skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Course or book to learn Java?
Just starting out in the comp-sci world, and decided I want to learn to build a simple Android application as a first project. I'm giving myself 10 weeks, by the end of which I want to have sufficient Java knowledge to be able to understand the language, and hopefully implement some of it myself. I plan on dedicating myself completely to becoming immersed in the language over the coming weeks, and plan on learning from this book:

"Head First Java" http://www.amazon.ca/Head-First-Java-Kathy-Sierra/dp/0596009208

I wanted to check with you guys if there are any better books for the purpose, or any courses that are open you'd recommend. I'm a complete beginner to the world of programming languages, so need something tailored for that.
I believe the inquiry was to determine whether discrimination against female applicants was starting to happen as a way to redress the male/female imbalance.
Interesting that you compare "a lot of programmers" to "good business people." It is no surprise that the programmers fare poorly in comparison. What do you have to say about Good Programmers? Or A Lot of Business People?

May I attempt to find common ground between our points of view by suggesting that 90% of programmers have this attitude? And that by the same token, 90% of business people are busy demanding flash web site intros and banners that SCREAM without doing the A/B testing or other quantified analysis to know whether they are generating higher conversions?

But your last statement is absolutely spot on: making what we do better is what matters most. Upmod gladly given.
People already do that! The slower-speed versions of a particular chip are either chips that were flawed and had to be clocked down to work around the flaw, or perfectly good chips that have been clocked down to fill demand.

Overclockers have been known to try to clock a "slower" chip to the speed of the high-end ones, and exchange the chip until they get one that works.
And in fact they did, years ago. Lots of block trades go across posit or whatever.
where's tqbf?
This is a very alien worldview to me. Being curious or "hormonally charged" seems normal, but people seriously looking to have sex in college seem to be in the minority. Otherwise, there would be an orgy every weekend, right? Anyway, advertising the sexuality of the women on campus to attract more men frankly makes me feel sick.
I don't think you understand how flash orders work. Flash orders give some 3rd party the opportunity to fill your order. An example: if the best price is $50.00 on INET and $50.01 on ARCA, INET gives some flash trader the opportunity to fill your order at $50.01. In this case, INET receives the commission.

If they decline, your order is routed to ARCA where it is filled at $50.01 (and ARCA receives the commission), and you pay a routing fee.

If you really don't want to be flashed, you can always turn on the "no flash" flag in your orders. But then you run a higher risk of paying routing fees.
It's a hybrid engine. I do my own crawling and indexing in addition to relying on external APIs. For the APIs I use, I've built a lot of relevancy and other logic on top of them so they often don't look the same as if you'd query them directly.

I started out exclusively with my own stuff, and then started using BOSS when it came out so I could focus on what I think are my value-adds. Now I use a bunch of stuff (including my own). My approach is to just be a better search engine. If an API does something awesome, e.g. WolframAlpha or embed.ly, I figure why not use it.
Incredible close-ups of spiders and flys
Flash Cookies and How Can You Stop Them
I don't understand how it can be between 100 and 200. Why the large interval?
MusicBrainz is nice. Thanks for sharing.
Mainly White pages, when I need to find same phone numbers, but for the other stuffs I can think only at very specialized info like publications where google is not a good enough choice.

StackOverflow is a good example for this, I can usually reach what I was searching for in it with from a good google query.
I don't spell PERL, PERL because it's an acronym. I spell it as such because it's that awesome it needs to stand out.
The problem with ORMs is that life is complicated, and data describes life, so data is complicated. And abundant. SQL queries are a relatively elegant way to encode the often complicated manner in which data answers a particular question.

<sarcasm>Gah! You know what I hate about building software? The programming. All those data structures are no fun! Lists and arrays and vectors and hash tables and trees, red-black trees, binary trees, b-trees, tries. Why can't we have a programming language that automagically stores all our information in simple variables and just gives me the answer I want?</sarcasm>
Answering Our Own Questions About Oracle's Social Acquisition Plans
A return to natural building: cob, straw bale, earth, etc
It's easy to redefine the meaning of a term if it's rendered as an acronym.

User Interface Designer = "white space"
User Experience Designer = "mental space"

Now how arbitrary is that? What is it about "Experience" that implies thinking and "Interface" that implies a lack thereof? What about all the designers unfortunate enough to come before the term "UX" was invented? I suppose Jef Raskin was only ever about white space.

Let me suggest an improvement

Mediocre Designer = "white space"
Good Designer = "white space and mental space"
Well, this stupid shit let me see your question which otherwise I would have lost.
Thx. Recently I've made a lot of improvements to #1. Of course, specific examples are always super helpful to improve it further.

#2 varies a lot depending on location and network. Unfortunately I still don't have a lot of geographically distributed servers.
I spend much less time speaking or writing about PERL than I do writing PERL code.

Note, I'm well aware that PERL is not an acronym. I ALWAYS spell it like that because I like to make it pop in my sentences. Frankly, if an employer is turned away by the way I spell PERL then I don't want to work for them.

My work speaks for itself.
I've found this bookmarklet, which threads comments, to be extremely useful:

http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-for-...
That's a Patrick-level post right there. Make it half as long and you can successfully impersonate our bingo card hero. :)
The Future of the Web - A Hypothesis
Will write code that writes code that writes code for money... best examples?
Famous Lisp quote from lispers.org. Does anyone know of some good public/open examples such code? I'd like to read and learn.
Digg’s Decline by the Numbers: Plummeting Traffic, Waning Power
Thanks for sharing. Do you have URLs for the aforementioned White Pages and specialized publications?
Facebook says it is seeking a patent on its own implementation, so apparently not.
was thinking "redis" the whole time.
But this printer doesn't do circuit boards or metals (let alone aloys)

I've seen the pages bout the fabrics that you mentions. They might go down well in the right sort of nightclub, but it's not a "solved problem" - you wouldn't want a blanket, pillow or comfortable but tough jeans made out of that. Though women may want those chunky high-heeled shoes made to custom order, once it can do colours.
The key point: In the world of defending military networks, it takes fighters - not merely techies - to do the job.

All that means is you need someone with domain knowledge. You need someone who can recognize non-technical signs of infiltration, who knows the value of different targets, and who knows the consequences of a particular system being compromised at a particular time. For military work, that means "fighters." The military's mistake, if indeed they're making this mistake, is taking it for granted that the best way to create good leaders and decision-makers is to train military guys in computer security, when they really need to open it up from both sides. Anybody who writes software in business knows that the really effective people who understand the technical and domain ends well enough to coordinate them emerge from both sides of the business, not just from the technical side and not just from the domain side.

P.S. I would be most alarmed by the small size of the Cyber Command, but I assume it's misinformation.
I think it could be argued that formulaic design/experience HELPS long term, if you have some functionality that the user needs.
If your app looks/acts/feels like the rest of the OS or environment, the user will (in theory) learn it faster and use it more fluently.

A 'revolutionary' design may be awesome, and may increase the productivity or ease of use of your specific application, while causing some serious friction between your app and it's environment in the users mind.
For me at least, #2 seems most often to have something to do with fetching the results themselves, rather than the network between me and DDG delaying the initial pageload. The results page will load very quickly (the header/sidebar, sometimes the zero-click results or disambiguation results), but then there's a very noticeable delay before the regular results get AJAX-loaded.

(It is true that the the better DDG is at getting me the zero-click kinds of results, the less of a problem this is.)
I figured if I can't beat 'em, then join 'em. Thanks for the cross post.
Factors Cause Silent Migraines
I prefer Django's ORM but using the ORM can be quite tricky if the database has not been created with the ORM in mind (i.e. you have a few pages of subqueries).
Find someone to command .. Wizard or so and do nothing :)
Unfortunately, that is not really the case yet. Some 3D printers say you can print in metal but what they are really using is the same plastic with metal dust sprinkled in. So while it looks like metal it does not really have the properties you really want in metal, such as strength.

Most of the different materials that 3D printers offer are pretty much the same plastic modified in some way.
The only rational reason to use DDG over Google is that for some reason you are on the extreme end of the paranoia towards Google or any other search engine. That itself is not much of a good argument as there are number of things you can do to make sure that Google doesn't track your search results.

From my point of view there are no compelling reason to use DDG over Bing or Google, the only reason DDG is a HN darling because we like to root for the small guy; lets see it for what it is.

Personally I would love to see a search engine that really gives Google and Bing a run for the money and disrupts the search engine market. Unfortunately DDG doesn't do that.
JS libraries have been in a benchmark war for a while now. This is an attempt at humor from the author of Prototype, a library that some would argue has been overtaken and overshadowed by jQuery.
Theories Mount That Stuxnet Worm Sabotaged Iranian Nuke Facilities
One caveat - WhisperNet. Amazon aren't going to be keen on people buying Kindles, only to use their free cellular bandwidth to read blogs. Amazon have no interest in making hardware, it's just a means to an end, the end in question being the end of the publishing industry.
Spot on. Couldn't have put it better myself.

Oh and the next big thing : Skynet
More structured queries that those that main search engines offer. For example: kayak, travelocity, etc. Bing bought out farecast for this reason. These kinds of queries can't be done easily if the only input a user can provide is in one text box. That isn't to say that web search engines could tackle these areas, but they wouldn't have as much of a head start in the technology.
I can see four different scenarios here:

- local box

- same rack, or at least not further than one hop away on a switch

- same datacenter (multiple switches)

- somewhere on the net

I would expect the first two to give good performance, the third adequate and the fourth too slow to be usable, and unreliable to boot.
How many 'freelancers' are really just temps who would take a permanent job the moment one came along? There's a huge difference between the few true freelancers with the skills and hustle to build an independent career, and the majority of semi-skilled workers bouncing between whatever gigs the temp agency gives them that week. Their biggest concern is getting out of the temporary labor market and into a permanent job with benefits. It's difficult to create solidarity when the number one goal of group members is to eliminate the group.
Ask HN:  Best Fitness Training Tech
Which fitness products (Fitness Watch / Heart Rate / Foot Pod etc) have you used that you would recommend? I am interested in being a bit more systematic about working out and tracking the effect of exercise on health over time. Ideally, the solution would be rugged, able to store/transfer data to a PC for analysis and be reasonably priced - but am willing to hear about compromises in various areas.
We use the freemium model (Paymo time tracking & invoicing http://www.paymo.biz)
it can have the following benefits for your potential business (in no particular order):

1. helps spread the word (lower customer acquistion costs)
2. "free" users are more likely to give you feedback, which will make your app better over time
3. you and your team feel good that you're able to share with the world something for free (just think of how many free apps help you during the day)
4. you can convert free users to paying customers. (in our case the app actually helps the users grow their business)
5. people seem to be willing to try out free apps vs trial apps more often
To give some idea of what is in mind - I was looking at this:
http://www.heartratemonitorsusa.com/garmin-fr60bundle.html

but knowledge is limited to online searches.
Ask HN: "Ruby on Rails Vs. Django". Is Django winning?
I was researching for a blog post and wanted your input, looking at the google trends (http://www.google.com/trends?q=ruby+on+rails%2C+django&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0) the momentum for Rails has drastically come down while interest for Django has been skyrocketing. Can you think of any key drivers for the change?
That's not a bad book. Once you're in to that, you might have a better idea of specific areas of Java you want to explore more (Android, as you say, or other areas) and you can go looking for more specific books in those areas.

Bruce Eckel's "thinking in java" isn't bad either. Might be a bit dated in some sections, but the basics are there. It' a creative commons free book, IIRC.
amazon.com (their focus on products that they sell makes their suggestions almost perfect).
I stopped watching TV. It's boring anyways. I work from about 10-12:30AM. Make sure you program only. Stay away from the web unless searching for help related to coding.

I can't do the early morning thing. I sleep till the last minute before getting ready for my day job.

(you have to love your day job to have energy for evening work)
Digg's decline, IMO, is due more to the efficiencies that have been created centered around URLs as a currency. Digg first became popular because its up/down voting was somewhat novel, and it reached critical mass. It became the place to get fresh URLs. Nowadays, it's nowhere near the monopoly on fresh links it once was. URLs spread like wildfire on any number of social media sites (reddit, google/yahoo buzz, delicious, twitter, etc), and derivatives of them (popurls, alltop, etc).

You no longer need to visit or take part in Digg to reap the rewards of having fresh content delivered to your doorstep everyday.
Really, no query in 4 years? What happens when the business people need some new data view? Do you dump all the data and reduce it via some one off procedure?
Do you think in the future you might exclusively use your own index and not be depended on others?

Let's say hypothetically tomorrow, all the search API you rely on, decides to cut you off, what then? How good is your own index by itself?

Just to be clear, I am not dissing on you, it takes a lot of gutso to take on search engine market alone, I applaud you for that, I don't see myself having that much guts to do it. I am trying to be realist about the meta-hybrid-search engine.
> For instance, Williams College, which admits only 17 percent of applicants, recruits 66 athletes per year. That’s 13 percent of the incoming freshman class that is dedicated to third-rate (literally, as Williams plays Division III sports) athletes over first-rate students.

He's assuming the athletic recruits are not also first-rate students. There are people who are good at both. From the numbers given, they get just under 3000 applicants, and admit just over 500 of them. I'd have no trouble believing that out of 3000 applicants, most of whom are academically qualified, they can find 66 who are also good athletes.
people don't need to search for rails info as much, because they already know what they need and/or go directly to the source? google trends is showing what people are searching for, which isn't necessarily what's being used the most (though likely there's a correlation).
Is this a joke? ;-)

Well, in Italy we have "pagine bianche": ahttp://www.paginebianche.it/index.html

Which is simply the translation of white pages: http://www.whitepages.com/

Regarding specialized pubs, its a long time I don't use one, but this list seems fairly complete:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_databases_and_...
I'd love to know what you think might disrupt as I'm always looking for good ideas, but know that is what I'm trying to do. Our about page tries to explain why you should use it: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html

The most visible things to me are the 0-click info and the less spam. Then there are lots of little things that start to add up, many listed on the goodies page: http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html
DuckDuckGo is absolutely awesome. The only annoyance is that it completely sucks at non-english searches, but for programming related stuff it's really cool.
Facebook believes in its own view of the world a bit too much. Somebody should tell those guys to get a sense of humor and stop making the world so "open".
I didn't clearly see the 'R' part of ORM in his text. Also, the 'M' part may not be necessary.

Any object store could be the solution for his problem. Depending on the requirements, this could be as simple as keeping everything his program needs to store in memory.
You're implying all vulnerabilities are bugs due to coding error.

To take a high-profile recent case: this would do nothing to prevent padding oracle attacks. Or future crypto attacks using techniques unknown to us now. Why? Because the encryption is working as it should. As advertised. As proven. Or imagine you used Rot13 for encryption.

Your DB could hold people's credit cards in clear-text; how will this language prevent that from happening?

Your website has no authorization tools, so you can access others' data by simply going to their URL; this is still a provably-correct logic structure.
It might be good to go beyond your comfort zone and dive into relational theory and practices. Data tend to live way longer than applications. You want to have a language and application agnostic way to store and access data so that different applications in different languages can share the same data. You also can evolve your application platform and languages using the same data over time. Want to re-write your app in C# instead of Ruby? No problem. The data and access method stay the same.

Of course if you are just building throw-away prototype or single usage app, you don't have to use RDBMS. Use object serialization, persistent hashtable, or OODBMS. Those tend to mesh well with the language you are using.
Clearly you have never needed to do anything remotely complex with a database. There is a reason visual programing languages aren't successful outside of a few extremely simple domains.
Hey, someone has to stick up for the lolcats!

I'm only half joking when I tell people that computers were invented so that my wife and her family and I can sit around drinking margaritas and watching Jan Terri videos on YouTube...
Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: you understand it better, but the frog dies in the process. Mark Twain
Ning is one prefect example. They gained lot of popularity with the freemium model but weren't able to cope up ultimately.

Ning did get into the bad books of many when they pulled the plug and asked all existing customers to either pay or leave.

Adding to what someone pointed out, the value depends on cost involved per free user and also if it is worth it in the long run.
I don't get it. Queries are a precise, textual specification of the data you need from a database. How can you hate that?

Perhaps what you mean is you hate dealing with converting the results to the data types you will use in your application?

Perhaps what you mean is you hate the administrative overhead of creating separate files and dealing with deployment when creating stored procedures?

Perhaps what you mean is you hate properly inserting your native data types into a written SQL query in a secure way?

Or do you actually hate writing SQL? To me, that's the best part of interacting with databases.
I can't speak to the GP, but I can say I've written a few systems ('moderate' in size, with a growing dataset) and was able to do the first pass and go for 6 months or so without needing to write any SQL. I ended up writing some because some reports needed to be run fast. The ORM was working, but doing more than it needed to, and it was easier to just write the SQL in that case than it was to try to figure out how to express the use cases in the ORM (GORM/Grails, using Hibernate under the hood).

I can't say I never write queries, but on the few Grails projects I've worked on over the past 18 months or so, I've probably needed to write fewer than 15 queries total.
Another way is to pick a top-notch library or framework in your target language, and learn to use that. For Clojure, I'd try making some clever charts with Incanter:

http://incanter.org/

(Incidentally, the only new language I've been able to stick with after learning Python is R, because it solves completely different problems. Which means R is now my Blub for stuff that I'd like to, given some free time, try with Clojure/Incanter...)
Ask HN: Best way to sell a small web app?
I setup http://FeedmailPro.com about a year ago. It's a freemium product that I built to meet my own needs.

The site is now being used by about 700 blogs, only about 20 of them are paying $10/month which covers hosting costs but isn't much money otherwise.

The site has the potential to be bigger, but I don't currently have time to work on it as I'm working full time at a y-combinator startup and FeedmailPro is just a side project. And I don't want to just leave support requests unanswered and stop maintaining the site as a good number of people are using it now.

So I'm not sure what I should do. Could the site be sold or donated to someone else? If so where would I list it for sale and how could I find someone trustworthy to take it over? I could just close up shop but it is being used by a number of people now who have come to depend on it. Merging the service into someone bigger like MailChimp would be another option if I could get a meeting with those folks and they were interested.

Any ideas?