skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
... but I would hardly put On Lisp in the same "gentle" category as Touretzky's book. A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation could easily be someone's first ever programming book. Show me the person whose introduction to programming was On Lisp and I will show you either someone who got fed up real quick, or someone who is a whole lot smarter than me and the coders I know.

I would probably recommend this order:

1. Gentle Intro

2. Practical Common Lisp

3. On Lisp
Simpsons did it
I don't I buy that argument without data to back it up. I'd hypothesize that the amount of piracy a title gets is directly proportional to its popularity.

Sure with an indie title you have fans that are more sympathetic to the producer, but with mass market titles you have the entire mass-market demographic. Do you really think that the number of people in the mass-market who are too lazy, dumb, or otherwise choose not to pirate out-weigh the ratio that sympathize with indie producers?

Show us some statistics please if you're going to make this argument.
Thanks for digging that up.

The original posting is this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=303605

And that's what PG comments on, see the thread.

The interesting bit is that there are some self posts (such as that specimen) that clearly deserve their 'weighting' but there are plenty of others that do not, and these fall victim to the collective punishment meted out to all submissions without urls.

I estimated the .4, so apparently it is even less.
For django, I've been using django-compress:
http://code.google.com/p/django-compress/

Works with javascript as well as CSS, nicely incorporates cache control, ahead-of-time or on-the-fly generation, etc. Works out of the box* in pure python, or it's trivial to plug eg YUI minifier or google-closure.

* Actually, last I looked there was a bug in the CSS minifier it ships with (http://code.google.com/p/django-compress/issues/detail?id=27), but I believe the upstream version has been fixed.
Fixing the Ratings Catastrophe Through Transparency
For people who didnt read Slashdot.org in 2001, this was the tagline given by CmdrTaco for the iPod.
Office Documents Recovery Software and Word Repair Software
AdreamSoft releases data applications including Photo Recovery, OFFICE Recovery and Word Repair. The series of data tools make data protection easily and efficiently
List of facts are copyrightable in Europe, where this developer, his competitor, and the transit agency in question are located.
Short articles on a specific topic require little coordination among contributors. A book used for class can't have redundant sections. Each part needs to build upon the previous sections (for math, anyway). The book should have a consistent style.

Anyway, that's what khanacademy.org is for.
Well, sure, you could say there are different degrees of "proprietary," but there's really only one "open":

1. Secret spec, patent-encumbered
2. Secret spec, patent-free
3. Open spec, patent-encumbered
4. Open spec, patent-free

You can of course expand that out to include other criteria, but... you get the idea.

I'd argue that #4 is the only one that's really "open," though a case could be made that #3 is both open and proprietary rather than simply proprietary.

Of course there are those who believe #4 isn't really feasible and that some patent somewhere can apply to basically everything... even if the patent holder doesn't know it.
It's not so much hostility towards privacy as strong disagreement about where to draw the line.
Since facts can't be copyrighted, and texts have plenty of facts that don't change much between generations, cheap texts in fundamentals could certainly be produced if professionals are hired to update the facts every few years.

Texts are dinosaur delivery systems for info. They leave the pretty-much untouched question of individualized computer-assisted learning wide-open ... a field which hasn't begun to emerge but most certainly will. The recent Khan Academy post here http://www.khanacademy.org/ is one pointer to a different future.
Google’s Legacy - the Internet Cesspool
Ask HN: My nephew wants to learn programming. What should I recommend?
My 11-year old nephew has been asking me how to get started programming. I'm thinking of suggesting Python because of its structure and clarity, though Javascript is tempting because of its web advantage. (There's Lisp of course, but I'm trying not to unfairly privilege the home team!)

What do you guys think? What language should he start on and what resources can you recommend for it? I think the goal should be to get him to rewarding feedback as quickly as possible, then he can either become an addict like the rest of us or drop it and move on.

Let me see what else... he's very smart and probably would prefer the straight goods to anything kidsy. Oh yeah, and (needless to say?) he wants to make games.
Hey,

Sorry for late reply. What's your number or email so we can discuss details.

lefstathiou@gmail.com
cell in hong kong: 852-6807-1354
Most of the people Andrew interviews will play ball--he pushes back on a short answer, asking for more, and they oblige (thinking specifically of Noah Everett... he wouldn't stop opening up!). Not so with Godin, he tells you what he wants you to know and no more in an attempt to lead you to find or stumble on the insights that will help you learn more about yourself and what you do well.
You're building a straw man here.

Large-scale piracy is very different than ensuring "the practical security of digital IP always and everywhere". Putting a _practical_ stop to services such as the Pirate Bay would be incredibly simple if it were enacted by national governments. If it turns out that in practice it's not enough there's numerous other easy, cost effective measures that could taken.

A solution doesn't have to stop 100% of piracy to be effective.
I think the ideas he was talking about were better conveyed by Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind".
Ahh, I guess he has his profile set to "friends of friends," so I can see his profile info since he and I have mutual friends.
This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post
Here's the WPedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character
New Click&Clean 3.6.5.0 add-on for Firefox
Aquatic ape hypothesis
Hi I work in the log importation services business.

From my perspective the main hurdle to log aggregation/correlation is not scalability. If splunk doesn't cut it for your performance needs, you have probably hit the price point to where you can afford a loglogic or similar appliance.

Instead the barrier to entry is in the number of applications supported by a particular log archival product, and the ability to correlate across the different applications.

As I'm sure you know at this point, adding support for log types is a painstaking task. Most vendors punt on this and tell customers to do it themselves.

If there is a niche available to you as a startup I would think that it would be in offering a very low turnaround time in supporting new log types. For example: give us some log sources and we'll support and categorize your logs with our service.

As for running in the cloud on large datasets, I think you'll find that most customers are not going to want to double or triple their outgoing bandwidth -- In addition to concerns from a security compliance standpoint.

That being said, good luck in your venture. Logging is a mess, and could certainly use some clean up. :)
Ruby would be a good choice, I hear the Prag Prog Learn to Program book is great and uses Ruby.

I was at my daughters new school the other day and I talked to the Librarian who is also teaching technology and he talked about using Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) which looks very cool and is somewhat game focused.
Flash isn't doomed quite yet. Flash supplanted java as the primary form of interactivity on the web in the early years, and javascript + html has been making inroads but flash still has a significant advantage. Pure HTML/CSS/JS/Canvas/SVG designs are nearly as capable as flash, but there are still serious design defects in the system, major problems with client support and standardization, and a distinct lack of tooling.

Today it takes a not insignificant amount of effort just to make a simple text box with a border having 4 rounded corners that displays correctly for >90% of a site's visitors using pure html/css techniques. Even if every internet user upgraded to a modern, standards compliant, CSS3 supporting browser tomorrow, there would still be a substantial hill to climb for designing good looking pure html/css sites, it would just be a slightly smaller hill.

Almost certainly this will change, standards will get better, browser marketshare will continue to skew toward newer browsers, tooling will improve, but all of these things will take time.

This is not a defense of flash, I don't think flash is good for the web even today, but until the very real problems of pure html/css design are put to rest (CSS4?) flash will still be seen as a go-to technology for a lot of things people want to do with the web.
I used to blind submit a lot of Joel on Software, Coding Horror (I feel slightly responsible for a lot of his posts on the site since there weren't many before I started posting them. I've stopped and I'm sorry.) and 37signals. So I was sort of expecting to be in the list for those. I must not have had the volume.

I would love to see my complete stats, but I'm just a stats junkie (hence my love for rep-based communities and sports).
Ask HN: Has anybody JRuby for their webapp?
Hi,

I am getting quite comfortable using Ruby on Rails but keep hearing about performance problems that comes with Ruby. So when looking for efficient implementations of Ruby came across JRuby. Also ability to use any Java library is a huge advantage for our current project.

Has anybody used JRuby successfully for their rails project? More interested in any problems faced because of JRuby?
But a coat hanger is made of steel which has much higher resistance than copper that is the standard for most wiring. The wire gage used for coat hangers is about the same that I use for speaker wiring, so using steel will definitely result in higher resistance.
Yep, for reference:
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257... (the statement has acquired some degree of notoriety since)
Following hacker tradition, you should throw K&R at him and see if it sticks :)
No tools that I can recommend. Sigh I recommend sprites(I use them all the time) but I have been doing them so long directly in Photoshop that's my default action, especially when in a hurry. I have tried a few tools but found they are very inaccurate.
The submitter's vote isn't counted in the algorithm as far as I know. The original algorithm (since chanced) I believe is (p - 1) / (t + 2)^1.5 with p being the number of points. So you can see the initial vote is subtracted.
Aaaaand it doesn't work. Goldangit.
Ask HN: What should I teach freshmen about Web 2.0 (and maybe entrepreneurship)?
I may have the opportunity to teach/TA a 1-unit exploration course at UCLA - the professor and I think Web 2.0 is a good topic to explore but I'm trying to find out what topics/case studies would be good to spark the imagination and future learning. I'm planning on calling in my friend who runs his own FML-type venture, if there's anyone in the LA area who would be willing to come by, drop me a line.
The dollars aren't for putting the 'X', they're for knowing where to put the 'X'.
Followup Questions to Strategic SEO for Startups
Smart games will do this for you. For example, Warcraft 3 initially lets you choose between normal and hard, but if you lose a mission, it unlocks easy mode. This way, nobody will end up playing through the game watered-down unless that is the only way they can make it through. Everybody who turns out to be competent will experience the game as intended, regardless of their initial estimation of their abilities.
How about DrScheme? I can't imagine more direct, rewarding feedback than the built-in graphics libraries. It's totally usable for games. It comes with a solid development environment, with a good step-capable debugger.
I have a feeling that would actually show a Gaussian distribution, perhaps with a peak in the lower digits (1-10 or so). So, you would see more number start with a 4 or 5 than a 1, or it would at least lack the logarithmic distribution that Benford's law has.
Good Job Andrew!
My son wrote a program for school in grade 8 with Python and PyGame that modeled mutation and natural selection among populations of predators and prey. It was a great learning experience for him, and introduced him to: classes and methods; inheritance; functions; datatypes; modules and namespaces; cartesian geometry; for, if and try blocks; and so on. It was challenging but not impossible for him to understand the stuff. Now he wants to be a video game designer when he grows up.
I think the reason people feel this way is because of the competitive capitalistic nature of the society we live in.

If I know X% of the population has acquired something for free, how am I supposed to feel when I'm expected to pay for it. Our society places a lot of emphasis on being the best and always being competitive with one another. How am I supposed to be the best or be competitive with others, when the playing field isn't level. The only way in this case to level the playing field is to also engage in piracy.
I'm not sure if you can see that because you are a mod or admin, but I can't see that information since crza made his snatches private. If you are a mod or admin and are concerned about outing yourself, pg will dead this comment and mine if you ask nicely. If you are a mod or admin, I'd be very curious to discuss the future of the hydra if you email me.
Random data doesn't follow the law. Fraudulent tax returns are essentially random numbers, hence, detectable.
I'll be there. Jay Graves from Austin TX

I do a lot of glue-ing and some internal app development using Python.

There is tons of stuff I'm interested in at PyCon 2010. Many of my session slots are double and triple booked.

I don't know Atlanta, I've only flown through it on many occasions, so I know the airport but nothing else.
> and a distinct lack of tooling

Great comment.

I think this is a principle problem. Any company that can put together a flash alternative toolchain half as good as Adobe's flash production toolchain is liable to make quite a bit of money.

Abstract away the browser incompatibility nonsense with the tools, provide the right kinds of editors and development environments, and lots of the complexity should be hidden away in the dev envrionment.
You don't think it's wrong to let a high-profile site blatantly break the rules everyone else has to follow because it profits them?
For rails, Sass ( http://sass-lang.com/ ) has a nice setting for doing this:

Sass::Plugin.options = {
:style => :compressed
}
Hmmm, I've been working on something like this for a little while now. I guess I'll get to find out what it's like to compete with Google at something.

(I deleted the ragecomment I left immediately after reading this earlier, sorry)
I've spent some time in China and found Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot, BBC (just to name a few) to be entirely blocked while I was there.

While it's debatable as to whether or not these Western websites are important to average Chinese, it seems like a mischaracterization to say blocking several of the top 10 most popular websites in the world is "very limited."

Another experience which spooked me a bit (I don't know if it was purely coincidental or not): I was visiting some fairly obscure websites while I was there and they were accessible. Yet, within a few days after I first visited them, some of them were blocked. That made me wonder if there are human beings checking websites to decide whether or not they need to be "harmonized" (Chinese joke).
I'm not sure this is correct, but I had the impression that "Eire" in English was used to talk about the island of Ireland.

I think this is something I just sort of picked up though -- so it's entirely possible I'm totally out to lunch.
What a laughable article. It's doomed because the iPhone doesn't have it and a tiny subset of Flash's capabilities are matched by HTML/CSS/JS?

The only area that Flash is even remotely threatened is delivering video which may shift away from Flash over next decade, but that's assuming Adobe doesn't do anything at all to keep that market.

Many mobile devices are getting full-featured flash players soon/now - http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/2009...

The 'slow nature of proprietry software' ... in comparison to web standards???? The current standards for HTML/CSS/JS are a decade old, and HTML5 is years away from broad adoption.

While web standards lag years - many sometimes - behind our evolving requirements there will be space for Flash and other plugins that more rapidly cater to new trends and technologies.
And the "How to Design Worlds" curriculum (by the authors of the well-known intro CS text "How to Design Programs") teaches functional programming for first-time programmers by building simple games and animations:

http://world.cs.brown.edu/
This feature reminds me of diffbot (diffbot.com). I met one of the co-founders (who's out of Stanford) and his demo worked very well. He was using it to check updates on course webpages, for example, so this feature isn't new. It also has some neat uses cases for financial companies tracking lots small snippets of new info.
Thanks sparky
I don't know about gruseom's nephew, but I suspect that even or especially for people just reaching the age where they can begin programming, there is something inherently more difficult about understanding lisp-like structure compared to more python or ruby like structure. Perhaps I am underestimating the minds of today's 11 year olds, but I don't think I would have gotten lisp at that age.

If anyone has actually tried to teach a 10 or 11 or 12 year old lisp, the whole board would be curious about your results. For now, I think it makes more sense for gruseom's nephew to use one of the languages with pedagogy better tested on young people: python or ruby.

Gruseom, the choice between python or ruby doesn't make that much difference, go with whichever one you are more comfortable with. One nice thing about ruby is Hackety Hack; a self-contained learning IDE. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackety_Hack
also here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076480
jQuery 1.4.1 Released
Only 0.0.1 away from being production ready. I kid, but jQuery does have a history of quick revs after a major release, which despite my cynicism, I appreciate.
Feedback needed on bottom search bar...click a result
Logo. It's the gold-standard of introductory programming languages. It has also been described as "lisp without the parenthesis", so it should have many of the lisp fans on here on board.

Finally, it's just fun. I have fond memories of moving that little turtle around with simple commands like "FORWARD 100" and "RIGHT 90", when I was introduced to programming at around the same age as your nephew. You really couldn't ask for a better first language.
I would recommend several things,

Squeak by Example[1], or better yet etoys[2]

How to design worlds, as already mentioned here

Alice[3], with something like [4].

Good old scratch from the logo tradition would also be cool[5].

[1] http://squeakbyexample.org/

[2] http://www.squeakland.org/

[3] http://www.alice.org/

[4] http://www.aliceprogramming.net/

[5] http://scratch.mit.edu/

Check them all out and decide for yourself. All of them are very consistent and fun.
Seconding Ruby. The tutorial that later got expanded into the Prag Prog book is available free online: http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/

I'm told it's very good.

And then there's always Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, which is fun to read and teaches surprisingly well.
Too interesting to pass up:

1 29.12 %

2 20.60 %

3 13.99 %

4 12.54 %

5 5.74 %

6 4.78 %

7 4.84 %

8 4.93 %

9 3.47 %
Competitious: Going from Cracked to Free
Sadly, you're probably right. What's depressing is that HN wasn't like that for a very long time (2 or 3 years, maybe?), but it seems to be descending into a Reddit-like cesspool of crazy very rapidly.

Having said that, this is still by far the best non-trivial online community that I know of.

EDIT: Wow... downvoted in 4 minutes, for a mostly harmless comment. I guess we've become closer to Reddit than I thought. I normally hate elitist groups, but there's a part of me that would like to see every account newer than, say, 200 days just get nuked. <sigh>... I really loved this site.
Though a fun article, this post serves better as an introduction to the book from which it is an extract (already posted today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076122)
XNA studio is nice because it comes with a finished game that you can edit, and there's no pointer nonsense to get tripped up on.
I'd say python with pygame hits the sweet spot of being simple and rewarding (for 2D stuff anyway), while still exposing enough of the underlying mechanics to be a good learning experience. You need to implement the main loop yourself, call collision detection functions, update and redraw sprites, etc.

Considering that, the interval between sitting down and having something that actually runs in front of you is still reasonably short.
Out of curiosity, do you subscribe to _any_ magazines, or do you generally only view freely available content online? I ask because I subscribe to The Economist and The New Yorker (and love them both), but I could see dropping them if I had a free digital medium I enjoyed as much as the print editions.
This is a top right/top middle activity, not a bottom left activity. I only noticed it because you said so - usually I ignore all those bars at the bottom because they're often just for sharing stuff on social networks, etc.
I don't disagree, but that doesn't absolve him of responsibility. He is as much a perpetrator of this as the banks are. If he'd needed the money, that would be one thing, but he took unnecessary loans to do speculative, risky investing.
> I also refuse to give reviews to Amazon for similar reasons.

I could not picture myself bothered by Amazon reviews. They help decide when to and when to not buy. They also help me decide between two books on the same subject, gives me tips on another titles/authors that I didn't know, etc.
I don't know why you were modded down, you are just stating your opinion.

But your response has a basic logical misunderstanding. Both the US and China engage in cyber warfare, but making sure that Twitter is stable during a period of heavy use by protesters is clearly NOT "warfare", it is ensuring the free flow of information.

More and more I am seeing the logic of those that say Chinese censorship is a violation of their WTO Free Trade obligations, as it allows them to sell their information services internationally without also allowing foreign firms to sell their information in China. This is restraint of trade, a protectionist attitude that will harm their development in the long run.
How to Recover Items Deleted from Recycle Bin?
How to Recover Items Deleted from Recycle Bin - Data Recovery
Please note that I'm not saying HN is turning into reddit - I don't believe my score is high enough for me to be allowed to make that claim. (I do believe HN would benefit from a measure of reddit-style levity: right now it's all Serious Business, all the time.)

What I'm saying is that real constructive critical debate requires strong-willed, pedantic, even curmudgeonly debaters. The marketplace of ideas doesn't work without the push and pull of challenges, refutations and even meta-refutations ('You're asking the wrong question').

If Paul Graham wants good answers to his question, the price he has to pay is an allotment of bad answers - answers that are revealed as such on the marketplace of ideas. You can't get the good stuff without also allowing the bad stuff (and having reasonable filters to distinguish them).

P.S. Not sure why I was downvoted for my comment above.