skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is attacking a straw man in which programming is equivalent to writing compilers.

The reality is that almost all of the sciences (and even some of the social sciences) have come to the point where you need to be able to program. Any data-driven field will require you to do data analysis. A decade ago you would need to know math, today you need to know math, and R. This is not the same as writing a compiler, but it is programming. And that's the best case scenario. In many fields, like genomics and ecology, the programming tasks become much more complex.

And that's just the sciences. The business world is also increasingly data-driven, and with increasing amounts of data there's increasing amounts of coding involved. Sure, not every field requires an understanding of programming, but not every field requires an understanding of history, and it's still taught year after year.
This is exactly what I think. I often rant about how everybody needs to learn to program, but what I mean is not so much being able to write code in a specific language as the mindset of approaching problems, and having an understanding of how a computer works. Today programmers are in a sense the gatekeepers of information and I don't think that's healthy in the long term.

There are several layers to this. In general, I think people older than ~50 approach computers in a totally different way than people younger than ~20, with us in the middle a little spread out. A good friend's father, for instance, used to hit Space in his word processor to center headings. He didn't do this because he didn't find the button for center alignment, he did it because he didn't think to look for it.

Another dad recently bought a new Android phone. He was studying the rather thick manual carefully, while his 10 year old daughter grabbed the phone, snapped a picture and just started using it. Startled, her father asked her how she knew all this stuff, to which she replied that she didn't know how to do it beforehand, she just did what seemed reasonable.

It might be a stretch, but I think that programming is on the same range of using computers (tools in general? I don't know) in this way. Solving problems is basically trying what seems most reasonable first. A well defined API is usable without even consulting the documentation.

I definitely think that teaching basic programming and computer science to everybody would be a huge win to society.

Sometimes I think of myself as a literate monk in medieval times. I imagine that lots of people would request their services, friends and family needing help with writing and reading. This is also one of the biggest reasons for my wanting more people to learn how to program: It's purely selfish, I get awfully stressed by having people come to me with ideas they can't implement, trying to make me do it for them.

I'm sure a lot of people here have similar experiences.
I believe in gradual change. Ending the extrajudicial punishment of children is not such a big step, because it entails only a small extension of human status (having already incorporated women, slaves, foreigners, etc.)

I doubt that judicial punishment of strangers is going to end anytime soon, but note how different that is to punishing a family member.

However, now you mention it, there is an interesting similarity. Why does punishment happen? Not for the reasons most people think. For instance, it doesn't (and can't) transmit moral knowledge from the punisher to the punished. Neither does it reliably cause obedience.

In reality, society punishes criminals in order to prevent greater suffering in the form of larger scale rioting and madness.

Similarly, parents punish children to prevent themselves from going mad. But if knowledge spread of how to be a better and happier parent then this sort of punishment would end.

Such knowledge may already exist in basic form:

http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/introductory_articles...
I bet a good percentage of that 50% are bots using the IE user-agent.
Appleseed is the farthest along:

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org
Pakistan's deadly robots in the sky
Yep, we are fairly UK-centric. I should have mentioned that.
You make a good point, I consume all my television via streaming services, too. It's possible that the adverts are different for that compared to broadcast TV. A cursory web search for Chrome TV ads does appear to confirm they're broadcasting them though.
Good idea. Actually, the software is at a state where I could start giving out beta keys to a few other companies and get their feedback.

Also, I would get the added benefit of learning how multiple companies in the same market operate.

I totally get your comment about domain knowledge being critical. And, I have learned quite a bit about how this market works. But, at the end of the day, I'm not going to know nearly anything about, say, being a mechanic than an actual mechanic with 10 years of experience will know.

This is what I'm trying to tap in to here. I get the benefit of domain knowledge in an area I know nothing about and get to write software for that market.

I just don't think I'll ever get to the stage where I know as much as these guys, especially since I'm not doing the actual work.
Fantastic post, and this is something I constantly struggle with. I spend way too much time in my head, planning out the "perfect" strategy, and missing lots of little opportunities along the way. I worry too much that things aren't scalable, and in doing so miss the unscalable things along the way that would get hundreds or thousands of new eyeballs on the project. I'm doing better, but it's refreshing to hear that someone who was like this was able to change.
I generally dislike those kind of links. Unless you watch your status bar (given that it's turned on and your browser supports this feature), you don't know what's going to happen. Whereas if you manually option-click/middle-click, you've got a behavior that you can count on (also, quite often you want open in background anyway).
Yes, NLP is still a tough nut to crack.

The flip side is that if you type just 'hamburger' into maps.google.com, you'll likely get a map of all the hamburger stands near your present location (based on either GPS or your IP address).

I'd argue that this is pretty damn smart, and it is way ahead of where we were 10 years ago.
How can they give out free ones without coming up with a price? You cannot develop a commercial product without knowing how much it will cost.
IPad’s Climb Up the Disruptive Innovation Cycle
My first inclination is that it's the influx of Digg users causing the lower returns, however, I don't know if that holds water.

Digg is notorious for providing low-quality traffic, but that the volume is going down doesn't make sense in that regard, as more users should equal more volume, even if the quality of the volume is lower traffic, it should still be up.

This leads me to question whether or not the new Digg users are replacing Reddit users.

Of course, it could also just be to a lower quality campaign, or perhaps ad-blindness as the users have become more used to seeing the ad on Reddit's site? Another possible explanation would be the rise of Adblock amongst Reddit users, of course, but I don't think that number scales enough to be the proper explanation.

I'd love to hear from other Reddit advertisers to see if this is isolated or more widespread.
Why exactly would that destroy small companies or individual inventors?
Nevermind, turns out I did get accepted, but the email got eaten by my spam folder. This is the first time I've lost an important email to the spam folder - kinda scary, particularly when you realize there's 1500 threads of spam in there...
Surely this must be a sign from the gods of Silicon Heaven.
A Postmortem Analysis of Standout Jobs
If you could build a cold fusion reactor (and let's say you get only one patent from it), wouldn't people be begging for you to build it? If you could turn your patent into VC funding, had proven it in the lab, and were actively seeking investors for it, then yes you deserve the patent.

If you can't do any of those things, is the patent worth anything? Maybe it's cost prohibitive - maybe, in that instance it would be better to turn over the idea to humanity - maybe someone can run with it and make a commercially viable idea for $500,000,000, instead.

This is a bit of a strawman's argument - something this revolutionary would involve a thousand incremental steps, along with a thousand potential revenue streams along the way. If you can't produce a viable business from the idea, aside from the patent itself, is the idea really that revolutionary to begin with?
If 60% of their customers want to participate on a regular basis then that's more than enough to build a billion dollar business. I don't see where the scandal is.
Jason Calacanis's Revenge: A new editorial project to rival TechCrunch
Yeah, I don't get it either :/ What was it?
Very good account name. Twitter is the pimp and the advertisers are the Johns. Google and FaceBook are pimps too.
Really don't like that I searched for something, found a link, clicked on it, and had the whole thing loaded into an iframe that I couldn't make go away easily.
What actually makes it an HTML5 Library vs just another framework? I saw there are some libraries included for websockets, anything else?
A customer who takes a common deal on Groupon is highly unlikely to go back to a business. At least here in the UK, Groupon's deals are all the same - restaurants, teeth whitening, facials (it just doesn't seem right typing that) and haircuts.

I can guarantee that there's going to be a teeth whitening deal every week - so why would I ever go back to a dentist and pay full price? Long term, these businesses are damaging their markets and industries. You'll struggle to build a business from fickle, deal-hunting customers.

That said, with things that are unusual I think Groupon is a good solution - a canoe trip, or climbing wall for example. There's less competition and it's a great way for people to try something that they might grow to love. But restaurants - come on!

It's like the reverse of a loyalty card - come again and we'll charge you double.
It's sort of on the back burner, but when I get a phone, I'll probably do more hacking on the Hecl port to Android: http://www.hecl.org
I disagree.

In economies which are predominantly Services
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_sector...

the life expectancy is better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expec...
I think this will change. As the promiscuity of personal data rockets, it will start to impact visibly on people's lives, and they will start caring. </ball type="crystal">
At first the only thing I saw driving it was an overhyped distrust for Facebook and an overestimated 'hands-on' group of super-users. But another context occurred to me recently, which is that institutions like churches could probably make great use of Diaspora. There you have the degree of trust necessary and an already proactive community - I can see them getting all hip and getting the youngsters to run a Diaspora server for the church. The key is marketing it to the right communities/institutions in my opinion.
The Kerela Conundrum
I loved this post. Absolutely loved it.

Gabriel, I'm interested to know how responding to micro opportunities affect your working schedule? That is: how do you deal with and respond to these kinds of events, and still get work done?

The fact that it's just you doing all this amazes me. And I can't help but think - to another person, these 'micro opportunities' may seem like 'distractions'.
The key differences I see are:

* Groupon takes a large cut of the coupon purchase cost - up to 100% if Posies Cafe is to be believed. So it's more like a 80-100% off coupon as far as the shop is concerned.

* All income is realized up front. Costs of the promotion are going to be known 100% and quickly after the "coupon" is printed. The actual impact of that could be spread over a long period of time.

* People feel obligated to use the coupon because they paid money for it. I'm sure the redemption rate is a lot higher on Groupons - it feels like an awesome deal when you buy, it has the urgency of time running out so people are more likely to buy if they are on the fence, and then they want to spend the bought coupon, because otherwise it's lost money.

If you can get around the (allegedly) absurd Groupon cut (which it looks like you can with negotiation), and you can price your discount so that you break even, Groupon could be a great way to drive business. The only thing Groupon is doing that seems even slightly "evil" is the high cut, but any business owner should look at that and make a decision based on the numbers and either negotiate a better cut or walk away.

But while Groupon might be a great way to drive business, I'm not convinced it's a good way to drive GOOD business for all businesses. The site draws extreme bargain hunters, and those are the sort of people that are not going to be loyal and aren't likely to come back without a coupon.

So I'd say that the blame is even more on the business owners if a Groupon goes wrong. The fact they know their total maximum liability before they even start the process makes this even better than a newspaper coupon campaign. With the tools they have at their disposal (not doing the groupon, negotiating the cut, setting a max number of sales), they are to blame if they lose money on the deal.

It sounds like (from the article) that most companies manage that aspect ok, they just don't realize how bad a set of customers they are going to get out of Groupon. That's purely the numbers influencing them into running the campaign, but if they broke even, then so be it. They can just mark it as a lesson learned and move on.
Great guide. It tells me how. Is there a similar document that tells me why?

The main thing I can think of is kqueue, but I'd love to see a list of all the features BSD gives me but linux doesn't (and vice versa).
Groupon takes a far larger cut than the local newspaper would.
I got most of my contract work via networking in the local tech scene using twitter and going to a couple of events, and just generally jumping at random opportunities. Replying to local people who are urgently looking for a small job to be done is by far the easiest route to get yourself out there. Once you gain a reputation of being good at what you do, people will start referring you work.

For what it's worth, I'm fairly introverted, and talking to random people isn't all that easy for me, yet I seem to have managed just fine[1]. All I did was talk to people what they were working on, what I did, and random techy banter. The idea is to make people remember you when they need stuff done, not sell yourself right there and then. This probably only works for techy customers, if you're designing web sites for random businesses you might want to use a different strategy.

[1] I'm offered far more work than I could possibly accept 2 1/2 years later, rates increasing steadily, and I don't even have a website.
The Revolutionary Rapper who Reasons
drop me a line. email in profile
It's very different. When was the last time you cut off a coupon from your local newspaper (I don't even know the name of mine -> Google -> Oh, it's Daily Herald, cool!), saved it in your wallet and used it in the store a couple of days later?

Groupon's difference is: (i) it's on the internet, fueled with great publicity it has generated (ii) the brilliant social aspect of the groupon system and (iii) the deal is instantly bought now, not later. So it's not a coupon at all but a web-based deal.

Groupon is very good at creating hoards of customers; what it lacks, I think, is the consultation that should be provided to businesses about how to limit and handle the crowd. Even gap.com had a rough day when Groupon unleashed a national campaign recently.
AdWords ?
considering the story itself is debatable and, in my opinion the consequence of unprepared owners, the 60% stat is actually what I found most interesting (given that they've repeatedly thrown around the 97% number, which is staggering)
BoA is holding my online bank accounts hostage
"It smacks of a desperate attempt to jump on the trend-wagon and less of a well-thought out marketing move and that is the real crux of the problem."

I wouldn't be so quick to judge if I were the writer. This will just be one of many discoveries as this type of business grows and gains in popularity, and I have no doubt they will learn and react with their best judgment.
(Google) Wave Protocol Summit
Heck yea! I was looking for something like this a couple of months ago.

Feature request: built-in ftp/sftp with upload-on-save option.
It's judgements like this that stop cell phone makers deciding that it's cheaper to just copy our inventions than pay us a licence fee.

When they "copy" your "inventions", are they actually reading your patents and building exactly the same thing? Or are they solving the problem in a way that is straightforward for skilled engineers, thereby producing a design that resembles yours even though they've never seen it? If it's the latter, and you're suing them for it, then yes, you're working for a patent troll.
I'm a physical goods retailer and I'd like to point out a bit of group-think on HN's part. 3 months ago, I asked you guys if I should use a Groupon clone (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1490096) and I got overwhelmingly positive responses (someone even called my concerns paranoid). Now the place is littered with negative attitudes toward Groupon. I don't think the facts underpinning my worries have changed, only the community's attitude.
Agreed, and I think that number will eventually rise as businesses learn what works and what doesn't with Groupon.
yep... and city ID, amazon mp3, (if verizon: my verizon mobile, and most laughably - vz navigator which costs $9.99/month and is no doubt worse than google nav)
Ask HN: Alternative uses for P2P?
Imagine that there is a perfect P2P technology, which can symmetrically connect a bunch of computers over a network -- what use cases can you imagine for that?

E.g. we all know about file sharing (torrent et al.), or simple data sharing (as employed by Skype); do you have any other ideas? Feel free to assume that any specific requirements particular to your idea were met by the technology, e.g. that it works perfectly across NATs in some way.
Amen sir. I made a switch to .NET and boy suddenly the Java ecosystem (library, builds, IDE) looks a lot better!
I'm a programmer/analyst at a startup. It is a fun job. I'm always jumping between tasks and have a million things going on all at once. For me, the job is ~70% programming, ~25% analysis, ~5% other. That will certainly very depending on the company and responsibilities, but thats probably a good model of the work from what I've seen. If thats your cup of tea (sure is mine) then I would say this would be a great way to go. There are downfalls though; if you go the startup route that is. More then likely you will be making less then corporate and the hours may be more erratic to, but that depends on corporate culture. I would say give it a shot if your curious.
There's always "old faithful":

http://www.amazon.com/Structured-Analysis-System-Specificati...

It's expensive and dated, but it covers the fundamentals as well as anything else. A programmer who has never conducted systems analysis ought to absorb this stuff like a sponge.

I followed these concepts for years in enterprises where they served me very well. But now I'm a bigger proponent of iterative prototyping, so I'm not sure how applicable they are. Then again, nothing wrong with a little fundamentals.
I nearly fell off my chair when one of our new enterprise customers asked me if we could provide them the app... but with Firefox support because that was all they used.

Heaven :)
Why are technical recruiters so clueless?
those factors would affect the CTR, not volume.

adblock would make sense, but redditors were pretty heavy users 6 months ago too.

my guess is that due to adblock there is only so much traffic for reddit to give to advertisers(i.e. something like 1 million page views), and now the number gets divided by 54 instead of 11
The difference might not be as pronounced as you make it sound. You can e.g. get diffraction effects just with a pinhole. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_camera#Selection_of_pin...)
Here in India, Google has run a full-page print ad recently.

http://www.labnol.org/india/google-chrome-ads-in-indian-news...
The logo for the Redis project will be decided by online vote
This is very, very cool
Times Square bomb plotter sentenced to life in prison
I don't have a lot of structure. Highest level, I try to work on things with the greatest marginal benefit. Micro opportunities fit into this framework because for a brief period they have a really high peaks of marginal benefit.

The trick is to be able to see which ones are really worthwhile and which are not. No matter what you'll have misses, but they're fun so I still don't feel bad about that. But over time I've gotten better at estimating the size of the opportunity and the scope of the work required to address it.

To answer your question more directly, I keep a number of projects open and move forward on them incrementally. That's the main branch and my default position. I don't set deadlines or goals beyond MVP. Then I have a background thread that monitors these things (HN, feedback emails and the like). If I see something worthwhile/fun/whatever, I just drop everything and do it.
Car Home for Android gets personal [applications]
I don't see anything in the title about working with typography. It suggests you will understand typography (like a professional designer does).
Neurofeedback Gains Popularity and Lab Attention
I doubt newspapers take a cut at all. They charge a fee to post an ad. Regardless, this article is describing the aftermath of Groupon coupons.
The correct phrase is "I am being ironic", not ironical.
Ask HN: Are installable webapps feasible/worthwhile?
I've an idea for a consumer-oriented HTML5 app that I'm working on. Without giving away too much information, it's an age-old piece of consumer software that's typically done as a shrink-wrap, install-from-CD kind of thing. But these days, most of the core functionality can be done right in the browser, so I'm developing a webapp to do just that.

How important is it that such an app be "installable" for consumers? The potential concerns as I see them are:

1. puts an icon in the Start Menu/Dock

2. app works offline

Assuming these things even matter, is it feasible to build apps that can do this? Although HTML5 supports offline operation (http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/offline.html) I'm not sure it's widely implemented yet.

Chrome has an app store (http://code.google.com/chrome/apps) but you apparently need a developer build of Chrome for it to work.

Perhaps installability isn't needed at all for a MVP... a simple bookmark might suffice. Thoughts?
Yes we are definitely planning to look into more options of how to get your source files to your phone - FTP and CVS/SVN among them.

At this moment we suggest you synchronize your source files with your development computer using dropbox. There is a writeup on what setup we use ourselves in FAQ section http://www.touchqode.com/faq.htm#synchro
It's not a scandal - I don't think this is a con. But I'd be interested to know how many businesses actually do repeat deals. It seems obvious that brands/chains (who probably do research and analysis) are not (yet) interested.
I think the process by which they discovered their synthesis method qualifies as experimental physics. Keep in mind that it is still hugely infeasible to produce industrial quantities of the stuff.

Also, as the parent says, a review of the literature shows a wealth of interesting physics being done with the material, much of it unencumbered by aspirations of possible engineering applications.