skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What makes a good guitar player, or painter anyway?

They practice.

Your idea that some people "have it" and some don't is just not true with almost anything in reality. Prodigies are extremely rare, and everyone else who "has it" got there by practicing in their field. Anybody (assuming no other learning disabilities) can become a programmer, and a good one at that, if they honestly believe they can do it, study the foundational skills they need for it, then practice and practice.

Try to remember how you became a programmer - chances are you started learning at an early age - you already had the foundational skills in language, math and science etc, because you were competent in school, and you probably spent a large part of your youth engaged in programming. You're no prodigy, and you didn't have it to begin with. Instead of saying "I can't do it", your probably the type to ask "how can I do it?".

The "bad", or non-programmers are more likely to be the ones who say "I can't do it", "it's too complicated for me", etc. You can crush the chance of these people ever being competent by simply agreeing with them that they can't - because if they don't have the belief that they can, they won't bother spending hours learning the foundational skills they need, or the thousands of hours practicing which would turn them into good programmers.

From my teaching experience, the learner's belief is by far the most important factor in their learning. Those who have no belief will simply not put any effort into learning, and will never progress. The author obviously understands this too, and invites the reader to first believe they can do it, so that they continue reading.

Try to write some educational material for programming, and introduce it by saying "You probably won't ever get good at this, you suck, why are you still reading?", and see how many engaged readers you get.
Great book. Especially the prelude is a great tutorial.

The book is used best in conjuction with Coursera's https://www.coursera.org/course/programdesign
Get free licenses for personal use of CoderGears products before December 24th
well actually dropbox is highly relevant enough for the technology, i could grab a depth within this concept, just point i was lacking is about SQRL
That Brian guy in particular is a total cunt. Holy crap. Willful ignorance of specific issues being raised combined with smug superiority. I find people on IRC to be a lot more pleasant. I am never mailing a mailing list.
Nortronics NAS-14V2 Astroinertial Navigation System
Uhm. What does "decided it was time to run fsck on my 1TB hard drive" mean? Decided how?
Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins – Science Religion and Morality Atheist
So the solution to this, if you want to abort an fsck, go back in time, and pass fsck.mode=skip to the kernel parameters.
Why Slack is worth $1bn: it's trying to change how we work
Is this not a __good__ thing for the Americans since the NSA backdoored most Cisco routers (http://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/internet-privacy/sn...). Much better the North Koreans running Cisco routers which they have backdoored then a Chinese competitor such as Huawei, which could be much harder to attack?
No, they introduce Lisp themselves, so it's not a prerequisite.
I think he is being reasonable and helpful.

Q. I can't stop fsck.
Brian: You can add a parameter to kernel startup.
Q. This does not help because I want to stop one that has started. I should raise a bug.
Brian: Don't do that there is already a bug report at number ....
I especially like their introduction on how to create a web service, using continuations for handling session, a technique also used "Beating the averages":

http://docs.racket-lang.org/more/
Could you give a specific example of how socat can be used with the openssl binary in the way you suggest? I'd like to try it.
Nice, your cached version is the fastest by far, although it uses a different algorithm. Running with `node js.js` without the cache, it takes around 6 seconds, close to Dart and Haskell.
Christmas carol in code – Comment your own
Every n boot (n usually around 30) is scheduled a fsck at boot. It is more a legacy thing as ext4 is really robust. I remember checking my /home/lost+founds regularly in this time and often finding random stuff, music, documents where the i-node has been made orphan so that it doesn't belongs to any directory.
Today, we have ntfs and ext4 with amazing journals which can replay most of the operation that has been made. So, when the Virtual-FS layer (the component of the kernel that map the bytes on your HDD to the logical file-tree in the exporer) detect an inconsistency it can replay and apply the correct state to the fs tree on the fly.

Now that we have robust disks and robust fs, I think that this fsck at boot setting could be relaxed. However, think of the people needing saving their data with an fsck because their HDD wasn't as robust as yours. It's not an easy choice to do. You can't even base your decision on the SMART metrics as the worst HDD, the one you want to check regularly, lie to/don't implement correctly SMART.
Exactly! Russians are incapable of growing enough food to feed themselves. My point exactly. Blaming their own stupidity on others is stupid too
What you're describing is often referred to in education debates as the "mastery approach" to education. It is a system that used to be commonly employed by private tutors teaching the children of aristocrats and by master craftsmen training apprentices. When done well, it is extremely efficient, because at each step in the learning process what you teach is 1) the most important thing that 2) the student is fully ready to learn.

"Fully ready" does not use 100% as its benchmark, though, because that would make the process less efficient. You just need to be good enough that you are well-prepared to learn the next step. You achieve, let's say, Level 45 (picturing your learning of a skill as climbing a ladder), which means you're ready to move on to Level 46. Level 46 assumes you can use all the skills learned up through Level 45, so it makes use of them, with the result that your Level 45 skill continues to improve with use as you learn Level 46. When you move on to 47, your use of 46 and 45 will continue to improve those skills.

So "mastery" of Level 45 does not mean 100% before moving on to Level 46 but means a level of competence that can be used successfully. With continued use, all previous levels will asymptotically approach 100%.
Why I still don't think it's likely North Korea hacked Sony
I have a book about my C64 which has a commented ROM listing in the appendix. This was basically the first professional code I read.

The book has a fold out plan of the schematics and there is one chapter explaining every part of it and one chapter about C64 repair. This is were I learned a good deal of electronics.
I use radio mode on Google Music, and follow various people on SoundCloud
Navigation and label handling. M-j lets you jump to a section, C-( inserts a uniquely numbered \lab and C-) gives a menu for inserting a \ref to an existing label.

(These may not be standard bindings - my .emacs is a horrible mess of legacy code dating back to a pre-git world.)
I agree Srecode needs to improve its documentation. It took me a while to learn to use it by reading the actual templates written that come with CEDET. I may write a tutorial for it at some point. But not now.

You can have a look at a sample template: https://github.com/emacsmirror/cedet/blob/f72ebbc52785013280... . Srt file has syntax highlighting in Emacs.
It was disassembled years ago, before the source code was made available.
A fairly bad answer, we can all admit that.
There was a more productive thread on a related topic on debian-devel recently:

https://lists.debian.org/20141213135648.GA14679@fishbowl.rw....

Basically it isn't possible to check at runtime if the next boot will require an fsck, so developer filed a bug asking for mechanism to do that:

https://bugs.debian.org/773267
Plague Reverse Engineering A.k.a Plague Python API
Show HN: An object oriented 2D game-engine in Clojure
No we don't. Like [greenyoda](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8779346) says, not for corporate email.
Once you've exported all your tasks you Mexico, you won't have to do anything!
Accept card (Stripe) payments with no coding
Did you read the other branch of thread that contains 180 email conversations about why his initially wrong answer was justifiable? I've given up reading after 10 emails since it was fairly useless. I think that thread is why this is posted in HN.
Payzo.io allows you to connect your Stripe account and create a simple hosted payment form which you can send to your clients.
Why didn't the enterprise go with the "microservices architecture" (not current usage of microservices, but you get the idea). Considering that SOA was actually originally from Java land, wouldn't the idea of every team with their own code base more appealing to the bureaucracy? The programming version of compartment.
Remark: Highlight Any Text or Command Output Using Regular Expressions
Same. I've had more success with Spotify's recommendations than other services I've used (most recently Pandora and 8tracks).
Indeed, not to mention the fact the there are lots of folks who need to use the OS on modest hardware (embedded devices for example) and having additional runtimes for a language like Go or Javascript (god save us) is kind of out of the question.

Rust seems to be a saner alternative, but isn't production ready.
“This is my favorite "Hello World" how-to of all time”
Yeah, this is precisely what I meant by "willful ignorance of specific issues being raised". :/

I really hope Brian is not like that in real life interactions.
OpenBSD has none of those languages in the base OS; given they won't update gcc or switch to clang, Lua is the only one that they could support (NetBSD has it in base) but there is not a lot of system software written in Lua (alas). It doesn't have a depth of libraries that Go does. JavaScript would probably never pass review, so Rust is possibly a future option, unless a system programming community springs up around Lua.
This value is configurable per file system. It is set at install time but you can change it at will.

You can set it with tune2fs using -c count or -i interval. A machine that is often rebooted might do without the interval, and vice versa.

You can turn it off completely but don't do that unless you have reason to. Running a fsck regularnly brings a bit of peace of mind, especially if your file system has been through a lot of upgrades.
It being a simple NTP client and not a server means that it has a vastly reduced attack surface. That's good. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't wait and see how buggy it actually is.
We should be very careful about fixing those kind of things, this is one of the biggest complaints against Windows, when you cannot shut down your machine, or boot wait a long time to boot it up, because it did the Windows Upgrade dance.

What's worrisome in this discussion is that the bug was reported 3 years ago, and acknowledge as upstream TODO, 2 years ago, but nothing has changed!
Most speed/red light camera's aren't actually owned or operated by the government. They are run by private companies who get the right from the government for a cut of the revenue. No it wasn't ever about safety but make no mistake it is a private for profit company pushing these things on everyone they just happen to dupe the government with a promise of a taste of the revenue.
Thankfully ext4 fsck is significantly faster than ext3, which means any inconvenience for users running robust storage isn't as prolonged as it once was.
Mostly Spotify. I browse playlists and recommendations, and once I hear something I like I check the similar artists in Spotify.

Reddit also helps with subreddits like /r/music/, /r/listentothis and other subreddits (there is an extensive list of links in the sidebars of said subreddits).
> Remedial action is not needed because the right choice was made from the grub menu. If it wasn't, you get to live with the consequences and don't do it again.

Is this polite or helpful in solving the issue? It's being preachy about the idea that nobody ever makes wrong choices, ever, and should definitely never be given the opportunity to fix their mistakes.
Ask HN: How do you come up with ideas/topics for your essays/blog posts?
I've noticed that people here are great at writing.

I am very inspired by pg's essays, and I want to learn to think like that, but I don't really know where to start looking for such interesting/surprising ideas and topics.

Maybe you could share some insight on how do you come up with ideas for your posts and essays?
Youtube playlists / individually curated mashups.

Youtube is a horrible discovery platform, the audio quality is lousy, and bandwidth is wasted on video. But the sheer volume of content + remixes + covers make it worthwhile. I can't think of a single song in any language of any genre and from any point in time that's not on the site.

8Tracks.com does a good job with discovering hand-curated playlists using youtube as its source.

I have a very global taste in music, and change favorite genres every few months (after exhausting most everything I can get my hands on). Spotify does a decent job in some categories, but the lack of content (especially international and instrumental) kill it for me. Pandora's recommendation engine always eventually recommends the pop hits. Even piano my piano instrumental playlists end up with Katy Perry.
Wat zijn de gezondste zaden en pitten? – Leef Nu Gezonder
I'm coming to NEU this spring and excited to see Scheme there. I followed few chapters from SICP some time ago, and am curious how similar/different is HTDP from SICP?
Dev update from Outracks Technologies
“I am not authorizing you to release a Ruby port of Metaphone 3”
Ask HN: List of words – List of regexes tool?
Does anyone know of a tool that would input a list of strings and output a list of regexes that match the strings? An intelligent regex pattern matcher ? If not, what do you think about building something like this?
I'm happy to pay to use a flight search API. Kayak and Hipmunk could provide an API and pass on the cost to the API consumers.
Yes it's true that socket sharing is not optimal for load-balancing scenarios. Here you would use 1 crank/socketmaster process per process that you want to run and a haproxy in front. Their goal is not to do load balancing but to not disrupt existing (web)socket connections when a new process is started.
> Ummm... what was the first trick?

"...to focus initially on people rather than ideas"
there are sub-reddits for certain genres with best album of the month/year and lists of recommended bands often with videolinks to youtube-links or spotify-playlists for easy evaluation
Coincidentally went to an effectual entrepreneurship workshop by Prof. Sarasvathy y'day.

Her learnings from talking to 'expert entrepreneurs' are that

1. they do not believe the future can be predicted, esp in the early stages of a new venture

2. they prefer to create the future in areas with high uncertainty by forging partnerships with people they know already, and who are also investing in the same areas

3. they go to the customer at a very low 'acceptable loss' as they can, building as little of the product as they can, investing as little as they can, and getting the first initial set of customers as partners.

4. they jump in to a fast iteration of execution/sales that helps them discover/create the market, relying on sales as market research.

5. they find pleasant surprises along the way that shape their execution/market/venture and they change to fit the new reality - and they shape that reality along the way

Finding great parallels with PGs essays here.. See http://effectuation.org/learn Read also http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/how-great-entrepreneurs... and the original paper at http://www.effectuation.org/sites/default/files/documents/wh...
By clicking a few links further one also finds out that systemd has ctrl-c to cancel fsck on the ToDo list.
The real answer is to use a filesystem that doesn't require off-line integrity checks, and to disable automatic fsck when you're stuck with something that does.

I use ZFS, which does this sort of thing in the background while the system is live. In fact, every read from a ZFS filesystem does a complete integrity check of everything that read depends on. If it finds an error during that process it fixes it before returning data to the caller, or returns a read error if it cannot. Those errors get collected and logged, so that if they do occur (usually due to faulty hardware) you can recover the effected files from backup.

This is much better than a surprise fsck when you're running late.
If the idea of school is to teach students to learn, why aren't there courses on learning itself and the framework of things around the act of learning that enables students to efficiently do so?

Essentially, why aren't good study skills explicitly taught and practiced?

What I've experienced through school is that whilst there is some implicit teaching of such skills, a lot of study skills are either found by students themselves through experimentation(random), or passed down from their parents. More often than not, these are attrocious for students that did not have enough parental involvement OR parents that don't know how to study efficiently either. My personal hypothesis is that these are affected by and also affect socioeconomic standing. Just like wealth, education also perpetuates through generations.

Personally, through highschool my aproach to studying involved cramming, keeping almost no note of due-dates and very messy planning of long term academic projects. In fact, anything that took more than 2 weeks of foresight would leave me scrambling to finish at last minute.

What's worse is that this did not occur to me to be a problem until well into 10th to 11th grade, which put a dent into my college prospects to say in the least.

Since then, I've been working on aquiring these skills on my own, playing around with things like holistic learning, spaced repetition, learning how to structure projects and aquiring organizational tools such as org-mode or even something as simple as using a calendar habitually. And it helps immensely.

And whilst now I'm starting to put these things into place, I keep asking myself: "Why was this not pointed out to me back in ,say, 6th grade?". General education is a great social equalizer, but the assumption that these neccesairy skills are simply passed down seems to go against that very idea. My personal opinion is that teaching these skills would have an incredible impact, since often intelligence is not the problem, but methodology is.
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I have improved it.

https://github.com/logicchains/LPATHBench/blob/master/lisp.l...
Evidence that the universe is made of strings has been elusive for 30 years
"Clash"?
IIRC, there was so much cash to move, that the cartel made custom-sized, reusable tote boxes, that fit precisely through the teller windows. To not notice that, when you have continuous video of all teller windows?

When you only hear one side of the story (the US Government's side) it's easy to make a case that sounds damning.

Firstly, it's not like people were turning up at banks with boxes helpfully labelled "DRUG MONEY". The point of money laundering is you have a reasonable explanation for where the cash is coming from. In this case the alledged cartel money was actually from companies that processed remittances. It's not entirely surprising if such companies move large amounts of cash. And having such boxes (probably provided by the bank themselves) would make a lot of sense for any bank with cash heavy clients.

But moreover the US never managed to prove the money actually did come from cartels. Their case amounted to: there's lots of cash moving from Mexico to the USA via HSBC. It must obviously contain drug money. Therefore HSBC is guilty.

There was also a sideshow related to transactions with Iran, caused by the fact that the USA was trying to impose sanctions on Iran globally but many of HSBCs international clients are not (theoretically) under US jurisdiction. Congress took a very strong "you're either with us or against us" line on this and banks (many of them, not just HSBC) got caught in the crossfire.

The fact is that AML laws are so terrible every bank is guilty of violating them. You really cannot run a large bank without having some criminal clients and post PATRIOT Act, that's enough.
Wolf Children is another great non-Miyazaki film done in a similar style: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Children
google has a better pdf viewer: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nYvECWLSzedsMew0INhv3tLhwut...
And def not fine for the 99% of the working population.
laundering money for drug dealers is not morally reprehensible in its own right (unless they are violent drug dealers);

Given the multiple pending murder-for-hire charges against Ulbricht, I don't think you can use "Silk Road is all about peace and love" as a get out clause here.

Shrem is on record as saying "Let me help you, BTCKing, avoid getting caught because I think Silk Road is cool". Not entirely surprising what the outcome was there ...
They thought he was "structuring". There's a $10k reporting limit for suspicious transactions. So obviously if you are doing something suspicious, you want to always go in under the limit. So now the real limit is lower than $10k and essentially arbitrary .... you really have no idea how you can use a bank account with cash without being classified as suspicious. Great system, huh.
To be fair, I don't think it's that simple. He must do at least some good for the country, or the country would suffer and he wouldn't have much to parasitize upon. He must be beyond any imaginable madness to play "let's see how long I can fuck with this country"-type of game, so, by Hanlon's razor, I hypothesize it's more like he's trying to do some good (and has incentive to do so), but has completely weird ideas on what's good and by which means it could be achieved.

Still, no matter what Putin's thinking, I don't like what's going on.
You've reworded what he said to make him sound a lot more polite. In fact on that last point, I had no idea what "Don't get carried away and start typing. #758902" meant until I just read your comment.
This indeed is the pathological case of awful pattern of modal notifications stealing focus. Here the "notification" that connection has failed indeed destroys the whole page you have been working on (by replacing the content you care about, with some message about which you could care less).

The browser (or application, or desktop environment) should be smart enough to allow enqueuing such notification and presenting it via some facility that respects users task and only shows the message via some non-focus-stealing approach. Such as growl.

The bug means loss of user information. We as developers should be treating the user's information as sancrosanct. Such as never presenting question "Do you want to save?". Instead, save everything implicitly. Don't steal focus to ask for confirmation: instead offer unobtrusive undo. Allow user to delete when he wishes so. (Like Gmail does.) Never lose user-entered information. Never destroy user's flow. Never destroy user's view (workspace).
I like to combine the graphs together into one picture and then another processor structure appears the picture: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4893/mem_lat3.jpg

This graph show the memory latency for a linked list walk that strides across a certain size buffer in memory. I used to use this picture for interviews and ask people to explain as much as they can about the processor from the picture. It end works for people who know nothing about processor architecture as I can walk them over what it says and see how they think and react to new information.