skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to disagree. Sure, if you go through that chore, you'll probably end up being a cool hacker. However, systems programming might not be what you really want to do (maybe you want to be a cool Hacker of JavaScript frameworks or whatever). I think it is better to work on stuff you really want to do. Maybe you want to create games - if at some point you realize your game's performance sucks, you can still dive down and learn all the other stuff. In other words, learning systems programming first is just premature optimization.

I don't even think learning stuff just for the sake of learning it even works. You always need some reason to learn stuff to really need it. For example, you can't learn photoshop by reading a book about photoshop. You have to try to accomplish something.

So set yourself a real goal, "I want to become a good programmer" doesn't count, something you want to build. Perhaps try to write a MMORPG - everybody will tell you that you will fail, but who knows.

I think it is very stupid to assume that after one year of learning C you can not yet program good enough to do anything. Set yourself a goal, then try to figure out how to achieve it. In fact, in my opinion, the job of a software developer is not to be good at some kind of programming language and then routinely solve problems with that skill. The job is to constantly learn new skills and to adapt to new requirements. Therefore the attitude "I am not good enough" is the exact opposite attitude of the attitude a programmer should have.

Disclaimer: I never got into C Systems programming myself. Probably I suck as a programmer - so what. We all do.

Edit2: Flicking through "Programming Clojure" only requires an afternoon, "Progamming Erlang" could be read in a weekend. Why don't you (the original poster) consider what you want to do, then evaluate a few possible paths (different languages, frameworks), pick one and get coding? Choosing a language just because of popular vote seems rather risky.

Edit3: Your MMOPRG's code will probably shit. User's will never know and won't care, though. Your second MMORPG's code will be shit in a very different way. And so on...
I'm Feeling Unlucky
Microsoft loses a shit-ton of money on OS vulnerabilities.
Don't Do That Then.

A better unsafe solution is to upgrade the breaker without upgrading the wiring or outlet. Breakers are usually $5-10 and most wiring won't burst in to flame from an extra 5 amps.

Note that fuse-in-plug does not keep you from overloading a circuit; it only helps when the device itself malfunctions.

Disclaimer: sometimes it will burst in to flames. You shouldn't actually do this.
there's a bug in the droid camera focus software (so should be fixable OTA).
The Django community in 2009
I'm not sure what he's complaining about with the Droid camera. It looks like it's just using a different white-balance setting than the iPhone.
I'm using Opera and it started getting too slow to play. When I investigated the opera.exe process it was using over 630MB of RAM. Took a long time to close the browser.

Good JavaScript performance tester!
FWIW, I have tried to completely delete my Facebook account and it did not work. They have no reason to delete your data, it's valuable information that you freely gave to them.
human_v2,

Although a few people want a Universal Language, the Logical Language Group which administers the Lojban language standard has never sought that as the purpose of Lojban. It is a thought experiment.

-Matt Arnold
President, Logical Language Group
contactRecords = [r for r in contactRecords if r[1] == "1"]
It's a big story currently in the UK so this article doesn't try to cover it all just one minor element. Namely, that politicians have been claiming that even if they take advice from scientists, then the politicians are still the experts in how people will react to changes in legislation. Which is clearly false.

The basics details of the actual story are here:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Political_fallout_from_the_sacki...

and here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#Government_positions
I get this all the time. It can be rather freaky.
just remove all the data from the fields:

before-

interests: "sports, hacker news, etc."

friends: 100

after-

interests: "-"

friends: 0

I did that once.. delete what you can.
I do talks for schools and various other organisations such as the Royal Institution, the Royal Society, the Further Maths Support Program, and others. The groups for whom I speak have very, very small budgets, and there's no chance of commanding fees like this.

I do it because I think it's important.

I take time unpaid leave from work, and I use my vacation time. I get my expenses covered, and a moderate fee, ranging from ukp50 (about usd80) to ukp400 (about usd650) per talk. And I do between 90 and 100 talks a year.

I'd love to make my living doing this, but 100 talks, to earn ukp40k, usd64k, I'd have to charge usd650 plus expenses for every talk. Schools can't afford that.

I'm not claiming to be a great speaker, although I'm over-subscribed, and described as one of the UKs leading speakers on math and science, but schools can't afford to support me. 100 talks a year is a real grind.

20 talks a year is genuinely sustainable, given that after a short time you'd have to change what you talk about. There's a lot of work goes into a really good talk. If you're charging lots, you are ethically required to put in the work to give a good talk. At 20 talks a year, to make, say, usd 100k you need to charge usd5k.

No wonder schools can't get inspirational speakers.
Adobe devalues Photoshop brand by releasing feature-limited iPhoto-like application for Android and calling it Photoshop.
Your condescencion is appreciated, I’m sure.
my question is can property rights be adequately protected by government? seems like history has proven that not to be the case.

the assumption that warlords would always appear in society no matter what is just that - an assumption. on the other hand, every government we have today was born by conquest and initially created by warlords.

I simply don't hold to the assumption that government will always be necessary in society to protect property rights. they are actually the biggest violators we have of property rights. people are capable of progressing beyond government, and I think they will once they finally realize what government really is.
I like to make 1 trivial comment for every 10 multi-point comments.
I was surprised by this conclusion: "I’d say [the Droid] is definitely the second best phone on the market..." It seemed to me that his points added up to it being better. The only one that was a solid win for the iPhone was the camera.
Whenever I give talks (2 or 3 sizable tech talks a year), I practice... a LOT. Like, go through the full, whole talk at least 15 times in its polished final form. If you count the more exploratory earlier practices, I think it's more than 30 or 40 practices, every talk.

So far I've only ever been paid a portion of travel expenses, which is why I don't practice more (honestly, I think practicing the final version only 15 times is kind of lazy). At $5,000 a gig... I think in the end I'd still be making a bit less per hour than I do programming, because I'd practice a lot more. The good thing is that I could suddenly afford to take the time to practice more :)
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You know, I have to say that London was the most violent place I've ever been. 9 out of 10 times that I'd go out in the city, there were muggings, very aggressive fights, people thrown out of bars, guys running into the street kicking cars right in front of the cops, buses that smelled and left one feeling tense and threatened.

And this wasn't just at night. At three in the afternoon, I saw a bar brawl flow out onto the street.

On one of my trips to Amsterdam, a local commented on how aggressive the brits were who would visit for stag parties, get drunk and start fights.

There really is something unhealthy going on there. It's worrisome really. There were lots of articles at the time about the youths. I can't remember what they called them, some kind of acronym. YAGs or something like that. It's a real tragedy.
Something like http://www.interworldna.com/images/summa/summa-cursors.jpg or http://www.interworldna.com/GTCO/gtco-ultima.php ? There's a lot of brands of these, they're called digitizers.
Javascript and PHP or Ruby.
I emailed pg with this request back in March - I got back a response saying that there wasn't a mechanism for changing a username. Though it would be nice if that has changed in the meantime.
That's what I suspected too. The thoughts of rejection occupy brainwaves that are otherwise spent thinking about and answering questions correctly.
DanielStraight,

Consider a reasonably-popular, useful software package. At first, one might just toy around with it without sufficiently reading the documentation. Before long, one will learn to use it correctly, but not before getting a lot of error messages. That does not mean the software is impossible to use.

Lojban is similar, except that the only place you get error messages in Lojban is from other users. What you are seeing is a symptom of how active the Lojban community is, especially since being featured in an xkcd comic. Many newbies are attempting it before learning it. You are seeing a process of welcoming and educating newcomers that has become the norm in our community.

Consider the hypothetical software package again. You may wish to do something weird with it that is at the edges of its scope. You may need to make a feature request, or report flaky performance at a level for which the software is rarely used.

That is what you are seeing as well. Our debugging committee, the BPFK, is hashing out a lot of edge cases. However, these edge cases are tangential to the day-to-day usage of almost anyone, which is bug-free.

-Matt Arnold, President, Logical Language Group
I just happen to have implemented something like this myself recently, which seems easier to me. here it is: generate a large random number for each card, then sort the list according to the random numbers. Can anybody here poke holes in that one?
I was thinking this way long before I touched a computer. Are you sure you're not just naturally weird in the head? (No offense intended, of course. I like it when people behave in a way that makes sense.)
Perhaps it does have an evolutionary purpose. Say you are a male who is constantly rejected by the female. If mate with the female, perhaps even against her will, then you produce offspring.

Also, being rejected is a dominance issue. If rejected from more powerful members of the society produces aggression to the point of killing those more powerful then the aggressive individual rises to power and increases the odds of reproduction.
Because it doesn't relate to the article. Who cares if he has a TV? This is about saving money watching TV by buying shows directly, rather than paying the general fee.
I don't know why you guys got downmodded. I agree with both. The article is pretty bad and neglects a very common sense approach to thinking.

I see little evidence that it actually reduces someone's intelligence. Maybe their test results acutely, but I highly doubt it makes someone dumber.
This also came to me as strange. It came to me that someone who is being rejected may not have good prospects in the future for succesful procreation.

So having such individuals' nature turn self-destructive / aggressive will ensure he/she get further rejected. Increasing the selection process: only the socially/behaviourally fit remains in the community.
Nova has changed too. I watched it every weekend growing up and it was much more hardcore. I've seen them mainstreaming themselves and taking on more social issues and less science/physics issues. Nova now is like a blend of Nova Science Now and Nova of 2 decades ago.
Shouldn't the author have first contacted MS letting them know of the flaw and making a post (and taking the credit) after they have fixed the flaw.
That is what I have seen happen in the past when the DNS flaw was discovered and also recently when the Twitter XSS vulnerability was found.
I have this literally all the time. It isn't freaky because it's normal. Can anyone describe what its absence is like? Do you suddenly become able to move? Are you moving before you wake up?
Python has always impressed me as an extraordinarily pleasant language, easy to learn and plenty powerful. I second the recommendation.
Low-level programming languages are molasses; once you understand the basic concepts, it's best to work with Scheme and abstractions til you're absolutely sure of what you're doing. Learn how to use a REPL, interactive debugger, etc....

The rounded programmer understands both computation and computers. C or an assembly language is a great way to learn how the computer works, but working at such a low level makes it harder to see the structure of the procedures you write and the processes they generate. Personally, I think it's more fun and rewarding to learn about computation first, then take a look under the hood. Others may disagree. Either way, you should learn both eventually.

For learning about computation, there are few better resources than The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, MIT's introductory computer science text for over 20 years. It, and supporting course materials are available online free of charge, and there's a print version for traditionalists.
Case-Lambda in Guile
Same. I got this no less than 2 nights ago. Opened my eyes but couldn't move my body. I looked over at the bedroom door and thought someone was peering in. Freaked me out but in my head I was like 'oh its this again. You know what, freaky creature at the door, I'm too tired to fight and move my body, now im going back to sleep.' He disappeared and I had fantastic sleep.
How Priceline Got Its Mojo Working Again
Because it does relate to the article. And, more and more people are killing their TV because it's crap. Save even more money and kill your TV.
I don't think I'm moving before I wake up. I just wake up and can move if I so choose.

Never experienced sleep paralysis before.
As far as I can tell, the "correct" shuffle in that post is wrong, int(rand() * $i) is always smaller than $i, so it will never generate a permutation where an element stays at the same position.

It is obvious from the numbers, too: the loop goes from $length - 1 to 1, so it has $length - 1 iterations, in the first iteration there are $length - 1 possible values for $r, in the second $length - 2, and the last iteration will always swap elements 0 and 1, for a total of (N-1)! different paths through the program, which are clearly not sufficient to generate N! different permutations.

[Edit: I had an off-by-one in my calculations, too. I hope it is correct now.]

[Edit: Actually, there still is an error in the first sentence: the algoritm will never leave the current element in its place, so the only element that is guaranteed not to stay at the same position is the last one. Run this:

for my $i (1..1000000) {
my @a = (1..10);
my @b = shuffle(@a);
if ($b[10] == 10) {
die "Criticism is wrong $i";
}
}
]
You can just move when u want. There's no delay or will power involved.
So when can I expect them to stop asking me where this or that function is hidden in Office __2007__.
Its a very simple bug, and will be fixed via an update not sure when that will be though.
"What's all your furniture pointed at?"
Found Photos: Rarely seen Steve Jobs
I don't think he was complaining about the quality (although for a 3+ MP advantage I wouldn't be proud of those shots).

To my eyes… they’re roughly the same quality once taken. And if I’m not mistaken the 1st gen iphone is a 2.0 megapixel camera and the droid is 5 megapixels. Yeesh that’s embarrassing.

Reports have complained that the Droids camera takes ages to open, shoot, and process. I'll bet that's what he meant when he said it really sucks. That would make sense, given that the device must process a lot more to take in all 5MP. Hopefully they'll refine this process in the future for faster shots.
Skype founders win back stake of company
The main competitive advantage of the iPhone is not the features. It's the overall polish and UI.
A problem can occur if you're shuffling a large number of cards (greater than the maximum of the random number generator) because each random number should be unique.
The issue is that the phone is apparently not auto-focusing properly. When you take a shot you'll often see red markers in the corners, which supposedly indicate that the camera couldn't focus (you're supposed to see green, at least according to some forums I've read — I see red every time). Rumored to just be a software problem that will be fixed in the next few weeks.
It's O(N * log(N)) instead of O(N).

And of course it has the usual problem of generating permutations using a pseudo random number generater: Even for moderately sized collections, the number of permutations is far larger than the number of differnt initialization states of many common PRNGs, so even if an algorithm looks correct, it may not be able to generate all permutations. For example, a 63 bit linear congruential shift generator has 2^63 = 9x10^18 possible sequences, while there are about 52! = 80x10^66 permutations of 52 cards.
I know that from participating on email lists for many years. I don't know how much of that type of information is in the standard literature. Tests are only a tool. The conclusions drawn from them are only as wise as the person(s) administering and interpreting them.
Google Book result, you'll be after page 31, table 2.7. Doesn't include figures for high school dropouts though.

"Racial and ethnic diversity in America: a reference handbook" - 2000

http://books.google.com/books?id=xc-YEVDhC0MC&pg=PA30...

The scary table is number 2.9:

homicide by firearm, per year, per 100,000 people

age 10-14 15-19 20-24
white 0.5 3.9 5.6
hispanic 1.1 14.0 18.1
black 1.8 29.1 55.6(!!)
I've thought about your comment for a while.

If you want to test for potentially interesting search space, you should do so systematically, not randomly.

A random scattering could leave vast areas unsearched, and you might not even know. (I think you'd have to look at a visualization that happened to make it clear, or do some other analysis.)

Covering the entire search space evenly is a better approach to start with. Increasing the frequency around high scoring points would automatically dig down into interesting regions.
I agree that you should broaden your horizons. It gives important perspective, and makes your mind a lot bigger. There's more than one way to do it, of course, but here's a sequence of languages that I would recommend:

Python: this will teach you to program at a higher level, and the libraries will make it easier for you to get into web programming or GUI programming or simple game programming or any other thing that excites you. That's what it's all about, when you're learning: do something that excites you, and you'll learn faster. Python has a very low barrier to entry, so try this first.

Lisp: once you know Python, you're not going to be bowled over by things like garbage collection. But you can still learn a lot from Lisp; if nothing else, it can give valuable practice with recursion and metaprogramming and the idea of a read-eval-print loop. It's a cool and fun language.

Haskell: this one is kind of difficult to learn, which is why I recommend learning it after you've got Lisp under your belt. A lot of advanced computer science stuff tends to debut in the Haskell community, and the average intelligence of Haskellers is pretty shocking. It's also a neat language that you can do cool projects with.

If you can learn these languages, I guarantee that you will be able to shift paradigms a lot easier than people who coasted along with the standard trio of C, C++, and Java.
A family (without a TV) that I know of has all their furniture pointed at a grand piano. Definitely not cheaper.
I love the way that Lisp lends itself to incremental testing. You can discover most bugs just by testing functions at the REPL. If you plan to continue with Lisp (hooray!) then I would recommend becoming familiar with SLIME if you're not already.

http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/
Ask HN: Review my app iPUBReader
We launched beta version of our site http://roorky.com. We developed this new book reader viz., iPUBReader which reads books in iPUB format. With iPUB most of the things that you do independently as you read book will become part of the reading experience.

Please let us know your opinion about idea and product.
Having a criminal past is also a huge factor.

This is anecdotal, but my neighbor's son is a black 35 year old male lacking a high school education and had a BS drug charge. It is very difficult for him to find a job, after all, who wants to hire an ex-con?

Also, his social network makes him very likely to be harassed by police.

I think the decriminalization of drugs will help the inequality, or at least fix a symptom.
Often times a movement wakes you up or as soon as you are conscious you are able to move. Waking up and not being able to move is quite a shocking experience. Happened to me once and I thought I was dead. I was very afraid because I knew someone in the room could hurt me and I couldn't do anything about it.

Of course, the same is true if I was unconscious and sleeping as well, but somehow, being awake and unable to respond and being aware made it terrifying.
> If this guy was on my team, I'd fire him. I don't care if his code was "20 orders of magnitude faster."

Ok, I'd hire him straight away after that, so things would work out well for everyone!
Yes. No prepared speeches please. It drives us nuts when we ask someone a question, and instead of just answering they launch into some long preamble they prepared in advance.

Interviews are only 10 minutes. We need random access; there is no time for sequential.
As soon as you point them to the excellent interactive

Word 2003 to Word 2007 command reference guide

http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/word/HA100744321033.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=904...

Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 command reference guide

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA101491511033.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=897...

PowerPoint 2003 to PowerPoint 2007 command reference guide

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA101490761033....

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=BEF...

Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007 Command Reference Guide

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102221621033.asp...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=CC3...

The first link is the online version, the second - the standalone .exe

I always put a shortcut to those above the shortcut of Word/Excel/Power./Outlook, explain/show how to use them in 5 sec and my users are happy!
This is considered standard. You only go public with a live exploit if the company shows no interest in fixing it. The author receives no sympathy from me on this.
So you are saying that iodine deficiency does not cause a decrease in IQ?
i'm not really worried about the complexity. it's plenty fast enough for my needs. but i am worried about getting decent results. i suck at anything that smells like math, but i think you're saying that the distribution of random numbers might not be random enough to get decent results, right?

is there some random number generator in a C-like language i should investigate, as opposed to using srand() and rand()?
Original article is at: http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/fortune/0911/gallery.ste...