skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm assuming that they already know how to program? Perhaps they could start with a simple user login/registration application. One of the requirements must be to use password hashing+salt for security. I think this is an essential lesson that all should learn. Too many web applications store passwords in plain text.
super simple db app, write to the db, read it back out via query/get/request whatever

move to comments.
create a gallery, let them use a lightbox(instill in them the idea that they don't have to do everything from scratch, and that it is in fact stupid)

go from there.
Agreed that abstraction is itself the problem - very abstract things are more difficult to understand than concrete things, because there's nothing to grab onto.

I know you're trying, but you're going to lose the beginner as soon as you get to the code example - it's just too terse and foreign. Remember that people who don't know monads also don't understand Haskell very well, so they need to know your intentions before trying to read the code. You have to explain this in English.

First you'd have to explain what the comma function does (creates a pair), what liftList2 does (takes the cartesian product and applies an operator to each pair - oops, that assumes the reader knows what cartesian product means!) and what the liftMaybe2 does (applies a binary operator if both arguments are not null - er, I mean Nothing).

In Java all these methods would have JavaDoc, so you have some clue what the author intends before reading the code. I think readable Haskell would probably need five times as many lines of comments as actual code since so many functions are one-liners.

It's much like math: if you really want to explain things so a beginner will get it, you need half a page of text and maybe some diagrams per equation.

Personally I like this Monad tutorial. We can at least say that a Monad is more like a macro syntax than like a data structure and people will get the vague idea:
http://kawagner.blogspot.com/2007/02/understanding-monads-fo...
I would ask him to TRY to clone his favorite web app.
TODO lists, or blogs are good for newbies, imo. You need to touch all the parts of an MVC framework, but everything can be pretty basic.
Funny...except for the part where I quit my job...I'm doing the same thing, and I'm even using rails myself! We should bounce off ideas. But I don't use skype or ym...try me at acconrad on gchat though!
I'm in nyc if you want to meet for even a few minutes :) My company was acquired, if that counts.
> are they betting everything on 4G becoming big in the next few years?

I'm not sure that's much of a bet as it is inevitable. Sprint already has a phone on the market, Verizon will have a large deployment later this year and AT&T plans to deploy next year. That's just the US; I think there's already a small deployment of LTE somewhere in Europe.
Oh, I know who he is. I occasionally peep at his blog in the way one would glance at a train-wreck before passing along.

And I don't see anything in his recent posts that would lead Knuth to conclude that he's 'doing lots of real important stuff'. The language alone sounds odd.

I still think its possible that someone is just trolling him - and certainly while he seems starstruck to receive a mail from Knuth's secretary - he's boasted before about receiving emails from Knuth.
custom blogging software. it can start simple and get really complex.
Beginner: E-mail to text message service.

Intermediate: Image host w/ resizing & cropping.

Advanced: Classfieds site that isn't vulnerable to SQL or XSS injections. Allows image and videos to be attached to a post.

Expert - Social network w/ image/video/wall/message/friend functionality.
FWIW I up'ed your initial question but down'ed some of your replies. Not due to your views of Apple (couldn't care less..), but because you seem to be acting kind of silly and trying really hard to not understand how Apple's current performance, and it's implied future performance, wouldn't be news to hackers and startups.

If you're being genuine, there's no need to leave - just try harder to understand or ignore the Apple stuff. If not, whatever.

p.s. for someone calling others "sheeple" I just want to point out that you seem rather concerned and emotional over your karma, with karma simply being an average of how those around you tend to see you.

Sheep?
Pornstar Programmer (SFW)
I think he meant 3/4 of the people reading the post, which is probably not representative of the entire population.
How much you wanna bet this is all an ad for the upcoming Facebook movie? ;)
Actually, this is what the book "Who Is Fourier?: A Mathematical Adventure" is about. It's the adventure of a group of families who wanted to learn more about languages, which led them to sounds which led them to learn about Fourier transforms. It's a lot of fun and it actually has real math that you often get to learn in a signal processing class in college. While it is very focused, this book and the approach will pique your interest in other topics.
Yeah, that's a pretty steep penalty clause, I feel there is little chance that part will hold. The initial 50% is in play for sure though.
Looks like it's down (or it's not organic-views.com), but for future content theft (IANAL etc):
Any domain that is either hosted OR registered in the USA can be DMCA'ed, regardless of actual location of the owner or the entity whose content was stolen.
Intel Digital Signage give shop owners, customers an augmented reality check
If I was teaching the basics of building an app, these would be some classes I'd teach:

1) hello world using MVC

2) gobble an RSS feed and make it pretty (learn about objects / data massaging)

3) pull data from a database and display

4) put / pull from database (CRUD)

5) some kind of basic auth

After that, a new world should have opened up. There's a lot you can do, mashup / small app-wise with just the above skills.

I would follow it up with:

6) REST / SOAP and intro to some popular APIs e.g. Twitter / Facebook / Gmaps

7) Performance tuning / Profiling (slow query log, denormalization, caching etc)

8) Front end stuff (jquery / ajax / visualisations, graphs etc)
Forum. You can break this into stages:
Creating Posts / Categories
Authentication / Session Management
Administrative access
Profiles
Etc.
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Specially after his foray into sex instruction and his staged PR photo with a "girl". Tacky.
bingo.
"but you're more interested in somehow getting 50,000 organic/free prospects into the top of the funnel"

who isn't?!

that's the million(10s or 100s even) dollar business question, depending on your interval. Go build that.
It probably won't be till September/October at the earliest. But thanks, look forward to that.
What's your dashboard?
YourAM - Appointment Manager For The Service Industry
"The idea that money doesn’t make you happy is a lie spread by rich people so that the poor people don’t kill them."

-Michael Caine
Ask HN: web dev houses, how do you handle continual improvement?
So, your customer says "give me a website that does X", you say
"sure" and go about throwing together an app to meet the spec. What happens after the jobs done and there is a new framework release, or a security problem with the existing app? How do you handle approaching the client for additional funding to "keep the rails version fresh" or "fix a potential issue with XSS"? Do you bake it into your initial contract? The whole thing seems fraught with danger to me.
Meet Flipboard
Bpython interpreter
We're hoping to be added to the mix at some point at http://Newsley.com . We're transitioning from social news to financial news search based on semantic analysis of news articles. We are still in very heavy development, but little by little, we're getting there.

By the way, if you're having problems doing financial research, I'd love to hear about them. Ping me. My email is in my sig.
That he's so starstruck by contact with Knuth surprises me -- occupying, as they do for me, roughly equal mindshare in the category of "old-school computer celebrities"

ESR is to Knuth what Sarah Palin is to Milton Friedman.
I learned several languages from writing the same metasearch program in them.

Given a query term, execute a web search against several engines, parse the results into one data structure, deduplicate and display.

This covers a lot of ground including regular expressions, parallelism, text parsing, etc.
Google has a forms tool that you may find handy. I think you could share the resulting spreadsheet it feeds into.
0. Hello World-ish

1. Simple link shortener (no accounts/logins, just store the links and do 301s)

2. Simple blog with HTTP basic auth on the admin

3. Update blog to have comments & true user accounts/logins for admin

4. Update blog to allow image attachments with a post and include the link shortener code (so every post has a short url)

5. Update blog to allow commenting and email the admin when a comment is posted

6. Something different–probably a simple forum or classified/ecommerce site that just uses paypal

7. Something dealing with external data/APIs
Oh man. I just heard the sound of a UFO door opening but I can't see anything.
Flipboard: A social magazine for your iPad
Now that's hot.
Javascript needs a lot of attention on its own since it has different best practices from other languages. At the same time, apps can be made more fun to play with if you know basic DOM manipulation. It will also be necessary to teach how to properly organize an ajax app (don't just send html or eval code, use json and separate concerns between client and server).
You're misstating the findings.

This wasn't a double-blind study where for applications where all else was equal, 4H hurts applicants.

This was a statement about the populations. The population that is in 4H is less likely to get in (or likely to even apply) to top schools than the population that is in, say, debate. That's not really controversial, although it's worth theorizing about ways to improve the situation.
You're absolutely right. My broad generalization was terrible legal advice, especially for those in Massachusetts.

That said, anyone who takes legal advice from a photographer/developer on an internet forum deserves what they get.
I come from Java and want to know what monads are in Haskell
Accent can impact speaker's credibility
If I were in their position, I'd try to swing the donation model. Reddit offers value and should receive value in return.

There is nothing wrong with trying to monetize an audience through advertising, but in some circumstances it is insulting to users. Reddit's value is derived from a strong sense of community and identification with that community: Secret Santa, University of Reddit, Reddit Island, and on and on. This spirit might not co-exist with aggressive advertising.

There is also nothing wrong with a premium subscription, but I think the author of the linked post makes a clear case for why this is harmful to the Reddit community.

Fundraising, however, would only tie the community together even more and intensify people's relationship with the site. Focus on the introducing the idea of ongoing donations into the culture, and focus on steering users away from the massive hive-mind sub-Reddits where there is less likely to be a sense of obligation to the site, and get more people involved in smaller Reddit communities where they are more likely to feel a personal connection.

I'd hate to see Reddit die, but I'd really hate to see it ruined because they can't figure a congruous business model.
Ask HN: Test drive my social commerce application
Hi everyone.

My co-founder and I have been hacking over this past summer break to build a social commerce application to be sold to online retailers (but used by online consumers like me and you). Basically, it's a widget, to be deployed on ecommerce websites, that:

1) Allows visitors to consult friends directly on the shopping website itself to obtain advice and recommendations from their Facebook friends; and

2) Allows visitors to view, evaluate, and discuss their friends' purchases (think onsite Blippy/Facebook Beacon).

Expected benefits are increased conversions, social cross-selling, reduced abandonment, and traffic building without additional CPC costs.

We are in private Beta at the moment, but we are hoping to get more feedback from the "C" segment of our B2B2C product. We appreciate it if you could try us out, poke holes at our concept/actual product, and basically be as constructively mean as possible.

Edit: URL is http://shh.zuupy.com/?p=product&pid=10001 (log in with our dummy Facebook account, demo@zuupy.com [password: zuupydemoaccount], on the bottom-left widget).

Looking forward to your feedback!
Thanks! I'll remember that. I'm keen to meet anyone who's a software developer or computer scientist (or in those general areas) :-) (Or anyone interesting, to be honest!)
Maybe I'm raving mad but doesn't 60 days seem like forever? That's tons of time for anyone to write, test and release their exploit. What takes 60 days, unless you've screwed up something completely fundamental to how your software works (in which case you'd spend far more than 60 days anyway)?
You asked about beauty and history, with an idea on how to discover... personally, I started with "The Math Explorer: A Journey Through the Beauty of Mathematics": (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591021375). That book got me hooked and from there I went on to pre-cal studies at university, eventually completing sequences in discrete structures, probability, up to and including calculus III, a level I never imagined I'd get to. That book was literally my starting point since I never took high school math seriously nor was I any good at that level. I think it'll serve you well considering the level at which you're at, as it did me. I've reread that book four times to date and still enjoy it.
Consider that standard CRUD-based web apps follow a pattern: add, update, delete along with listing the data. For instance, a contact manager is a good way to work through all those pieces. I'd recommend getting that core pattern down before playing with extraneous stuff like image resizing or playing with REST/APIs.
I'd split the semester into two parts -- one close to metal, something simple like a url shortner. Then something using an existing framework to build something more complex like a blog with an admin interface and some RSS feeds or JSON API.
So, are they making more money now? Isn't that the goal? If you want a gazillion readers, give away a high quality publication for free. If you want to be able to make a high quality publication, though, you need society to bear your costs, and not everyone will want to do that, so you will need to charge and your readership will decline. The toal isn't readers: it is providing provable value.
I'm in Ann Arbor, MI. I also know a lot of the startup scene here (it's not as huge as many of the other startup hubs, but just as passionate). Our office specifically is in an old brewery (built in the 1860s) that has been turned into an office building, and affectionately dubbed the "TechBrewery" since being overrun by tech startups.

Anyway, I'll DM you more details if you're interested at all in making a stop in Ann Arbor.
Ask HN: Outsource printing for online art marketplace
I am considering developing an online art marketplace with a twist and am wondering, anyone know of a good solution to outsource the printing of digital art? I would rather not front the cost for in house printing.
Many of these ideas seem aimed only at harming "Wall St", not at providing benefits to consumers.

For example, 1. No one forces customers to deposit money in banks, they do it because a valuable service is provided (ATM's, direct deposit). How will using a check cashing place (thereby disrupting wall st) help me?

Or 4. If you don't want your money "skimmed" by high frequency folks (disclaimer: I'm one of them) and don't want to pay commissions, use ALO orders [1]. This has the problem that your order might never be filled. If I
want to own 100 shares of Tesla now (and I believe it is worth $1.00, assuming a bid/ask of $0.01), how does harming wall st help me?

Or 8. The author seems unaware that mutual funds are already being disrupted...by the ETF's (issued by Wall St) he suggests we buy. Maybe we should stick are money under a mattress?

To borrow a phrase from other discussions, "the goal isn't to kill facebook, it's to help our customers." This applies here - focus on the consumer, not on the competitor.

[1] http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/content/ProductsServices/Trading...
http://www.nyse.com/equities/nysearcaequities/1157018931913....
I see your joke but a communications satellite is a much larger cost than the 8k satellite. We are talking millions of dollars for one simple satellite.
Driving test: Theory test pattern
There are two parts in the theory test : The multiple-choice test and the hazard perception test. You need to pass both the sections in the same session in order to attain a theory test certificate, which can then be used to book the driving practical test within two years of passing the theory test.
The alternative is buying windows. If you want it for free it's not that bad to download every N months.
Essential Reading for the User Experience Designer
This sounds like good advice for any endeavor:

"I find the reason some developers succeed beyond their wildest dreams more interesting:

* They passionately believe in not doing what is commonly expected.

* They are willing to take a risk.

* They work hard at getting their execution right."
It seems like an obvious idea in retrospect, and it fits with the iPad concept-- not a necessity, but a much more satisfying way of doing some specific tasks.

I wonder what its integration with the browser is like? I'm not sure if it'd be better to have a separate app for my Google Reader and Hacker News, but those are both sources I'd like to read in this format.
A case for GPU computing: Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and the Mercury Playback Engine
I don't know what to be amazed more at:

* 100+ people working on the same document seamlessly in near real time

* The fact that no one is ruining it or deliberately stepping on each other's toes.
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Confessions Of A VC Who Raised Money During Financial Armageddon
I just can't conceive of Ceglia's claim holding. It seems that, regardless of the authenticity, systems are in place to prevent Facebook from undergoing such a drastic shift. Can anyone relate this to similar circumstance?
The demo is actually pretty fast http://aloha-editor.com/demos/960-fluid-demo/

I think it's a front page script that's causing the slowness.
John Gruber: You seem intelligent...
I'm no lawyer, but the contract says "The agreed upon completion for the expanded project with working title "The Face Book" shall be Janruary 1, 2004..."

I would imagine typos could affect a contract - would that be the case here?
The idea is that harming "Wall St." will help consumers, but you're right that it's secondary to helping them first.

Lots of problems Dixon listed revolve around fees, and my guess is that a lot of people feel ripped off by the financial industry because it makes tons of money while not seeming to provide equal value.

Any disruption that lowers the costs of doing business helps both customers while achieving Dixon's goal of disrupting the establishment. This is true in many industries.
I think that such a call should be relatively straightforward. A picture of a naked child is not pornography unless there is explicit sexual context, i.e., touching of genitals, etc. Otherwise, a naked child in a bathtub, pool or such activity is the picture of innocence itself.

If there was doubt, bring it before a jury of one's peers as opposed to some back-room morality police.
> I bought this app. I'm more than willing to support the the Rebellion. I haven't actually verified that this app works as demonstrated but for a dollar it's worth the risk. I have no intentions of paying another $20 a month to AT&T.

As a current iOS developer, I’ve always wondered what the financial repercussions of getting pulled from the App Store would be. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple refused to pay the kid his post-commission cut from what he was able to sell due to this kind of hidden behavior.
Tethering on Edge probably wouldn't be the best experience anyways. =)
Shouldn't he have to prove he paid $1,000 to Zuckerberg? We may not be getting all of the facts in the case, so it's questionable whether this is valid on the terms themselves.

Also, oddly one instance says "The Page Book" while another two say "The Face Book."
Creating an optimized Windows XP virtual machine in VirtualBox
Porn economy so bad that chicks have to do their own sites? Should consider barter with devs.
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I wonder why would anyone want to give up reliving the same day after measly 30-40 years.
Would it be better to age in the meanwhile?
I hope I didn't step on any toes. It made me nervous that so many people had the document open all at once... (Go Google!)
It's a neat concept, but it seems they still have some issues to work out. I'm getting a login error when trying to log in to facebook, and none of the other channels are loading any content.

Edit: Facebook's still not working, but the other channels are. One thing's for sure: it's the best way to browse HN on an iPad.
I think that there is a (strange, in my opinion) backlash against any 'hacking' of our personalities when it is presented directly as such. If the book had been named 'The Study of Social Intercourse' or something less "sleazy" I doubt it would be a controversial book.

My view is hacking your personality is no different then improving your coding skills. It is just another skill set and there are advantages that can be derived from improving it. And, as you point out, personality isn't something that can be directly changed.. Thats called 'faking it'. No, personality means changing deeper things, like learning to care for people (or learning to care for yourself). Plus... Compared to coding it is a skill set that is far more useful and influential (unless you get really lucky...)
Just ask RTM.
A proper conversation should be an exchange of gifts. Your words are a gift to them, and theirs to you. Never give yourself a gift.
Haha! Self-empowered women who can code! This is so novel because everyone knows women can't do difficult things like computers and math. Oh and thanks for finding this and sharing, you are so clever, and we all had a good laugh!
I'm impressed with the video and can't wait to try it. I love startups that improve the way we interact with all the content bombarded at us.
I think it is pretty certain that if Ceglia wins this the results for the tech start up industry will be pretty bad. Facebook shares have been trading in closed deals for a while and I am sure there are many people that believe that they have millions or even billions of dollars in their facebook shares. If this guy wins all of these shares may lose more than 80% of their value. (This is not necessarily the case, but there is a marked possibility).

This will be felt in the VC industry, believe you me. The VC and angel investor industry relies on the big payoff and if the biggest payoff in recent history turns out to be a dud, then there will be much less demand for new investments and the few investors that remain will insist even more on professional CEOs to swoop in and take things over.

So this is something to think about. Of course, it does not mean he should not get the shares if he has a right to them legally, but the repercussions of this can be huge.