skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you structure a software beta program?
If you're interested in using Scratc, check out the materials in the UK's Codeclub. I've run a lttle club in a primary school based on Code club and it went very well

https://www.codeclub.org.uk
People still have a level of constant ambient pain which can be addicting to be rid of, even if it's slight.
A tech god start talking about topic he does not understand well enough, and the article is full of descriptions without much data to back.

No one is immune from human nature after all.
Check out @ntoll work, I was on one great speech by him at pyconf about teaching kids with micro:bit and Minecraft.

I have no experience in teaching kids how to code, but I have quite big experience in working with kids in scouting, and what I can advise is to do with your students things that really work, and are not considered "boring" - like controlling LED lights, "hacking" websites with dev tools, making computers in Minecraft, etc. Your mission should be to open their minds and spark a passion to coding, then they'll learn a lot on their own and will have own ideas for projects.
Neural Net Learns to Play Atari “Private Eye”
Really cool!

Recommendation: hover over a chat message, see which song was playing when the message was sent. Most of the messages are referencing the current song, so most value is lost at the end of the song.
Publishers could simply use regular urls for their tiny files.
The .NET CLR has an EBCDIC text encoder/decoder in the base class library. I had to research this once when it was asked of me how easy it was to injest some COBOL-built files in C#. We ultimately didn't need to use that as the COBOL side had switched to ASCII at some point and its owners had forgot, but I suppose it is good to know that even modern .NET code can speak EBCDIC if need be.
Well, that's the importance of stable APIs. You only need a new copy on major revisions, which are rare. libcurl, for example, claims to have had a stable API and ABI since 2006 (https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/features.html#stableapi). Why do we only get zlib?

I bet many Android devices already have at least 9 copies of sqlite, since so many apps ship their own copy.
Solar Employs More People in U.S.Than Oil, Coal and Gas Combined
Show HN: Don' buy shit on Amazon with Amazon contemplate
It's far more complicated than that. At a first pass, the drop in interest rates helped debtors who were on variable rates or able to refinance, and creditors who held fixed-rate assets. Conversely, fixed-rate debtors and variable rate creditors got hurt.

The drop in rates arguably raised asset prices, which helps e.g. people who currently own houses. This comes at the expense of people who need to purchase houses in the future. So there are generational implications there.

However, it can also be argued that the drop in rates catalysed an economic recovery, without which there would be fewer jobs for the younger generation.

All of this is arguable. But to say that the fed is robbing widows through artificially low rates and money printing is just emphatically wrong.
>16GB: +190,00 €

Jesus christ that is absolutely absurd.
It's funny (and sad), but people, even when they are not actively interrupted tend to check things like Hacker News a lot when they live in an environment with many interruptions.

This kind of aligns with the idea (backed to some degree by various studies) that trying to do multiple things, which you are doing in such an environment leads to people finding it hard to focus and distracting themselves.
The performance issue still stands. Linked Lists are often MUCH slower then array backed lists on modern hardware. This is true even when doing lots of inserts. Having all your list in the CPU cache is just too much of a performance gain over having it spread out in random locations.
New York City Has Been Zoned to Segregate
...so why's it hilarious?
They tried that. Quantum made the quarter-height 5.25" "Bigfoot" drives for a little while. They didn't go far. I think the problem is that a larger disc, though it has greater area, also comes with worse mechanical stresses, plus the head has to be larger, which again means greater mechanical stresses and distortion under movement, and can't seek as quickly. There's a reason drives have gotten steadily smaller; otherwise they'd be making big, flat 8" or 12" hard drives for really high-capacity needs.
I wish more open source projects had a way to support them besides for working on the code base. I usually don't know the languages they use and don't want to invest the time to learn their framework. I'll gladly give them $20, though.

What are some ways to support open source projects besides writing code?
We don't have anything too huge we give it. I think our largest package is like 100MB. But we do have about 40 active projects in its system. Also, I attended something by a guy who worked for Accenture, who talked about using it with thousands of active projects and some of the technical issues they had to overcome (and work directly with Octopus team to help resolve, at some points) with such a massive amount of projects.

It was this guy that gave the talk, he has a blog with lots of information about his experience with Octopus. A few of the quirks I encountered when getting everything set up with our company were resolved by reading his blog: http://ianpaullin.com/category/octopus-deploy/
MIT scratch to get the kids excited about programming. Also a great way to learn basic concepts like conditionals and loops.
Then "Teach Your Kids to Code: A Parent-Friendly Guide to Python Programming". Build fun shapes using turtle.
Source: Teaching an 8 year old to code.
Considering recent changes in the US government's leadership, this really needs a (2010) in the title.
The corollary to that is that in (a lot of) software your application's performance can plummet over time and nobody notices, because it appears to be holding steady. "But AcmePro Enterprise Plus is faster than it's ever been," you counter. Try running it on a 486DX4 with 32 megs of RAM like you did with version one. We'll wait.
Sooo... I'm guessing this fits into what Brendan Iribe was talking about in his recent blog post, when he mentioned that the company wanted to "accelerate [their] roadmap"? From what others have mentioned it sounds like Hugo Barra is good at rapidly growing software and hardware platforms. That could potentially work well for Oculus and VR as a whole.

Hopefully for us ground-level users it means even more resources put into content development. Possibly new hardware revisions releasing earlier than had previously been planned as well?

I must admit I'm also hoping that any knowledge he has of the Chinese manufacturing industry contributes to smoother supply chains for Oculus products. No more parts shortages or shipping delays, pretty please. :)
> Could that not have been used to make pain pills?

To my knowledge, the industry has moved away from poppies that produce morphine (they still technically grow p. somniferum, but a special cultivar with low morphine content to discourage theft).

Instead they extract the opioid compound thebaine, which is then converted to powerful name-brand pain meds. This is why they're called "semi-synthetic opioids", because they require thebaine as the primary ingredient.

So yes, those could have been used to produce pain meds the "old-school" way but I doubt they'd be of any use to western pharmaceutical companies.
Show HN: Stayhome, a TV show tracking and discovery app
Having glanced at react, angular(2), riot.js and vue - and being somewhat familiar with procedural, message passing, class/inheritance OO, functional and logic/declarative (SQL/Prolog) paradigms - I can't help but think that many of the developers that praise react do so because react introduced them to (a rather convoluted form of) functional programming, leveraging templates (the php paradigm) as a form of gateway (in the teaching/approachability sense) approach?

Because so far I just can't see react as the best/simplest approach to dragging REST[1] apps into the world of GUI COD(Code on Demand)[1] apps. Vue seems to strike a much more elegant balance, for example.

Especially in terms of life-cycle - I can't say I'd look forward to maintaining most complicated js stacks for say five years - with a horde of (rapidly evolving) dependecies, and often a plethora of build tools/steps that in general all do some rather simple, but incompatible source-to-source translation (templates to html, some js dialect to another, scss to css).

Vue certainly doesn't fix all of that - but it seems a bit more consistent and simple IMNHO.

But maybe it's just me. It'd be interesting to hear if anyone's actually made the jump from "react in anger" to "vue in anger" - or vice-versa?

[1] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
Yup massive respect for Carmack on a technical level but I can't agree with him here. At least on the individual level US has one of the lower income tax rates when compared to Europe or Canada. I don't see how going even lower would benefit US society as a whole(spending a little less on the military might help though).
Yeah... with no sources for the extremely sweeping claims made, it's just a rant.
I stopped wasting my time for a similar reason. I added some information to a page and it was reverted because I didn't properly source my change. OK I re-created my change and added with a properly sourced reference and someone who didn't like it reverted my change, citing the guidelines on BLP. I made the change again and in the note, I quoted the BLP guideline, explaining that my change was consistent with the rules. My change was reverted again and I received an email warning about a possible suspension of my account for defacing pages...

With that, I was like "F you people". I don't think I have added any information since then.
How to Use Automation to Improve Your Cloud Security Posture
Whats next in growth and marketing for Tech
Principal Component Analysis (Explained Visually)
Did you try it? What issues are remaining? Links to the bug tracker reports? Legitimately curious.
Personally I don't see how people could even stand using a laptop smaller than 15", but maybe that's just because every laptop I've ever owned has been 15".

...that said, I do own a 10" tabtop, and that's... good for web browsing I guess, wouldn't dream of coding on it.
I use CloudFlare - free and fast.
I wish one of clang, or gcc, would gain an option to let me initalise any stack variable to 0 if there is not an explicit assignment to it. I suspect (and I'd really like to know) that with optimisation, the practical cost of this would be 0, and a whole bunch of issues would be cleaned up.

For malloc, I can already choose fairly easily to 0 out memory, but here it can get more expensive if one isn't careful.
I think we agree in spirit. My argument is more about something like decision fatigue. There is simply a mental cost to even glancing at a distracting thing that you have struggled with. When you are first building a discipline you lack, even the smallest factors like that can overwhelm you, especially if your bucket of decision making power is all used up later in the day.

I have been on this agenda of simplifying my computing over the last couple of years and it has really made a difference. I don't need a special app for TODOs. I don't need yet another status bar agent pestering me to update itself. I don't need an IM client begging for my attention. We are builders and problem solvers, and we are paid to think really hard. Our computers and phones are devices that have a default mode that guides us toward content consumption and a bunch of "least bad" technologies.
Even though it's about the design of Unix (tools) this seems to be mildly related:

http://www.linfo.org/rule_of_silence.html
I recently started keeping a Bullet Journal, and one of the pages I have implemented is the Habit Grid. Sounds like an analog of the app you're using. I have about 20 things I'm interested in doing every day, so throughout the day I go and mark the ones I've done.

Google image search shows a lot of great examples.
This is a very useful, common-sense post. I've created exactly that sort of thing using redis. The expiry mechanism combined with formatting date strings to create time buckets for keys allows quite a bit of power and is simple to write.
I spent some time volunteering at an event where we were paired up with a ~5-6 year old, working with Scratch.

We had a lesson plan booklet to work from, but I found it far more effective to completely ignore it and let the child explore, and then guide the result of that exploration into a result. Seeing the sheer delight on a kid's face when you point out that with a few minor modifications, what he or she has made is in fact a playable computer game is spectacular. (and then beatboxing with them to record "background music" and sound effects is also fun ;) )
Ask HN: What are some ways to support open source projects besides writing code?
I wish more open source projects had a way to support them besides for working on the code base. I usually don't know the languages they use or don't want to invest the time to learn their framework. I'll gladly give the project $20, though.

What are some ways to support open source projects besides writing code?
Ask HN: What issue and project tracking software do you use?
I assume most teams use Jira.
This comment is especially relevant, given yesterday's popularity of Scott Aaronson's blog post.
This highlights something I think a lot of people sometimes forget: Social Media is efficient! It's easier for me to write out a story once, and post it so others can see, than it is for me to tell the story anew each time I meet up with someone. It's also easier for me to keep up with what's going on with distant relatives, who I normally wouldn't talk to.

As a privacy enthusiast, I dislike Social Media and wish we went back to things like blogs, but I get how, for most people, social media is the quick and simple way to get this done.
And note also that Teletypes and paper tape were the rationale for the ultimate "you asked for it, you got it" text editor - TECO. The basic idea was, if you had a paper tape with typographical errors, you could feed that and a correction tape into TECO, and it would apply the corrections. It eventually morphed into an all-purpose editor; DEC's VTEDIT was a screen-oriented editor written in TECO macros, and Emacs was originally implemented in TECO as well.

It's kind of appropriate that a typical TECO command line looks a lot like transmission line noise. :)
Please see the guidelines for job postings in the FAQ:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
When you are looking at the potential of losing TB's of data it's money well spent. I ponied up some extra money to set my FreeNAS box at home up with a pool of mirrored devices because I care about my data - if you don't then feel free to save the money. (One of these days I'm going to pony up for a LTO drive to do a monthly backup and drop it in a safe deposit box, one ~$115 LTO-7 tape is enough to backup my entire storage array).
> Unless, of course, the average Linux developer remains a graybeard with a Thinkpad.

The latest generation Thinkpads have high res screens :)

> many of the distros are spending resources to switch to Wayland

High DPI support is vastly improved in Wayland, so that's a good thing!
It is pretty silly to basically leave money laying on the ground with an alarm that calls police when someone takes it.

A better approach would be to have locks which open for the users. If the user does not lock up the bike and it is stolen, bam, they get hit with the $1500+ fee to replace the bike just like the existing bike sharing systems.

Locked bikes can still be stolen, but it is a giant leap ahead of just leaving them laying around.
Deleted because of downvotes instead of discussing it.
He reposted it last month.
Ask HN: Get uninterested students to care about privacy, coding and tech in gen?
Hi, wonderful people of HN!

I run an open source community-cum-free software and online rights awareness group in college. However, I have noticed that most new students to college are largely not interested about important matters like privacy and digital security. Perhaps we could change our approach a little to become more welcoming and appealing to such beginners?

Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,
Ryzokuken
This is absolutely crazy, he did say, that he gained much of data point from Armadillo Aerospace project. Again, Peter Thiel reiterates the similar thing about "bytes and atoms".

What if the state of CA regulated Quality Controls and Error rates on Software produced? What if there is a regulation to prove that a Video game does not impair congnitive skills of 1% of people who play it etc.

The tech world is so lefty because, its "byte world" is nearly unregulated but the Aerospace, manufacturing etc. "atoms world" is regulated to death. That is the problem. If there is a person without depth, its is likely to be you than John Carmack.

Edit: As usual flagged, but if this was a testament to the group think article from the atlantic or new york times, this would have a couple hundred upvotes and a massive policy discussion. My respect for John Carmack has increased even further, he like many practitioners is an empiricist.
This is actively the point of college admission essays, though. Especially for post-high-school applications, each student only has enough time to write and edit so many essays, so requiring college-specific essays keeps applications-per-student lower. That raises enrollment rates per acceptance, which helps colleges manage the size of their income class.

The Common App didn't save time for most students, it let them do more applications via the same number of essays. So yeah - those essays exist as a transaction cost to weed out the uncommitted.
I've thought about this and it can't easily be done. Where would you draw the line between the company providing a service or being essential to the product?

For example in clothes manufacturer, which contracts out the making of its clothes to a company in another country. Would the people employed by that other company be counted?
There's also the $IFS (Internal Field Separator) for Bourne-like shells.

Oh, and Ruby copied Perl's `$/` and `$,` for record and field separators. (The "English" module provides $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR and $FIELD_SEPARATOR.)
As an American, I would argue that's an ideal that we don't generally expect most people to keep all of the time.
> You can try all day convince me others about your "liberal" (since it's U.S based community, I use this stupid term) ideas and how you're right,

Taking into account that I'm an Spanish living in Spain in a town with almost 30% of foreign population and that I have always voted leftist parties and I think that Merkel has been one of the worst leaders in the EU in decades it is clear that you not only don't know how the EU works but you have a very strange way to put labels on people and what the people in the EU thinks.

Your comment about "you can say racist all you want but that doesn't change the fact." says a lot
I would venture to guess that once a few people are inadvertently sprayed by paint while walking to work in the morning, destroying the bikes in public will be applauded.
It seems to equate to imprisoning someone in the house of a very poor person who can only afford to feed themselves, and requiring that poor person to provide the prisoner with food, and then punishing the poor person when they refuse.
I've done this before as an instructor as a tech camp. One great activity for the 12-16 age group is teaching them to mod minecraft.

This is a little more advanced, obviously, so it's not a great activity for total beginners. However, once a kid learns that they can make exploding blocks just by writing about 5 lines of code, they're totally hooked.

It also gives them an initial idea as to what real software looks like. Once that is demystified, their confidence as coders increases substantially.
New Prospects for Growing Human Replacement Organs in Animals
You can get them thinking in a programmer mindset through some board games. There's a whole 'programming' genre out there, where you have to choose the right actions in the right order to play the game effectively. Here are some examples:

* Robot Turtles

* Robo Rally

* Colt Express

* River Dragons

* Walk the Plank!

* Mechs vs Minions

Get them playing the games, and then after they're enjoying themselves and having fun, explain how it relates to programming, and replace the actions in the games with functions ("actions") you can do in apps.
Incorrect. "Science" is the reason why we had things like lobotomies in the first place.

Your entire arguments rests on a "No true Scotsman"-like logical fallacy.
I trained myself to be less busy – and it dramatically improved my life
I just found out today that Seagate bought Dot Hill.
Yeah, that's my concern. I want reliability, super reliable. So reliable that I can live life recklessly without a backup. Backup does get expensive, managing, paying, the bandwidth, the restoring.
There is some scrutiny.

Abstract: The London team also gave the children standard chemotherapy, they failed to show the cell treatment actually cured the kids. “There is a hint of efficacy but no proof,” says Stephan Grupp, director of cancer immunotherapy at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who collaborates with Novartis. “It would be great if it works, but that just hasn’t been shown yet.”
For my work (a startup, to give you sense of scale), we use GitHub Issues + Projects. Projects is still in a little bit of a 1.0 stage but does its job well enough in terms of giving you very bare-bones lanes to funnel issues + priorities.

For my personal projects, I use a combination of GitHub Issues for technical planning (and now I plan on using https://www.realartists.com/blog/ship-20.html, which launched yesterday and has been fantastic in my limited time with it) and Trello for marketing/content planning.
DirecTV Now Is Exactly Why People Hate Their Cable Comapnies
I buy instant coffee at ALDI. We have a Keurig, but the pods cost a small fortune, and I drink far too much coffee.
Sites opt-in to AMP, so copyright is less of an issue there.
Just say yes you won't apply elsewhere and then apply elsewhere anyways. How are they going to know? Besides they can't enforce a contract like that in court because 1. there's no consideration 2. it's a contract in restraint of trade. So just lie.
Saving small lives that couldn't be saved other wise. When they have children, what are the odds for more trouble during pregnancy and more emotional pain.
It's not quite the (positive) impression I get from react - but then I can't claim to be familiar with the internals.

I do think one of the reason I struggle with react is because I still believe the Web is good for REST and Web pages/hypertext - and native is to be preffered for "applications". Conversely I think react is a pretty poor fit for "Web".

It still strikes me as crazy complicated compared to say Java SWING driven by a dynamic language like python (jython).

Might explain why I struggle to embrace it. I mean if you're worse than Smalltalk or Pascal/Delphi - the stack has to be backwards crap for GUI programming, right?