skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the end of the day, a lot of the details end up on the mental cutting room floor, there's no getting out of it. If you can't specialize, get used to a bit of Swiss cheese brain, but hopefully retaining the 10000 foot overview so you pick the technology back up reasonably fast next time.

The only things that have really helped:

Key takeaways go into a Deck in Anki (spaced repetition).

Lots of notes and/or screenshots in Google Docs for easy searches. (still haven't embraced Evernote)

Bookmarks in Firefox with tags.

Teach someone what you just learned.

One frustration in particular is the time spent wading through minutiae instead of creating something with impact. But sometimes that's part of what we get paid for, navigating / remedying the pain points. Anyone can (eventually) slog through most development technologies, but adding understanding and context and utility to it, that's where the challenge lies.

Heinlein said something to the effect of "specialization is for insects," but increasingly the bulk of world seems to be leaning that way. There's nothing wrong with specialization, but choose wisely. Check out Google Trends on a few technologies over the past 10 years and see their rise and fall.
Why paid reviews are a bad marketing strategy
Vaccines increase individual resistance to infection, but they do not increase it to 100%. However, when a group is all vaccinated, the effect is that transmission rate drops below what is needed for a disease outbreak, and thus the group gets near 100% protection.

A cluster of unvaccinated children in a group create a living habitat for small outbreaks, lengthen exposure time of vaccinated kids, and thus create the conditions for the extra vaccine protection to get pierced.
OpenMP is terrible.

While you can argue whether introducing pragmas as control structure is a good idea or not, the performance issues with high load(>80% total cpu) and the caveats(two OpenMP versions in same app, multiple threads running OpenMP paralleled code & etc) are just not worth it.

TBB[0] is much better option(especially with C++11, where you can use lambdas to warp your to-be-paralleled-code and don't have to put it elsewhere), and you get all sort of goodies with it(e.g. thread-safe-containers).

[0] https://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/
Some Notes on Orbital Mechanics
If you don't want to learn new things don't take jobs that require something you don't know. Take jobs that require the skills you already have.
Some of my cats love boxes but others have no use for them.

I don't think it is 100% universal.
Your point seems to be that we shouldn't blame a corporation worth billions for making laws that make our society worse because there are others at fault as well...?
I think it is awesome.
This would be an interesting twist on a job board. After reaching critical mass, charge recruiters to see the updates. They get a pool of people they already qualified when they're actually looking and developers get more control over the process.
wild status 404 appeared:
http://www.cessor.de/404
I like this. I know that recruiters are something a lot of us have to deal with, and most of the time they are an annoyance. This approach sounds like it could save a lot of wasted time for both of us. That said, I realize I don't know much about the business of being a recruiter, and I wonder what their perspective might be.
Just because they use it doesn't mean it's not still despised :)

Until very recently C++ has been the best tool for the job (or more usually C++ and Lua or other scripting language).
I actually tried changing all of my Rays to *Rays, passing pointers instead of values, and it made no significant difference in rendering times.
Given geography and its current land neighbors, the US military is 5 to 10 times oversized for a defensive role.

But that's of course not what it's for. It's for bullying the entire world and to provide massive opportunities for lobbying and pork barrel politics.

Not something to be proud of, really.
Check out Printerest with Steve Brule
Path tracing is extremely parallelizable.
Yeah, but there's nothing particularly wrong about rent growing above inflation. A consumer price index is basically a weighted average of prices. Naturally some of these prices will be above the average.
Qt/C++ users can now use futures with .then() and .await() constructs through this tasks[1] library.

an example of .then() construct is here[2].

an example of .await() construct is here[3].What happens here is the following:

1. The function is suspected at that line.This suspension does not block the thread and hence the GUI remains responsive.
2. A thread is created and the lambda is run in the new thread.
3. When the lambda completes,the function is unblocked and finish up its work.

The above gives easy to read and non blocking synchronous code.

[1] https://github.com/mhogomchungu/tasks

[2] https://github.com/mhogomchungu/zuluCrypt/blob/d0439a4e36521...

[3] https://github.com/mhogomchungu/zuluCrypt/blob/eadd2643291f3...
Wow. Charging someone to help you find a job. Now that's really flipping the script!
I don't. I understand the principles of the stuff I use and can draw upon past experience to analogize to new stuff. Like, despite what a lot of the Node community will tell you, a Reactor model on N threads (where their N = 1) is not new. I saw it in Java, with Netty, most of a decade ago and you see it today, albeit abstracted from you a little, in Play. At a gig last year, I was able to build out a plan of attack for scaling out a Ruby web server infrastructure pretty easily (despite not knowing Ruby or Rails) when I learned that EventMachine was yet another similar system. At some point, the principles stick, and the stuff on the surface just chances. And that--whatever. You can pick that stuff up and set it aside whenever.

Wordpress? Just another CMS.

Joomla? Just another CMS.

JSON? Just another interchange format.

That said, I'm convinced at this point that, barring the very occasional unicorn, measuring yourself against other people who claim to be "full stack developers" is really just a way to make yourself feel bad. "Full stack developers" are stupefyingly rare, despite every startup you see on here trying to say otherwise. It's the new "rockstar" or "ninja". I used to call myself one, but I was a liar. My "stack" skills include "debugging MySQL with gdb and strace" (this has happened, and it was terrible), but doesn't include "JavaScript flavor of the week" because I just have no interest in it. Other folks are more than happy to keep up on the cutting edge of JavaScript, but their conception of a "stack" ends at "well, I tried to configure nginx and it didn't work" (or even higher than that, at "Rails did X but I don't feel comfortable diving in and figuring out why").

Just do what you can, and don't beat yourself up over what you can't.
The Best Startup Incubators
Mine too. I believe you're exactly right here. Volume seems to be attenuated from 100% at the armrest by the digital control, and overridden back to 100% when the PA is keyed. I've done exactly what you described and I stopped getting audibly assaulted on flights where I opted to listen to channel 9, or to watch a censored movie.
To start with - I happen to be European. (Finn, living in UK.) I would say that all three of your examples actually confirm what I sad above.

UKIP, Podemos and SYRIZA are all parties that rose to their position of power only after the status quo was already horribly disturbed.

UKIP - While UK feels a bit xenophobic at times, it was only when the financial stability was shattered that a more-extreme-than-current protest movement gained power

SYRIZA - rose to power after Greece economy was first demolished, and then further abused; again, the calm and nice status quo was disturbed

Podemos - I hear Spain has suffered similarly since the financial crisis and is still in the process of starting their recovery
Nice 404 page.

Perhaps you'd be interested in Glitch City Labs forums? (a topic from there got on HN frontpage before): http://forums.glitchcity.info
I wonder if it would make sense to package a kind of "standard" version of the app, with the most-used / most important extensions, content types and whatever configured, as a Sandstorm [0] app. That way you could even make the "needs to by set up by a programmer" part optional, and target a larger user base. And you'd have a demo instance right away! [1]

[0] https://sandstorm.io/

[1] https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-02-06-app-demo.html
Definitely--everyone has their blind spots. Having the best native code developer I know, a guy who's worked at nVidia and Apple and who has forgotten more about GPUs than I will ever know, ask me how to make a web app was an eye-opener.
Whats amazing, is that lives will be saved because of these donations. Human rights defenders, journalists, activists etc...
It happens: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/continuously_operatin...
Depending on your area freegeek could be a great place to donate. They give away computers to people in need or let people earn a computer by volunteering and learning how to build their own!
I don't, for the most part. The trick that I've found is to understand the underlying theory and don't sweat the individual syntaxes or design patterns. The new platforms of today have a lot in common with the platforms of yesterday. The state of the art languages of today are combining theory and technology which has existed for decades. Tomorrow's Joomla will be doing things in a way very similar to yesterday's Wordpress.

For example, if you understand event driven workflows, you'll be able to pick up react/flux, desktop UI drivers, and video game addons. If you understand continuations (and the various ways to abstract away continuations), you can grok most of Javascript (and by extension, Node.js). If you understand pointers, you'll be able to follow C (though I'd also recommend learning some Assembly as well to really understand C). Pattern matching will get you Haskell and Erlang. And if you can use Google well, everything else is a search away.

Now it is important to note that theory will never make you an immediate expert at every language and platform. However, it does let you bootstrap yourself into a language or framework quickly enough that outsiders will hardly be able to tell the difference.

I've found that once I understand the flow of a program, and ideally the theory driving that flow as well, the syntax required to express the changes you want to make to the flow is merely a few Google searches away.

Another thing to note, if you bounce around like this, you will never get true mastery over a particular language or framework. This is OK for more than 80% of the work you do, but you will end up picking up more information about one language over another - of one framework over another - simply to complete your work. Having this depth of knowledge is not even remotely a bad thing, so long as you keep sight of the bigger picture: don't let the quirks of one language or framework constrain your thinking for all languages.
Yeah. I would actually love to hear their point of view on this. Surely they don't like cold calling and emailing all day but also there might be a lot we don't know about as the talent.
In practice, they're throwing seven- and eight-year-olds at Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu and the kids are LOVING IT. My daughter and her friends, who are pink-dress-wearing MLP-loving girly girls are really getting into it. I cannot tell you how highly I approve of this.
Go concurrency isn't parallelism: Real world lessons with Monte Carlo sims
A world where the point is to have war, I mean, fun.
Don't worry about not remembering things. Your brain is very good at keeping track of the things you actually use frequently, it happens automatically.
Chinese Tech Firm Offers Night with Porn Star as Bonus
I use an accountant and claim it as a tax deduction the next year.
It's understandable why this would irritate you but worth remembering that the VC economics don't work out for reasonable-sized successes. The wins have to pay for the losses, and the win rate is something like 2 in 10.
Makeschool admissions policy: the beginning of institutionally supported ageism?
On their admissions and FAQ page [1], the following may be found:

"What age do I have to be?

Our typical student is aged 18-25, 18 is the minimum age (for legal reasons) but there's no upper age. Whether you have a CS degree and want to beef up your skills or you're a high school grad and want to jump into your career, you should apply!"

[1] https://www.makeschool.com/admissions

Startups in the Valley have a documented problem with ageism (sexism too, but let's stick to one issue at a time for now). Makeschool is not an employer, so the same rules about age discrimination do not apply for their admissions. They say that there is no upper limit for admissions. However, by explicitly providing an age range like this, it gives the impression that it will be difficult for older students to be accepted, and that they may feel out of place if they were accepted. It easily intimidates them from applying in the first place.

As Makeschool is trying to position themselves as a kind of talent pipeline into the start-up ecosystem with their partners/investors, this feels like the beginning of institutionally supported ageism in the hiring process. Makeschool is funded and/or partners with some of the biggest names in town, who also support a lot of other companies. If these companies start saying that they only take graduates from this program or programs like it... well, it all seems set up to exclude otherwise talented people discovered their love of programming or entrepreneurship after the age of 25.

I just really don't like seeing a recommended age range on a program for which there is no practical reason to do so. People can learn a new skill at any point in their life, not just their late teens or early 20s.
In my experience, that might be dependent upon where you are in the country, the leadership of a company, pre-determined notions and biases (likely unfounded) about the ability of older workers to keep up with trends, and the relative age of the employees you will be working with.

In the startup world (nationwide/worldwide maybe), ageism might be equated with "likely to have a family and commitments to prevent he/she from working longer hours than are typically expected". If that person writes "single, no kids, open to 60 hours per week" (and I'm not suggesting they should) on a cover letter, being 50 years old might not be an issue.

I usually recommend trimming jobs when they become irrelevant. Working on systems in the 1970's and 80's will show you have a foundation of knowledge that dates back through computing history, but I'd usually recommend trimming those types of things off (or at least limiting to them as "previous experience" entries with little content).

There is usually no reason to trim experience before you turn 40 these days, though as technology changes quicker that could become lower. The things most people did 15 years ago likely still have some relevance. 25 years might be another story.
Lawmakers want US Congress to be able to (finally) deliberate online
Dogs have owners, cats have staff, goes the popular saying. Apparently staff includes people who try to figure out cats. What a difficult profession to be in.
I kind of miss flash. Security issues aside, Actionscript 3 and the graphics api felt a lot easier to use than js/canvas and was more performant.

It felt like adobe just rolled over once Steve Jobs declared flash dead. They even bundled mcafee antivirus with the flash download, it's like they just want it to be over.
The Thoughtworks radar [1] has done a pretty good job in the past of predicting which technologies would catch on and which ones wouldn't.

http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/
If you're getting your work done, on time, and to the quality specifications, who the hell cares how many hours in the week you work?

We're working on computers, doing work which does not benefit from typing for N hours straight; there is no meaningful correlation between quality/quantity and hours worked.

I wish more people realized this.
You jump around jobs and see where it gets you. Eventually, you realize how to pick and choose your tech.

I got real burn out with front end, with emberjs, angularjs, and now react. I'm going to just wait this out until ES6 come about and see where that go.

I think in general I moved toward back end with all the big data and data science is going to be at. And now I'm going back to school to become a data science practicioner.

The trick is to have enough experiences and understanding overall concepts. I've done a variety of MVC in different languages and was thrust upon to do frontend and all that jazz. Those experiences will help you solve problem easier and hone your skill set in finding solutions.

I've seen people talking about how full stack is unicorn. I'm a full stack, I'm experienced in many technologies, master of none but a very small subset. I am constantly surprise how I am way more qualified than some of those frontend programmers or architecturers out there.

The deal is just continue to gain experiences on variety and you'll hone your problem solving skill. You might also be under selling yourself too. There are very few engineers out there and there are tons of pretenders. I've worked with two "front end" and a "acting cto" that specialized in architecture. They were anything but the position they claim to be but they sure do have a purrty linkedin profile with tons of people writing good things about them.
Great discussion here, although so much of it presumes that people whose hiring prowess mistakes CV crafting skills for CS wisdom are worth working for.

Okay, I'm lucky to be at a point where I squeezed enough blood from the software development rock to carry on even if I never wrote another line of code again.

But I can hardly express how much happier I've been in a (relative to "rock star" and/or "ninja" mindsets) silly, part time "data specialist" position for a local non-profit that really needs someone who can spin useful utilities and disparate systems connectivity from any available silk (or dirty kite string) than I've ever been slaving away in the usual "headless chickens" environments managed by the usual clowns whose management training consisted of little more than proving themselves useless at software development itself - which training, of course, tends to result in the aforementioned hiring prowess to boot.

Good bleeping riddance!
> Another thing to note, if you bounce around like this, you will never get true mastery over a particular language or framework.

I think this is a bit unfair. I find myself rapidly getting to the point of expertise where other people start asking me questions, just because I didn't have to spend time going from "dumb newbie" to "intermediate"--but being able to start at "intermediate" because of the built-up knowledge of everything in my back pocket. Part of it's also that I recognize that technical mastery is mostly just being able to Google faster and better than the next guy, but still.

We're short a letter in English for what I really mean, but there are I-shaped people and T-shaped people--what about U-shaped people? Building on multiple sources of knowledge to join them at the top? =)
This is a misrepresentation of the problem here. You're restating the corporate arguments.

> There just isn't enough user demand for freedom to overcome the loss to businesses of losing control of their content.

DRM doesn't prevent businesses losing control of their content. Orange is the New Black has, AFAIK, only ever been distributed through EME, but it's all over the Pirate Bay, every single episode.

> maybe it means coming up with alternate ways to monetize

We have alternate ways to monetize. The simplest being doing exactly what they are doing except not DRM-ing their content, which demonstrably has worked for multiple content distributors. There are others.

DRM isn't about controlling content or monetize that content. It's about maintaining an outdated business model because business executives don't understand the internet. Which would be fine, except that it's hurting the open web.
640 Labs was bought out by Monsanto in December, 2014.

I used to work with one of the founders. A really great guy and his success is well-deserved.

640 Labs is my example of what a real Chicago startup should be. They put their heads down, got to work, and got a product out in the field (literally).
"Probabilistic Programming is a new programming paradigm for managing uncertain information."

I thought probabilistic programming has been around for decades.
According to a 2006 study by the National Research Council, the thermoneutral zone for a domestic cat is 86 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the range of temperatures in which cats are “comfortable” and don’t have to generate extra heat to keep warm or expend metabolic energy on cooling ...Corrugated cardboard is a great insulator and confined spaces force the cat to ball up or form some other impossible object, which in turn helps it to preserve body heat.

Yeah, Occam's Razor, not Schrödinger's cat.
JSConf Budapest – Early birds are out
> I've seen people talking about how full stack is unicorn. I'm a full stack but I'm experienced in many technologies

Can you debug your runtime (Ruby, Python, the JVM, whatever) in gdb? I can, and I still don't consider myself "full-stack"--both because I leave JavaScript to JavaScript people, but also because if you asked me to debug a kernel I'd look at you and just shrug.

The stack goes down past your application.
"Flapping plosive at the bottom of a long tube."

What an exceptionally colorful description of the effects of that type of codec! Well done.

I wonder if there are applications for psychoacoustic modeling approaches for safety/compulsory announcements. Can they be encoded in a different way before broadcast on the PA to take advantage of our perception of human speech? And possible a different codec still for users of headphones?

Or perhaps a quick, sharp attention tone before urgent broadcasts, but for non safety/compulsory announcements, a lower volume setting...
Yep, looking from the UK or Ireland, we are constantly told how the US is so efficient at everything, etc etc....but their tax system is a complete mess...There are far to many credits, loopholes, electoral pork, red tape in the US system.

It's part of a bigger question I have been pondering recently. My sense is that in the 80s/90s the US tax system was much more efficient than the UK/Ireland/Scandinavia/German/Baltics system but somewhere along the line we learned their lessons and overtook them in terms of efficiency. (I suspect it's a bit like the Beta/VHS thing).

Even running a small company taxes in the UK is (honestly) not too tricky when it comes to this stuff - I'm sure it's even easier in a flat tax place like Estonia (take 20%, send it electronically to government, go back to work.).

I can only imagine how painfully complex it is in the US - and the amount of time an entrepreneur would spend dealing with it instead of building stuff.

Having been in the states a number of times in the last few years, I have been pretty shocked about the amount of bureaucracy that gets in the way of even very basic stuff - simple transactions, employee visas, lack of credit/eletronic payments for stuff etc etc
J. Kenji López-Alt from Serious Eats did some experimentation and found that burgers in general don't really rot: http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/11/the-burger-lab-r...