skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're not friends who I'd hand the book to.

They're certain people at companies I know and work with professionally who ask me "Hey gte910h, what's a great way to learn programming".

I'm known as respectful yet blunt. If I handed this to someone, they'd wonder if I was saying they came off as retarded or that I had no respect for them (or programming is much harder than it is for the type of tasks they want to do).

For people who work in relationship based businesses (many non-programming businesses are), what others think about you is very important. The idea I thought them incompetent would be a very bad thing.

Some of the people I'd hand a book that went through the typing approach without the coddling part would hear the book loud and clear and possibly not remember the message I could use to hand them the book: "Hey, this guy who tends to be a bit insulting to people in some of his writing wrote a book on programming. He acts like you're a dull 11 year old throughout the book. But hey, his method is good".

These aren't people with big egos, but I'd sure as come off as having one about my profession if I tossed this at them. Especially if they handed it off to a third person who I never met but had heard of me.

I'd just be more respectful and less helpful and not ever mention the problematic resource. It's not worth the risk I'd lose a client over it.

>You aren't listening. He said to, "deride the language" and "praise the approach" to those you give the book to.

It wasn't clear to me the poster was talking about those you give the book to. It just sounded to me like he wanted me to give props to Shaw for his approach while saying he wrote in a manner some would take offense to.

As to Zed Shaw, I think I've honestly put in more work on the book already than 99% of the people who love it unconditionally have. I've read it in it's entirety and given suggested changes. Editors and critics are very useful when writing books.

He doesn't need to change the style. If he changes the style, he can market it as a book for adults and children. If he keeps the style the same, he should market it as a book for 12 year olds. Then, when someone hands a copy, it says right there on the cover "Yo, this is for kids" and no one get's insulted as you can reveal "Hey, this is really good, in spite being for 12 year olds".
> Ah, the innocence of youth.

Ah, the smug certainty of a Wall Street Reporter. Let's not forget how miserably the WSJ (and all other media) have failed to pick up on the gross fiscal abuse on wall street. Some modesty would be in order here!

Besides, the student's suggestions are rather uncontroversial. She merely suggests that "to change wall street you have to change the incentives". How can any sensible person disagree with that?

The attitude that... "of course the people at Wall Street are going to screw everybody over for profit; what did you expect?" oozes from those last remarks. Urgh!
Weird. Wonder why my submission didn't get caught by the duplicate check? Looks like both have the same URLs.
Thanks for writing it! No seriously, thanks.

Flot is one the best full sized chart libraries. And yours is the best Sparkline library we could find.
The COOLEST Projects From Microsoft's Imagine Cup (PHOTOS)
oh I see....this is Siri...not Sirius Radio...my bad
Youth and Paradigm Shifts
Maybe, I was evaluating Ruby for my university tasks even before Pyhon, but found a lack of good GUI and Plot/Math libraries.
Touch Apps for OS X
I have been pondering where Apple is going with these iTouch / iPad / iPhone apps and their iTunes app store. Bear with me for a bit...
looking at various ways to charge merchants...ex. cpc for more advanced users...or per day for simpler merchants.
Collecting data gives you the ability to aggregate past events, look at them statistically, and uncover patterns that may be counter-intuitive or just not apparent when looking at each event independently.

You can then use this knowledge to develop heuristics and rulesets that you can apply to better live your life. For example, maybe you discover that when you eat a banana, you get a surge of energy ~30 minutes later that lasts for ~1 hour. Now you know that when you need an hour's worth of energy, you can eat a banana a half-hour before.

That's a pretty simple example, but if you analyze various aspects of your life, you can gain much better control over it.
He didn't use GitHub as a shining example of Ruby. He said the community embraces it, so he's had exposure to it as a result. CouchDB isn't written in Ruby either, and he mentions that too.
Poker Face
I'd be wary of trying to equate technical census terms with common definitions of related terms without citing their explanations. Both "urbanized area" and "not in a central place" probably don't exclude suburban areas.
good points...I will take care of A) soon.
I believe that there is a time limit on the duplicate check, that way items can be re-posted after some time has passed. I'd guess it's probably 30 days.

For those wondering, here is the original: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1201079
Toby, Dave & Ian Explain XKCD
Job Fields That Boom During (or Because of) Recessions
Tip: pulling random elements from a list in C#
see also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283172
In general, I agree with you. However, Rails' influence on other platforms has yielded some great projects. My current favorite is play (http://www.playframework.org). It's almost a one-to-one feature port of Rails to Java, but actually manages to do it in a way that works very well and very pragmatically. I'm at least as productive in Play as I am in Rails, and that's after many years of Rails development.
That is a great reason to be in the game. Higher barriers to entry behind you are often a good thing.

Plus it seems like we've been seeing a growing trend of posts saying "Web companies are so cheap to start that VC investment isn't necessary". The VCs need somewhere to invest that actually uses the money.
Even if this is legally correct, I expect that they will close down this loophole within a few years. The effects of the Digital Economy Bill have yet to be felt, but one thing that seems certain is that potentially a lot of erroneous allegations or disconnections could take place. Perhaps a more proactive way to deal with this is to build up a legal defence fund for people wrongly accused of copyright violation and to vigorously contest such cases.

In the longer term, and assuming that current trends continue, aggressive enforcement of copyrights will be very good for creative commons media and free/open source software.
Bodily motions influence memory and emotions
Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack
Not from what I saw. I worked at a very large Manhattan-based investment bank and we paid the research quants way more than the rating agencies. There was a brain drain from rating agencies to the bulge bracket firms. There's a lot more money in making the right trades (for yourself or for clients) than in writing reports.
It was mostly the same with me. We attended a church 400 yards from my house. All the neighbors did as well. The neighborhood was like a family -- if you needed a glass of water you just went in the kitchen of the closest house and got one. Nobody locked their doors because everybody knew everybody and somebody was always around checking on what was going on. Kids played outside until dark, and sometimes later, without much parental supervision. Everybody knew that everybody else was looking out for the kids.

That's how I thought everybody grew up.

My dad died and my mom remarried and moved off to a retirement community in Florida. They have about 1200 units which are mostly full in the winter. Everybody attends the same church, everybody participates in the same activities, everybody sits out on their porch in the evening. You're never bored because somebody is always coming by and either talking to you or asking you to participate in something. If somebody has a problem going to the store, other people drive them. If somebody has a problem cooking their meals, neighbors pitch in and help them out.

When my mom died last month, there were a thousand people at her memorial service. The line of people coming by to give me a hug, cry, and offer their condolences took almost an hour. These were people who had kids and grandkids off all over the world, but for them the people in the park were their family.

There is something in that experience that I want, especially as I grow older. We all spend a lot of time plugged in and wired up, but we seem to have forgotten how to sit on the porch as the sun goes down and have a good heart-to-heart talk about our lives and values.

As cool as technology has become, we're missing something very important.
Exactly.

On a site that men pay but women join for free you're going to find a lot of women who expect men to pay for everything for them, and the only men on that site are going to be the kind who expect to get what they pay for.

Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, everyone's a grownup after all. But that isn't the demographic that match.com et al are after - they measure their success in how many marriages they produce. Marriage-oriented people are also more likely to be at the point in their lives where they have money to spend to, they're a highly desirable market.
I love Ruby. I love Rails. I don't love that Rails 2.2.2 doesn't work well with the version of Ruby Gems 1.3.6, which I have to have on my machine for my Rails 2.3.4 projects. Can I just upgrade the 2.2.2 project? No because it's not mine...it's a client's project. etc... This happens to me all the time.

The problem isn't mental bandwidth. It's more along the lines of the "Consistency-Atomicity-Partition Tolerance" debate related to databases and the noSQL movement. Perhaps it's the "Creativity-Velocity-Supportability" triangle - Ruby/Rails leans toward the "Creativity/Velocity" - it's fun to use, the community is very creative and the framework moves fast. It's harder to support old projects as time goes by because the framework moves on and old projects break.

I'm consciously choosing the higher supportability cost of older code because of the fact that I love writing code with Ruby and Rails. It's still a cost I have to be aware of when I start a new Rails project.

EDIT: I reread the comment and I retract "This is a subtle ad-hominem attack on someone making a very legitimate point about the community."

When I first read it, I thought that he meant "mental bandwidth" and "shallow" as attacks and i can see he wasn't implying it that way...
This was my first thought when I realized Siri is like an agent in semweb-speak.

Does anyone know of any Google acquisitions in this space? Aardvark comes to mind, but it wasn't an autonomous system... perhaps their NLP work was state of the art?

Any other startups working on this kind of stuff?
Louisiana Bill Would Outlaw Insulting an Under-17-Year-Old By E-Mail
Nokia is a great lesson in the failure of checklist-based product development.

Better camera? check. Better battery? check. Better speakerphone? check. Better antenna? check. Better supply chain? check. Better margins? check.

And they're still getting their clock cleaned in smartphones because of what's missing from the list: user experience, software quality, developer ecosystem, etc.
"Hi. Is <my friend X> in?"

There was a time, when I was a kid, that to meet your friends, you went to their house, rang the doorbell, and asked the above question to the parent of X who opened the door. Or you called them, and then their parents would answer the phone, and you asked the same question.

Now, all kids have mobiles, and just call or text each other directly, completely bypassing the parents. Parents get to meet the friends of their children much less, and kids get to meet their friends' parents much less, and I think we're worse off as a society because of it.
Try a used T40, T41 or T42 -- maybe a bit on the bulky side for you, but they have really solid hardware support under Linux / BSD (eg suspend resume usually works with no fiddling, wireless works, etc). These were the last decent models in the original IBM Thinkpad line. For some reason the T43, the final T-series model which predates Lenovo, is much flakier than its predecessors.
EA, Ubisoft, Sony, Disney Settle Patent Lawsuit
as a non-native english, honest question: does "room" also means something else from "some space with walls around it", or you actually have a very large room?
> And then I recommend something like Arch Linux whenever you feel like you are ready for something more advanced!

What's so great about Arch? Why should I waste my time getting the basic functionality working, like X or audio?
This one seems much smoother and it can do a maze
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uERF6D37E_o
i hadn't heard of the app until this post, so i looked it up. the demo video is impressive and (the ending) is pretty funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpjpVAB06O4
For the heterosexual use case (90-95% of use cases?) the network effect is a two-variable problem. You have to consider not only the number of eligible mates but also the sex ratio, since the sex ratio affects your odds-per-eligible-mate. If there's more men than women on the site, after a certain point the network effect for men actually gets worse as more men join.

It's not that great for women, either, since they're overwhelmed with contact by large numbers of men.
Tell HN: 'Review My Website Group' on Linkedin
I really love the HN community when it comes to reviewing websites. There are lots of smart people with great ideas. That's why I created this linkedin group-to do these reviews
in a more prefessional setting.

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=2998582&trk=anet_ug_hm&goback=.anh_2998582

Linkedin discussion is better than HN in that whenever you review a website, you will get the updates automatically.
Here are a few more reasons to join this linkedin group:

1. Ask other members to review your website

2. Ask other members to review new features of your website

3. Answer questions and demonstrate your expertise in a professional setting (with your resume just one click away)

4. Jobs, networking opportunities

Hope you guys like the idea and see you on Linkedin.
Interesting to see a VC firm whose goal is 3-4% returns instead of 20% returns.
The question is not about what the _lone word_ "user" means. That's obviously not specific enough to have a single definition.

The question is what does "3 million people who use our web-based apps" mean.

A simple truth test: Are there "3 million people who use [their] web-based apps"? Absolutely not. Not under even the most remotely reasonable definition.
I think most people realize that the medical industry is highly regulated and that's why they overlook the opportunities there.
My first HD was 5M, I thought I'll never fill this up :-)
Right, but my point is that even if you interact with people while shopping it doesn't lead to meaningful relationships, so I think the "correct" choice is to shop in whichever way is most time efficient.

What you end up doing with the time you save is up to you of course. But no amount of shopping is going to compensate for a lack of friends and family.
Opera Is Now The World's Fastest Browser For Mac
This article taught me about the problems of a small diner in Vermont and its quest to find a local pork producer raising 300-500 pigs per year. Along the way I read some comments about suburbia and learned the diner had a jukebox that played the music of local artists.

Still can't tell you why Americans are so lonely.
In other words, you're saying women don't look for a husband with the ability to provide resources.
nice information, will try to use some of the tips.
No one is arguing the State of California can't get the evidence. Just the law states you can't use warrants to get it from journalists, just subpoenas, to allow to filter out items from other sources/stories.

Federal law has an exception. State law doesn't have an explicit one.
You were just ahead of your time (but only by a month, that's better than missing by centuries like some people).
Kill Your To-Do List
It's not just cheap oil. The real reason: it's part of our national character, especially post-1950. We don't care enough about close friendships to have them.

We have an arrangement where everyone in the white-collar world is expected to live a lifestyle that makes sense only for the most ambitious-- 40-60+ hour work weeks, unpaid overtime, a social life based on weak ties ("networking"), and national job markets. This is fine for the most ambitious 0.1%, but it shouldn't be expected of the other 99.9% who will never be CEOs.

Because we deny the reality of class, we're in a sort of perennial "gold rush" mentality. Look at the shitty houses built in suburbia, most of which will be falling to pieces in 30 years. Isn't this the same level of quality you'd expect in housing built one mile from a gold mine, on land that will be abandoned after the mine is exhausted?

Europeans focus more on community and less on individual ambition because they know that most of them will never be CEOs. Oddly enough, virtually every study of social mobility has concluded that Europeans have at least as much social mobility as we do in all dimensions that matter. We sacrifice a lot more, and don't get much for the sacrifice.
I absolutely wouldn't say that open always leads to be the best solution. That's what I was (unsuccessfully) trying to say before: Openness is one desirable attribute for a system, but not the only one. Apple utterly fails at openness but succeeds spectacularly at most others, so its system is very good overall. Android is better at openness but inferior in many other respects that people care about.

And I didn't really mean "open up the iPhone OS." What I meant is that we don't have a fight between an open iPhone (even a relatively open one that just didn't arbitrarily ban political cartoons and anything not written in C) and a closed iPhone, so we can't say "Look at this — the closed system is winning. Closed must be better."
> If you don't love the language you're programming with, you should find another.

It's the other way around. If you love a language, you are probably unaware of its flaws or of other languages (It's like the stupidity-confidence correlation). This is one of the reasons fanboys make me want to puke.
What if Twitter turns this feature on internally?
which ones? and at what layers?
We're using Sparklines and Highcharts. Highcharts is cool because you can get the zoom and select range thing going on with eventing to do updates.

Frankly you've saved us a ton of time from writing this ourselves, so please accept my undying thanks!

Now if we could just get a jQuery plugin that would turn on those Woot lights of yours...
Mac is a minority platform. iPhone OS is a minority platform. Both are tremendously successful for Apple and growing consistently. To say the iPhone is a winner and the Mac is a loser is cherry-picking your criteria pretty carefully. Yes, the iPhone is bigger in its market and didn't have an unfortunate stretch of history under Gil Amelio, but both seem to be doing extremely well these days.
Also peak helium:
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/going_going_gone/
Inverting the Golden Cage, or a Gift to the Barbarian Hordes at Apple’s Gates.
Google adds support for hCalendar and hRecipe Rich Snippets
And he was right. 7 years from 2001 to 2008 he was saying this and everyone dismissed his concerns by calling him a partisan bush-hater. Maybe so, but he was still right.

Keynesian economics brought us out of the great depression and the lack of their application led to deflation and the lost decade for Japan.

Supply-side economics, on the other hand, have been tried twice in the last 30 years and both times they ended with massive government deficit and collapsed asset bubbles.

Before casting aspersions on someone by virtue of their -isms, I'd check the record of the -isms in question.
That's a really great app.
Congrats to the team.
I use Arch but I wouldn't necessarily take the author's advice. If you enjoy tinkering and want to learn more about administering a linux machine, Arch is great.

But if you want things to "just work" then Ubuntu is also great.
I am actually having quite a hard time filling up my 250GiB hard disk. I mean, fill it up with stuff that's non-recoverable elsewhere, so e.g. videos don't count.
LOL... Apple buy Sirius Radio.. now that would be hilarious...
This is an _alpha_ release. This is the exact same software as written for Maemo, not yet customized for the Android platform. So the menu and back buttons aren't hooked up yet. Rome wasn't built in a day.

The address bar is not always shown. It scrolls away as you leave thet op of the document.

Your comment "At the bookmark view, tapping on the address bar" doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. If I ignore the bookmarks part, for me on Nexus One, tapping the address bar definitely does bring up the soft keyboard.

Overall, I'm very excited about the progress this shows. I'm sure getting it to work at all was the hard part. Hooking up a few keypresses to do the actions you expect is surely coming, and soon.
Less magic. Ubuntu is a complex system, and hard for a beginner to learn and customize. However, there's no need to switch while you're happy with Ubuntu.
Or add following a laser-pointer.
Yeah, right after building their own URL shortner / image host.
The fact that they did one release that was essentially laying the ground for the future and for which they didn't think customers would be willing to pay full price (since features = value in a lot of people's minds) makes you wonder if they'll ever do another big release?

A single data point is not a trend!
I like that it looks like a circular and has the deals front and center.

The one thing I had a problem with is when I got there I wanted a header/tagline or about page explaining what you do and how you do it. I'm sure most will know, but it still seems like a basic must that it be explicit especially since you're new.
The quants who figure out the right trades are front office quants. Back office quants (risk management, finance, operations) are not paid nearly as well, even in investment banks.

Ratings is back office work, and is paid commensurately.
Http://blogs.atraf.co.il/blog/MEJDL.aspx
> Change your settings so that when you reply to a note, the note you're replying to is included below what you write (this is called quoting).

Obviously, he has never been forced to use ms outlook.

Unfortunately, he doesn't advocate text-only mails -- see the dicussion about font size.
I'm not sure about manually bouncing but allowing a filter to bounce an email can let you trick spammers into believing they reached a bad address.
Loving a language on account of things that have nothing to do with the language seems kind of weak to me. I love the people, communities, and tools that surround python, but if they all disappeared tomorrow I'd still use it.
I love the past tense for a future event.
Patent Absurdity: A Free Documentary on Software Patents
AOL -> ICQ -> AIM/Yahoo -> Gaim -> Pidgin

It's amazing how little things have changed on the instant messenger side since I started using AIM.

I will forever associate ICQ with that silly Uh Oh! sound when you received a message.
Google Study On Failure Rates of Cheap Hard Drives