skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to play with scratch to test it out. I really like it - it is a real programming language, but the big difference is that the blocks tell you all the options you can do while a text editor only shows you white space. The blocks also enforce syntax (prevent spelling/usage errors) and allow you to witness the execution of the program step-by-step (see how your program runs).

I think most of the mental barriers and frustrations of learning a new programming language is not knowing what you can do with it, not knowing the right syntax, or not knowing what the program is doing during execution - the block interface removes most of these problems while still preserving a programmer's mindset. Hopefully this will convince some of the 'hardcore' programmers that it is a legitimate language, even if developing with it is a bit slower than typing.

I haven't played with it for a while - they were planning to add function blocks, but I don't know if they did.

Also - lots of kids actually have played with scratch. If you look at the website, there are 1.1 million projects and 150,000 members. So - this next generation is really poised to make this platform their own. Maybe it will be their TI-83?
My explicit point was, internet porn is an addiction factory. Porn in magazines, books, videos has a very healthy place - mostly because its social and portable.

Porn on the internet has been neither. It is not designed creatively, for enjoyment socially, in venues suitable for sex.
The real question is what successful startups would fall into this guy's criteria. Then the follow-up, which successful startups wouldn't fall into this guy's criteria.
If you put it that way I sort of agree, although I think Americanized ethnicity or race is much less dominant as a trait than other traits.
The effect of having 5% black people in colleges will have a much wider benefit for the entire society, than if you converted those 5% into asians and whites.

Yes, those 5% may become factory managers or programmers or something similar, which is great. But those 5% black people, will act as role models for the other 30 million black people that currently form the largest social underclass, and are responsible for a lot of social problems at the moment.

So I'd say that the second goal, that of creating an educated black populace, creating a 'cosby family' that the current underclass can look up to, is more important than creating another bland middle-manager.
I really did not intend to be so dismissive, but was just trying to counter with the idea that the iPhone 4 is such a wonderful piece of design and engineering. That I just can't imagine it being remembered for anything other than that. Just an opinion.
Why Deep Packet Inspection Isn't Just for Network Engineers
Supernatural also really cought me with interesting story and great buildup. The genre couldn't be more different though
I switched from the Sony eReader to iPad for reading books. And while I prefer looking at eink, I am much happier with the overall iPad experience.
One thing I haven't been able to do on the iPad yet is overclock (speed up without making the audio sqeaky) video lectures. Might come to Android tablets first if VLC does a port to Android.
Oh I'm sure this is true on some level but it must be difficult to have to constantly deal with the assumption that you're there because of your race. It's just another level of scrutiny, and I guess racism, which is ironically created by the program meant to destroy it.
do you remember the 90s?

man, everyone thought apple was stupid. something you'd only use if you got it for free.

I mean, the same complaints were voiced then as now (e.g. it's essentially a closed hardware platform) but unlike now, they didn't have the upside. They weren't "cool"

At the time, most people had used apples because apple gave computers away to schools. Really, I think it was a bad strategy, because we all came away with the idea that apples were slow, outdated, broken garbage which couldn't run anything more interesting than 'Oregon trail'

so, uh, yeah. I'm personally still not a fan of apple. but I can certainly say they didn't always have the masses of loyal fans they have now. (I mean, they had fans, but they were few, and generally looked upon with the pity one has for BeOS or Ameiga fans.) This large and "cool" apple fandom is actually a pretty recent development. Now, i'm way out of touch, and most of the people I meet are *NIX users, so I wouldn't really know, but as far as I can tell, it really started with the advent of OS-x.

edit: as others point out, my point of view is probably a little different... as I'm a technical person, and apple did not really start appealing to the technical crowd until os-X.
Why do you say "In the West"?

But I agree, I learned Python because it seemed like a great language, and learned Django because I was moving into web dev after years of other work with Python. I don't believe I'll ever pick up Ruby for anything other than learning Rails (and I doubt I'll even do that, since Python is so similar).
Sure, but then you're writing off CSS3 and continuing to write code as if it were 2006, which I personally don't like having to do.
It's about the same as constantly having to deal with the assumption you are there for geographical reasons, because you speak with a southern accent.
The "working man's intellectual." My brother and I loved the American Splendor comic as kids, even though some of the adult-oriented content was over our heads. A great writer has passed. I'll never forget Pekar saying of David Letterman, "Guy's just a fratboy". I miss TV like that.
Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky, but I really don't want to have to hack or coerce the things I buy in order to make them do what I want.
I used Gentoo four/five years ago, and the draw was the amount of optimisation available. Everything's compiled from source with optimisation flags for your specific hardware rather than the generic 'works pretty much everywhere' options that are used for pre-built binaries with most distros.

The down-side is that it was - at that time, at least - a huge nightmare to maintain and do major upgrades. Almost as bad as CentOS. Waiting for things to compile every time you install something also got boring pretty quickly. I moved to Ubuntu, and I'm now considering moving to just Debian for future VMs I build.
You may believe that, it may be a good argument. But it isn't the usual argument advanced in favor of affirmative action, as it is entirely novel to me.
You can read the C++0x FAQ in an hour...
8bit city maps
The system is there to spread dark skin across all strata of society, breaking the stereotype that a particular skin color belongs in a particular lower strata.

The problem with this though is that whites have to pretend that the system doesn't exist for it work. If dark-skinned students are allowed in because of a well known preference program the stereotype is in fact reinforced.
I don't see thinking without words as "unconscious" at all. I'm aware I'm doing it; I keep the thoughts in the forefront of my brain and direct my investigation consciously. Its just not in words at all.

E.g. play a kids match game, where you turn up pairs of cards looking for a match. Two of spades, Three of hearts - no match. Turn them back over, try again.

But really, you aren't saying those things in your head - you might but you don't have to. You just look at the cards, and if they don't match you turn them back down. Try another pair - five of diamonds, two of spades - hey! that matches the 1st two of spades I saw!

The whole time you are consciously looking for a match, and unless you're explaining the game to somebody, your language processor can remain idle.
A good language that is pleasant to write leads to more experimentation with approaches to a problem - which wouldn't get tried out otherwise because it would be too tedious/performance-intensive with other languages/implementations.

I have basically built ooc to make programming a lot less annoying for me (and others) to try new things with. The work is really starting to pay off and I thought I'd share it! It's not like anybody forces you to try it ;)
Definitely not false: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pupillary_light_reflex

The fact that bright light can still annoy you just shows that there is an upper limit (and there is a lower one too, obviously) -- not that it doesn't work.
> curl: bash -c "`curl -L http://ooc-lang.org/install.sh`

Extra points for this awesome install process. I wish more projects would make a seamless newbie experience higher-priority.
ENEL Inaugurates First Industrial-Scale Hydrogen Plant in the World
I think people realize this. Nobody who cares about job security works for a startup unless they have no other options.

Working for a startup when you want job security would be like getting an art degree if you want money.

My experience has been that if you want to hire people for significantly below market rates, you need to accept that you will be getting inexperienced people who probably can't get good stable corporate jobs. They are getting paid in experience rather than equity. It's just not really something that people who are good and experienced do very often, because as you said, it's not a very good deal compared to the other options available to people who are good and experienced.

(note, I said "hiring" - the rules are rather different if you make them a founder, or give them founder-level equity.)
In the short term it is reinforced. But on the longer term, you create a wide array of dark skinned college educated people who have college level jobs. College educated tend to breed college educated, and family/relatives will tend to be college educated.

So in the medium term, the current state that the black community is in will change towards a more intellectual and educated one.
Yes but there are few (if any) universities that have a "southern accent" based affirmative action policy. If such a policy existed it would exactly the same.
Then we'd need to access the ooc AST from C++, which is also quite a piece of work. (I mean - it's easy to use ooc code from C in a C-like way, e.g. MyObject_myMethod(arg1, arg2), but in C++ that would be tedious/inacceptable)

Besides, what's the point in having a shiny language if we have to use C++ to implement part of its compiler :(
I'm not sure about this. Pale skin color means you spend more time indoors (a job) and don't have much free time. Dark skin means you have enough free time to have a tan. In fact I think that the rich have darker skin and the poor have paler skin.
All the schools have geographical quotas. They don't just allow people from one region to come in, no matter how great they are.

Was there not a problem with one of those schools where 40% where jewish when admission was only based on test-scores?
Finding Leaks in Ruby Apps with Eclipse Memory Analyzer
That may just be a language barrier. The smart ones will at least listen if you can show them the added costs they'll be paying for nickel features like this.
It may be novel to you, but that's the point of affirmative action. It's not to help a particular person, it's to help an entire segment of society.
Sexy syntax. C++ and Objective-C both have the superset-of-C ugliness.
It's either from:

http://www.simonsebagmontefiore.com/stalincourtredtsar.aspx

or

http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-History-Anne-Applebaum/dp/140003...
BeebPlayer, iPlayer and Android: or why I am epically, fumingly angry at the BBC
China is good at copying technology and selling for cheaper or improving an already existing product, but real innovation, such as creating new technologies that create whole new indsutries still will be from americans.

This is exactly, to the letter, what America said about Japan, and it was completely wrong.
Your examples do not establish your point or contradict my claim. Really your examples reinforce my claim -- you "are digging in the wrong place".

See my post above that starts "Look, guys, this thread and its article are making a big, gigantic, HUGE mistake."

Look, I can mail you a copy of one of the crucial books, and it will still take you years to understand the thing. And, you will have a tough time finding anyone in information technology entreprenurship able to understand in less than years.
HP’s Snapfish Buys Video Sharing Site Motionbox
How Apple maintains explosive earnings growth
Gaussians don't work very well when the typical value is near one of the bounds. For example say 3/4 of drivers don't eat, apply makeup, talk on the phone, etc, while driving, and generally pay attention to the road; that sort of attentiveness is probably most of what makes a good driver, so you'd have the majority of people being near one extreme of the possible range and get a rather one-sided distribution.
We're on Django; there is a relational DB in our architecture, but when you're browsing the site you're nearly always hitting either Solr or a key-value store.

But why wouldn't you use a relational database? It works, the ORM's good, it's fast enough, you're probably not going to hit scaling problems. If you do hit scaling problems, then that's a really really good problem to have.
Great rant and 100% agree.

I started my company 5 years ago, helping Morten Lund (early Skype investor) redesigning and productifying many of the companies from his portfolio.

Many of them where tech heavy to say the least and needed to be made into understandable very easy to understand pitches.

The problem wasn't really the tech people but often the marketing people. For some reason they all thought that all these little details where important and absolutely needed to be in the copy. In some ways they always reminded me of lawyers trying to write every possible disclaimer into a piece of text.

The way I ended up solving it was to make sure to write copy into the design.

That way it became harder for them to add all sorts of additional content without breaking the pages.
Or Orc, which keeps to hold my fascination since I first discovered it, weeks ago.

http://orc.csres.utexas.edu/

Hopefully I will have more time for it and SR:

http://www.cs.arizona.edu/sr/
A new language means I have to start from scratch with all the boring crap that you have to write to make a language usable. Database drivers, http libraries, mail tools, command-line parsing utils, xml & json serialization, test tools etc etc.

There's nothing more annoying IMO than reinventing all those wheels one more time. I'm willing to play with the new JVM languages because I can get all that stuff for free but the advantages of one more sui generis language are going to have to be HUGE for me to even consider retooling all that junk.
A Simple and Creative Solution to AT&T's Data Plan Problems
Unless you're suggesting that any company named "Apple" would have those fans ... in what sense is a massive base of loyal fans an unfair advantage?

They (we) are loyal fans for good reason.
"depending on where the company is and how early the hire is." In the case where a new hire gets 30%, presumably the company is early enough that they are basically joining as an additional co-founder. Certainly possible.
In my experience http://www.zazzle.com/ or http://www.cafepress.com are the best.

Since you have the traffic, and you're a hacker and can set this up, I'd suggest that you run a T-Shirt contest.

Pay $100.00 for the top design and promise to promote the designer from your home page - let your audience vote on it.

Prior example: Shoemoney is a master at getting people to design all his stuff for free eg:

http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/05/29/design-my-new-business-c...

Good examples of sites doing this:

http://store.theonion.com/category/mens-tees-hoodies,4/big/

http://www.bustedtees.com/

Even CNN played around with this model:

http://www.cnn.com/tshirt/#headlines/allshirts/2010/6/1

I actually think the CNN-type model could work well for you - let people pick their favorite saying, make the contest about building a template / format for the t-shirt
Main reflex: Some useful syntactic advances over Java, but where's the beef? I see generics exist at runtime - what else?

Also, is the type system known or believed to be sound? Are there casts?
What would a car metaphor be like? Would it be like we're all driving early racing cars? Not everybody even has a seat, and some people are still sitting astride cars like on a saddle? (Yes, some early racing cars are driven like this.) Some people are still arguing the merits of a two-lever yoke over the wheel. Others are arguing about 3 versus 4 wheels. There are people who advocate steam engines.

The thing is, the development of the car got to focus on and nail the use case and user experience before it was able to really take off. Do we really think of end-to-end user experience of programmers? Smalltalk had some human factors thinking put into it, but I'm not sure this happens for new languages with enough applied human factors knowledge and expertise. (And the attention to that sort of detail didn't go quite far enough for Smalltalk either.)

Most programmers are the last people to do that sort of designing. In particular, I think most programmers are too familiar with programming. It's like someone asked a driver of one of those saddle-seated early racing cars to design a minivan.
"We want to do a highly selective, fully online, credit-bearing program on a large scale - and that has not been done," said UC Berkeley law school Dean Christopher Edley

There is absolutely no reason to be selective in an online college unless you are trying to create artificial scarcity.

This quote shows just how pointless college is.
I'll just call further attention to this - it's highly unhelpful that the reviews can be sorted by best/worst/newest.

Best is always "WOW I CAN SEE MY COMPUTER" style and worst is always "IT DOES NOT WORK GIVE ME MY MONEY BACK".

Actually helpful app reviews would be a massive improvement.
My experience as being employee 8 million at a Large Corporation is nearly identical. I can choose my own tools, work from home when I want to, take breaks, etc.

We've already taken care of the cash flow thing, so it ends up being much more relaxing than working for a small company. We aren't going to go out of business if our software isn't released tomorrow, so we have lots of time to write quality solutions. We can build stuff that's really nice to work on, instead of stuff that will give us one more checkbox in a TechCrunch comparison article.

(I worked at a small company for a long time. It was less flexible, and every year, we "don't have enough money" for a raise. Eventually it was very stressful, my input didn't matter at all, and I got paid nothing. All for what most people consider "the ideal job". "Going corporate" was the best thing I ever did!)
Thought Leadership Requires Going Beyond The Innovators
Who's on Forrst?

I was expecting a clever allusion to the Abbott and Costello routine!
Another lecture about how money can't make up for a good work environment where people can be proud of what they do. Problem with these articles is that money and a fulfilling job aren't mutually exclusive as it's being portrayed. It's not black and white.

How about trying to make people happy and giving them enough money that they invest themselves and take responsibility to maintain and even improve the status quo?
EMR merely abstracts away the problem of configuring and hosting hadoop; the actual business of crunching data is still very much in the build-it-yourself realm.

There is a huge, huge market for a value-added service on top of EMR to help people understand their data.
I'll be there. Is there any sort of schedule or is it just open hacking?
Jeff Jarvis on the Tragic Element of the new iPhone 4 Ads
Thankfully there's a community (and a bindings generator) for that. Chances are the libs you want to use are already in: http://github.com/search?langOverride=&language=&q=o...

Yes, that's one more advantage of producing C code - integration is seamless. No need to reinvent all the wheels, rewrite what you feel like, re-use the rest.
At some point in the future the legal system will need to be rebooted because of decisions like this.
For what it's worth, this data is from 1997. (E.g., see table 3.4 from the book being discussed, No longer separate, not yet equal: race and class in elite college admission, by Espenshade et al.)

Also - and this is not exactly a problem, just a methodological feature to be aware of - it appears that they produced their models by aggregating the data together across schools.
Android users will surpass iPhone users by end of 2010
That assumption was unstated and, if stated, would be wildly unjustified.

For what was stated and assumed, my example works.

Sure, my example looks contrived and pathological, but so it commonly is with simple examples.

Your claim that height, weight, etc. are normally distributed is also wildly unjustified.

You have swallowed a common bit of old quasi-mystical nonsense from 100 years ago that real data is commonly normally distributed. That claim is nonsense.

Read what else I wrote about Gaussian distributions in this thread.

Grow up. Learn. In practice, Gaussian is rare and otherwise fantasy land.
There are casts, closures, and more. Feel free to join #ooc-lang on irc.freenode.net to have more informative discussions ;)
Tanenbaums stationwagon always seems to be one step ahead of fixed line capacity.
You could install Wordpress with an RSS to blog post plugin. At the very least some content could go on them with AdSense around it. I have about a dozen of these that earn a few bucks every month, basically just enough to pay for the hosting and domain renewals. In the process, you should get a little boost in page rank when you do actually use them because of their age.
Effective Concurrency: Prefer Using Active Objects Instead of Naked Threads
"There is absolutely no reason to be selective in an online college unless you are trying to create artificial scarcity."

If every college let everyone in, it would be worthless. Colleges need to be selective. They should base admission on grades.
But the implication was that it had something to do with it being a startup. There are plenty of startups with neurotic founders, and plenty of big companies that aren't a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Picking the right programming language for your startup
Thanks for posting the VMWare video.
tl;dr - give early adopters "useful information, not claims of your own genius as a forward-thinking vendor" to Cross the Chasm
yes, sorry -- there was a glitch and it got unpublished somehow. but it is live again.
Maybe ability to make you commit now to reading his next blog post is a competetive advantage?
I think if you want to make a car analogy then languages are more fundamental, like roads. And if languages are like roads then we haven't gotten to the point of really exploring the design space of cars because we're too busy deciding how many lanes roads should have, which side of the road we should drive on, what kind of paving material we should use, and how traffic signs should be posted.

To be competitive in the current web job market, I have to have at least three fundamentally very similar languages under my belt: javascript, and at least two of perl, php, python and ruby. In truth any one of these could easily do the job of the others. Lately I find this irksome. Diversity is only a virtue up to a certain point.
We used a foil-lined box to do this at my last job.
Is it just me, or does that page feel a little spammy? There are definitely some interesting links there, but there's something about it.
One company might choose to give an early hire 20%, possibly even making them a cofounder. Another company might give an early hire 0.5%. Hence the 40x variability in the amount of equity given to early hires.
That sounds like a very leaky abstraction.
http://pandigital.net/search.asp?productid=392: (specifications) 7” Digital TFT LCD, 600 x 800 pixels

The 6-inch, 800x600 e-ink readers are now at 150 USD (Borders, Amazon, etc.). Some with SD and Bluetooth included. A bit more for touch screens (Sony?).

So, battery life and readability versus color and Wi-Fi.