skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree the classes often aren't that engaging, but I do think it'd be useful for everyone (or at least a lot of people) to understand the basics of giving instructions to a computer so it can do things for them. Many will end up having to do at least some simple form of it in their future lives, anyway; certainly people in the natural sciences do, and increasingly lots of other people will find themselves needing to write an Excel macro, or sort some data with a Perl script, and various other such things.

I agree current CS 101 classes aren't good at conveying that excitement though, of being able to make a computer do what you want. The linked article talks about media computation as one approach to that: instead of having people sort lists or whatever, show them that they can make simple art stuff. (I personally got hooked on computers much earlier than college in large part because of a Logo course.)
I've been a big fan of the free and excellent Eloquent JavaScript: http://eloquentjavascript.net/
Does your link explain how education is a human right or free? It might be a good investment, but that hardly makes it free.

When anything that requires significant effort (skills, capital, services, etc) is pronounced as a right to be given to all, that right, by definition, necessitates payment or enslavement of others to be fulfilled.
I'm not sure if I'm misinterpreting this, but it looks like lazy evaluation could make his "synchronous event loop" into his "asynchronous event loop" without all the worry about callbacks. A few Lispy macros could have the same effect. I guess an "asynchronous web framework" (buzzword bingo!) written in a Lisp (or any language with macros, like Lua) would be interesting.

Or maybe I'm getting this wrong.
Rational philanthropy? It's a very healthy concept but I have to ask, are there any studies about the per dollar value of the above? I love the basic idea of the Copenhagen Consensus. You may or may not agree with its conclusions, but as far as process goes they're the only ones I know of who try to do things in a scientific, falsifiable way.
Exercise for the sake of exercise bores the living snot out of me. For instance, I hate going to the gym, but I love to walk outdoors or wander around exploring a strange, new place.
Open source, flexible & feature-rich Advanced Multiple File Uploader - Plupload
Versioning Feature for Amazon S3 Now Available
But you are using nice chunky grained blocks of asynchronous-ity (which makes it easier) rather than spreading it evenly throughout your program (often quite hard).
Platform for full video courses from leading universities with Richard Ludlow
Interactive Storytelling of the Less-Virtual Variety
Really? I'd be more concerned about a guy who somehow managed to travel to Paris, fall in love, get married, and have a child in less than a minute.
Now somebody should re-implement git/mercurial on top of S3.
You love your day job,a startup offer with 45% equity arrived
sorry I'm posting this on a throwaway account.
background:
I'm in my mid 20,single, located in Japan and working for the-so-called high-tech corp that i don't really proud of, but I like my job. very smart people, agile, warm, and funny. I have huge passion in start-up, have an experience in working at one, and enjoyed the culture very much. on the other hand, i need job security, especially at this economic time.
My close friend is trying to build his second start-up company and he needs someone like me...

the offer:

1. 45%~ equity, although i haven't talk much with him about the details

2. I'll be paid by salary, albeit a very low one

3. regardless my job title, I'll be managing most of the business and technical stuff. He'll just managing his first company and be the CEO figure for this new one.

4. there're already clients ready to do business with us.

5. I like the technology and business challenges he showed me, and i think i can build a product for him.

the problems:

1. by family tradition i "need" to get married fast... like before 30. committing to something like this will take most of my time. I'm sure I can handle the load, but I'm not sure my non-existent-yet SO can...

2. My friends first start-up isn't very successful one. It works, lives, profitable to employing 20~ more in 4 countries, but it is a stagnant/saturated market, the new company also in similar market with different products. I have worked in start-up in similar field which is more successful.Um, what I'm trying to say is that he is not the typical leader who you would idol, he is more likely happen to be there when opportunities come. there're many inefficiencies in how he manages people, resources, how he behave as a leader in general. I suspect this will be a problem when I want to change something the way company works etc.

3. he is my close friend, and I'm afraid doing this business with him will ruin our relationship when everything goes down.

4. I'll likely to loose market-level salary, perks, housing benefits, and going back to ramen life, which is kind of suck but okay... the biggest problem is job security, again my culture(?) and family will stand against my decision

okay, I'm not sure why i post this here, but what i see that this community has lots of experience that I know nothing of. Based on your experience and my details above, what can you suggest me?
Psst: internal dashboard to track the number of stamps which non-paying users used this month won't take you five minutes to implement. It is a single SQL query, right? I know you'll have to discard a working Excel system to do it but from the moment you're done to the moment you die you will never have to update that Excel file again. Process efficiency! You can crank out as many of these little micro-things as you want and put them in a single dashboard, which will give you a quick health check at a glance, minimize time spent bookkeeping, and make you not waste too much time digging into reports when you could be working. OK, tangent over.

There is nothing wrong with giving people free things that actually cost money, as long as your COCA (cost of customer acquisition) is substantially lower than your LTV (lifetime customer value). It is no different, conceptually speaking, from doing something like paying from AdWords for a user who might convert into the trial but never into a paying user. I'll probably pay Google close to $1,000 this month for that: this is safe because I have historical data and a failsafe (discussed later).

It has also been my experience that most users go up-or-out very quickly on my service. If that continues to be true for you, you have very little to worry about.

If you speak to an accountant, who are generally conservative types, they will recommend you to do something to cap your maximum liability via this. For example, you can clarify that unused free stamps expire at the end of the month. (That might already be the policy. If so, smart.) You could also reserve the right to yank that offer at any time. I'm not a lawyer, but I think that is likely to be as simple as merely yanking the offer at any time.

I'd put a failsafe in the system to prevent you from spending over $X on free stamps in a day, for reasons similar to why Google only has authorization to charge me $X in a day: if the process goes suddenly out of control, have a human think things through before saying "Oh, sure, 1500% growth is totally normal under these circumstances. Spending approved!" It might happen because you ended up featured on the front page of the NYT. Congratulations. It also might happen because you ended up on 4Chan when some enterprising individual suggests using your service to send a million pictures of genitalia to some public figure who has made statements they do not approve of.
You are using the best strategy, but you should care about people leaving. Why do they leave? May be they were not satisfied with your product, or they just don't want to pay.

There is a trick to make people pay, the same that Microsoft and other software companies are using. Give your service for free and start charging when your customers can't afford to stop using it, then they afford to pay!

Evil, but works.
TPM (trusted platform module) chip hacked
I think you mean this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=598523
See also http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24756/

This was a hardware hack, not a software hack.
The problem is that if you are not interested in CS and haven't been programming before the course then lets face it - you won't become good at it during a semester.

So later, when you are faced with different environments and sets of instructions (excel, perl) you'll just call your computer guy, or fill the spreadsheet manually.

It might be better to teach programming after 3-4 semesters, to show how some tedious work from previous classes can be replaced by a neat excel macro.
Were there ever newspaper articles with similar headlines, replacing "Facebook" for "telephone" or "telegraph"?
The problem dependency injection attempts to solve disappears when you have dynamic scoping. I've said this before - DI is probably the dumbest fad (no small feat) in object-oriented programming.
The Google Alphabet - Lady Gaga & Tiger Woods are the only humans to feature
Ask HN: user experience - "reasonable" way to logout from Google OpenId ?
My question is about user experience here, and surely someone else has already implemented this, hence my question.

I'm currently working on a site for my friends.

I've decided to implement account creation and login through only Google OpenId, to get started at least. This all works technically well, and suits the target - my friends all have a GMail account and are willing to avoid creating a new login/pass if possible.

One of the drawbacks though is that login out from the site doesn't log you out from Google OpenId (as there's no such thing as single sign out currently in OpenId, if I'm right).

As such, if you click on "login" right after clicking on "logout", you'll be in, without any apparent check. So the log-out feature is essentially broken per se.

I understand that it's not really the current scope of OpenId etc, but I'd really love to get some feedback from people who may have found work-arounds to still rely on OpenId or Google accounts, more specifically.

My current work-around is to display a yellow warning after people log out, stating that they need to logout from gmail, and providing them with a link to do that.

What do you think?
Lying vs. Simplifying – Ready? Fight
Python's float type is a double.
What if instead of a practical class as the intro we had a theoretical class.

Things like Boolean logic, what a Turing machine is, the logic behind a stack, queue and so on. Teach the ideas behind computers without focusing on the practical.
IPhone isn't the new IE6
I thought the ad notable for the blatant cosmopolitanism of the world it envisions. Remember that less than 30% of Americans have passports and sodding of to France and marrying a frog-eater (of all things!) is likely not at the top of most peoples todo-list.

Having said that, I agree with Googles vision of the world, and I thought the ad was great.
I would submit that the reason we still don't do async very well is because callbacks are just not a very good technique for some reason.

If you look at Erlang (which the article mentions), I don't feel like I ever do the kind of Async programming he talks about here. I break the work flow into a pipeline of processes that do a specific job. I never have a process send a message to another process and waits for the answer. Every process receives some message, does it's job and then forwards the resulting message to another process.

I guess I just find this style of coding easier to reason about because every part of the pipeline is completely stateless and has a straightforward job.
Do not underestimate the hard work and utter pain of a startup.

Do not underestimate the joy of creating something wonderful.

And be wary of recommendations from people living in a completely different culture.
Sounds like a Google interview question. "How many women does it take to have a baby in less than a minute?"

With a followup of "How would you schedule these women to avoid the possibility of conflicts?"
Is Rackspace cloud servers really that bad?
> Yes. And you can also develop malware and give it away on your own website.

Yeah, and doing sex with random strangers is as dangerous ... you never know what you're going to get.

That's why I'm a proponent of Sex licenses, given by state institutions after testing your general health, your mental health and the quality of your DNA ... people without a license shouldn't be allowed to have sex, to work in public institutions (since that's where people fuck around the most), or to leave town without notifying the proper authorities.
If this works with CloudFront, it would save us a ton of effort renaming files to their MD5 hashes. We could then serve multiple concurrent versions of your website from a single file tree.
We do code reviews to make sure VIP WordPresses are as fast and stable as possible, but more of that information could be documented. You're right and it's something we're actively working on.

There is going to be a dedicated VIP portal with documentation of all the special functions, lots of theme and system info, and best practice coding guidelines for WP.com.

The cool thing about VIP is you can get, say, a direct link from the Yahoo home page and it doesn't break a sweat. It's specialized to just WordPress, but more people every day are running their entire site through WP.
If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good.
Javascript ePub Readers
The M is a nice keyboard. I'm typing on one right now. I think every programmer should own a model M. I expect to have this keyboard for the rest of my life, unless I decide to splurge on a Unicomp replacement some day.
How Apple is Becoming More Like a Carrier Every Day
"on the other hand, i need job security"

This says it all, right?

"and he needs someone like me..."

But he could find someone else, right?

I think you need to figure out why you would really be doing this. Is it to help your friend? Is it because you want to work for a startup? Or is it because you really think you could get stinking rich from this deal? Personally, only that last reason would be good enough for me to give up a stable job.
For what it's worth, the vast majority of compromised sites we look at are because of host vulnerabilities or issues rather than something at the WordPress layer, which is pretty far up the stack.

An up-to-date WordPress, which is easier than ever using the built-in upgraders, is secure. There are more bad sysadmins in the world than people who can't click the upgrade button.
They would see what I was saying, but somehow remain skeptical, and I think the ad made a more convincing case than I ever did.

The key to convincing a skeptical person of this is to take something they value and demonstrate how you improve it.

For example, you can show how the web makes their fundraising operation more efficient, allowing them to kill less trees, raise more money, and spend less time on it and more time on feeding the hungry (or whatever). Or how improved teaching tools help beleaguered inner city teachers spend less of their time doing prep work and more of their time directly interacting with their kids, while being less burdensome on the budget. Or on how democratization of information/communication is helping people become less reliant on the grapevine (which might give outdated or just-plain-wrong advice) and more reliant on reliable sources such as cough your friends on subjects of major importance to their lives, such as whether they are eligible for a particular benefits program. Underapplication due to ignorance of procedure/eligibility is a major longstanding issue for people who worry about making it easy to apply for government benefits, and the easy access of information to that net-enabled communication is easing that markedly. (I am not necessarily in the group of people who is particularly motivated by this argument, but your friends might be.)

For example, check for EITC on Twitter or Google.
I find hard to believe Lessig when he keeps saying he's for more free speech as he arguing to take it away.

When attacking structural problems, a bandaid will not not work. I wish Lessig would spend his time trying to argue 10th Amendment and a reduction of the commerce clause instead of arguing for reduced freedom.
The lost souls of telecommunications history
An Idiots Guide to Really Really Bad Programming
Boeing’s Biggest Bird Leaves the Nest
Not really. Being black doesn't make you slower, less able or more susceptible to disease. Aging does.

>> But someday I hope to be 88, and it's going to be really damn annoying if everyone says "wow, that's pretty good...especially for an 88 year old!"

If you're 88[1], still accomplishing meaningful things and don't have cancer or dementia you're doing brilliantly and shouldn't care what people are saying about you.

[1] Substitute future impressive age assuming life expectancy continues to increase.
I'm much more excited about this than the iPad.
Online map of Arequipa hotels booking service by hotels-arequipa.com
[OT: that's my old Bishop quoted in the article. :-) I miss Boston sometimes...]

I think companies are absolutely aware of much easier it is to get people to spend $10-20/month on a subscription where if the consumer had to pay all up front they would definitely think twice.
I have the opposite complaint. We hold our humanities students to much lower standards we do our science students.

At least at my university, when science students were required to take a humanities class, they had to take a regular humanities class that would count towards a humanities major. They couldn't cop out and take "Bedtime Stories" instead of an English class or "Should I get out of bed in the morning?" instead of a Philosophy class. No, they were expected to take regular humanities courses alongside humanities students and to write humanities papers comparable in quality to those from humanities students.

However, when humanities students were required to take science classes, there had the option of taking "Let's play with HTML" instead of Computer Science or "Let's talk about stars" instead of Physics. These classes would never be allowed to count towards a science major, but humanities students were allowed take them to fulfill their "science" requirements.

If we believe that a well-rounded student must have a command of language, some knowledge of history and literature, and capacity for critical thinking, then a well-rounded student should also have mathematical proficiency, scientific fundamentals, and the ability to think computationally. "Dumbing down" science classes for non-science majors seems to me to be doing them a major disservice.
I'm not sure we're capable of devising a governmental system...

From the perspective of our ancestors, birth control is just as weird, arguably weirder.

Human beings are strongy predisposed to believe that the way we do things right now is the only correct/justifiable way they could be done:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias
Thanks - the AP link doesn't work (maybe because I'm not in the US?) and sends me to a page to select which state I'm in, but this link does.
The difference between SQL and NoSQL
I think quite a bit of it is to do with lazy programmers.

With asynchronous programming, it's fairly constant. You have to think about things as you go, and once you get the hang of it, there are little surprises.

With synchronous programming you have the illusion that it is easier - fork() ! magic!. So you can get a lot done quickly. But then you have the realization that as things get more complex, you'll have to deal with locking,concurrency,scaling issues, etc. But by that time it may be too late to change architecture.

It's probably best though for programmers to work on a big synchronous system, realize just how much code you're writing to cope with the fact you asked the OS to execute your code in random order, and then hopefully realize that telling the OS to execute your code in an explicit order is probably a better idea.

>> If we look at Django or Ruby on Rails, arguably the two most promising new web application frameworks to emerge in the past few years

I'd also disagree with that. They're probably the most hyped up, but that's something entirely different. Once again, likely lazy programmers who want a framework for this, a framework for that. How about just make your own framework.
Honestly, I couldn't care less. For me, the ad was a watershed moment; A tech company just coming out and saying "What we're doing is miraculous. We're not going to bamboozle you with glitter and dancing girls, we're just going to show you.".

We all know how important evangelism can be. Everyone on HN has been asked for their opinion or advice by a non-techie. This ad could have a more powerful effect by talking to us, by galvanising support and driving home to Google fans just how damned important their technology is.

I think perhaps you underestimate the general population, but I don't think it matters much either way.
SKI combinator calculus in Java
Real-Life Multithreading
WordPress.com has servers in two datacenters run by LayeredTech and one by Server Beach, around 1,200+ total. When one datacenter fails we (hopefully) fall over to the other two. We have DNS and monitoring services at half a dozen other locations, and of course utilize CDNs for frequently-accessed content.

Support is handled by a worldwide team of some of the nicest and sharpest people you'll ever meet, with escalation to the core people behind WordPress. We've seen and worked with more high-profile blogs than probably anyone else.

The typical floor for VIP is 1 million pageviews a month. Many clients do many times that, or host dozens of sites with us.
Metacompilers Tutorial
Whoops, a (belated) thanks for your reply!

That's a great point, and an annoyance I started to notice as I used it myself... if I have a free evening this week, I'll see if I can apply PG's Bayesian filtering method to Tweets.

The Twitter data hose is an immensely valuable resource, and I hate to see it muddied up with all that spam. I think it's worth working to improve that.

Please let me know if you have thoughts on how I can improve twhittler!
Chinese and Russians Claim 9 of Top 10 Spots in International Programming Comp
Should that be synchronous instead of asynchronous, and vice-versa? Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
I love my Model M but I think this is the last go for it. It already has a DIN-PS2 adapter and now manufacturers are starting to drop the PS2 port (Dell). I feel like I get less enjoyment out of it each passing day. I have to switch to a quieter keyboard at night because of the tapping noise. And with more stuff showing up on my desk, more and larger displays, I'm running out of space.
I think i should rephrase that:
It is good to have job security, I don't need it that much, but my parents, friends, families will stand against my decision.

Yeah. I sometimes think it as a way of helping my friend and I want so much to start new things, which i hope will give me courage to start my own start-up.
I'm not hoping i could get rich fast with this deal, it is just that I have this fear to loose a stable job in this economic situation.

Of course he could always find someone else if i decline his offer... but since we're good friend and he gave me good offer like this, I'm in a situation that is hard to decline it...
If you're using a serializer to write your document, it doesn't make any difference whether you serialize to XML or HTML. If you worry about where to put a '/', you should most likely be using a serializer instead of whatever you are doing.
As i wrote above, I have 2 years helping start-up in similar field. It's hard and everything, but somehow i enjoyed more than my current job...