skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Programmers come from all kinds of backgrounds. Some are still in high school (no college). Some dropped out from college (no degree). Some went to college, but for something completely unrelated to programming (me).

Would I be a better programmer if I had studied it in school? Almost certainly. But I tried taking a CS class, and it was so dry, so inapplicable, and so poorly taught (or, granted, I might not have been the best student), that I walked away from it thinking that programming was nothing I wanted to be associated with, ever. Instead, I got into front-end development. In time, I realized that to execute on the ideas that I had, I'd need to learn web programming — something my school didn't teach. SO, over time, I taught myself.

To sum up: If his friend is excited about getting started programming, I wouldn't steer her towards getting a CS degree any more than I'd steer someone interested in music towards getting a music degree, someone interested in running to a kinesiology degree, or someone interested in writing to getting an English degree. People have interests and passions, and they should explore them outside of institutional structures like universities.
Thank you for the answer.

Did you ever do or would it be possible for you to do a benchmark on relatively large corpus of how fast can you count, say 10 million words? Or 100 million?

I'm really curious about how well does this method work relatively to usual map-reduce on clusters. For comparison: single home PC does about 2.5 million word counts per minute using local files and mergesort instead of network.

This is why I asked - 300 words per minute using using 6.5 million randomly available nodes vs 2.5 million words per minute using one home node - that looks like a huge waste. Would it be possible to do more fair comparison?
I have never heard of him. I will check out some of his work. Thanks.
Psychology Essay About Human Behavior And Mind
Students following medical and psychology courses are required to compile a psychological report on patient. There are many ways and methodologies to compile a psychology report. This short article explains the importance of psychological reports.
OK, well that's not really true either. To say that there is no cross over from MSR to product development is incorrect. I know for a fact that SQL server has been inspired by MSR and vice versa.
Interesting etymology of alarm - reminds me of the English "Mayday!" from the French "M'Aider!" (Help me!)
Spreading Hayek, Spurning Keynes
While watching YouTube video - my CPU load from browser is about 15-20%, that means YouTube player "steals" up to 400 million CPU cycles each second!..

There's nothing to worry about.
So this is something like Einztein or Academic Earth - but not for courses but for papers/publications, as far as I can get it.

Deserves a bookmark, even if it requires Silverlight for rendering certain components of the page ( "To view the trends of publication and citation, you need Microsoft Silverlight." ).
I always preferred ATI; GeForce was always more expensive for the equivalent (at least when I was keeping up on PC gaming) model and it had a wholly painful user interface, and it still does. ATI's user interface was always simplistic, and most of all 95% of what you needed to do could simply be done through the windows interface to begin with.

I think ATI started going down hill when AMD took over. It's strange that a fairly on-par brand name managed to go to a solidly second place when the second place CPU manufacturer purchased them.
In my thesis writing days I used to copy each revised version on a CD.
Cray Y-MP Specs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_Y-MP
Indeed. I have started using Dropbox very recently, I am still not used to it. When I'm back home I'll just copy all there, it is just a simple drag and drop! Thanks for reminding me!
I think you misunderstand. I didn't downvote you because your comment contained no concrete information. I downvoted you because I couldn't work out what you were saying, and there was no concrete information (in either interpretation (to me)). Sarcasm doesn't convey well in the written medium, especially when there are multiple cultures in the readership.

You complain about an assertion without support, and then you appear (to me) to do the same.

It's the "double whammy". If you make a bald assertion without support then - if I care - I'll ask for your reasons and evidence, but I won't downvote for that alone.

You said:

> I gave a lot more information, expressing my
> opinion on why that comment is far from the truth.

Not as far as I can tell. You may think you explained, but to me, without your obviously extensive knowledge and experience, you didn't.

You say:

> I did mention a specific part of both frameworks,

That wasn't clear to me at all.

If you had said something like:

> I disagree - consider component/feature X. It seems
> to me that Django is *way* ahead in that regard, and
> for some applications that's far more important.

... then you'd've got an instant up-vote for me. Useful, direct and concrete information without confrontation.

I hope that makes it clearer. You may disagree with that policy, but it's what I've gravitated to after some years of being here.
Nice work - can you give us some data on how it is?
I learned this lesson with a lousy floppy on my C64 in 5th grade. I still remember the awful sound of the 1541 struggling to read that lost file into "Paperback Writer".

It haunts my dreams and reminds me to always back up, always.
Thanks a bunch for posting it.

Very good advice, absolutely relevant and true, and he says it so well.

Personally for me, it was very reinforcing to my current beliefs.

Now the challenge is to keep living those beliefs! now, that's intimidating :)
It's just ingrained primitive instinct; and quite simple psychology really. The social "cost" of a Mans death is much much lower than a Womans.

Loss of 80% of the male population could be recovered fairly quickly, but loss of 80% of the females would be devastating for generations.
The majority of technical people I know don't back up stuff either, even stuff that is important.

Why that is, I have not idea.
dropbox anyone?
Bold words. I can guarantee that encoding issues will prevail. They may be of another sort, but they will never go away magically.
New frontiers in social networking: the NeuroPhone
Every personally important file I have lives in Dropbox (I'd be fucked if this went bad; most recently, Missouri tried to get $30K in bogus taxes from me that I was able to fend off with a copy of my 2004 tax return). My music is synced with SugarSnyc (irritating but not critical to replace since I only buy physical media).

I honestly don't get why everyone doesn't do something similar. And if you're truly paranoid, there's Tarsnap.
oh look! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_arts_sake
Very impressive. Haven't heard about Django Dash before. As such it took me a few minutes to understand what's going on. Had to scroll down to read what the site is all about.
It's still really complicated to do backups. Except perhaps with time machine (the external box that is connected via WiFi). I recommended the Time Capsule to a friend with a Mac, but she considered it too expensive at the time. Why there are no competing products for other OS is beyond me.

I also still have backups for my home networks on my TODO list... Most work is duplicated on Servers (email, git), but music and photos are still endangered.
When I studied they had some small coursework you had to do in the first few weeks to indicate you understood what plagiarism was so there were no excuses if you got busted. Perhaps something similar for backups would be good.

I lost data on the weekend whilst trying to resolve differences between directories on machines. I was using meld (at 2 o'clock in the morning) and clicked 'delete' on a selection when I meant to click 'right'.* Spent several hours after that scanning sda1 for byte segments resembling the beginning of xlsx files (no luck). Serves me right for using dumb binary formats that don't lend themselves to diff-based source control.

* Brilliant the way the app places those buttons right next to one another.
Yeah, I don't think of programming as an art, but a craft, so that's why I have the point of view I do.

There are tons of projects that will never go anywhere, done just for learning or as neat hacks, but why ensure that one won't?
If you refactor you should always retest. I've lost track of the number of times things have been broken by someone tweaking things to make them better.
I'm PHP all the way usually and I get a LOT of flak for that, but it works out fine for me and, given the exodus to Ruby/Python over the past few years, I'm picking up a load of work that people are finally realising they can't hand off to that schoolkid for $50. It would take a lot more than comparable or merely better tools for me to make the jump.

If you want a bad analogy (and I KNOW you do!), I want a VHS->DVD jump rather than DVD->Blu ray else it's just not worth my while.
thanks for your comment, made many things clear.
Flow chart: How to find out which things to throw out
That's not the point. These are the kind of projects programmers do for fun. Your comments is like saying "if this guy didn't go the zoo, but rather spent his day at work, he at least might have been productive". Now, I can imagine you wouldn't enjoy watching somebody else's pictures of zoo animals, unless you were very interested in zoo animals, like, say, some people are interested in compiler technology and/or esoteric languages. Because Brainfuck is an insanely simple language to compile/interpret it's actually makes for a nice small example!
But does it scale? Once you get beggars knowing they can get free money like this, how much do their attitudes change? How many people start to scam the new system? Does the scamming effectively prevent it from helping people who actually need it?

And as pointed out in other comments, many 'homeless' are homeless by choice, not because they can't get one. Some beggars aren't even homeless... They just choose to ask for money instead of earning it.

It's very difficult to make a system work properly when all humans are involved.
Cloud is not Rocket Science but it is Computer Science
Is this better at anything than http://scholar.google.com? I find it inferior: it's slower and I can't filter by time. Search results seem similar.
Federation would allow interoperability with other services. A user on Skype could communicate with users on other networks, such as Google Talk/Voice. Basically, freedom from being locked into a single service provider.
I did a small language for fun: http://www.hecl.org

And it has actually turned out to be useful, besides being a lot of fun to work on.

I am not saying fun projects need to be useful (I'd be the last one to say that), I'm saying "why ensure they'll never be useful?".

Here's another language that is a 'fun project' that, who knows, might be quite useful some day:

http://wiki.reia-lang.org/wiki/Reia_Programming_Language

Edit and the classic "hobby project":

> "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

Once again, by not tying a rock to his leg, it eventually went on to be just a bit more important than a hobby project.
Cisco Rumored to Make Offer for Skype
Run add for Carbonite, Time Machine, any backup service here. Something that's that important, you don't take a backup of some kind every now and then?
Don't dismiss the oft-maligned joys of idleness. You might not get much time to do it later!
Whole article, single page:

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/29/how-obama-got-rolled-by-w...
Google Acquires Angstro, a Social Networking Aid
Here's another distributed client-side computing framework -> http://github.com/revis/Really-Cloudy/

It hasn't been touched since december '09, but it looks neat too.
IPhone sales numbers (for trivia game QuizQuizQuiz) ‘US-eh?
Or to put it in a car analogy:

If we hadn't reinvented the wheel, we'd be using stone tires.

Reinventing is not always a mistake... And sometimes you have to make a lot of mistakes to make progress.
It's not just Obama - look at RBS (84% owned by UK taxpayers after their bailout):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/feb/25/bonus-rbs-ban...

Part of me understand the reasons for it - they need to keep the banks as going concerns so we can sell them off again. But I fear that may be establishing a precedent for bailing out the "too big to fail" banks periodically.
I'm assuming you've been downvoted because slightly more than 50% of HNers think of this project as an artistic/fun project.

But the fact is, even a purely artistic/fun project will have some creativity or originality in it. I would consider a toy language or Brainf__k written for the first time as artistic.

But this project is just a JIT for Brainf__k, there's no creativity in it, and all it did was give the author some experience writing JITs. In that sense this is an exercise project, and IMO exercise projects do not belong to HN.
The owner of my company is a only few years younger than me and that feels -weird-.

I suppose that when I'm 50, it won't feel quite as weird to work for people younger than me, but the bigger the gap, the weirder it's going to feel.
A Hit Song on YouTube, Unnameable on the Radio
My wife just finished a thesis - that was in Carbonite, a hosted SVN repo and dropbox.
I'm not saying this haphazardly or even negatively. I'm not one to ever jump on the "bash Jason" train because I think that he is a smart guy working hard to figure out how to be successful.

However, one of his core strengths is talking. He knows what to say and when to say it and how in order to attract people. He is using this issue as a platform to reach his existing audience while attracting new people.

I'm not saying that he's right OR wrong about the issue itself. What I'm saying is that he uses topics like this as a platform to further his own influence. The proof is in the pudding... this is a hot story on HN and hundreds of new potential viewers have checked out the clip and likely the entire show.
Mail the document your own email... Don't need a techie friend or some whacky sync service.
Seaswarm: we can clean up the Gulf in a month
I always knew that I should keep backup(s), but I didn't get backup religion either until the first time I had a hard disk crash on me and lose everything. Unfortunately, that may be what it takes to get most folks into the habit.
This is an awesome project to look at to learn how to write a JIT. BF is simple enough that it's easy to see what's going on.

Learning is silly and useless?
s/water/beer/g and get the exactly opposite effect. ^_^
I really like web.py. It's small, lightweight, does exactly what you need it to do and then gets out of the way.
> Learning is silly and useless?

Yes, that's precisely what I said, isn't it.
Uh. Awesome. Best thing on the net in ages.

Feature request:

1) Leaderboard (all scores periodically reset? countdown to reset?)
2) Top scorers colour-coded.
3) Ability for my fellow pixels to hear me swearing at the top of my lungs at them.
That's sort of like "problems in space elevator design" or "problems in cryogenic preservation of near-death human beings." It's a field so advanced and hard that it's a barrel of fish when it comes to open problems.
That would be the Abel prize. Although I wouldn't call it a better or worse prize. The two awards simply have different goals they want to recognize. Abel is more of lifetime achievement award and Fields is more of a recognition of brilliant younger mathematicians and an encouragement to go on to greater things.
Samsung: 1 million Galaxy S smartphones in 45 days in the US
This is alarmingly addictive. Only problem was it took me about a minute to figure out my browser window was too small to see the target shape, so I had almost no idea what was going on. Still, incredibly cool.
Sabateours spring to mind. They stay in place right til the end and then move one pixel away. Aaaaaargh!
Free Software is not free
A minimalist's guide to using Twitter simply, productively, and funly
I'm the opposite. There are entire UI concepts that only exist inside ATI's config GUIs. I had to research to find out how to disable HDMI overscan in Catalyst Control Center - it's there but there are buttons that aren't drawn as buttons.
Yeah, no chat. Simplicity is good here.
Excellent idea which I had planned to eventually execute myself some time.

- I'd be more comfortable with forwarding on emails that contain bills than allowing you access to my login info, however you've done a good job projecting trustworthiness

- You don't explain what's going to happen when I answer 'no' to 'Do you have an online account?' - are you going to setup the online account for me?

- Under 'My Billers' I don't see a status indicator, i.e. I'd like to know if you have already successfully logged on to that biller. At the moment I can't tell if you couldn't logon successfully, or if it's just that there are no bills (in fact there are bills, but it hasn't retrieved any of them [airtricity] - I had to double check my login details - but an indicator saying that the login details were ok would've saved me from doing that).

- Adding a biller for the first time (in the wizard) is easier than adding one subsequently (where info is hidden within multiple dropdowns). You should design the wizard to also be used after you sign up.

Further development:

- You should probably start with at least 2 countries, otherwise you might get stuck in the (relatively small) Irish market.

- I'd like to be able to forward on all business invoices to you and have them categorised according to my preference e.g. hosting, transport etc.

- Leading to: automate the process of filing and paying my VAT returns - I would pay for this service.
Fish Oil Blog
Learn the Benefits of Omega 3 Fish Oils. See how it compares to Krill Oil and Cod Liver Oil.
One a remote desktop control tool, the other's a phone call app.
Best low-tech solution I've found. No hand-holding and scary software needed. Send an email once or twice a day and you have instant offsite versioned backup. For added security CC it to a couple of different accounts (for example both gmail and university account).
this kind of story is always a wake up call to hurry up and save/backup your data... the least you can do is send yourself a copy of the *.docx at for example gmail.
There was a recent quote from Zuckerberg to the effect of: "We know this but people don't want to create lists."

True. But I think there's too much emphasis on that last "s" in "lists".

I really just want two lists. One list of acquaintances, work colleagues, people I randomly met, and friends of old.

The other list is my "in" list. Those are people (who overlap with some of the above) that I trust and that I'm OK sharing personal information with.

But- just looking at a "friend"'s FB profile shouldn't allow me to know that's what I'm looking at. This eases the social tension that could result from someone not being on your "in" list.

The "in" list, if integrated, would be easy to maintain and create(FB could probably get it 75% right without me doing a thing).

Even with 1000+ friends and having had Facebook for 6 years now, I don't need/want twenty lists with five adjustable settings, etc. Just those that can see those drunken tutu pictures and those that can't.
It's a tough one though. They need to ignore some random pixels but then again making a giant block shape is a loophole. Maybe calculate match as a percentage of the pixels that would be blank? Dunno. Tricky but doable :)
makes sense, otherwise skype or whoever buys skype can give tough competition to Cisco's Webex.
Mom's smoking habits disturbs babies nappy pattern
Of course, this was all obvious at the time (check the comments at Calculated Risk at those times), but a major outlet like Newsweek can only report on it now, when all the loot's already walked.
The chart Wired provides is nice, but doesn't really tell the full story. It doesn't tell the story they're writing, and it doesn't give enough information to really work out what's going on.

Looking at that chart, I do not see an increase in direct services traffic, such as the facebook apps they mention in the articles. I see an increase in Video traffic, specifically, eating up the other services. This is not the same thing. We need more information, anyway: is this video direct streaming? Is it video accessed over web sites like youtube? If the latter is the case, does it really count as a separate category? Why put services and types of content on the same graph, anyway?

It also doesn't tell the whole story. I'd like to see a similar chart of total data transfer. Obviously the total amount of Internet data transfer has skyrocketed over the same period, and we already know the way the proportions work out... But for all we know, web usage is growing in absolute terms. Maybe it's not growing as fast as video-specific web traffic, but it's still growing. Besides, technology to effectively store and transmit video in place in websites is relatively new. It should be no surprise that it's piece of the Internet pie is still growing!

Overall; kind of bullshit. I like the idea that non-http services are taking over the Internet, but the numbers Wired presents don't validate that one way or the other.
The Unica Story: Yuchun Lee’s Journey from MIT Blackjack Team to IBM Acquisition
I keep all my stuff in .txt files, stored in dropbox. I name them as "Java - blahblah.txt" or "CSS - blahblah.txt"

For searching inside notes, I use agentransack. I find this more efficient and simple.
I think your 'a committee approved this book' bit is completely wrong. I have seen a TON of really, really bad books that got published through large publishers. I've also ready really, really good books that got rejected for them.

Publishers don't publish what they think is good. They publish what they think will -sell-. It's quite a bit different.
It's the same as carpentry and sculpting. It's the same thing, but one is a craft and the other is an art. This guy just took time off making furniture to build a sculpture.

Sure, he could have made a new kind of furniture, but making sculptures also has its merits (or not, depending on your viewpoint, I guess).
The bits that resonated with me were the references to "courage", i.e. overcoming one's fears in order to do that which would make oneself happier, more fulfilled etc. When I think of "regrets", I think of this wish that I'd overcome more of my own fears of other people's reactions, fear that the universe would not somehow provide at some minimum level etc. in order to try to follow my own dreams and passions.

At least if you try and things don't work out, you won't regret never having made the effort to seize the opportunity.
Does HN censor the "fuck" in "Brainfuck", or was it just you?

EDIT: Ah, it doesn't.
Introducing fise, the Open Source RESTful Semantic Engine
I'm not a designer, but 2 weeks doesn't sound like much time for a designer to really do a good job. Especially since you probably won't hire them this minute, so they've actually got quite a bit less than 2 weeks to do anything.
Unpacking the Global Human Egg Trade
Those aren't saboteurs… I believe scoring is done on the client side so they got the point and are rushing to do the next shape.

They either need to do scoring server side, or there needs to be some sort of locking.
I can't believe people are still arguing about this. Wired made some bullshit graph, whatever, why do we need to prove them wrong? They have their opinion, and it's not going to kill the web itself, so let's just leave it at that.

This is precisely the reason why Wired wrote that article: They knew it would get them publicity, and that's what the "X is DEAD" articles are for. Just trolling.