skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's funny to read this, 'cause in many ways I started programming (flailingly) with Ruby/Rails, and then worked backwards from there. I read Peter Cooper's Ruby for Beginners book, which ended with a little Rails, and then I read some HTML. I didn't know a lick about JavaScript for a while, and so there were all these Rails helpers and shortcuts, and they were a complete mystery! Rails has so much "magic" to it that I often found myself confronted by problems that I could not understand, because I was at a level too abstracted to really know what was happening. In an odd way, though, it was really helpful – it was like walking around in a giant robot suit, being able to make greater strides than I really should have been able to on my own strength, and then having it break down from time to time and forced to understand pieces of the nitty gritty. Eventually it broke down so much that I had to do a lot of the background reading I should have done from the start; but what's nice is that I could never imagine coding a project of any sort without some sort of strict organizational system like Rails'.
Does it need to just function or does it need to be an easy to maintain, versioned, self-documenting effecient debugged, QA'ed, UX designed, accessible web app? If the former then you are in luck. If the latter, you are better off paying someone to do it for you an working a different job for six months.
The article seems a bit alarmist to me. One person on the phone in traffic and someone who watches movies on their laptop while driving? These don't seem indicative of the common case to me. As far as his complaints about cell phone overuse, the fact is that most people don't have much to say. Most situations like the one he described are long and relatively boring. Is keeping your self occupied such a bad thing?
Sure, but this thread was about what it's "advantageous" to call yourself. Calling yourself a "hacker" in front of 99% of clients is not going to get you off to a good start.
There's a $40/month difference in price if you use google voice for texting and get the $10 data plan. (You change your phone online to one eligible for it and change the APN on your nexus one)
Because I thought that of all places, a site dedicated to entrepreneurship would attract people who understand that it isn't true that the only way to make money is to "exploit the proletariat", but rather that the proletariat would be a lot worse off without successful entrepreneurs.
Twitter, texting, cell phones, etc. don't cause rudeness, they just make it more obvious.
If I was to start over again I would go like this: C, Python, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, SQL, Django. For me it's imporant to understand how something is put together on at least some basic level. E.g. I more or less know how Django's ORM translates into SQL, or how a Python inerpreter translates Python code into bytecode (at least very theoretically). I hate the idea of using something as a magical black box.
“Scripts are stored in a language-independent internal representation. A dialect defines a presentation for the internal language. Dialects contain lexing and parsing tables, and printing routines. A script can be presented using any dialect – so a script written using the English dialect can be viewed in Japanese. For complete localization, the application terminologies must also include entries for multiple languages. Apple developed dialects for Japanese and French. A “professional” dialect which resembled Java was created but not released.”

— http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2006/ashopl.pdf . The example it gives for the “professional” dialect is “{ words | style == bold }.character[1]”, which as far as I know would have made it one of the first non-research languages to use pseudo–set-builder notation like that.
You know what, for a second I was jealous of you after reading your comment, but then I caught myself and realized that this is a case of "the grass is always greener..".

If that's what I really wanted, I could also do it, and I wouldn't even need a boat-house. It wouldn't be too hard to go somewhere quiet for a few days and enjoy the peace. I guess I don't want that enough to actually go out and do it.

Maybe I should so I can see if what I imagine it to be and what it actually is are anywhere close to each other.
I think Giff nailed it in his comment to you.

You might want to frame your thoughts around where you think you are in terms of Product/Market Fit -- that is, do you think you are pre- or post-?
Impressive. I'll continue to dream about Big Blue.
That depends. Sometimes I write significant amounts of code in vvery very short spces of time, other times it takes much much longer. When I was studying CS, I often did my assignments literally fifteen minutes before the deadline. Sometimes I can work extremely well (and fast) under pressure.

But heres the catch - programming is more than just writing the code. Its about solving problems. Its about architecting abstractions, algorithms and modules. Its about thinking.

Even though I may sometimes write substantial amounts of code in fifteen minutes or half an hour or an hour, an order of magnitude more time has already went into solving the problem in my head. Coding doesn't take much time when all you're doing is copying a solution from your head to the computer.

As an example, I found my first-year CS programming lab exams funny. They forced us to "do it on paper" for the first fifteen minutes, before you were even let touch the computer. Having already been programming for a few years prior, I could have done these assignments in my sleep, so I'd look at the spec for a moment, solve it in my head and sit there dong nothing until we were let use the computers. Then I'd copy'n'paste the solution from my head to the computer and walk out a minute or two later. The problems were easy enough to solve in under fifteen minutes and the "coding" was just dumping text from my head to the editor.

So, yeah, programming is more than typing into an editor. Most of it is done in your head.
I voted for both because as a programmer I sniff out bugs like last night's leftover curry.
While pthreads is indeed a great, simple, and easy to use API, I find it bizarre that it is without a portable timed join. It's functionality that I expected to be in a threading API, and even though it's not too difficult to work around it, it's tarnished my views of it.
Well, we run RailsMentors (http://www.railsmentors.org) for that reason, stop by, sign up, and see if you can find someone to mentor you. It's all volunteer, there to help newcomers get excited about Rails. Doesn't cost you a think, except for your time. Of course, the mentors will expect you to put some effort in, and they won't do your work for you, but the idea is to help people like you get up and running.
I think this judge's decision should be used to instruct people about the difference 'idea' and 'execution.' Nothing like a few billion dollar price tag to make that clear.
Readability is important.

Maintainability (and by corollary readability) is PARAMOUNT.

Post mentioned most programming is string manipulation. Well even more code must be maintained. It is the #2 tool feature / programmer skill. (#1 is being able to get shit done and thus create something needing maintenance).
> Sure, but in another 50 years many of their children will have just as much land through none of their own doing.

Can't people give their wealth to whomever they want (while they are alive or dead)? In a system such as yours (where the state comes and takes all property like a vulture after someone dies) it means that every old person should spend all his money before he dies. He should also stop working (as many old people (at least in my country) spend their lives working for an inheritance for their children).

I guess such a thing such as working to provide for your children and grandchildren is wrong in your books.

Here is another example in my country: many farmers have children and teach their children farming. This is the only skill that some of them can transfer. The children works on his father's farm. If there are two sons the father will try and buy extra land. The children inherit and divide up the farm after the father’s death. You thus get people living generations on the same farm.

In your ideal communist system, the child will lose his home, his father and his job (through the sin of inheritance).

> It's possible life could have been better for everyone if not for inheritance.

If all wealth is divided up after inheritance, the best (evolutionary speaking) strategy would be to have as many children as possible. That way, your offspring can have a larger share of someone else’s inheritance.

The idea of the far left, of trying to steal someone’s property after he dies is pretty reprehensible for me. What is worse is their motivation for it. The idea that an individual’s rights (and property) are subservient to the majority. What you are basically saying is that if something is good for the majority, the minority or individual does not have rights.
This is a gotcha in Lua, too, but there it makes a bit more sense - tables ("dicts", if you prefer) explicitly have a key/value part and an array part - if you have a table with keys 1* to N, it's handled internally as an array (with O(1) lookups), but #, the length operator, explicitly gives you the upper bound for the array portion. In practice, this isn't a big deal, since the very different performance etc. means that they're usually used in very different ways.

It sounds like Javascript has the same downside, but without any upside.

* Yeah, Lua is 1-indexed. Nothing's perfect. Lisp has all those parens, Python has the whitespace thing...you get over it. :)
This provides no new insight or any real insight at all. Of course we don't know what the clarity of the contract is yet. No one is claiming it's clear either. That's the purpose of the courts and a judge.
Do you have a 'how to' for creating Gantt charts with Latex?? I use it for my papers, but pretty much do the charts in excel..
my web 2.0 poetry
it is on my newsfeed
the computer is doing the stalking
if I clicked on your user page
that would be stalking
Ask HN: Best way to find good beta testers?
I've recently created a new site which helps people find bargains online and am currently finding it difficult to find good beta testers.

I have put up a landing page at www.happybuy.com for sign-ups and attempted to find some interested beta testers via appropriate forum postings etc, but am finding the going slow.

Was wondering what other HN users experiences are in regards to finding good beta testers?

What works? What doesn't? Are there any particular sites, communities or strategies you'd recommend for connecting with interested users?

How many beta testers are a good number - for my purposes I'd like a relatively large number to get a good cross-section of opinions and interests.
When I took CS101 (Summer 1993) we actually wrote Pascal code on paper for the exams :-)
Kinda, but no. You can do simple things quickly with Rails. That means you get to the harder things faster. You very quickly discover that you have to learn Ruby if you want to do anything beyond scaffolding. I think that's what he means by being a "productive" Rails programmer.

But a person who has done Rails development for 6-9 months, ad has used Git, and knows how to deploy an application to Heroku... they will really be able to do a lot of cool things very quickly. Just watch what happens in October during the Rails Rumble.
I have found solitude to be what you make of it. That's the point, I suppose -- less external forces impacting you. I've also wasted a lot of time with nothing to show for it and not coming out particularly de-stressed and never got into the re-centering flow. there may be some element of practice to getting the most out of time alone, that will help you to enter that restorative mode. Not much compares to it when you get there, though.
I felt like a small part of humanity died when we lost commercial supersonic transit, as I hate seeing our race lose any kind of technological capability. Though I doubt I'd use it myself, I'm glad to see someone is trying to bring supersonic flight back, and targeted at those who will benefit most: executives whose time costs more than plane tickets.
I would be tempted to agree; I've wanted at times to go and learn C, so I can know what my Ruby is really written in; but there's always more complexity underneath; I could and should learn how computers themselves work, but there will come a time when I will need to, and for now there's only so much time. Put quickly, I'm using a magical black box to type to you right now, and if I started from the beginning, I'd never have the time to use it.
Try working out the amount of code you write in an average day, or week. If you're writing, say 500 lines per hour, for 4 hours a day. At 5 days a week for 50 weeks, you've written 500,000 lines of code in one year.
I do occasionally program stuff, even though that's not what I prefer.
I'm a sysadmin really, and to some extent, I'm sometime a dba, a network admin, a web designer, etc..
how do I call myself something without limiting myself.
Also I'm wondering how much of the HN crowd are more sysadmin than programmer.
I'm not a remarkable programmer by Hacker News standards, but I have experience in what I think is a decent variety of languages. I've done C and assembly; I've done a stack-based language; I've done the popular dynamic imperative languages (Perl, Python, JavaScript, a little Ruby); I've done Lisp and Haskell. Heck, I've even programmed in Visual Basic.

And in all my programming adventures, AppleScript has to be the weirdest, most backward, hardest to figure out language I've ever had the misfortune of using. I think Gruber nails it here -- English and other natural languages are not nearly precise enough to express program text, and the problem is exacerbated when you try to support multiple natural languages simultaneously. Visual Basic may not be a terrific programming language, but at least it's internally consistent.

To quote Einstein, "Everything must be made as simple as possible, and not simpler." AppleScript's designers tried to simplify away the essence of programming, and wound up making scripting much, much harder than it should be.

To anyone out there who needs to script OS X, save yourself a great deal of pain and avoid the temptation of using AppleScript just because it's OS X's "native" scripting language (this is was my mistake). Access OSA through a sane language like Ruby or Python instead.
I do something similar. I actually often spell out code that I want to write while away from a computer. To me it also feels wrong to go through what you call mode A and not have the project working (unless it is in really early stages). So I get the basic structure set up, refactoring 3-10 times in the process, then write a list of features. Each time I get to code I knock put at least one feature and commit to the VC repo. Of course sometimes I add new features so the list gets longer. I know I am wrapping things up when it starts getting shorter (knocking out more features than inventing new ones). It doesn't always work so I end up leaving the code base without the feature completed. If this happens I end up being obsessed with the unfinished feature to the point where I spell out code in my sleep. Good to see that someone else is using this pattern.
Over the last six months, I have been traveling back and forth to beijing for 2.5 months at a time. When in beijing, I don't have a phone, let-a-lone a smart phone. The one thing I have noticed is that I used to go to my phone anytime there was a millisecond of downtime, in line, waiting for a check...

Now, I just sit and watch the world that is around me, and I find the real-world local to me is way more interesting than what is happening on techcrunch, perezhilton...

There is some much information being created and consumed that whether intended to be or not it's really just become entertainment.
I didn't down vote you, but I am guessing that the reason is because this is off topic. You are welcome to make your own thread though!
And then we would not have this conversation :(. My advice is to at least learn about pointers and virtual memory. It will make a lot of sense out of a lot of things and it can serve as a nice foundation to actually jump into C one day.
vaporware alert
I program in C. Also Assembly, I have programmed in CHILL also. Sometimes for fun I call myself a research engineer. When people idly ask me what I do, I tell then I grow flowers.
I think the author got a little too caught up in flickr's cleverness of making an ID based on different information. For instance, the first letter is the post type, then a group of letters is date, and then there is the post number for that day.

The fact is, not many people are going to go devise their own URL shortening algorithm and implement it. While it is a good idea, I just don't think many people will put in that kind of effort.

What might work is a more general algorithm. An algorithm that can reliably shrink and unshrink any URL.

I'm not sure, but this might not be possible considering that many people have invented compression algorithms, and the general rule is that if you compress data, you are going to loose data. (I'd like to hear someone's opinion on that considering I haven't dove deep into compression)

Edit: By 'possible' I mean 'meaningfully possible'. Taking a URL around 50-80 characters and making it around 20-30.
An intelligent attempt to encourage amateurs to avoid speculating about things they know nothing about. As with anything vaguely complex or esoteric, the media talking heads are pretending that they can break down a complicated issue (like contract law) into 30 second talking points and thus end up oversimplifying and misleading the general public.

Fortunately, this sort of issue (esoteric, complex and intractable to 30 second analysis by 24-hour news networks) tends to fade quickly from the headlines, so with any luck, we won't have to endure the idiotic platitudes of news anchors and their paid analysts for much longer.
Nope. I'm a hardware guy, but I found this place to be a great source of good news and reading.

Rather than code, I do machining, CAD, and design control.
I find "remember you <class> 101 course" pretty pointless. Nearly every class I ever took began with simple stuff and then the following years you learnt why that was all wrong, not quite the truth, or how you work around those rules :-)
just install some good games (not Minesweeper) on their workstations, and let them relax that way

How about a game that rewards employees for completing work tasks? Like, for every customer-reported bug triaged or minute of audio transcribed, you get x gold to spend in the game. Maybe even integrate the work tasks into the game, like that old Atari game where you had to send the right meal orders to the right tables -- show categories as buckets, and bugs as falling descriptions. Earn in-game rewards by correctly categorizing bugs faster than the average.

Heck, if someone wants to work on this idea, I'd probably put my current project on hold and join them.
I meant to upvote you, and missed the up arrow. Sorry.
Hold up. Do you really need a Gantt chart? Would a graph built in Excel/Numbers/GDocs be a better solution? Maybe a burn down chart. I have never found Gantt charts all that useful.
No wonder, since by that metric

var r= dice(array,12)
r=slice(r)
r=trim(r)
r=strip(r)

is four times as productive as

var r=strip(trim(slice(dice(array,12))))
HN has threaded comments; you should be able to reply to each one individually. This has the bonus of showing up in the HN user's "threads" page.
The "fate of the Concorde" was a massively stupid design flaw where the engine intake was BEHIND the rear wheels. Looking at one up close it's very easy to see why the thing exploded. The tires blew during take-off (expected to happen on any airline at some point) which sent rubber and metal shrapnel into the engine, causing a catastrophic explosion.

This new design "avoids the fate" simply because the engines are on top of the wings.

Why there's so much regulation behind "wanting to go faster" is mind boggling. The Concorde had some technical flaws, but the plane did a great job at what it was built for: getting people places faster. I hope this plane is able to bring back what we lost.
I taught a high school Java course for three years. One year I decided to give the students an overview the whole stack of what was happening, from the transistors to logic gates to the ALU to machine code to the Java byte code. It was a thoroughly rewarding experience for both me and the students.
To address the potential complaint that source control logs aren't as immediately accessible as source code comments, most editors and IDEs can hook into cvs/svn/git/Perforce, and most source control systems can insert the log into the source directly.
Good summary.

> Why not minimize the front-running problem by making the dates you roll harder to predict? Instead of rolling the front month every month, why not include some basket of CL1 thru CL12 and find opportune times to roll?

While this is being done by some funds, I would think volume is an issue. I'm not very familiar with non-equity futures, so I could be wrong, but typically the front contract is the only one with significant volume for large funds. That is, until the contract gets near expiration, at which point volume slowly creeps up in the next contract.

However, the article mentions that at one point UNO was 86% of the natural gas market for the near contract. To me, it seems almost negligent if you're the fund manager to allow it to swell to that size. No wonder arbitrage funds are popping up to pick them off.

> Once these ETFs got popular, why not invest in some of the storage infrastructure and charge a slightly higher fee but give much better tracking to investors?

From the way the article describes the major banks, it seems like they're already doing something similar to this. I wonder if they offer ETFs with this structure.

The one thing I can't understand is why the CTFC thinks it should be trying to protect these ETFs from getting pre-rolled. There is nothing illegal going on here, it's just dumb, slow-moving fund managers getting taken advantage of by smart, nimble traders. An ETF which poorly tracks its underlying commodity's spot price should simply go out of business because people stop investing in it.
Can you use Dashcode to build web apps that you want to submit to the AppStore?
Finishing with .../electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/ works for first link (although google also shows a much longer link for a python course from the same url)
http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/ works for the second.
Thanks.
Eclipse keeps track of TODO and FIXME comments, and can sync them with a bug database.
Salt (Cryptography) - Not the movie
> anyone who is already using a Windows server

The only commonality is Windows itself. Windows NT on RISC processors has proved to be limiting in that almost no software was available to platforms other than Intel. This means the only functions a Windows on ARM server would be able to handle would be those of Windows itself and the software Microsoft choses to port.

It's kind of a copycat reflex. Apple is investing a lot in ARM, porting a big chunk of their OS to it, so Microsoft is convinced it must do the same, regardless of having a viable product.
Good post, i've been teaching RoR at university of texas over the summer and the videos/slides are all online.

http://www.thinkbohemian.com/

Any feedback is appreciated, as this is a beta class, and i'm writing the material as I go.