prompt
stringlengths 2
23.7k
| chosen
stringlengths 1
43.3k
| rejected
stringlengths 1
16.4k
|
|---|---|---|
adobe cto on flash for mac
| apple is certainly blocking adobe despite being able to run flash on a machine like the ipad. the reason for this isn't because it can run, it's that it can't run well enough to not break the flow of the device, making it feel slow. most mud being slung back and forth seems to be ignoring this.to a large degree, i agree with this choice, and i welcome flash's demise (if it happens) in favor of something more open / capable / faster. flash serves unique needs which have now largely been done better by other tools.apple is all about feel, and as they absolutely cannot control the quality of the flood of old / crappy flash apps that will grind the machine to a halt if they enable it, they've decided to block it outright. it fits perfectly with their app store model, where they can ensure programs run quickly enough. whether you agree with the app store model or not is another issue entirely, apple is being merely consistent in all this. | "these crashes you are seeing do not exist. the 100% cpu usage is likewise an illusion. also, google is evil. believe me!" |
adobe cto on flash for mac
| "these crashes you are seeing do not exist. the 100% cpu usage is likewise an illusion. also, google is evil. believe me!" | 2 flash has been incredibly successful in its adoption, with over
2 85% of the top web sites containing flash content and flash
2 running on over 98% of computers on the web.oh really? i've disabled flash on all my browsers a week ago and don't even notice that i'm missing so much web-content! |
adobe cto on flash for mac
| 2 flash has been incredibly successful in its adoption, with over
2 85% of the top web sites containing flash content and flash
2 running on over 98% of computers on the web.oh really? i've disabled flash on all my browsers a week ago and don't even notice that i'm missing so much web-content! | if they are having problems reproducing the crashes, they should pay for me to send my macbook to them - it is 100% reproducible every single time. i actually installed windows on a partition, and i boot in there to play flash video.i open a video site. i try to jump to a location in the middle of the video. it crashes.and of course, if you play 3-4 videos, the macbook will decide to switch itself off because of overheating. |
adobe cto on flash for mac
| if they are having problems reproducing the crashes, they should pay for me to send my macbook to them - it is 100% reproducible every single time. i actually installed windows on a partition, and i boot in there to play flash video.i open a video site. i try to jump to a location in the middle of the video. it crashes.and of course, if you play 3-4 videos, the macbook will decide to switch itself off because of overheating. | i have to say kevin is doing an incredible job remaining collected and professional even amongst the unprofessional comments from both the pro-flash and anti-flash. |
higher-order perl is available for free as a pdf
| i read this book several years ago when i was still doing a lot of straight-ahead php. was a bit of a mind opener at the time and totally changed my approach and understanding of programming and programming languages. much of the book is applicable to javascript, ruby, and python. i don't have much use for perl now, but it's still a great read. | has anyone seen mjd lately? i haven't heard from him and he hasn't updated his blog since january. i'm starting to get worried. (this pdf was put up long before that.) |
higher-order perl is available for free as a pdf
| has anyone seen mjd lately? i haven't heard from him and he hasn't updated his blog since january. i'm starting to get worried. (this pdf was put up long before that.) | it was really mind-boggling when reading it - but then i did not have much chance to apply the techniques in my work. i've read a lot of positive reviews of this book and how it changed the way people programm - but what was exactly the technique that you picked up from it?i once copied the crawler using iterators ( <link> ) when we needed a quick script to check our links - and it worked nice for about a 1000 entries and then it suddenly started to be really slow. i tried to find out where that slow down happens and it was after the return statement in traverse - it seems like this code triggers some garbage collector problem. i did not have time to analyze that further - but it happened both in 5.10.1 and 5.12.1.i've also send a simple bug report to mjd (for the line 'my $html = get($url); - it redeclares $html and so the value becomes invisible from outside of the loop and in particular for the return statement), but i never got any answer from him. |
higher-order perl is available for free as a pdf
| it was really mind-boggling when reading it - but then i did not have much chance to apply the techniques in my work. i've read a lot of positive reviews of this book and how it changed the way people programm - but what was exactly the technique that you picked up from it?i once copied the crawler using iterators ( <link> ) when we needed a quick script to check our links - and it worked nice for about a 1000 entries and then it suddenly started to be really slow. i tried to find out where that slow down happens and it was after the return statement in traverse - it seems like this code triggers some garbage collector problem. i did not have time to analyze that further - but it happened both in 5.10.1 and 5.12.1.i've also send a simple bug report to mjd (for the line 'my $html = get($url); - it redeclares $html and so the value becomes invisible from outside of the loop and in particular for the return statement), but i never got any answer from him. | the regex as a value generator in this book is really quite good. i've been dying to see somebody write it up and stick it on cpan. |
higher-order perl is available for free as a pdf
| the regex as a value generator in this book is really quite good. i've been dying to see somebody write it up and stick it on cpan. | can't we just let perl fade gently into that good night? i mean really. time's up. |
gates buys feynman's "messenger" lectures (to make available to the public)
| some videos from feynman which make a great impression on me were these.."take the world from another point of view"1.) <link> <link> <link> <link> | gates is not only a big feynman fan, he's also a big fan of video lectures. here's a quote:"the thing i asked for christmas last year, those teach12.com dvds, the sad fact is that in their science area i now have all of their lectures. these things are brilliant. if you weren’t here to hear me enthused about that, these are not-- they’re kind of pricy, but these are brilliant science lectures. if you want to learn about-- if you want to understand how semiconductors work, get the lecture called 'physics in your everyday life' and watch it. he will explain to you, better than i’ve ever seen explained, because i’ve always tried to explain to people how semiconductors work. if you want to know about geology, just get the geology course. if you want to know biology, you want to know string theory, you want to know anything, they’ve gone and found the very best lecturers in the world and they’re fantastic.the problem is i’ve seen them all now. i’m going to go back and re-watch maybe about half of them, because they’re that fun and interesting.some of them-- my daughter is 11, my son is 8 -- some of them, like i got all their high school ones. some of those are good enough i’ll get to watch with my kids and go through and see if they’re ready for them. so, i might have to think of something new. i’ve told them they should go get more lectures. there are some areas that they don’t cover very well. they don’t cover chemistry as well as they should. there’s actually nothing that’s really good on chemistry out there." |
gates buys feynman's "messenger" lectures (to make available to the public)
| gates is not only a big feynman fan, he's also a big fan of video lectures. here's a quote:"the thing i asked for christmas last year, those teach12.com dvds, the sad fact is that in their science area i now have all of their lectures. these things are brilliant. if you weren’t here to hear me enthused about that, these are not-- they’re kind of pricy, but these are brilliant science lectures. if you want to learn about-- if you want to understand how semiconductors work, get the lecture called 'physics in your everyday life' and watch it. he will explain to you, better than i’ve ever seen explained, because i’ve always tried to explain to people how semiconductors work. if you want to know about geology, just get the geology course. if you want to know biology, you want to know string theory, you want to know anything, they’ve gone and found the very best lecturers in the world and they’re fantastic.the problem is i’ve seen them all now. i’m going to go back and re-watch maybe about half of them, because they’re that fun and interesting.some of them-- my daughter is 11, my son is 8 -- some of them, like i got all their high school ones. some of those are good enough i’ll get to watch with my kids and go through and see if they’re ready for them. so, i might have to think of something new. i’ve told them they should go get more lectures. there are some areas that they don’t cover very well. they don’t cover chemistry as well as they should. there’s actually nothing that’s really good on chemistry out there." | it's sad that the bbc had sufficient rights that they could sell the tapes outright but didn't feel any compulsion to simply make the films available themselves. how many other such gems are rotting in thier archives? |
gates buys feynman's "messenger" lectures (to make available to the public)
| it's sad that the bbc had sufficient rights that they could sell the tapes outright but didn't feel any compulsion to simply make the films available themselves. how many other such gems are rotting in thier archives? | you just reminded me of some other great feynman videos i had bookmarked: <link> |
gates buys feynman's "messenger" lectures (to make available to the public)
| you just reminded me of some other great feynman videos i had bookmarked: <link> | now, microsoft has been spending money to open-source books for a while; they funded a lot of the internet archive's book-scanning program. this is the first i've heard of gates doing it. i wonder if he really will? |
code monkey island – board game to teach kids programming
| i think "board game to teach kids programming" is a misdescription. this is a board game that teaches kids to think like programmers --- it teaches elementary logic skills and makes them familiar with programming concepts. it doesn't teach them anything about actual programming, though it makes them better potential programmers. i think this game is worthwhile as a general learning exercise, i.e. to develop structured thinking, but with regard to programming, it is a misdirection of efforts.to elaborate: there's a certain magic moment when you write your first program. you realize that you can make the computer do things. first, you just have it print a test message. wow. then you have it add two numbers. it works, and you feel a surge of emotion: with this tool, anything is possible. it's an incredibly powerful and liberating feeling. it is very persuasive, and often gives rise to an immediate fascination.the way to "teach kids programming" is to give them that experience, to let them feel that eureka!-moment. teaching kids about logical statements, loops, etc. is neat stuff, and will certainly make them into better thinkers, but it does not make them (significantly) likelier to open up a repl and type in "print 'hello world'".and that is the critical point: if a parent wants their child to pick up programming, they'll have to get them to actually program. playing games about conditional statements and basic logic is only very tangentially related to getting children to write and run code. (the same complaint goes for other products in this space: picture-books, games, etc. to bring children closer to programming have been released in great number recently.)perhaps there is some sort of general fear that actually opening up a terminal, notepad, etc. is somehow an intrinsically difficult task (likely because most parents have no idea how it works, either), so parents try to edge closer to programming with these educational toys, but the problem is that "learning to code" is not something that can be done by gradual immersion. a child can learn to swim by dipping their toes into the water and then slowly wading into the pool while moving their arms --- a couple hours of this, and they'll learn to swim. however, with coding, the process is not as gradual: at some point, the child has to open up an editor and start typing. an effective educational tool that "teaches kids programming" really must do only one thing: help them make this step. | when i think of programming board-games, i immediately think of roborally:<link> it doesn't necessarily teach you skills that would be practical in the real world, it's a ton of fun, and all the programmers i know that have played it have really enjoyed it. |
code monkey island – board game to teach kids programming
| when i think of programming board-games, i immediately think of roborally:<link> it doesn't necessarily teach you skills that would be practical in the real world, it's a ton of fun, and all the programmers i know that have played it have really enjoyed it. | this is a genuine question; not trying to be cynical or troll: is there any chance these games actually deter children from learning to program? i personally feel it was more satisfying as a child just to open up visual basic and drag and drop buttons and hide windows and whatever. if i'd been introduced to programming through a game meant to introduce kids to programming, i'm not sure i would've developed the same enthusiasm. |
code monkey island – board game to teach kids programming
| this is a genuine question; not trying to be cynical or troll: is there any chance these games actually deter children from learning to program? i personally feel it was more satisfying as a child just to open up visual basic and drag and drop buttons and hide windows and whatever. if i'd been introduced to programming through a game meant to introduce kids to programming, i'm not sure i would've developed the same enthusiasm. | this is not the monkey island you're looking for... |
code monkey island – board game to teach kids programming
| this is not the monkey island you're looking for... | damn, with a name like that i was hoping for a game of self discovery as a young man quests to become a swashbuckling pirate. |
ask hn: would you pay for an online, restore-only gmail backup?
in light of this story: <link><p>i'm wondering what people would pay for simply an encrypted (cloud-based) gmail backup - no ui, just $x (usd)/year - and you can restore it to another account, to another email provider, or to physical media (for an additional fee)... $5/year? $10/year? i know some say this is a terrible place for pricing advice, but... any thoughts? | for a cloud-to-cloud backup service like this, my biggest worry would be about finding out the hard way that the backup provider has bugs.how do i solve this as a user? look for reviews and stories of successful/failed user restores? | backups are worthless if you don't test them regularly.consequently, this service would be worthless without a ui for me to read my emails and see that you've successfully backed them up. really, i think a desktop app that lets you browse a tagged archive of emails, with an integrated gmail downloader, would be ideal. |
ask hn: would you pay for an online, restore-only gmail backup?
in light of this story: <link><p>i'm wondering what people would pay for simply an encrypted (cloud-based) gmail backup - no ui, just $x (usd)/year - and you can restore it to another account, to another email provider, or to physical media (for an additional fee)... $5/year? $10/year? i know some say this is a terrible place for pricing advice, but... any thoughts? | backups are worthless if you don't test them regularly.consequently, this service would be worthless without a ui for me to read my emails and see that you've successfully backed them up. really, i think a desktop app that lets you browse a tagged archive of emails, with an integrated gmail downloader, would be ideal. | no. i trust google more to get backups right than i trust you. |
ask hn: would you pay for an online, restore-only gmail backup?
in light of this story: <link><p>i'm wondering what people would pay for simply an encrypted (cloud-based) gmail backup - no ui, just $x (usd)/year - and you can restore it to another account, to another email provider, or to physical media (for an additional fee)... $5/year? $10/year? i know some say this is a terrible place for pricing advice, but... any thoughts? | no. i trust google more to get backups right than i trust you. | i'd pay for a search with regex of my gmail data. it would be even nicer if it could do aggregates and graphs.on another note congrats on making a great mvp on such little time. |
ask hn: would you pay for an online, restore-only gmail backup?
in light of this story: <link><p>i'm wondering what people would pay for simply an encrypted (cloud-based) gmail backup - no ui, just $x (usd)/year - and you can restore it to another account, to another email provider, or to physical media (for an additional fee)... $5/year? $10/year? i know some say this is a terrible place for pricing advice, but... any thoughts? | i'd pay for a search with regex of my gmail data. it would be even nicer if it could do aggregates and graphs.on another note congrats on making a great mvp on such little time. | backupify. |
zen photon garden
| sierpinksi triangle: <link> was created by someone the last time this was on hn: <link> | it would be awesome to have a little blog post about why and how, this is very cool tech! i'm lazy i don't want to go read the code, i want a beautiful and clear explanation with pictures |
zen photon garden
| it would be awesome to have a little blog post about why and how, this is very cool tech! i'm lazy i don't want to go read the code, i want a beautiful and clear explanation with pictures | clever and pretty. is it possible to add an "absorb" slider to the walls? i'm having trouble making some of the effects i'm trying for. |
zen photon garden
| clever and pretty. is it possible to add an "absorb" slider to the walls? i'm having trouble making some of the effects i'm trying for. | i like how having a lot of random stuff ends up making some natural-looking textures: <link> |
zen photon garden
| i like how having a lot of random stuff ends up making some natural-looking textures: <link> | i wish there was a "best of" for this. i don't have the arts enough to make anything visually pleasing and would love to see the results of those that do. |
the consumer web is deflationary
| i think just about everything in this article is accurate, but that it ultimately doesn't matter, because the particular class of goods that are subject to this is rounding error on an economic sector which, if you compared it to e.g. fixed income securities, would resemble a pimple on the nose of a particular emperor depicted on one coin of the vast horde that a dragon sleeps on.here's an interesting experiment for you: guess what portion of the us economy is video games, movies, music, and consumer internet services put together. now graph that against "of the last 20 people you talked to, how many are white men between the ages of 12 and 24?" i think that graph shows a markedly upward slope. i also think that it does not asymptotically approach the right answer.you could do a spiritually similar experiment with, e.g., cosmetics/beauty aids, wedding services, etc and young ladies. or healthcare, if you're looking for a gigantic underestimation. | i believe tyler cohen's "the great stagnation" arrives at a similar conclusion, but i'd like to see hard numbers. in regard to entertainment, it'd be interesting to see a nomalized total $/hr comparison of various activities. for example, compare a standard movie in a theater to playing dragon age. that'd be roughly $15/hr (adding popcorn) vs. (120 hrs game play / ~60$ for the game) ~$.50/hr. that seems impressive, but .50/hr is still much higher than the 0$/hr that free broadcast television offers. i'd be curious to know how all these different types of media consumption shake out in the long run. |
the consumer web is deflationary
| i believe tyler cohen's "the great stagnation" arrives at a similar conclusion, but i'd like to see hard numbers. in regard to entertainment, it'd be interesting to see a nomalized total $/hr comparison of various activities. for example, compare a standard movie in a theater to playing dragon age. that'd be roughly $15/hr (adding popcorn) vs. (120 hrs game play / ~60$ for the game) ~$.50/hr. that seems impressive, but .50/hr is still much higher than the 0$/hr that free broadcast television offers. i'd be curious to know how all these different types of media consumption shake out in the long run. | i agree with most of the article. however the author suggests that the net reduces the ability for sellers to price discriminate. i think it helps both sides, and the outcome is in doubt. on the one hand it enables faster and broader flow of price information, but on the other hand it reduces the anonymity of the buyer. i think what we will see is an arms race between buyers sharing information and sellers creating all sorts of ways to individually vary the discount they need to offer. |
the consumer web is deflationary
| i agree with most of the article. however the author suggests that the net reduces the ability for sellers to price discriminate. i think it helps both sides, and the outcome is in doubt. on the one hand it enables faster and broader flow of price information, but on the other hand it reduces the anonymity of the buyer. i think what we will see is an arms race between buyers sharing information and sellers creating all sorts of ways to individually vary the discount they need to offer. | it seems that it sucks if your retirement portfolio consists of the industries being undercut and you need things like medical care. airnurse, crowddoctor 8 99medicines are unlikely to drive med prices down. |
the consumer web is deflationary
| it seems that it sucks if your retirement portfolio consists of the industries being undercut and you need things like medical care. airnurse, crowddoctor 8 99medicines are unlikely to drive med prices down. | the interesting thing about this is that pretty much every point in the article can be read as: the internet changes consumer markets to be more like the idealized markets in economics textbooks.just a random observation, but it might be something for serious economists to look into. |
how to get rid of old stuff, sell it for more, and use amazon as cheap storage
| i wish i could ship everything in my attic to amazon and they would photograph, catalog and store the stuff privately.then for some kind of low annual fee i could ship things in and out as needed.this service would include pre-scheduled shipments of holiday decoration.the problem i have is that i forget what is in my attic. on a few occasions i've purchased something only to find out i already own one. it was just buried in the attic and i forgot about it. if i try to buy something on amazon, this service would remind me that i already own it and ship it to me.besides the attic stuff, i also have small random, rarely-used things that i know i'll need in the future, but don't know where to store them so i'll find them in the future.someone once suggested that i just keep a running list of items near the attic door. i tried it, but didn't keep up with it.it would be nice to set some kind of expiration of my stuff as well. if i don't request an item from amazon attic in 18 months, it can be sold. maybe that's a way to offset my fees.another idea... this could have a social aspect (what doesn't these days!?). i could give select friends access to my personal amazon attic catalog and they can borrow something, again for a low shipping fee. amazon will send them a friendly email to return it and then charge them eventually if they don't.(yc, here i come.) | interesting idea. i looked up amazon's storage fees [1]: $0.45 per cubic foot per month from january to september; $0.60 per cubic foot per month from october to december.if you are using this as a long-term storage solution you have to be careful because amazon charges, "a semi-annual long-term storage fee of $22.50 per cubic foot will be applied to any units that have been stored in an amazon fulfillment center for one year or longer...each seller may maintain a single unit of each asin in its inventory, which will be exempted from the semi-annual long-term storage fee."[1]: <link> |
how to get rid of old stuff, sell it for more, and use amazon as cheap storage
| interesting idea. i looked up amazon's storage fees [1]: $0.45 per cubic foot per month from january to september; $0.60 per cubic foot per month from october to december.if you are using this as a long-term storage solution you have to be careful because amazon charges, "a semi-annual long-term storage fee of $22.50 per cubic foot will be applied to any units that have been stored in an amazon fulfillment center for one year or longer...each seller may maintain a single unit of each asin in its inventory, which will be exempted from the semi-annual long-term storage fee."[1]: <link> | just remember guys: useful for small footprint, high value line items that are mass-produced. (conversely, not so useful for old items with low resale like clothes, or craft one-off items, or big things like furniture.)when your object of question hits a low-enough dollar value that your opportunity cost for making a buck off it exceeds your time value, why not donate it to a goodwill instead. :) |
how to get rid of old stuff, sell it for more, and use amazon as cheap storage
| just remember guys: useful for small footprint, high value line items that are mass-produced. (conversely, not so useful for old items with low resale like clothes, or craft one-off items, or big things like furniture.)when your object of question hits a low-enough dollar value that your opportunity cost for making a buck off it exceeds your time value, why not donate it to a goodwill instead. :) | unfortunately amazon flagged my account as fraudulent, i can only assume because a previous tenant in my apartment evidently ripped people off. we received their mail for some time and most if it seemed shady. it's been a year but i cannot sell. there is no appeal, and no recourse. i've had an account with amazon for more than half my life (something like 12 years) but no dice.too bad, because this sounds handy. kind of wish they had even a halfway decent competitor, though. |
how to get rid of old stuff, sell it for more, and use amazon as cheap storage
| unfortunately amazon flagged my account as fraudulent, i can only assume because a previous tenant in my apartment evidently ripped people off. we received their mail for some time and most if it seemed shady. it's been a year but i cannot sell. there is no appeal, and no recourse. i've had an account with amazon for more than half my life (something like 12 years) but no dice.too bad, because this sounds handy. kind of wish they had even a halfway decent competitor, though. | i never actually tried their warehouse fulfillment service but i swear by amazon for selling used gadgets. amazon gets a lot of traffic from consumers making it a great way to sell something quickly. i remember listing an used android phone that was maybe two year old technology at that point. i went to list it and within a few hours someone snagged it at like $90. the only other route i've ever tried is craigslist, which has worked out pretty well too. asking for the same price you can usually have someone pick up the item locally and get every cent you are asking for if you're reasonable. i always price things about 20% more than i think i will sell through cl. |
can you buy a license to speed?
| people go to such amazing lengths to avoid getting a ticket, but it's very easy to speed and not get pulled over.1) don't drive stupid. it's perfectly possible to drive very fast without driving badly. if you're swerving a lot, accelerating then stomping on your brakes, jerking from lane to lane... it's an indication that you're not planning ahead and are therefore driving badly. you deserve to get pulled over. and for heaven's sake, don't race unless you're willing to get pulled. be a little grown up.2) go as fast as you want - but don't be the fastest car on the road. always let a cop-catcher run about a 1/4 mile to 1/2 mile ahead (don't tailgate them, that'll get you pulled over for speeding and being an ass).3) don't use a detector. they give you a false sense of security and will guarantee that if you do get pulled, you get a ticket. not only that, 90% of the time no officer is going to leave the radar "wide open" on all passing cars - which means your detector won't go off until after you've been tagged.4) don't speed in residential areas. there's just no gain.bonus tips:1) as much as possible, stay out of the left hand lane. that's just easy pickings right there. edit: that doesn't mean it's okay to zip around people on the right. just don't sit there with the pedal on the floor. be there when you need to be - but don't be there when you don't .2) when in an area that you can't see possible hiding spaces get adept at feathering your speed down a bit and letting a car (ok) suv (better) , van or truck (best) on the left side shield you from that spot. edit: again to clarify this doesn't mean zip around on the right. you're actually going to be gong slower or matching these cars, preferably from two lanes away. if you don't have two lanes, don't do this.3) at night it's especially easy. i don't know if it's the same in all staets ,but every one i've driven through cops have their headlights on while they wait. if you look far enough ahead - and you should be anyway otherwise you're driving poorly and deserve a ticket - you can see a copy waiting a half mile off or more.4) if you think you've been tagged, don't slam your brakes. in addition to being a hazard, the cop has already tagged you - and the sudden flare of brakelights is a surefire giveaway to the fact that you know you were speeding. (this one is the hardest for most people...)in the 1980s "a speeder's guide to avoiding tickets" came out, written by a state patrol officer. i think most of what i do up there is a variation on what's in that book. if you speed a lot but are willing to do so intelligently and safely, you should get it. it's excellent and still as valid.anyway - that got long-winded. tl;dr: speed smart and safe, don't be an idiot, and pay attention and you don't need to spend money on a fancy license plate frame. (or a fop sticker in other states...)- speeding ticket free (and driving fast and smart in muscle cars) for more years than i can recall. | let's just take a step back and note something:this is about human lives. once you eliminate birth-defects, car accidents are the leading cause of death for people under 35. particularly for young kids, who obviously aren't driving.car accidents kill 34,000 americans per-year. that's like if 9/11 happened once a month every year.and speed matters. stopping distance and kinetic energy go up with the square of velocity. a pedestrian hit by a car going 20 mph will almost certainly live. a person hit by a car going 40 mph will almost certainly die. |
can you buy a license to speed?
| let's just take a step back and note something:this is about human lives. once you eliminate birth-defects, car accidents are the leading cause of death for people under 35. particularly for young kids, who obviously aren't driving.car accidents kill 34,000 americans per-year. that's like if 9/11 happened once a month every year.and speed matters. stopping distance and kinetic energy go up with the square of velocity. a pedestrian hit by a car going 20 mph will almost certainly live. a person hit by a car going 40 mph will almost certainly die. | my grandfather is a retired police chief from a major metro. when i purchased my car (which has over 400 horsepower, so i like to... play), he told me to become part of the highway patrol or police charity organization. he told me when he was in law enforcement, any member of these organizations were treated "much more lightly" than others.for only $25 or something like that, you can get a piece of paper you can put in your wallet to show you're a member. for around $2,000, you can get a license plate frame.he said even with the piece of paper, if you're pulled over, you have a pretty good shot of being given a warning. you just need to make sure you show it to them when they pull you over.with the license plate, he said he would never pull over someone with the license plate, because law enforcement doesn't have enough money as it is and they'd rather not piss off those who have money to donate.i didn't really believe him (grandfathers and all), but i donated anyways (for a piece of paper, not the license plate). now i see this article, and i'm starting to think he was serious. |
can you buy a license to speed?
| my grandfather is a retired police chief from a major metro. when i purchased my car (which has over 400 horsepower, so i like to... play), he told me to become part of the highway patrol or police charity organization. he told me when he was in law enforcement, any member of these organizations were treated "much more lightly" than others.for only $25 or something like that, you can get a piece of paper you can put in your wallet to show you're a member. for around $2,000, you can get a license plate frame.he said even with the piece of paper, if you're pulled over, you have a pretty good shot of being given a warning. you just need to make sure you show it to them when they pull you over.with the license plate, he said he would never pull over someone with the license plate, because law enforcement doesn't have enough money as it is and they'd rather not piss off those who have money to donate.i didn't really believe him (grandfathers and all), but i donated anyways (for a piece of paper, not the license plate). now i see this article, and i'm starting to think he was serious. | grew up with both parents in law enforcement. the one time i risked name-dropping my mother in another county about an hour away, i lucked out and the guy knew her and gave me a warning - and i was in a vehicle with out-of-state plates (had come up to visit).friend of mine is a county cop near houston. he told me, "the bigger the stack of 'i donated to the 100 club' stickers or whatever on their back window, the bigger the chance they're going to be a dick and they'll get a ticket anyway."i'd say that having a texas mason license plate (not frame), being polite, saying "sir" or "ma'am" as appropriate, and handing over my chl (as required by law) with my license/insurance - showing that i've undergone a background check already - has more of a chance of getting me out of a ticket than any stack of stickers.unless i run into an officer that is anti-chl - but so far, that hasn't happened. had one ask me "sir, do you have your weapon on you?" "no sir, i'm not allowed to have it on property at work." "well, you never know when you might need it." |
can you buy a license to speed?
| grew up with both parents in law enforcement. the one time i risked name-dropping my mother in another county about an hour away, i lucked out and the guy knew her and gave me a warning - and i was in a vehicle with out-of-state plates (had come up to visit).friend of mine is a county cop near houston. he told me, "the bigger the stack of 'i donated to the 100 club' stickers or whatever on their back window, the bigger the chance they're going to be a dick and they'll get a ticket anyway."i'd say that having a texas mason license plate (not frame), being polite, saying "sir" or "ma'am" as appropriate, and handing over my chl (as required by law) with my license/insurance - showing that i've undergone a background check already - has more of a chance of getting me out of a ticket than any stack of stickers.unless i run into an officer that is anti-chl - but so far, that hasn't happened. had one ask me "sir, do you have your weapon on you?" "no sir, i'm not allowed to have it on property at work." "well, you never know when you might need it." | i was really hoping that they had done a study to find out if it actually works.they didn't. |
facebook's privacy dinosaur wants to make sure you're not oversharing
| > it’s in facebook’s interest to get us all to oversharecould that absurd legend get buried already? it’s their obvious, direct commercial interest to keep your private information reserved for themselves, to improve proprietary targeting. the over-sharing might be zuckerberg’s openness ideology against his company commercial interest.> just imagine how worthless yelp would be if a majority of its users turned their reviews to “private” or “friends-only.”well, i don't know about yelp, but my facebook newsfeed has mainly friends’ updates. there are some advertising, but i doubt the advertisers feel their privacy violated by those. | facebook does not really care who you share your posts with. it does care that you stay on facebook so that it can charge coke and nike and other big brands huge dollars to put their posts into your timeline. so, making you feel a little better about facebook security could mean more money on their bottom line. |
facebook's privacy dinosaur wants to make sure you're not oversharing
| facebook does not really care who you share your posts with. it does care that you stay on facebook so that it can charge coke and nike and other big brands huge dollars to put their posts into your timeline. so, making you feel a little better about facebook security could mean more money on their bottom line. | am i the only one who sees double meaning in using a "dinosaur" to help remind people about "privacy"? or maybe i'm just reading too far into it. |
facebook's privacy dinosaur wants to make sure you're not oversharing
| am i the only one who sees double meaning in using a "dinosaur" to help remind people about "privacy"? or maybe i'm just reading too far into it. | queue the report showing that users who review their privacy/sharing settings on facebook end up sharing more, not less... |
facebook's privacy dinosaur wants to make sure you're not oversharing
| queue the report showing that users who review their privacy/sharing settings on facebook end up sharing more, not less... | does anyone have the image link for the privacy dinosaur? |
how long are you going to keep your dirty business phone?
| this ad just makes me think there is some money is making a phone with some antibacterial properties, not that i need to eliminate phones. | it seems odd to me that people still need separate phones for personal/business. aren't there services that allow you to set up a separate number that goes straight to the same phone? i know google voice does that, and lets you even set filters so that it (for example) only rings during business hours and goes straight to voicemail otherwise. |
how long are you going to keep your dirty business phone?
| it seems odd to me that people still need separate phones for personal/business. aren't there services that allow you to set up a separate number that goes straight to the same phone? i know google voice does that, and lets you even set filters so that it (for example) only rings during business hours and goes straight to voicemail otherwise. | steering wheels have 9 times more bacteria than a public toilet seat. that's 967,402 bacteria! well by cutting the number of steering wheels per person to 0.1, over 104,345 billions of bacteria will be removed from earth by doing so. those bacteria will never know what hit 'em. |
how long are you going to keep your dirty business phone?
| steering wheels have 9 times more bacteria than a public toilet seat. that's 967,402 bacteria! well by cutting the number of steering wheels per person to 0.1, over 104,345 billions of bacteria will be removed from earth by doing so. those bacteria will never know what hit 'em. | i used to have two phones (one for work, one personal[0]). i appreciate the appeal of consolidating that into one just out of convenience. "you're carrying around too much bacteria" seems to be a rather weird argument even to bring up.[0] in my case, i needed access to both ios and android, so this wouldn't really have helped anyway, but that's separate. |
how long are you going to keep your dirty business phone?
| i used to have two phones (one for work, one personal[0]). i appreciate the appeal of consolidating that into one just out of convenience. "you're carrying around too much bacteria" seems to be a rather weird argument even to bring up.[0] in my case, i needed access to both ios and android, so this wouldn't really have helped anyway, but that's separate. | you don't expect me to do my dirty business on my regular phone, do you? ;) |
programming language development: the past 5 years
| i spent some time doing several small programming exercises in ioke. i've also done similar exercises in several programming languages ranging from c to java to haskell to ioke.ioke was ridiculously clean in almost every scenario. the only part i missed was that i didn't delve deep enough to really use the macros to their fullest extent. something that would take 50 lines of idiomatic ruby took 10 lines of ioke. ruby is already a very expressive language and yet ioke could express the same thing in half the amount of code.the author of this post is not kidding when he says that ola designed the language with no regard for performance. the language is slow.however, ola is working on a language that learns from the expressiveness of ioke but is a bit more practical. it's called seph and is at <link>, finally, a small story: i was spending a few nights a week writing ioke and trying it out about a year ago. ola spoke about ioke at an internal company presentation (sort of a mini-conference) and afterwards i started to talk about the language with him and brian guthrie. we talked about the language constructions and how we solved problems in the language, etc. etc. finally, i get around to asking the question, "so, after writing ioke for these past few weeks, i feel like i have no idea if i'm writing idiomatic ioke!" both of them look at me as if i'm a crazy person and finally ola smiles and says, "there need to be more than 10 developers writing in a language for there to be idiomatic anything." playing with these languages are fun but messy! don't be afraid to make mistakes and just dive in. | for anyone interested in agda, i found this [0] paper really helpful for getting my head around dependent typing. i sort of doubt that dependently typed languages are ever going to catch on, but they embody some seriously cool ideas about how to verify program correctness.also, agda has probably the most flexible syntax for defining function fixiness, letting you easily define new "syntax": if_then_else_ : {a : set} -2 bool -2 a -2 a -2 a
if true then x else y = x
if false then x else y = y
[0] <link> |
programming language development: the past 5 years
| for anyone interested in agda, i found this [0] paper really helpful for getting my head around dependent typing. i sort of doubt that dependently typed languages are ever going to catch on, but they embody some seriously cool ideas about how to verify program correctness.also, agda has probably the most flexible syntax for defining function fixiness, letting you easily define new "syntax": if_then_else_ : {a : set} -2 bool -2 a -2 a -2 a
if true then x else y = x
if false then x else y = y
[0] <link> | fogus mentions ometa, which is amazing in my own humble opinion. you can, extremely concisely, create a parser for a language you dream up. the author of ometa has an example of parsing javascript in 200 lines of ometa. ometa can also parse itself in about 40 loc. this conciseness is the reason alan kay's viewpoints research institute is using it for their steps project (attempting a full gui system from "scratch" in 20k loc). they use it to compile all the languages in the project, and even make use of it in their 200 loc tcp implementation.the example gist provided really doesn't do it justice (partly because there's a variant with slightly lighter syntax). check out the sandbox for ometa/js (there are several ometas, each for its own host language), which has several projects you can check out: <link> |
programming language development: the past 5 years
| fogus mentions ometa, which is amazing in my own humble opinion. you can, extremely concisely, create a parser for a language you dream up. the author of ometa has an example of parsing javascript in 200 lines of ometa. ometa can also parse itself in about 40 loc. this conciseness is the reason alan kay's viewpoints research institute is using it for their steps project (attempting a full gui system from "scratch" in 20k loc). they use it to compile all the languages in the project, and even make use of it in their 200 loc tcp implementation.the example gist provided really doesn't do it justice (partly because there's a variant with slightly lighter syntax). check out the sandbox for ometa/js (there are several ometas, each for its own host language), which has several projects you can check out: <link> | i'm surprised that factor was not featured.[1]: <link>
[2]: <link> |
programming language development: the past 5 years
| i'm surprised that factor was not featured.[1]: <link>
[2]: <link> | cheers for including scratch (a graphical programming language aimed at kids). scratch is worth playing with, if only to witness the potential (and drawbacks) of graphical programming languages. now back to my labview code... |
tsa encounter at san
| i wish i had the means to do what he's doing. but the problem for me, and for many other people i'd imagine, is that when i'm at an airport, chances are i've paid a very large amount of money to be at a certain place at a certain time for what is probably an important reason. risking losing that much money and the possibility of not getting to where i need to be, even for the noble goal of civil disobedience to protest a ridiculous and screwed-up system, is just too daunting for me. all it takes is one tsa officer having a bad day and misinterpreting something i've said to send me and my bags home--and even if they're in the wrong, the only thing that can decide that is an expensive court case, and i'll still have missed my flight.i applaud people like this who remind the system that it works for us and not the other way around. i sadly can't take the risk of doing it myself. | good for him. civil disobedience in defense of our liberties isn't just a good idea, it's a moral obligation. |
tsa encounter at san
| good for him. civil disobedience in defense of our liberties isn't just a good idea, it's a moral obligation. | if the goal of the new patdown is to make everyone so embarrassed that they opt for the backscatter machine(1), then i suggest turning the tables.the next chance i get(2), i'll be pulling a when harry met sally on the tsa employee checking my junk. let's see how much he likes it when i loudly beg him to keep rubbing me just a little bit longer."damn, that feels good, man. i hope you're enjoying this as much as i am."(1) see <link> den has the machine and i fly out every week or two, so i'm sure i'll be reporting back shortly. |
tsa encounter at san
| if the goal of the new patdown is to make everyone so embarrassed that they opt for the backscatter machine(1), then i suggest turning the tables.the next chance i get(2), i'll be pulling a when harry met sally on the tsa employee checking my junk. let's see how much he likes it when i loudly beg him to keep rubbing me just a little bit longer."damn, that feels good, man. i hope you're enjoying this as much as i am."(1) see <link> den has the machine and i fly out every week or two, so i'm sure i'll be reporting back shortly. | everyone who is against this needs to understand that these are necessary preventative measures. what is stopping someone from replacing their testicles with 2 cherry bombs whose wicks are then threaded out the urethra? wear some tight jeans and you'll generate enough friction to ignite the wick, resulting in an explosion that'll knock down the water cups of passengers across the aisle. |
tsa encounter at san
| everyone who is against this needs to understand that these are necessary preventative measures. what is stopping someone from replacing their testicles with 2 cherry bombs whose wicks are then threaded out the urethra? wear some tight jeans and you'll generate enough friction to ignite the wick, resulting in an explosion that'll knock down the water cups of passengers across the aisle. | old news that i didn't know: you can opt out of the backscatter machine, but you can not opt out of finishing the security screening (i.e., the patdown), once you've put any luggage on the belt. so says the supreme court: <link> |
the future of software developers
| i sense a hint of bitterness in this article, which is unfortunate because the central point is very valid: the growth of open-source frameworks requires today's programmer to be fluent in picking up new libraries and frameworks at the drop of a hat.it's true that the new breed doesn't understand the lower levels as well as the old, but that is simply because 30 years ago there wasn't anything except the lower levels to understand. getting anything done with programming back then was much harder, but on the other hand, the choices were more straightforward. whereas there was a higher bar of raw intelligence and tenacity just to dip your feet in programming, today there is a higher bar to what true masters can do (the obama campaign machine comes to mind).the essence of software development does not change though. just because you don't understand all the layers today as readily as a 1980 programmers would, doesn't absolve you of the responsibility of being ready and able to dive through the (increasing numbers of) layers to find bugs and leaky abstractions. equally importantly, you need to develop a sense of where your time is best spent, both in terms of immediate productivity and in terms of long-term ability. this was as true 10, 20, 30 years ago as it is today.it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that knowledge acquired by programmers of yesteryear was innately better and more detail oriented. of course there are more mediocre programmers now because there are orders of magnitude more programming jobs, but there are more great programmers too, and it would very foolish to write off someone's talents simply because they do not share the same arcane but relatively useless knowledge that an old-timer posesses. | i think there’s a valid point here about the changing nature of programming in a connected world.on the other hand, i think there are also real dangers that the article didn’t highlight. the old sayings that “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” and that “it’s dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket” are as true as they ever were, and many of these modern, opinionated frameworks and plug-ins are excellent case studies.sometimes, using opinionated tools is a strength. if what you want to build fits a framework’s natural usage, you can get up to speed quickly and avoid much of the laborious infrastructure work that otherwise goes with starting a new project. that can be a big win.however, sometimes it is a weakness. if you want to do something that isn’t quite what the framework does, breaking out of the box can be expensive, maybe even prohibitively so. moreover, that applies not just when you first start a project, but also as the project grows and evolves, perhaps beyond the scale/scope the original tools were ever intended to support. and even if someone else comes along with a tool that is more suitable, it can be difficult to migrate.if all you know is how to glue components together, you can take advantage of the strengths, but you’ll struggle to overcome the weaknesses, and worse, you’ll never create new tools that serve you better or let you create something that isn’t merely a recipe made from the ingredients someone else gave you.i thought it was sad the other day, when mailchimp’s annual report web page[1] was doing the rounds on the web design forums because of some interesting effects used in its presentation, and the first question asked usually wasn’t “how does that work?” but “does anyone know a plug-in to do that in $framework?” i’m betting that the next attention-grabbing web page using a new and interesting effect will be written by someone who asked the first question.[1] <link> |
the future of software developers
| i think there’s a valid point here about the changing nature of programming in a connected world.on the other hand, i think there are also real dangers that the article didn’t highlight. the old sayings that “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” and that “it’s dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket” are as true as they ever were, and many of these modern, opinionated frameworks and plug-ins are excellent case studies.sometimes, using opinionated tools is a strength. if what you want to build fits a framework’s natural usage, you can get up to speed quickly and avoid much of the laborious infrastructure work that otherwise goes with starting a new project. that can be a big win.however, sometimes it is a weakness. if you want to do something that isn’t quite what the framework does, breaking out of the box can be expensive, maybe even prohibitively so. moreover, that applies not just when you first start a project, but also as the project grows and evolves, perhaps beyond the scale/scope the original tools were ever intended to support. and even if someone else comes along with a tool that is more suitable, it can be difficult to migrate.if all you know is how to glue components together, you can take advantage of the strengths, but you’ll struggle to overcome the weaknesses, and worse, you’ll never create new tools that serve you better or let you create something that isn’t merely a recipe made from the ingredients someone else gave you.i thought it was sad the other day, when mailchimp’s annual report web page[1] was doing the rounds on the web design forums because of some interesting effects used in its presentation, and the first question asked usually wasn’t “how does that work?” but “does anyone know a plug-in to do that in $framework?” i’m betting that the next attention-grabbing web page using a new and interesting effect will be written by someone who asked the first question.[1] <link> | isn't the op describing the world as the older generation wanted it to be? if you had asked some programming luminaries in the early 80s what they expected from programming 30 years later, they would have said "it will be more abstract, higher-level, with less direct knowledge of the underlying hardware required. software should be write-once run-anywhere and shouldn't require arcane knowledge of the lower levels of the stack, and this will be a good thing." well, guess what, here we are. i'm afraid i can't remember the source of the quote, but this is analogous to the belief that "the advancement of a civilization can be measured in the number of things a person can make happen without needing to understand how".web development is, for the most part, write-once run-anywhere, from an x86-on-steroids desktop pc to a pocket-sized risc device (even for people with very small pockets). frameworks abstract away a lot of complexity and a modern developer is more of a builder than a wizard, and this is a good thing. if you had told those 80s programmers that programming in the future would have been less like electronic brain surgery and more like building with lego, they would have, i think, been quite pleased at the notion. thirty years of software engineering research and practise have gone into making it this easy to build stuff. i wonder if perhaps the fact that development now looks pretty similar to development 30 years ago causes people to overlook just how much has changed; it's also true that despite things getting easier, there are still plenty of frustrations in modern development that a programmer from the 80s would recognise. |
the future of software developers
| isn't the op describing the world as the older generation wanted it to be? if you had asked some programming luminaries in the early 80s what they expected from programming 30 years later, they would have said "it will be more abstract, higher-level, with less direct knowledge of the underlying hardware required. software should be write-once run-anywhere and shouldn't require arcane knowledge of the lower levels of the stack, and this will be a good thing." well, guess what, here we are. i'm afraid i can't remember the source of the quote, but this is analogous to the belief that "the advancement of a civilization can be measured in the number of things a person can make happen without needing to understand how".web development is, for the most part, write-once run-anywhere, from an x86-on-steroids desktop pc to a pocket-sized risc device (even for people with very small pockets). frameworks abstract away a lot of complexity and a modern developer is more of a builder than a wizard, and this is a good thing. if you had told those 80s programmers that programming in the future would have been less like electronic brain surgery and more like building with lego, they would have, i think, been quite pleased at the notion. thirty years of software engineering research and practise have gone into making it this easy to build stuff. i wonder if perhaps the fact that development now looks pretty similar to development 30 years ago causes people to overlook just how much has changed; it's also true that despite things getting easier, there are still plenty of frustrations in modern development that a programmer from the 80s would recognise. | the biggest problem for me personally is the fact that the progress we're going through kills everything i was ever interested in. there's far less space for curious tinkering and exploring of the system today and tomorrow than what there was yesterday.as we go up in abstractions, we have less ways to overcome the problems we're facing. the development becomes more streamlined and there's less space for coming up with superior solutions to problems during development. though, i'm mainly talking from performance considerations, something a modern developer doesn't really care about.that said, i think the biggest "problem" is that new breed of developers/developing culture is fundamentally very different from how things were 10-20 years ago. back then what many people did was that they coped with the limitations of the system/industry and got employed that way. they got into it because the system/industry was lacking something. for example 20 years ago being able to understand and write assembly was a crucial skill in many places. it was an essential, just like being able to interface with a remote database is essential today. now that we've got high-level tools and performance, there's no need to care about assembly. people who originally were valued their weigh in gold because of being able to stretch the limits of the system have become obsolete. this same thing will happen more or less to computer security industry too as we move away from unsecure languages like c and c++, although they aren't the only reason behind local/remote exploits. |
the future of software developers
| the biggest problem for me personally is the fact that the progress we're going through kills everything i was ever interested in. there's far less space for curious tinkering and exploring of the system today and tomorrow than what there was yesterday.as we go up in abstractions, we have less ways to overcome the problems we're facing. the development becomes more streamlined and there's less space for coming up with superior solutions to problems during development. though, i'm mainly talking from performance considerations, something a modern developer doesn't really care about.that said, i think the biggest "problem" is that new breed of developers/developing culture is fundamentally very different from how things were 10-20 years ago. back then what many people did was that they coped with the limitations of the system/industry and got employed that way. they got into it because the system/industry was lacking something. for example 20 years ago being able to understand and write assembly was a crucial skill in many places. it was an essential, just like being able to interface with a remote database is essential today. now that we've got high-level tools and performance, there's no need to care about assembly. people who originally were valued their weigh in gold because of being able to stretch the limits of the system have become obsolete. this same thing will happen more or less to computer security industry too as we move away from unsecure languages like c and c++, although they aren't the only reason behind local/remote exploits. | the only thing that matters is outcomes.if simplified frameworks let people make things, that's awesome in my opinion. more of that!low level technical stuff has its place too; but the use cases are far far fewer. its really much more important as a developer that you can produce something and show it to people, than that you have a detailed knowledge of the platform. |
bitcoin by analogy
| sounds remarkably like this explanation: <link> i wrote this last year. | i like paul graham's thinking on a lot of topics, but that quote of his that kicks off the article... oof. what a pandering mess. |
bitcoin by analogy
| i like paul graham's thinking on a lot of topics, but that quote of his that kicks off the article... oof. what a pandering mess. | i like how this breaks down the different functions accomplished very finely. when i explain it[1], i tend to blur different desiderata together, which has its advantages. but here it's in very digestible chunks that let you handle one feature at a time.[1] <link> |
bitcoin by analogy
| i like how this breaks down the different functions accomplished very finely. when i explain it[1], i tend to blur different desiderata together, which has its advantages. but here it's in very digestible chunks that let you handle one feature at a time.[1] <link> | the last technical section raised a question i've never thought about: when the mining runs out in a hundred years, how will new blocks holding transactions be added to the block chain?my intuition is that there's a difference between the proof of work for the purpose of the block chain versus mining coin that's glossed over in this article. any description i remember seeing conflates the two. is there something more going on there?i suppose then transaction costs will necessarily rise to cover the discrepancy, though it seems like an efficient market so they'll probably just replace the reward. |
bitcoin by analogy
| the last technical section raised a question i've never thought about: when the mining runs out in a hundred years, how will new blocks holding transactions be added to the block chain?my intuition is that there's a difference between the proof of work for the purpose of the block chain versus mining coin that's glossed over in this article. any description i remember seeing conflates the two. is there something more going on there?i suppose then transaction costs will necessarily rise to cover the discrepancy, though it seems like an efficient market so they'll probably just replace the reward. | well written analogy of cryptocurrencies, it might help to mention all the other hundreds of new cryptocurrencies that follow the same or similar model, ltc, ppc, doge, vert, xpm, etc.
the issue with btc now is not if it is a ponzi scheme, if it is then so is usd, euro! etc.
banks (central especially) are very worried about btc. this is the next phase, which i like to call "then they fight you".
banks are refusing to do transfers to exchanges, citing fraud (absurd as exchanges have stronger aml/kyc policies than banks), central banks are creating or trying to block new sites, creating new laws banning purchasing cryptocurrency. the theory is that if you can stop the fiat leaking out, you can kill its apparent trade value.
i say as long as 1 person can use the network to send the minimum transaction amount, the network will survive.as they say in dogeland; 1 doge = 1 doge. as long as this is true, dogecoin will have value. |
advice for ambitious 19 year olds
| "incidentally, don’t let salary be a factor. i just watched someone turn down one of these breakout companies because microsoft offered him $30k per year more in salary—that was a terrible decision. he will not build interesting things and may not work with smart people."that quote drips so much of elitism its disgusting. ms still has many brilliant engineers and is building alot of really complex stuff, probably more than your average startup ever will. this is the kind of talk i find really off putting about the whole startup-scene... | sam was just telling me how much he regretted looking at this thread."oh, you should never read hacker news comments about anything you write," i told him.whereupon it immediately struck me how strange and sad it was to be saying this, as the person who started hn.seriously, some of the comments on this thread are hn at its very worst: bitter, willful misinterpretations of what sam is saying. |
advice for ambitious 19 year olds
| sam was just telling me how much he regretted looking at this thread."oh, you should never read hacker news comments about anything you write," i told him.whereupon it immediately struck me how strange and sad it was to be saying this, as the person who started hn.seriously, some of the comments on this thread are hn at its very worst: bitter, willful misinterpretations of what sam is saying. | my suggestion to 19 year olds. be careful with this blog post."working at an already-massively-successful company means you will learn much less, and probably work with less impressive people."seriously? yes big companies have lots of bureaucratic crap and things take longer blah blah. however, you do not want to be giving this advice to an "ambitious" 19 year old. big companies have a lot of smart and impressive people. lots. they also can teach you a thing or 2 about the "real world"."incidentally, don’t let salary be a factor. i just watched someone turn down one of these breakout companies because microsoft offered him $30k per year more in salary—that was a terrible decision."let me provide the other side of this. you are giving up $30k in salary today as a 19 year old. now, lets imagine that you need to get a job soon again since that "awesome breakout" company actually failed, what do you think is going to happen ? yes, you will not be able to negotiate as high a salary as you could have if you had that extra $30k. it is not just about $30k. it is about having the power to negotiate next time if you move which you probably will as a 19 year old. |
advice for ambitious 19 year olds
| my suggestion to 19 year olds. be careful with this blog post."working at an already-massively-successful company means you will learn much less, and probably work with less impressive people."seriously? yes big companies have lots of bureaucratic crap and things take longer blah blah. however, you do not want to be giving this advice to an "ambitious" 19 year old. big companies have a lot of smart and impressive people. lots. they also can teach you a thing or 2 about the "real world"."incidentally, don’t let salary be a factor. i just watched someone turn down one of these breakout companies because microsoft offered him $30k per year more in salary—that was a terrible decision."let me provide the other side of this. you are giving up $30k in salary today as a 19 year old. now, lets imagine that you need to get a job soon again since that "awesome breakout" company actually failed, what do you think is going to happen ? yes, you will not be able to negotiate as high a salary as you could have if you had that extra $30k. it is not just about $30k. it is about having the power to negotiate next time if you move which you probably will as a 19 year old. | it's often dismissed as cheesy, but it's the most important career advice there is: find your passion. ninety nine people out of 100 never have a great answer to the question, "where do you want to be in 10 years?" instead, they treat their careers in ad hoc fashion, hopping opportunistically from job to job.the best way to succeed is to have a very clear answer to that cheesy question. such a clear answer that you're almost burned by its intensity. such a clear answer that it guides your every move. this clarity of vision will allow you to weather temporary failures and setbacks, and it'll provide you a roadmap for the climb up the mountain.this is what separates the brilliant-and-hard-working from the brilliant-and-hard-working-and-uber-successful. the world is full of brilliant, hard working people who never get a "lucky break." the secret is that the "lucky break" is often the result of many years of directed effort. so keep that in mind as you go along. if you want to achieve tremendous success in any field, there's a buildup period of at least 5 years, and often more than a decade. it really pays to pick your path early, and to stick to it.obviously, some folks have taken more circuitous paths to success, and that's totally cool. but ask most of the majorly successful people in any profession what got them there, and they will tell you they focused relentlessly on it. ambition isn't enough; ambition needs direction.find the ladder you want to climb, and start climbing it -- because most ladders are pretty damned tall, and hopping between them gets tougher the older you get.i say this having learned it the hard way. i traded what i want to do for what i "should" do for many years, and now i'm trying to catch back up to my vision. i still have time, but i wish i'd been honest with myself at 19. |
advice for ambitious 19 year olds
| it's often dismissed as cheesy, but it's the most important career advice there is: find your passion. ninety nine people out of 100 never have a great answer to the question, "where do you want to be in 10 years?" instead, they treat their careers in ad hoc fashion, hopping opportunistically from job to job.the best way to succeed is to have a very clear answer to that cheesy question. such a clear answer that you're almost burned by its intensity. such a clear answer that it guides your every move. this clarity of vision will allow you to weather temporary failures and setbacks, and it'll provide you a roadmap for the climb up the mountain.this is what separates the brilliant-and-hard-working from the brilliant-and-hard-working-and-uber-successful. the world is full of brilliant, hard working people who never get a "lucky break." the secret is that the "lucky break" is often the result of many years of directed effort. so keep that in mind as you go along. if you want to achieve tremendous success in any field, there's a buildup period of at least 5 years, and often more than a decade. it really pays to pick your path early, and to stick to it.obviously, some folks have taken more circuitous paths to success, and that's totally cool. but ask most of the majorly successful people in any profession what got them there, and they will tell you they focused relentlessly on it. ambition isn't enough; ambition needs direction.find the ladder you want to climb, and start climbing it -- because most ladders are pretty damned tall, and hopping between them gets tougher the older you get.i say this having learned it the hard way. i traded what i want to do for what i "should" do for many years, and now i'm trying to catch back up to my vision. i still have time, but i wish i'd been honest with myself at 19. | i'm 19, and just started as a software engineer at a startup in nyc. it's been absolutely incredible - i never thought i'd be here a year ago.i'll admit that my situation isn't universal - luckily, i could get my foot in the door with many startups by being in the last batch of hacker school - but if you, like me, hate academia and want to get to work, don't let your age stop you. sure, there's companies that care about your schooling - the googles, twitters, facebooks, and palantirs of the world - but there are so many more that just want great hackers with awesome github profiles and real-world chops.(and, of course, make sure to never stop learning on your own time! you will, inevitably, have gaps in your knowledge you missed from school, but between coursera, the availability of free textbooks and lectures, and other resources, it's not hard to remedy that on your own) |
why bitcoin failed as a currency and is on its way to become an asset
| while i've been skeptical about bitcoin here, this is a terrible argument against them. broadly speaking, there is one market, the global market. dollars aren't that special, really, they're just one more asset in a pool of millions of different asset types with every imaginable attribute and every imaginable kind of customer. (yes, they are a bit special, but in the grand scale of things there are all kinds of special assets, like food, water, gold, housing, medical care, professional skills, "when everything is special, nothing much is". dollars aren't that special.) the only way to carve out a piece of that global economy is to very aggressively build yourself a walled garden. certain entities do that, like those running mmorpgs with internal currencies, who aggressively prevent people from using mmorpg currency in the real economy (mostly because of the sudden and horrific tax implications if they permitted it to act like true currency). they deliberately make their currencies as useless as possible outside their walled gardens to avoid scrutiny by the irs. (and they don't do a perfect job. but the walls are usually high enough.)this is not what bitcoin should or can do. it wants to join the pool of millions of different asset types and bring some new and unique characteristics to the party. it can not become a separate economy, because very, very powerful (and completely impersonal) forces drag everything into the global economy. if you try to separate the economies, all you actually do is create arbitrage opportunities, and the act of exploiting those returns the currency to the general market.for bitcoin to remain fully separate basically requires them to be utterly useless as anything but tokens in a video game. the posted argument is complete gibberish. | the distinction between currency and asset can be fuzzy. would you rather be paid in usd, gold, bitcoin, google stock? how much extra would you charge to accept any of the above? i'd personally take bitcoin rather than gold today, because bitcoin can be exchanged for usd around the clock from the comfort of my chair. |
why bitcoin failed as a currency and is on its way to become an asset
| the distinction between currency and asset can be fuzzy. would you rather be paid in usd, gold, bitcoin, google stock? how much extra would you charge to accept any of the above? i'd personally take bitcoin rather than gold today, because bitcoin can be exchanged for usd around the clock from the comfort of my chair. | as the author says, building a real bitcoin economy would take time. but i don't think an isolationist attitude would help; it seems like it would take longer. |
why bitcoin failed as a currency and is on its way to become an asset
| as the author says, building a real bitcoin economy would take time. but i don't think an isolationist attitude would help; it seems like it would take longer. | this really only applies if you completely ignore the nature of the internet and everything that a digital currency implies and treat bitcoin just like any other paper currency. it is totally feasible to run bitcoin pricing with dynamically updating btc prices based on an underlying fiat value in any merchant situation.most of the markets right now where actual trade takes place rather than speculation are simply taking this exact approach, whatever the exchange rate is for the currency at the time of the trade, the value will be decided based upon an underlying stable value. that's totally not possible with a traditional currency where you print price stickers and put them in shopping aisles, but it's par for the course for btc right now and probably will remain so until a stable value for the currency can be worked out, but this is no big deal. |
why bitcoin failed as a currency and is on its way to become an asset
| this really only applies if you completely ignore the nature of the internet and everything that a digital currency implies and treat bitcoin just like any other paper currency. it is totally feasible to run bitcoin pricing with dynamically updating btc prices based on an underlying fiat value in any merchant situation.most of the markets right now where actual trade takes place rather than speculation are simply taking this exact approach, whatever the exchange rate is for the currency at the time of the trade, the value will be decided based upon an underlying stable value. that's totally not possible with a traditional currency where you print price stickers and put them in shopping aisles, but it's par for the course for btc right now and probably will remain so until a stable value for the currency can be worked out, but this is no big deal. | on its way to becoming an asset indeed. over the last year bitcoin has seen a ~20,000% return rate. if bitcoin gets uberpopular (i.e. each coin is worth ~ us$2m) within 20 years, then bitcoin would have a return rate of ~ 85% per year consistently for the next 20 years. there is practically nothing else with that close a return rate, so the only financially sound course is to hoard your bitcoin, not spend them. |
top democrat backs 1099 requirement repeal
| it's interesting that the story doesn't mention that baucus was the one who put it in the healthcare bill in the first place. he's got some good people working for him to pull that pr off. | i was shocked to read about this requirement snuck into the health care bill. it is insane.can you imagine anyone who buys a computer needing to send hp or dell a w-9 to request their tax id, then waiting for the response, and then filing a 1099? i can't imagine what was going through the lawmaker's heads.pretty much all goods would start to be priced at $599. |
top democrat backs 1099 requirement repeal
| i was shocked to read about this requirement snuck into the health care bill. it is insane.can you imagine anyone who buys a computer needing to send hp or dell a w-9 to request their tax id, then waiting for the response, and then filing a 1099? i can't imagine what was going through the lawmaker's heads.pretty much all goods would start to be priced at $599. | anyone else notice they didn't realize this requirement was in the bill until months later? i wonder what else is in there. |
top democrat backs 1099 requirement repeal
| anyone else notice they didn't realize this requirement was in the bill until months later? i wonder what else is in there. | i suspect this will end up being repealed a month before it is scheduled to go into effect, with half a dozen riders attached. |
top democrat backs 1099 requirement repeal
| i suspect this will end up being repealed a month before it is scheduled to go into effect, with half a dozen riders attached. | since the 1099 requirement was put in to recover more revenues and improve the healthcare bill's financial justification, if that requirement is repealed, should congress re-evaluate the healthcare bill based on the new (worse) numbers? |
the + operator has been replaced.
| so now you need to "quote" "every" "word" "you" "are" "searching" "for" - how crazy is this?what is even worse than this - and this is pretty bad already - is that terms are no longer included by default.google will leave out terms you are searching for, if it so chooses, unless you purposely put the plus (or now quotes).the engineers are not in control, it's pretty darn obvious.added: doesn't the use of quotes prevent stemming? didn't plus allow stemming? | that's sad, as google's "smart" broad interpretation of keywords makes it worse and worse for very technical queries.quite often i have to prefix every term with +. quote-based syntax doubles annoyance of this pointless task. |
the + operator has been replaced.
| that's sad, as google's "smart" broad interpretation of keywords makes it worse and worse for very technical queries.quite often i have to prefix every term with +. quote-based syntax doubles annoyance of this pointless task. | seriously, i was wondering today whether i should ask hn what you think about these google smart inflection and alleged misspelling detection.i am so tired of this. i do mistakes (after all errare humanum est), but i do it rarely, yet i am enforced to use quotes practically all the time (i am doing it since many months at least, don't remember exact moment, but i think in 2010 there wasn't automatic i-know-better, but only suggestions, correct me if i'm wrong, please). it's such a pita. is there maybe some secret search switch that can be used (and turned on in chrome by default hopefully) to allow me avoiding typing quotation marks (") more than many hundreds times a day. and i still unconsciously always write without them for the first time, and, surprisingly, sometimes get correct results when the terms are ultimately known by everyone.before google only suggested what i am possibly searching for. why it is so sure now (i.e. this year) to make my original queries second-class citizens? unbelievable and abominable poise. |
the + operator has been replaced.
| seriously, i was wondering today whether i should ask hn what you think about these google smart inflection and alleged misspelling detection.i am so tired of this. i do mistakes (after all errare humanum est), but i do it rarely, yet i am enforced to use quotes practically all the time (i am doing it since many months at least, don't remember exact moment, but i think in 2010 there wasn't automatic i-know-better, but only suggestions, correct me if i'm wrong, please). it's such a pita. is there maybe some secret search switch that can be used (and turned on in chrome by default hopefully) to allow me avoiding typing quotation marks (") more than many hundreds times a day. and i still unconsciously always write without them for the first time, and, surprisingly, sometimes get correct results when the terms are ultimately known by everyone.before google only suggested what i am possibly searching for. why it is so sure now (i.e. this year) to make my original queries second-class citizens? unbelievable and abominable poise. | okay, perhaps this is easily explained, but i am baffled.when you search google for a small phrase, for example, oauth authorization:search query: oauth authorization
about 525,000 resultssearch query: oauth "authorization"
about 1,470,000 resultshow does the result not only increase, but increase nearly three-fold?i've always thought the quotes were meant to be more exact. for example, if you search for web design without the quotes, you will find results including web design and website design, but if you search for "web design" with the quotes, you will not find the entries that say "website design" so that reflects less results than the latter. so why am i seeing this oddity, does it make sense to anyone else? |
the + operator has been replaced.
| okay, perhaps this is easily explained, but i am baffled.when you search google for a small phrase, for example, oauth authorization:search query: oauth authorization
about 525,000 resultssearch query: oauth "authorization"
about 1,470,000 resultshow does the result not only increase, but increase nearly three-fold?i've always thought the quotes were meant to be more exact. for example, if you search for web design without the quotes, you will find results including web design and website design, but if you search for "web design" with the quotes, you will not find the entries that say "website design" so that reflects less results than the latter. so why am i seeing this oddity, does it make sense to anyone else? | i'm guessing w/in a few months google launches a g+ integration with search that lets you reference your contacts in search queries using the + operator. |
amateur astronomers discover a planet with four suns
| they were using planet hunters - which appears to be a crowd sourced "find interesting bits in all this data" website. (<link> | any chance someone could make a diagram of the orbit for us? i really can't picture this? does it make a figure 8 around the first two stars? |
amateur astronomers discover a planet with four suns
| any chance someone could make a diagram of the orbit for us? i really can't picture this? does it make a figure 8 around the first two stars? | their link to human vs machine is interesting:<link> wonder how good their machine learning is? i'd love to throw some support vector machines or neural networks at this stuff! |
amateur astronomers discover a planet with four suns
| their link to human vs machine is interesting:<link> wonder how good their machine learning is? i'd love to throw some support vector machines or neural networks at this stuff! | i tracked down the original paper (<link> and dug up some useful details.the planet in question is a gas/ice giant similar to uranus with a radius 6 times that of earth (nearly 80,000 km in diameter) with an as yet unknown mass (although it must weigh less than half of jupiter's mass at the most). it orbits a pair of binary stars with a period of 138 days. the binary it orbits is an f dwarf star with 1.5 the sun's mass and an m dwarf with 40% of the sun's mass, they orbit each other with a period of 20 days. for reference, this translates to the two stars orbiting much closer than mercury's orbit (around 0.17 au) and the planet with an orbit close to that of venus (around 0.65 au, according to my calculations).this system is bound to another binary system of similar total mass (a g2 star similar in mass to our sun and an m2 dwarf star with around half or less the mass of our sun) at a distance of around 1,000 au. at that distance the second binary system would merely be the brightest stars in the night sky of the planet. the two binary systems would orbit each other with a period of tens of thousands of years. |
amateur astronomers discover a planet with four suns
| i tracked down the original paper (<link> and dug up some useful details.the planet in question is a gas/ice giant similar to uranus with a radius 6 times that of earth (nearly 80,000 km in diameter) with an as yet unknown mass (although it must weigh less than half of jupiter's mass at the most). it orbits a pair of binary stars with a period of 138 days. the binary it orbits is an f dwarf star with 1.5 the sun's mass and an m dwarf with 40% of the sun's mass, they orbit each other with a period of 20 days. for reference, this translates to the two stars orbiting much closer than mercury's orbit (around 0.17 au) and the planet with an orbit close to that of venus (around 0.65 au, according to my calculations).this system is bound to another binary system of similar total mass (a g2 star similar in mass to our sun and an m2 dwarf star with around half or less the mass of our sun) at a distance of around 1,000 au. at that distance the second binary system would merely be the brightest stars in the night sky of the planet. the two binary systems would orbit each other with a period of tens of thousands of years. | man, everything has to be quad core these days. |
ask hn: how did you learn programming? how long did getting good take?
go. | i learned programming from a book make your own video games which was in the library of my (not so well off) chicago public school. we didn't have a computer, but i found out you can simulate a basic program with graph paper. that was twenty-something years ago.my trajectory as a programmer has gone from sucking lots to sucking less. i might get good someday. | i first played around with dos on an 8088 back at school. i'd edit batch files and make it print out amusing things. made a text adventure, self-replicating files etc. i then tried editing an exe file to change it, and realized it wasn't quite that simple. later on, i found qbasic and used it to write "real" programs, such as little animations and an alarm clock using the pc speaker. i learned some pascal at school, which is where i found out about flow control structures and functions. later on, as a teen, i played around a lot with delphi, finally getting over the disappointment of not being able to edit .exe files that i had as a child. i made a lot of one-off programs i'd put on cds with autorun as greeting cards and personal messages to friends. i later did a couple of months of vb at school, but didn't learn anything new compared to what i could already di with delphi. i sneaked into the high school java classes when i was in 8th grade, and thanks to a particularly tolerant teacher got to unofficially participate. i learned java and c basics at university classes i took as part of a cooperation agreement between my high school and the local university. later, officially in university, i took more java classes and learned what i could of c++ on my own. i was fairly comfortable with c, but c++ was frustrating, because a lot of the complexity felt unnecessary. i stuck with java for the most part. i wrote c++ and java at a number of research assistant jobs, and learned bash script and awk on the side for one-off tasks. my first exposure to python was when a student at a course i was taing asked if they could submit work in python. i accepted that, and learned a fair bit from dissecting that program. i didn't touch python for a while after that. later, at another job, i did c# one-off programs for psychological experiments. on the side, i was playing around with virtual reality and used vizard, which is a 3d visualization package built on python. i started playing around with python seriously at that point. i now write mostly in python, except for c and c++ bits for performance-dependent stuff and hardware interfacing (which i use from python with ctypes.)how long did getting good take? it's hard to say. i feel i've learned something from each of those experiences, and gotten better in the process. i'd say i've gotten to the level where i'm confident in my skills as a programmer within the last couple years, as i've seen meaningful things done with my code. |
ask hn: how did you learn programming? how long did getting good take?
go. | i first played around with dos on an 8088 back at school. i'd edit batch files and make it print out amusing things. made a text adventure, self-replicating files etc. i then tried editing an exe file to change it, and realized it wasn't quite that simple. later on, i found qbasic and used it to write "real" programs, such as little animations and an alarm clock using the pc speaker. i learned some pascal at school, which is where i found out about flow control structures and functions. later on, as a teen, i played around a lot with delphi, finally getting over the disappointment of not being able to edit .exe files that i had as a child. i made a lot of one-off programs i'd put on cds with autorun as greeting cards and personal messages to friends. i later did a couple of months of vb at school, but didn't learn anything new compared to what i could already di with delphi. i sneaked into the high school java classes when i was in 8th grade, and thanks to a particularly tolerant teacher got to unofficially participate. i learned java and c basics at university classes i took as part of a cooperation agreement between my high school and the local university. later, officially in university, i took more java classes and learned what i could of c++ on my own. i was fairly comfortable with c, but c++ was frustrating, because a lot of the complexity felt unnecessary. i stuck with java for the most part. i wrote c++ and java at a number of research assistant jobs, and learned bash script and awk on the side for one-off tasks. my first exposure to python was when a student at a course i was taing asked if they could submit work in python. i accepted that, and learned a fair bit from dissecting that program. i didn't touch python for a while after that. later, at another job, i did c# one-off programs for psychological experiments. on the side, i was playing around with virtual reality and used vizard, which is a 3d visualization package built on python. i started playing around with python seriously at that point. i now write mostly in python, except for c and c++ bits for performance-dependent stuff and hardware interfacing (which i use from python with ctypes.)how long did getting good take? it's hard to say. i feel i've learned something from each of those experiences, and gotten better in the process. i'd say i've gotten to the level where i'm confident in my skills as a programmer within the last couple years, as i've seen meaningful things done with my code. | '77-78 school year: punched card fortran iv (really more like a ii) on the ibm 1130. prompted me to start and never stop studying software engineering ("structured programming" et. al. was the rage back then).summer '78: most everything but c and the like on a rich unix v6 system. focus then besides exploration was still writing the best quality systems, started learning how to work on other people's code bases helping others with their final class projects.after some time off for first year of college, starting in the summer of '80 heavy duty c (lions' notes best reference then) on unix v7 and bsd 2.x. plus playing around with lisp machines.'82-83 lisp at lmi, although wasn't able to get a whole lot of time in (lisp machines were scarce back then). first serious work with sicp and scheme.'84: c on a variety of 68000 bsd unix workstations. learned how to grok and port code between these subtlety different systems. also some common lisp on pcs, followed by the t lisp dialect.'85 on, moved from working on ersatz versions of emacs to the real thing (mostly gosling, which was what gnu emacs started from), some heavy duty debugging required to find wild pointers (e.g. atron on 8088). more work on other people's code and first client-server project.long break for more school and aftermath in a period when route 128 was dying.'90 or so, ms-dos and sun os c (worm filesystem and system interfaces), followed by c on windows 3/3.1 and sun os 4.x. starting transition from journeyman to master.after various c and oracle consulting work, transition complete in mid-90s with a serious greenfield c++ client server system using oose methodology (the unified process nowadays). that's when i considered myself to have become "good".with all the interruptions and distractions (was trying to become a scientist in this period, but finances got in the way), took perhaps 10 years of concentrated effort in 20 calendar years. |
ask hn: how did you learn programming? how long did getting good take?
go. | '77-78 school year: punched card fortran iv (really more like a ii) on the ibm 1130. prompted me to start and never stop studying software engineering ("structured programming" et. al. was the rage back then).summer '78: most everything but c and the like on a rich unix v6 system. focus then besides exploration was still writing the best quality systems, started learning how to work on other people's code bases helping others with their final class projects.after some time off for first year of college, starting in the summer of '80 heavy duty c (lions' notes best reference then) on unix v7 and bsd 2.x. plus playing around with lisp machines.'82-83 lisp at lmi, although wasn't able to get a whole lot of time in (lisp machines were scarce back then). first serious work with sicp and scheme.'84: c on a variety of 68000 bsd unix workstations. learned how to grok and port code between these subtlety different systems. also some common lisp on pcs, followed by the t lisp dialect.'85 on, moved from working on ersatz versions of emacs to the real thing (mostly gosling, which was what gnu emacs started from), some heavy duty debugging required to find wild pointers (e.g. atron on 8088). more work on other people's code and first client-server project.long break for more school and aftermath in a period when route 128 was dying.'90 or so, ms-dos and sun os c (worm filesystem and system interfaces), followed by c on windows 3/3.1 and sun os 4.x. starting transition from journeyman to master.after various c and oracle consulting work, transition complete in mid-90s with a serious greenfield c++ client server system using oose methodology (the unified process nowadays). that's when i considered myself to have become "good".with all the interruptions and distractions (was trying to become a scientist in this period, but finances got in the way), took perhaps 10 years of concentrated effort in 20 calendar years. | i was a mad magazine fan and in a super special issue in the early 90's they included basic program source code printed in the magazine. i sat down and typed the whole thing in line by line and printed a full-screen pic of alfred. e. neuman. that was why i started going through the basic manual at the age of 9 or 10. it took getting a job writing jsp/servlets to get 'better', but still not 'good' 20 years on. |
ask hn: how did you learn programming? how long did getting good take?
go. | i was a mad magazine fan and in a super special issue in the early 90's they included basic program source code printed in the magazine. i sat down and typed the whole thing in line by line and printed a full-screen pic of alfred. e. neuman. that was why i started going through the basic manual at the age of 9 or 10. it took getting a job writing jsp/servlets to get 'better', but still not 'good' 20 years on. | i learned programming in basic at age 10 when a computer-science-teacher uncle of mine explained how super mario worked. it was all a bit over my head but after about a week i was drawing some mario-inspired shapes on the screen. the next big push came when i taught myself to do early cgi-based stuff: it was just so exciting to be able to share something with dozens (!) of people. if you define being good as "being able to pick up a new language in a few days" then yeah, i guess i'm good 8 i think that's a goal well worth pursuing. picking up a new language will expose yourself to new constructs 8 practises, it trains your programming muscle. if you define good as "expert at programming task x" then, sadly, i am not very good. the best part about programming is that you never stop learning. that uncle of mine is now well into retirement and he's still programming microcontrollers for fun. |
peter thiel’s graph of the year
| that graph is a bit of a lie. student debt is summed over all students, so it grows if the student population grows (which it has; 2013 saw a decline, but that will not factor much in this data yet). it also integrates over many years. that makes the total debt look more threatening.it would be more reasonable to show a per-year, per student debt (people graduating in year x had an average debt of $y; people leaving without graduating had an average debt of $z)such a graph probably still looks bad (median income has dropped, after all), but it will be more informative. | i think these trends are largely irrelevant to the thiel fellows. after all, most of them come from elite universities and could easily find a high paying job after graduating. if thiel wants to put his money where his mouth is, he needs to find a way to solve the problem of the bottom 50% not finding a job. and i don't think that spawning more startups will help - just look around the startups you know - how many of the people there would have been unemployed if they hadn't joined a startup? |
peter thiel’s graph of the year
| i think these trends are largely irrelevant to the thiel fellows. after all, most of them come from elite universities and could easily find a high paying job after graduating. if thiel wants to put his money where his mouth is, he needs to find a way to solve the problem of the bottom 50% not finding a job. and i don't think that spawning more startups will help - just look around the startups you know - how many of the people there would have been unemployed if they hadn't joined a startup? | this is a bad visualization because it is hinting at a visual congruence that isn't there. when plotting things with two y axes, you have to be really careful and honest about what you're trying to look at.when you use a line graph, visually, you're displaying a trend (in the most naive way possible). when you have two y axes, then you need to ask, "what is a valid way to compare two trends?" remember, a trend is intrinsically about slope. if you arbitrarily adjust the min/max axis value, then you can arbitrarily adjust the appearance of the trend.here is a fixed version that shows the actual numbers on full, 0-based scales: <link> this shows you how deceitful thiel's plot is, even though the axes are "clearly labelled". iconic perception trumps reading numbers.here is a year-over-year plot: <link> alternative, more meaningful visualization, would be to show % change from a baseline, in this case the 2003 value. that would be far more honest and informative. and here it is, as a bar plot, which is more effective for comparing values along a common scale. (since we have computed percent change, we have a common scale.)<link>*note: i just read the numbers off of thiel's plot and don't have the source data, so this plots are approximations. i can share a simple ipython notebook of this if anyone really cares. |
peter thiel’s graph of the year
| this is a bad visualization because it is hinting at a visual congruence that isn't there. when plotting things with two y axes, you have to be really careful and honest about what you're trying to look at.when you use a line graph, visually, you're displaying a trend (in the most naive way possible). when you have two y axes, then you need to ask, "what is a valid way to compare two trends?" remember, a trend is intrinsically about slope. if you arbitrarily adjust the min/max axis value, then you can arbitrarily adjust the appearance of the trend.here is a fixed version that shows the actual numbers on full, 0-based scales: <link> this shows you how deceitful thiel's plot is, even though the axes are "clearly labelled". iconic perception trumps reading numbers.here is a year-over-year plot: <link> alternative, more meaningful visualization, would be to show % change from a baseline, in this case the 2003 value. that would be far more honest and informative. and here it is, as a bar plot, which is more effective for comparing values along a common scale. (since we have computed percent change, we have a common scale.)<link>*note: i just read the numbers off of thiel's plot and don't have the source data, so this plots are approximations. i can share a simple ipython notebook of this if anyone really cares. | that chart compares median income with total student debt. also the scale for median income is not zero-based. the point is still valid, but this widespread use of misleading charts is awful. |
peter thiel’s graph of the year
| that chart compares median income with total student debt. also the scale for median income is not zero-based. the point is still valid, but this widespread use of misleading charts is awful. | compare and contrast:<link> for the graphically challenged: unemployment in the us is low (<5%) for people with bachelor's degrees and up, and high (>5%) for people with less than a bachelor's degree. unemployment rises directly in proportion to how little education one has. |
visual studio and team foundation server will have git support
| rock on, microsoft — this is great news for windows developers. as much as the open source community (of which i am a part) loves to rag on microsoft, they seem to have recognized the threat of platforms moving off of windows (steam, ipads, android, ...) and are taking reasonable steps to encourage development for windows (make the developer experience better).this — a reasonable response to a potential threat — is a huge step for microsoft. kudos, vs team. | i'm a tortoisehg (mercurial gui front-end) developer and an (occasional) mercurial contributor.i think this is really great news, both for git, microsoft and oss in general. it is definitely a great move for microsoft.i hope they also add support for mercurial in the future. git is a great tool but i think mercurial is equally powerful yet easier to use and understand (imho). it is not as widely used as git, particularly in oss circles, but there are many oss projects (e.g. python) and many companies (e.g. mozilla and facebook) that use mercurial very successfully. choosing git as the first dvcs they support makes a lot of sense, but mercurial would be a nice second choice.in particular, being able to use mercurial with tfs would be awesome in an enterprise context. plus i'm sure all in the tortoisehg project would welcome the competition if visual studio were to get builtin support for mercurial as well as git :-) |
visual studio and team foundation server will have git support
| i'm a tortoisehg (mercurial gui front-end) developer and an (occasional) mercurial contributor.i think this is really great news, both for git, microsoft and oss in general. it is definitely a great move for microsoft.i hope they also add support for mercurial in the future. git is a great tool but i think mercurial is equally powerful yet easier to use and understand (imho). it is not as widely used as git, particularly in oss circles, but there are many oss projects (e.g. python) and many companies (e.g. mozilla and facebook) that use mercurial very successfully. choosing git as the first dvcs they support makes a lot of sense, but mercurial would be a nice second choice.in particular, being able to use mercurial with tfs would be awesome in an enterprise context. plus i'm sure all in the tortoisehg project would welcome the competition if visual studio were to get builtin support for mercurial as well as git :-) | when i read "q: does this mean team foundation version control (tfvc) is dead?
a: not for a second."the thing that comes to mind is a politician saying "i'm not thinking about resigning". his resignation has just become nearly inevitable.i have more belief in the statement about microsoft working with open source, or at least ms developer division working with open source.on the whole this looks cool, though vs integration will have to be very good to tempt me away from git bash and tortoisegit. |
visual studio and team foundation server will have git support
| when i read "q: does this mean team foundation version control (tfvc) is dead?
a: not for a second."the thing that comes to mind is a politician saying "i'm not thinking about resigning". his resignation has just become nearly inevitable.i have more belief in the statement about microsoft working with open source, or at least ms developer division working with open source.on the whole this looks cool, though vs integration will have to be very good to tempt me away from git bash and tortoisegit. | this seems alright, but it definitely feels incomplete. i tried it out with one of my github projects, and the setup wasn't impressive at all.first, it didn't automatically detect that there was a 'github' remote. my first guess was that i needed to call it 'origin', but that didn't fix it. instead, i needed to go into the command line and specify the master branch's upstream branch like so: "git branch --set-upstream master github/master".second, as soon as i tried to fetch i got "an error was raised by libgit2. category = net (error). this transport isn't implemented. sorry". turns out i have to use the 'http' link instead of the 'ssh' link as the remote destination.both of these errors could have been avoided automatically, or at least given better help. branch has no upstream? assuming that it's the only remote branch with the same name is a pretty good heuristic, especially when you do no work without user action. don't support ssh? try the obvious http alternative, or tell/ask the user to try it. |
visual studio and team foundation server will have git support
| this seems alright, but it definitely feels incomplete. i tried it out with one of my github projects, and the setup wasn't impressive at all.first, it didn't automatically detect that there was a 'github' remote. my first guess was that i needed to call it 'origin', but that didn't fix it. instead, i needed to go into the command line and specify the master branch's upstream branch like so: "git branch --set-upstream master github/master".second, as soon as i tried to fetch i got "an error was raised by libgit2. category = net (error). this transport isn't implemented. sorry". turns out i have to use the 'http' link instead of the 'ssh' link as the remote destination.both of these errors could have been avoided automatically, or at least given better help. branch has no upstream? assuming that it's the only remote branch with the same name is a pretty good heuristic, especially when you do no work without user action. don't support ssh? try the obvious http alternative, or tell/ask the user to try it. | this is (a) absolutely shocking, and (b) utterly fantastic!if ms had tried to make a dvcs to compete with git, they would have always been third-fiddle (to git and mercurial, and possibly others). but they could still have made money selling it to all-microsoft shops.instead, they acknowledged the situation and incorporated git support!this is so right, so beneficial to their customers, and yet so completely opposite to what i expected them to do!i must give credit where credit is due ... fantastic decision, microsoft! |
ask hn: what would you have conficker do?
being that today is april 1st - april fools day - and also the day conficker computer virus was to download a new set of instructions. i was thinking what would i do with the 3-12 million computers at my beck and call.<p>email resignation letters to everyone's boss.
insert porn into everyone's powerpoint slides<p>pretty lame that's why i asked the question. | update all the people with ie6 to something newer | synchronize the system clock, set the volume to maximum, and then, at the right moment, and with perfect synchronicity, each computer would play back a prerecorded speech claiming to be a message from god... |
ask hn: what would you have conficker do?
being that today is april 1st - april fools day - and also the day conficker computer virus was to download a new set of instructions. i was thinking what would i do with the 3-12 million computers at my beck and call.<p>email resignation letters to everyone's boss.
insert porn into everyone's powerpoint slides<p>pretty lame that's why i asked the question. | synchronize the system clock, set the volume to maximum, and then, at the right moment, and with perfect synchronicity, each computer would play back a prerecorded speech claiming to be a message from god... | calculate the quintillionth bit of pi. with ten million reasonably modern computers it shouldn't take more than 12-24 hours. |
ask hn: what would you have conficker do?
being that today is april 1st - april fools day - and also the day conficker computer virus was to download a new set of instructions. i was thinking what would i do with the 3-12 million computers at my beck and call.<p>email resignation letters to everyone's boss.
insert porn into everyone's powerpoint slides<p>pretty lame that's why i asked the question. | calculate the quintillionth bit of pi. with ten million reasonably modern computers it shouldn't take more than 12-24 hours. | seed torrents.hey, if everyone's upstream bandwidth is being soaked up by _the wire_, other viruses won't be able to use it to send out spam. |
ask hn: what would you have conficker do?
being that today is april 1st - april fools day - and also the day conficker computer virus was to download a new set of instructions. i was thinking what would i do with the 3-12 million computers at my beck and call.<p>email resignation letters to everyone's boss.
insert porn into everyone's powerpoint slides<p>pretty lame that's why i asked the question. | seed torrents.hey, if everyone's upstream bandwidth is being soaked up by _the wire_, other viruses won't be able to use it to send out spam. | put up fake april fool's day websites in place of popular sites. oh, wait... nevermind. |
making a site that can handle #1 on hacker news
| your site apparently got ~2250 visits per day (so, less than two per minute) at the height of your "surge", and seems to consist of three pages (/, /about, and /open-source). most people are only going to look at just /, so let's say 3000 pageviews. the day after was still seeing good amounts of traffic, so it wasn't some kind of momentary "all 3000 hit the site in the same minute" situation: it seems like a fairly benign decay. how could you possibly have been dealing with 287 concurrent users?my website (saurik.com) is seriously written in javascript. i was doing this long before node was popular, and so it is designed "horribly sub-optimally": it is using rhino, which is not known for speed. i use xsl/t as a templating engine to build the page layouts, which is also not known for speed. every request is synchronously logged to a database. i get over 50k html pageviews a day, most for one recent article which i posted a few weeks ago: when i posted it, i was getting well over 3k pageviews per hour.i do not do any caching: i generate each page dynamically every time it is accessed. i seriously dynamically generate the css every request (there are some variables). even with 3k html pageviews per hour, that's less than one complex request per second. how does one even build a website that can't handle that load? that is what i'd seriously be interested in seeing: not "how do i handle being #1 on hacker news", but "why is it that so many websites are unable to handle two requests per minute". | while the sentiment is clear, i had an uncached wordpress site on shared hosting withstand #2 or #3 (i forget where exactly it peaked). hn isn't all that huge a traffic deliverer. it's just about the quality of that traffic. |
making a site that can handle #1 on hacker news
| while the sentiment is clear, i had an uncached wordpress site on shared hosting withstand #2 or #3 (i forget where exactly it peaked). hn isn't all that huge a traffic deliverer. it's just about the quality of that traffic. | you have no dynamic content and your website crash at 200~ concurrent users?you're doing everything wrong then. i had a website going through 6000 concurrent users sometimes and which was hosted on a very cheap mutualised server! i didn't realize so many people had no idea about simple caching techniques. |
making a site that can handle #1 on hacker news
| you have no dynamic content and your website crash at 200~ concurrent users?you're doing everything wrong then. i had a website going through 6000 concurrent users sometimes and which was hosted on a very cheap mutualised server! i didn't realize so many people had no idea about simple caching techniques. | a lot of people commented on the original submission in which he asked for feedback on his site and ... nothing's improved, not even the grammatical errors!the only thing that's changed is the site's migration to s3 from linode, and the addition of cloudfront! |
making a site that can handle #1 on hacker news
| a lot of people commented on the original submission in which he asked for feedback on his site and ... nothing's improved, not even the grammatical errors!the only thing that's changed is the site's migration to s3 from linode, and the addition of cloudfront! | actually you can combine middleman and dynamic pages to get fast static pages and still keep a few dynamic endpoints. we did this on our website <link> for email registration, and blogged about it here : <link> - when 90% of your users only consume static content, you greatly benefit from this. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.