 6 months, you start getting grunt work thrown at you and that's how you end up overwhelmed and struggling at the 3-year mark. If you do the first 6 months right and gain the credibility, alliances, and reputation that'll put you on a good vector, you (a) have a much higher chance of getting on a fast-track, which means better work rather than more of the same, and (b) can get away with slacking and recharging (as you seek external promotion) if you are passed-over for some reason.

Also, for higher-level positions, switching jobs often means changing locations and doing that every year is pretty miserable... especially if you have kids. At some point, you're specialized enough that unless you live in New York or SF-- which are pretty much out once you have kids, unless you're in a hedge fund or a VC firm-- you're going to have to stick with a job for a few years just because there aren't many jobs in your specialty and location.

It's worth changing jobs for a genuine promotion, but a high frequency of lateral movement looks really bad. Given also that it can be hard to tell if a new job is a genuine promotion, it's better to stay where you are if you have something good and you're continuing to advance.
I miss Groklaw dearly, too.
I disagree about the 'middle class bailout'. Interest rates are lower, but house prices are higher (good for middle class wealth if you bought before the crisis, bad if you have to buy after the crisis - look at household formation since the crisis to see how that's working out). On balance, banks collect the same interest, and homeowners have less to spend on anything else.
No; that doesn't factor into it at all. The home ownership rate is the percentage of occupied houses that are occupied by their owner, rather than being rented. It isn't affected at all by the number of people under each roof.
What's a good resource to learn about crypto?

I'm using the java.security and javax.crypto implementations, definitely not implementing algorithms on my own.
12 Weight loss tips for busy people
Familiarity with frameworks is useful, but knowing plain JavaScript inside out is way more valuable than being able to recite various APIs. But if your friend hasn't found the job yet, and therefore doesn't know what framework he will spend his days learning to loathe, I'd say put together a few small projects with a smattering of libraries to get a better sense of their strengths and weaknesses, what problems get solved, etc.
No, because intelligent life exists outside of Earth. It is a matter of time until we find it. Just like it's a matter of time until religion is no more.
She went to some local meetups, and got lucky to find a good developer.

So attend some meetups and ask around. If anyone is interested get work samples and vet by giving him/her a short paid relevant assignment.

You can also find great remote developers, but vet them with short communication and coding assignments. Github/Linkedin/Dribbble are good resources to find someone remote.

Good luck and I hope you find someone well rounded with excellent communication skills.