skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In the end, if you're not embarrased about the code you wrote half a year ago, it's a sign you're not progressing.

I just can't agree with this statement at all.

I have written loads of code years ago that I am not embarrassed about, but I feel that I am definitely a better developer than I was some years ago.

I really liken code to writing of any other sort. I don't feel embarrassed about everything I wrote from a few years ago. My opinions and styles may have changed, but it's not all crap. Some of it definitely is crap, though.
Wikipedia and Ralph Koster seem to agree.

"The word "shard" in a database context may be derived from the 1997 MMORPG Ultima Online, which referred to its game servers and their associated databases as "shards." This was in reference to the game's fiction, in which the broken shards of the evil wizard Mondain's Gem of Immortality each contained a complete, living copy of the world.[24] This usage spread informally through the video game industry, and may have come into mainstream usage via Flickr, which began as a tool for an unpublished MMO."

Original blog post:
http://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came-...
Depends on how dense your source material is.

No matter your level of sophistication, if you are making it through ten pages a day, you should probably switch to harder material.

The specific number doesn't matter too much, though.

If you get through one page of dense math an hour, you are doing well.
Well, this is nothing new. It's called heuristic evaluation and it's been around at least since 1990 [1]. Almost every item in the article's list maps to a simple and well known heuristic.

It's very strange (or sad) that the author doesn't mention heuristics in his post and talks about his conclusion as something "new": "it dawned on me that a trained eye can often spot unfriendly software a mile away." It may have "dawned on you", but it's nothing new.

It never ceases to amaze me, how oblivious of basic usability the people in IT are.

[1] Nielsen, J., and Molich, R. (1990). Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces, Proc. ACM CHI'90 Conf. (Seattle, WA, 1-5 April), 249-256.
>Jackson's AMA went badly, he/his team was specifically pissed at Victoria and demanded consequences, threatening a public campaign against reddit.

This is a very plausible conjecture, especially in view of admins' comments in wake of the fatpeoplehate ban explicitly permitting racist anti-black subreddits to continue to operate. This could have become an existential threat to reddit. In view of that, and their apparent weathering of past anti-user controversies, a user revolt would seem like the lesser evil from a short-sighted perspective.
Great article - cars are an old idea that are dramatically in need of a fundamental reboot. Google's self-driving cars are a huge start - as combined with the rise of the sharing economy, could signal that the car industry's approach of many slightly different models of the same basic tech to different segments of the market will no longer work. Safety, convenience, and reliability could be the new important features consumers look for.
I can't believe for one second he thought his request would be granted. And even if it were, he still has no way out of his self-imposed house arrest.

Everything he does is just self-publicity to fuel his ego.
>In Sweden, he would get a fair trial at a european court. If his case even would go to trial. Then he would be extradited to the U.S. by treaty, where he would be exposed to the horrors of the American Justice System.

FTFY.
I would like to put forward another perspective.

I notice that in software industry there is common recommendation of doing some project (or just hack something) to to learn or get better at something. This advice I think is solid and is generally good for many people.

However, I feel that it is not valid or valid only in very limited way to some people. This all depends on character types I guess. E. g. myself, if I ever tried following it I would not get anywhere, because projects for the sake of projects is something my mind has big problems with. It's simply not in my nature.
I would argue that regarding this point I am part of silent minority in IT industry since I noticed quite a few developers who are similar in this regard.

So what is alternative if projects/portfolio/... might not be a thing for you. What works for me:

1. Concentrate on Theory. This addresses few things: I must understand theory to not get frustrated, I m more interested in theory than practice in general, Often theory is just enough and mind will just find solution when you need.

A. Concentrate more on studying theory.

B. Use micro-projects just for testing and understanding concepts, not something useful by itself.

C. Study "best practices". To compensate for project problem.

2. Look for a way to have goals (projects) forced on you. Addresses few things: it frees your mind from over-thinking (e.g. "whats the big purpose of this?"), it must be done - you cannot just quit when lose interest/reason-to-continue.

A. Hobby. Join online courses with assignments, university (if it allows).

B. Job. Try to look for positions with more "projects".
That statement from kn0thing made me think "pride does indeed come before a fall". Let's see!
I've leaned to stop caring about fads until they become a reality in project requirements.
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Then it's all about the domain.
Kill your TV.
It is. One of the most basic usability references talks about this [1] and:

1) Nobody cares - nobody respects it;
2) People make posts saying " it dawned on me that a trained eye can often spot unfriendly software a mile away" as if this is something new!

[1] Nielsen, J., and Molich, R. (1990). Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces, Proc. ACM CHI'90 Conf. (Seattle, WA, 1-5 April), 249-256.
Indeed. One must trust that Sweden will not in any way allow him to be extradited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Sweden

(The sentence before the URL was sarcasm by the way).
Show HN: Execute android code snippets via browser
That's not true
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/616928546875932673
I have it turned off in my main browser with NoScript, and then selectively turned on for sites I frequently use (like HN) with poor usability without it (like HN). It's actually surprising how many actually require it though. I prefer to use emacs-w3m, and thus not get distracted with images or anything else.

But no, JavaScript is not required to sign in (that's what HTTP Basic and Digest authentication are for), nor to post comments (that's what the HTTP POST method is for); both capabilities are available to a non-JavaScript browser.
`User blindness' is a problem, but good design can also help.

Eg instead of confirmation dialogs make as much undoable as possible. GMail goes so far into that territory (originally by accident) as to introduce a delay before sending your message to give you time to undo.
I thought one motivation for colonies was to help ensure the preservation of humanity in the event of a catastrophic event on earth.
No, because we already have native and the browser should be left alone for interactive documents.
Do do you mean PNGQuant? There's the usual issue that it's lossy, for that image you might as well use mid-level JPEG compression.
I am using/loving React a lot and is already in several production apps I am working on (thanks for awesome work Facebook!) but I don't fully get this release.

I feel it's a bit premature to separate `react` and `react-dom`. React has proven itself for the web but still has to prove itself as `react-native` and I don't get the friction/complexity being added by break it down into two components for the web. I feel React is more the rendering engine `react-dom` than the class/component system now `react`. What makes React beautiful is to be able to freely mix html into JS and not being limited to the render() call, so I feel the cut is a bit non-organic.

Finally, I love the approach `learn once, write anywhere` but having `react` as a thing by itself points (or at least confuses) to a workflow where you can write components by themselves then plug a rendering engine DOM or native, I don't think that's the initial intent and I don't think that's the intent now of this release as well but it's unnecessary confusing.

[Edit] Don't fully get why I've been downvoted.
It's basically an ad from studio Shaft known for it's stylistic approach to certain things in anime production. Something nonstandard from them is what people expect. Plus, there's nothing wrong with trying to show off in an ad at the price of usability.
The problem is that Apple doesn't provide access to lower level APIs that would allow other browser engines to compete on performance and increased functionality. They can only compete on UI. This lack of competition is holding back the potential of the mobile web.
Tim Hortons coffee.
Maybe he should have asked Germany. They seem pretty mad at the U.S. listening in on all their phone calls and hacking their leaders' private communications.

How does that get him out of the UK though?
Studying a language is probably the worst way to learn it.

Languages are so simple to pick up these days: stackoverflow, teamtreehouse, git, etc. Latch onto a fun project with a fun mission, learn languages on the fly, and finish it. In a book, you wont learn how to debug that broken ruby gem. This will guide you in the right direction as well, it will force you to pickup pragmatic practices. [As opposed to sitting in the break room debating abstract factory patterns vs factory pattens]. After 13 years of coding, I just code on projects I enjoy now. I have to learn Go? Meh. Whatever. As a side note on php (my true love), I encourage the hate - it helps my pay.

Java? Not until it gets the basic web functions,
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/832620/stripping-html-tag...
Was it a hoax? Who sent the letter?

Was the response by France genuine or also false?
-Waking up really early, before sunrise, with no other distractions than a cup of tea and your work. Knowing you have 3-4 hours of uninterrupted time to get shit done, and someone to show the work after that.

Works better for me than burning the midnight oil (which works too but probably isn't as healthy).

-Not doing too many things at the same time (hard)

-Having a passion in what you are doing and being proud of the quality of the end result

-Some excercise helps to get the blood flowing and oxygen into your brain which I find helps with focus
It just means that this test was described at least several times in different "computer" media over last few years and almost everyone has read about it.
Same thing with all "logic" puzzles.
What's PNGquadrant? Google didn't help
:) Did you see this one? https://medium.com/@boopathi/it-s-the-future-7a4207e028c2
I would link to his reply a few days ago on /r/movies to someone seeing Terminator Genisys with their father, but the subreddit has gone dark.

He got reddit gold, had a perfect response, and added a handwritten note (an effective way of showing that he was involved, not just his publicist).

He has the team in place to be notified of these things and hit it out of the park.
I agree. I guess i was mislead by the title then.
Agree with everything except this one point... it seems a bit odd to refer to his retreat to Ecuador's embassy as "self-imposed house arrest".

Surely he has a genuine and reasonable fear of being extradited to a country that operates an off-shore detention facility that exists outside the law; a country that tortures prisoners.
Maybe you would know, but are MEMS gyroscopes of accurate quality to output true north data?

Specifically referring to Invensense 9150 9dof (3 accel, 3 magnetometer, 3 gyro)
> In Sweden, he would get a fair trial at a european court

Sure.
It is really sad that a clown like Assange is considered a hero around here. There are much better people, you would be better off picking someone at random.
To me, the start of a productive day beings with a good sleep the previous night. No need for coffee or other stimulants.

If possible a short nap after lunch (siesta) will also help stay energized for the rest of the day.
What does it take to build payment apps like Venmo and Square Cash?
Someone just asked me about payment apps like Venmo and Square Cash. They wanted to know what is the level of effort involved. And the more I thought about it the more it seemed there is a lot more involved. Can HN please help shed some light here?
Clearly that can't be true. That subreddit is still valuable without AMAs. The people in charge just can't bring themselves to be honest with their users. Look at the re-opening announcement and spot the blatant lies and half-truths:

> Today /r/science was briefly shut down, and in the interest of transparency we would like to address the reason for this occurrence. Following consequential changes in admin organization and AMA execution, the capacity of /r/science to continue hosting AMAs was impacted. Admin support has been crucial to the /r/science AMA program, and unfortunately these recent changes had the consequence of limiting that support, impacting several AMAs. By changing the status of /r/science to private briefly, we hoped to enable both Admin and the moderation to team to focus their energies on resolving these issues in a timely manner. Though this situation is ongoing, we are returning /r/science to public status in order to limit the inconvenience to the community.

> The comments in this thread will be locked.

They also don't care to explain themselves to their users so they just blocked the comments. Father knows best.
I think I would call this "depth scrolling" as it is somewhat different from a zooming interface (where the interface is laid out in space, like landmarks in Google Maps).

It is basically allowing you to scroll "into and out" of the page and that's it, instead of "up and down". It's not really changing how you interface with it.
Study Says on East Coast Electric Cars Dirtier Than Gas Guzzlers
I seem to recall a claim that it is easier to adapt the human to the interface than the interface to the human.

And for some reason i have it mentally attributed to Apple...
I've recently started doing Yoga (mainly breath yoga - Pranayam) and Mindfulness.

30 minutes - first thing every morning.

It's unbelievable how much my energy levels and concentration have gone up!
This is my favorite productivity hack.

If I'm stuck on a problem, I'll go for a walk. My hope is that I'll find a solution, but I often discover that I don't even need to solve the problem.
What other reason is there to go private?
Nginx doesn't do the advanced cache invalidation based on tags in a header.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing but what makes you say working extremely early hours is probably healthier than working extremely late hours?
I have a lot of productivity programs, calendar apps, todo lists, mind mapping software etc. etc... But the greatest tool in my arsenal is a notebook and a pen.

Every morning, before I start working, I browse my calendar, Omnifocus, notes from yesterday, and with my notebook, I write down the three things I absolutely want to get done today.

I don't always get those three things done, but I sure do make a lot of progress on them and feel good about my productivity at the end of the day.

Something about the ritual and physical act of writing stuff down with a pen really does it for me. When I forget to do this or start working without it, I feel directionless and will mostly just answer email and get inconsequential stuff done all day.
The UK and Germany (amongst others no doubt) have been complicit in Extraordinary Rendition for starters... you can believe in humans rights and fair trial if you like, but that'd be naive.
i am using a personal kanban board to organize my tasks and work on them one after another... if someone interrupts, i just add another task and continue working on the previous one
I don't dislike it at all. I just was hoping to have varnish handle everything on that server.
I don't disagree with the assertion that iOS needs greater browser choice, but, even were that to happen, Safari falling behind other browsers in standards support would still be an issue.

IE6 remained a thorn in the side of the web development community long after viable alternatives appeared.
This is a nice use of CSS 3d transforms. I wonder why it isn’t 3d on an iPhone, which ought to support these transforms. Perhaps it was too slow or memory-hungry?
"also does" is far from "if we can't do AMAs in a NY office any more, we have to close shop"
The gyrocompass orientation should, in principle, be obtainable by properly integrating gyroscope readings (and accelerometer? not sure if required).
Luhn is also used for the last digit in Swedish social security numbers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity_number_%28Sw...
which makes me remember doing this in school around age of 10. i wish the teacher then would call it an "algorithm", so one wouldnt grow up thinking "algorithms" is something complex and hard to understand
Not that much. Apache gets about 30-40 requests per second on average. However, this is with Varnish handling a lot of requests that never get sent to the backend.
I mostly agree, however one point I disagree very strongly with is the first: An Excel/development IDE – like user interface

IDEs are horrible, horrible examples of interface design I can easily agree with that. However,

> Excel is the most unconstrained application most people know, and a lot of software starts out as an Excel sheet before growing up into ‘real’ software.

Usability comes first and foremost. If most people are familiar with Excel that means that the Excel interface language is a good language (if not the best). I don't care if it doesn't sate the desire for an "elegant" user interface. The fact is that nearly all users already know how to use the interface and are extremely proficient with it: what more could you possibly want out of an interface? Scrolly fiver-finger gestures and other complete shit that you don't need? YAGNI.

We make huge sales based on usability. Our bigger customers have historically placed us into a competition during our initial sales pitch. If the sale ends up in that situation we always win. Why? Because by the time customers are using our software to build toy/test solutions our competitors are still training the customer. Why? Because usability comes first and foremost, because our UX guys don't let pet peeves about Excel get in the way of making great and usable interfaces.

If you can "unconstrain" your solution enough to make it fit into a spreadsheet then I say, "go for it."
The former has exited in one form or another for ages.

As for the other, personal experience indicates that it is of questionable value at best.

I have seen way too many apps either not come back up, or come back up in some insane state. As such i consider it no better than the autosave on a wordprocessor.
FBI Warns: Physical Attacks on Internet Connections on the Rise
> most non-programmers seem to forget their high school math

I wrote a book to fix that: http://noBSgui.de/to/MATHandPHYSICS/

This book is like calling `apt-get install hs-math mech calc`.
I feel the same after doing web programming for over a decade. I started out doing database stuff and actually with hindsight I think I could have quite happily narrowed my focus towards being a db specialist, and avoided that feeling of treading water. People say it's great to be an all rounder but it's only when you are focused you excel at one thing. After grappling with an ad-hoc task, I master it after a day, only to forget it by the next time I need to use it.
But going private is not subtle enough for that.
The first time I've seen the Luhn algorithm was on a compromised web server. The cracker has put several fake ebay login/registration pages, as well as a couple of Javascript files.

The pages were obviously intended to be used for phishing. However, what really made me go "wow" was the extra mile they went: one of the Javascript files contained methods that took the credit card number from the fake registration page and checked its validity w/ the Luhn algorithm before emailing it to a random email address. If the number was invalid, the user got an error and they forced him to re-enter.

I didn't know about the algorithm at the time (this was around 2005), so I was a bit baffled what the heck they are trying to do.
On CNN a few days back:
French minister: It's possible asylum will be offered to Snowden, Assange.
Here's what works for achieving extreme levels of hyper-creativity and hyper-productivity for me. Will it work for you? Yes. Will you do it? No, you will find endless excuses to call the below "impossible". Still, for anyone who dares, here it is:

1. Get as much sleep as you can. Consistently. Yes, it's counter-intuitive. Yes, you'll have fewer waking hours. But those few hours will be many times more productive and joyful.

2. Drink more water and eat fresh food. Eat less than you normally do.

3. Get plenty of fresh air and sunlight.

4. Get a good amount of physical activity throughout the day (exercise, walks, whatever works for you)

5. Get plenty of vacation time during the year. Do not do ANY work during your vacation time - focus on enjoying yourself. (Ideally, 1/3 of the year should be spent on vacation time)

6. Make a list of the 20 most important things you want to accomplish (near-term). Sort the list so that at the top you have the things that you feel most passionate about. Keep the top 2 items and scratch everything else (I don't mean de-prioritize - I mean scratch it / drop it / burn it / forget it / it ain't happening.)

7. Focus all of your time and attention on doing those things that are most exciting TO YOU personally. Whether those things have any utility to anyone other than you is irrelevant. You come first.

8. If there is anything else that still absolutely needs to be done - find a way to delegate it to someone who's good at that stuff.

9. You will be unstoppable.
Call a friend once a day at roughly the same time. Catch up on what you two have been up to, talk about what you've accomplished in the last 24 hours, and discuss what you'd like to get done before the next call.

No app or self-help book could ever replace the shame from letting down someone you respect.
Disconnect (on AppleMusic's Connect service)
I've always wondered how driving an electric car powered by a dirty coal or diesel power plant (common in the Caribbean) could be cleaner than driving a high efficiency internal combustion engine car.
On the plus side, the rapid adoption of new versions of iOS means that should Apple improve Safari, the new version will quickly supersede the old, rather than having it linger around for years, as IE6 did.
The BND are in bed with the NSA:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-intellige...