skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably old news for a lot of people here, but a cathartic piece for me to write. It's hard not to come across as partisan, but it's a great time to be in software.
Ask HN: Good books for English writing?
Does anyone have recommendations on good books for English writing?

I want to improve my writing and tried Jason Fried's idea of an essay being written in five versions: a three-page version, a one page version, a three-paragraph version, a one paragraph version and a one sentence version. It worked really well but the side-effect is I became more critical about my writing.

I have read "The Elements of Style", done the googling and have a list of to-read books; but I think the advices from you will help a lot more.

P.S. I'm a Chinese migrant living in Australia.
FIFA just banned gay fans from the World Cup
In situations like those, I feel like OOP is some of the most buzzword laden areas of CS.

Things like "Cohesion", "Layering", "Polymorphism", "Abstraction", etc.

They are all great concepts with a lot of important principles, but I drives me nuts how often I've heard them used excessively.
I have a subscription. In terms of hard technical information, Phrack has them beat. Still, I find most of the articles in 2600 interesting. The tone of the magazine is rather neutral, compared to Phrack which sometimes reads like it was written by an angry 15-year-old.
Please expound upon why it doesn't hold water...
WikiLeaks:Police issue second arrest warrant for Assange
That makes sense.. however winner's curse is more relevant when you have common value auctions (eg: bidding for something with an unknown value that is the same for everyone).

However, in advertisement everyone has a different value derived from the ads, and also since you advertise every day, winner's curse is less likely (you learn).

=)
Re: 1. The only reference in the Wikipedia entry to the pressuring of the German govt. by the US consists of this line: "On February 6, 2007, U.S. officials warn the German Government not to issue international warrants." This line was added to the article a few days ago. Its cited source is a document leaked by Wikileaks.

Re: 2. According to Harpers, and its reading of El Pais and Público, what's newly revealed by the released cables is "a large-scale, closely coordinated effort by the State Department to obstruct ... criminal investigations"

Re: 3. Espionage may be expected, even accepted. What is or should be embarrassing for the US is its employment of State Dept. diplomats for the purpose of espionage.
I pick up and leaf through 2600 whenever I end up in a Barnes & Noble or Borders, just to see if it's still there, really.

I'm generally not that excited by the articles about computer security, but I still love reading articles written about the hardware that runs the PSTN.
http://xmonad.org/

Not only is it a real-world Haskell project, it's the only one I can think of where the co-founders are from the UK and...Nebraska!
Yeah - I think the advice is great if you happen to have a few tens of thousands of dollars, though at that point it isn't especially profound. For a startup with little to no capital, 5-10k is a lot of money.

Certainly I wish that I had some better names available to me for some projects of mine, but if I were to focus on the project first, I think the rest would follow. I look forward to the day when I can be incredibly frustrated at having to overpay to buy a better domain name - once I've already had some minimal success.
It's been only removed for Task API... But why would do you need more than 30 seconds to process normal request?
Wikileaks Loses its DNS Service
Are you just inexperienced? Don't prematurely sell yourself short. I'd read that a Rails hosting company found that 70% of their customers hadn't properly indexed their tables, and knowing's half the battle.
I'm a biochemistry grad student, and my school is just now considering offering a (bio)statistics course for the first time... But parent poster is right, chi-squared is usually as complex as it gets.
So essentially, its git at work. If you're using svn, then each and every commit of yours gets pushed to the main repository. That, is not feasible if you're working on a big feature. With git, you can just continue working on your local machine, and push a series of commits at once.

Thats really nifty, for you to "code fearlessly", especially (or maybe only so) if you've got huge changesets. :-)
>Gutierrez ruled that the government had to prove Crippen knew he was breaking the law by modding Xboxes.

What bullcrap!

All I heard my entire life was "Ignorance of the law is no excuse..." So which is it?
Everything I remember about maths I remember because I understood the "why" of it. The stuff I learned rote - just to pass the exams - I have long since forgotten. I'm now frustrated that I was expected to learn anything by rote, as it's all lost to the sands of time now.

Rote memorization might help you with exams and book problems, but it won't help you develop long-term mathematical problem-solving skills. If you can't explain it from first principles, you don't truly understand it.
On every notable standardized math test in the US, and on any commonly used calculator, a square root is non-negative. Another example: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sqrt(x)
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The good thing about learning to write well is that every books is a book about writing - or at least every good book.

Increase the number of top quality books that you read and your language will naturally improve. It's not a magic recipe, and it won't happen overnight, but it will happen.

One way to make sure that what you read is always good is to focus on the classics - Dickens, Twain and so on - and also the (good) translations of foreign classics - Dostoievsky, Hesse, Marques... those are usually very well written and translated, and the more you read of them, the better your written (and spoken) english will be. Try reading one book every week or two or thereabouts.

Between that and constant practice (with feedback where possible), you should see your writing skills go from ok to good and eventually excellent within a matter of years.
I find the subject fascinating, but the author really deserves the credit. Work he had done to visualize the concepts were really well-done.
Why is it cathartic? Are you angry? Do you feel victimized or held hostage? Maybe you should have written more about your feelings.

Anyway, you make points that I can sympathize with but I don't understand some of it. Why do people have such a visceral dislike of licensing costs? Presumably most HN people want to eventually build a start up that charges people money for a software service. People here are often quite indignant when someone complains a service costs too much. Yet MS is somehow bad for making money. Personally I find most of their pricing to be reasonable (in some cases that's no doubt thanks to pressure from free alternatives).

Also why do people always write these goodbyes and feel they have to cast off everything from MS forever? These proclamations are just strange. Let it be known to everyone that I'm never having apple flavored jolly ranchers again! Seriously, think of MS as just another shop in the bazaar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
Sure. And a good interviewer should take that into account. I ask this kind of question ("write me code to reverse this linked list, re-using the existing nodes") quite frequently. I don't expect even experienced programmers to have memorized it, and it's (a bit) more interesting than it sounds.

While I do give mental brownie points for people who can just write it in one go, I don't consider it a non-starter if you can't. But if you can't get to the point of having written it, with prompting and help, in half an hour, that's a non-starter.
Pretty sure he just typed them into R and pasted the result into his blog. How much time should someone spend on a blog post being provided for free?
Not the intended target, but I'll throw in my two c from doing a lot of applied math.

Math readily has two components. The first is a formulaic, formal component that can be readily overcome by rote. The second is the more freeform conceptual understanding that motivates and directs the first. I feel confident that if you ask anyone familiar with advanced math if they understand concept/theorem/tool X, they'll say yes if they know it in the second form and are confident that they can reconstruct the important parts of it in the first.

I think a lot of why people rebel against rote memorization then is that it, as a method, is very likely to prevent you from encountering the second side there. If you honestly use it to improve your fluency with the formal manipulations, it can be a great tool for learning more math. It's just easy to lose that honesty.

To really understand math, you need to recognize that it's a language you must both read and write. I suggest that if you do get strong benefits from rote memorization, then you should complimen t your reading by attempting to synthesize mathematical concepts you've not seen before. Read the claim of a theorem and then prove it yourself without knowing the answer. If you can honestly complete mathematical synthesis at that level as well, then rote memorization isn't hurting you in the least.
> My opinion of Amazon is improved. The position they're taking is unpopular with the nerd crowd.

"Nerd crowd"? This is clearly a free speech issue, with implications for EVERYONE.

Amazon ostensibly doesn't trample free speech rights here because they are a non-government entity, but they had the option of standing UP for the First Amendment.

That would have been something. Not doing so... just makes them another large corporation.

Who even needs prior restraint when the government can lean on you behind the scenes? That's a chilling effect right there.

As for harm reduction, if transparency were taken up a few notches back in 2001-2002, it might have made it impossible to lie the populace into supporting the Iraq War.

I can't fault Amazon for not wanting to get on the bad side of the government, but I think that ignores the larger issue -- nobody should have to worry about hosting any documents with a legitimate free speech claim, sans a court order to remove them.

I find it extremely unlikely that Amazon was NOT responding to government pressure, but let's consider that possibility: In that case, Amazon is, of its own volition, deciding it has a pro-government-censorship position, even when the government hasn't tried to do so! They are taking a political stance against material that has a compelling claim to First Amendment protections.

The only pending legal case is against the alleged original leaker, not any of the publishers.

Every major U.S. media outlet has published at least parts of the documents. ALL of which are classified -- the information is classified, not just the verbatim reproduction.
The problem with Google cherry-picking answers is that it removes context.

For example, I recently searched for "javascript mime type" and it correctly returned "application/javascript". But only by browsing the first search result (traffic taken from Stack Overflow) do you see that this is relatively recent standardization and IE will have problems with it.
Depends on the position. I have worked, recently, on codebases where that kind of thing was absolutely a core skill and we asked people to write linked list code in the interview process. We were also doing manually-managed core OS and display manager code for a mobile operating system.

In my current job writing server-side Java and Ruby on Rails code, I wouldn't dream of asking that question. It would be pointless.
Should Google Get its Groupon?
JQuery Tips and Tricks
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Funny, I already use cash for almost everything.

But I did it because I didn't want the credit card companies to have every detail about my life.
Wikileaks Down. Assange Close to Arrest
Scribes: Plugins In 60 Seconds
“How to Write an Executive Summary and Raise Insane Amounts of Capital”
Amen. Someone in my orgzn was let go very recently. I'm not in mgmt so only had a peripheral view of what transpired, but the orgzn I'm in is very loose and generally hires strong candidates with very high success rate. We don't have a lot of time to spend monitoring performance closely; we expect people to work independently and deliver in a non-sweatshop environment. Once a problematic situation is recognized, it sucks up a lot of time, energy, and karma (heavy HR involvement, PIP programs set up, tracked, etc.), and of course we have tasks which the individual was expected to be completing; now not so much. Also, the months spent bringing up to speed someone who will now never contribute to the team, time and teammate energy which could have been expended on a better candidate. The net cost has been huge. I remember there were some doubts about this individual at interview time (and our interview process is nowhere near as severe as what is described to take place at Google, etc.), and these were ignored (there were "extenuating circumstanced"). I'm reminded of a quote from Ronin "Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt." Even though from a fictional source, it's good advice. Also: "no exceptions".
Book Review: Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke
Nice post. I almost completely agree with it.

The license cost point is a good one. I actually think it is kind of sad that software as a profession is all becoming enterprise software. No offense, but look at almost all of the YC projects... they're all things that I frankly would have had virtually no interest in coding as a kid. It all looks CRUD apps with the word "social" in the pitch.

But I think the profession has become one where software is marginalized, and you make money off of everything else. It's like music. No one wants to pay you for the music -- you have to make money selling t-shirts.

And then we have threads where people are surprised to see people say, "I just need a programmer".
I agree, but I was referring to the organized Warez Scene[1], not private bittorrent trackers which generally favor user-ripped content over "Scene" content. V0 is the most popular for private users, but the groups still stick to V2.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)#Audio_standard...
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Fair points, cathartic is probably the wrong word - how about 'draw a line under'.

I don't think Microsoft is bad to want to make money, more that the choices around now make it a different dynamic around web technologies.

I'm not sure why others write these posts, for me it was more a long winded way to say 'After a long time I'm not mainly using the Microsoft dev stack, here's what this blog will be about'.

I won't suddenly forget 6 years of .net, but for me it's quite a shift.
Only over wifi.
This does happen a lot in science. Between fields and even within a field, for example a biologist discovers a handy 'new' data structure that is useful for storing DNA samples. Which is simply a basic binary tree. As the reviewers of a biology paper are usually biologists and not computer scientists, they might not notice the obvious.

Similarly, within computer science I've seen cases like this as well. A researcher in scientific visualization built an awesome visualization algorithm based on a 'new' data structure. Then it turned out this data structure was already discovered in the 90's by a theoretical computer scientist.

In neither of my cases it undermined the underlying research, it's basically just a missing reference. It's inherent in science that some things are rediscovered once in a while and it is very hard to follow articles from a completely other field.

However, something as blatant as rediscovering integration reviewers from each field should have noticed....
Agreed. If everybody in your immediate proximity is already intimately familiar with your site, http://www.usertesting.com is great for this. (I'm not affiliated with them other than being a happy customer.)
Interesting how Python goes from 20 in the top 100, to 0 in the top 10. Java, C++, and C# seem to scale all the way down to the top 10.

Lisp won, but maybe the question is, is there something wrong with Python?
Iddo Friedberg has a great analysis of the paper: http://bytesizebio.net/index.php/2010/12/02/a-new-life-form-...
I'm very glad that you wrote this. Thank you.
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I have an intense desire to contribute to the Chromium Project, however, I too am a programming novice. I know a bit of Java, but not much else.

I understand that this is a monumental end goal given my current situation, but can anyone point me in the direction of the best tutorial books that money can buy?

Good karma for anyone that responds :)
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Honestly I think this is my personal funniest post of 2010. And no, it's not making fun of Haskell.
Yahoo: Top searches in 2010
He's probably talking about embedding a JavaScript engine within a game to script the lower-level (usually C/C++) game engine, a role that is currently often filled by Lua: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)#Vide...

I wouldn't be surprised if this has been done too, but if it has it's not as popular as Lua.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1623
Thanks for taking the time to read it.
Thanks. That's a great response.
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I've been doing this since long before git was a twinkle in Linus' eye. The tools may make it easier or harder, but the attitude is all inside the programmer.

Of course, while I'm happy to code fearlessly (there has never been a code module I've been afraid to jump into), it scares me to death to see some others do it. "Hmm, maybe Hank should just take baby steps..."
Most people would rather use their software than admire it.
I would recommend you OOSC (Object oriented software construction) by Bertrand Meyer. A mammouth book. Its length, which could be a hindrance, is its best point: you'll have plenty of explanations for every concept.
http://nedroid.com/2010/11/thanks-for-reading-my-comics/
Huh, well my opinion of Matasano has definitely dropped.

You guys aren't fans of full disclosure over there?
http://users.volja.net/database/matasano.PNG
No, lookup the the "switch" statement, depending on what language you are learning it may not support it directly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch_statement
Quit. And let them know why you quit. Take a stand!
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: Has US already indicted him?
It's true that it's easy to write very bad JavaScript when you're first starting out, but I rarely run into those problems any more now that I've learned which corners of the language to avoid.

I don't always agree with Crockford's decisions on what's good and bad, but overall he's right, and that's why it's important to use a book like "The Good Parts" when you're learning it. That said, I always recommend "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide" as well.
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Why do people have such a visceral dislike of licensing costs?

Some people are like that, sure, but that's a loud minority of idiots.

For me it's not a dislike for licensing costs, but a preference for free of charge; like all people I like a good deal when I see one.

Not to mention that most software requiring licensing costs also has additional handicaps, like not being able to look at the source code or fix it; which is really necessary sometimes, especially when your company is in the software business.
It’s actually quite possible to define quantities like mean and variance on a circular dimension like hours or angles, with definitions analogous to the conventional ones on the reals; it just takes a bit of mathematical cleverness. (The general field is sometimes called “circular statistics”, and for the mean specifically, Wikipedia has an article here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_of_circular_quantities)

That the two of you ignored your friend’s point and started talking about mathematics instead could be insulting† and she was may have been quite justifiably annoyed. Interpreting that annoyance as evidence that doctors are uncritical/uncurious/uncreative is pretty narrow-minded, IMO.§

† depending on your existing relationship and usual interactions.

§ obviously I wasn’t there and don’t know your friend, so can’t really judge. YMMV
Assuming you mean for (int i = 0; ; ) {} that is legal syntax. Perhaps I'm dull, but what is the error?
It's ironic since (as someone who was a C programmer for ages) we used to be seen as the uncultured pragmatists. Yeah, C is kinda crude but it's fast. When did that get turned into Hippydom? I'da thought all those dynamic languages were more hippyish with their (almost)anything-goes approach.
The name is Benoit.
Just a guess but they only have three total so selected might mean "all" publications and even then the one you cite only has 2 authors instead of 10 and Jane's name is listed first. It's that something that is important to post graduate students?
I'm not saying that problem solving and understanding aren't important (see Bloom's taxonomy).

I'm saying that you still need memory to justify whatever domain your knowledge is in, and that memory seems to be the bedrock of further knowledge (understanding, creativity, problem solving etc.).

Am I missing something here? Do you not need some element of memory to explain things from first principles, and to have an understanding of something?

edit: I've just realized from reading wtallis' comment that I might be confusing two different forms of knowledge: memory and reasoning, insofar as reasoning can produce further truths. Is that what you are getting at?
How much money did the US government dump into hedge funds to keep them from collapsing because they were "too big" (read: too well-connected) to fail? Doesn't sound like they have secret magic to steal money, else they wouldn't have been in trouble.

As for the recent underwhelmingly US diplomatic memo leaks, that has an easy and logical explanation. These memos were merely secret information, about on the level of a ... memo inside any corporation. That is why security was so lax on them to allow so many of them to be accessible to low rank personnel. More important information is kept more secret with a tighter reign on who has access and how many people have access.
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Actually, the results showed that there were a much greater range of Java programmer abilities than most other languages. There were more Java programmers in the top 10 than any other language, so asserting that Java is just for 'average' programmers is rather shown up for the baseless snobbery that I rather suspect is PG's basic attitude.
Regular Cocoa Emacs, probably better than Aquamacs for most people: http://emacsforosx.com/

And if, instead of Things, you want an awesome todo feature in emacs, check out org-mode, and its partner iPhone app, MobileOrg. (The MobileOrg icon is hideous, though.)