skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, and its because programming languages actually provide almost nothing to help out here.

E.g. methods cannot be declared 'non-reentrant'. Data cannot be declared 'atomic'. Yes, you can hack together solutions using library methods etc. but the language doesn't help much.

We wrote an 'operating environment' for a major computer manufacturer once - a storage device they eventually cancelled (hardware was problematical). Programmers wrote objects that were each invoked single-threaded, passed workitem messages between services instead of directly calling. The environment managed message queues, handled all the threading and reentrancy invisibly.

The programming team loved it. They could write restartable, failoverable modules in this model without every dealing for an instant with concurrency explicitely.
While price feels tremendous, there are differences with raw GPRS/3G data service, though.

First, SMS is reliable transport. In case message cannot be delivered, message will be hold in SMSC and receivers' HLR would notify SMSC to reattempt the delivery, as fast as recipient is available again.

Second, SMS is globally routeable. You may visit another country on the other side of the planet, and the message will still be delivered to your phone.

And one weird thing comes to my mind. If SMS are really that overpriced, why noone in Telco world announced really cheap SMS plans? They would instantly win huge part of the market. Is that some sort of worldwide cabal?
China has developers that already know Mandarin.
That's terrible advice, I hope you're being sarcastic but I fear not. There's plenty of useful stuff outside of CS which isn't liberal arts.

Maths, stats, electronics, physics could all be useful in an entirely computing-based career.

Biology or chemistry could open up a career in bioinformatics, molecular modelling or simulations. Likewise linguistics for text mining, information retrieval, speech/language processing.

Economics if you're interested in being an entrepreneur.

The crunchier end of philosophy, where it overlaps with maths and linguistics and cognitive science, will give you a much deeper frame of reference for understanding many hard problems.

Not all computing jobs involve twee social web startups or mundane CRUD.
I think the main problem with patents like this is that there is no accountability.

If the person who granted such a ridiculous patent was fired for negligence, maybe it'd motivate them to be a little more strict
Algorithm Design Manual self-study
There are many p2p networks for streaming content - they seem to be popular in Asia for watching English and European football, and I think many of these existed prior to 2007.

I'm sure there's a mountain of other prior art covering the concept. It isn't novel to anybody with half a brain. I was streaming audio in the 90s and clearly remember thinking about a p2p network then, because of the expense and legal threats I was receiving. All I wanted to do was enable football fans living abroad to listen to the local radio station on match days.. I thought I was doing the BBC a favour by extending their broadcast range! Yeah, I was just a naive kid. :)
Not to rant or single you out, but I'm not sure that "programmer" is a sufficient descriptor in this thread anymore since everyone seems to have their own little definition, and I'd argue that solving real world problems is only one of many attributes of "real programming".

Is game programming solving a problem? What about music visualizers? They're both fun distractions, but to call them "problems" is stretching the definition. What about malicious programming efforts? What about using programming languages for the challenge of it (brainfuck, whitespace, etc)?

Refusing to use anything but lisp may make you a poor candidate as an employee or teammate or entrepreneur or whatever, but says nothing about your ability to use lisp effectively.
> "It saves me over and over again when dealing with code I don't understand."

This is the key statement of the original post.

If you don't understand the code, then you need to sit down and read it until you do.

Using a debugger can lure you into quick, localized fixes to make small problems disappear. If you just need to make a minor fix to an external library that you'll never look at again, this is probably OK. But if you own the code, you're in a rut.

Constant use of a debugger is a crutch that prevents you from deeply understanding a problem or discovering core issues.

In the long run, a debugger slows you down. Don't step through code to verify fixes; write automated tests. Don't set breakpoints to verify that a value is what you expect; write assertions to confirm that they will always be so. Don't step through new code to verify it is correct; write a unit test first or compose your new code from smaller, proven pieces.

When confronted with a bug, sometimes the best thing to do is just stare at the ceiling and think about what might be causing it -- quite often you'll find the right answer.

Some bugs -- the really hard, nasty ones -- may never be revealed by stepping with a debugger. Performance problems aren't shown by a debugger. Only understanding your system at a high level can inspire you to make fundamental changes in your code. A debugger blinds you to these.
Philosophy -- learn to see things from different angles, different philosophies. Most importantly, observe how others in your class react to discussing touchy philosophies and concepts, like religion and politics. Learn to step outside that box, and be objective while respecting opinions, and make your own decisions. Trust me, its well worth it. Both for the laughs, and for the wisdom.

edit: Just noticed I'm echoing what many others have said. Interesting that we all had the same thought.
I considered building something like this for some time (there are similar extensions but they either not work or send only pdf) and will probably do it anyway even if send to kindle kinda work.
The thing i don't like about this particular implementation is that looking at the code (background.js) it looks like that it contains a list of urls with the location of the text content (tag path to the location).

I guess this is done for pages that are not being parsed correctly (the user then select the text manually, and the url+tag path is sent to the server and it will be added to the list in the next release), he should have used readability.
I'd prefer something that doesn't log in any way the urls i'm sending to the kindle (even if only to fix some issue with the text extraction algorithm).

Edit: The contained urls have query parameters too, not good.
Of course it's ridiculous. They are hoping that twitter just pays them to go away. If it loks like twitter has a backbone and it's going to actual court, they can just drop the case. Why not? It's free to try.
Have you heard of jobrary.com? You might want to check it out.
Twitter is a unique case in that their engineers in 2009 were even worse than the ones at Pivotal. They still had outages every day, so how good could the "pivots" have been?

But my point still stands as Twitter did not renew their contract...

It's also not what I've "been hearing"... I've had to work directly with Pivotal people.
On a Mac, you do "Alt+e e" to get the acute accent for "Résumé". To get a grave accent, use "Alt+~ e". "Alt+i e" gives you the circumflex on the e: "ê".
Hope that helps anyone looking.
Can you provide some rational or data points on why hyphens are not a good thing, particularly given your example of google parsing the words accurately? I hear this often but always without explanation.
Opera Mini Up 84 Percent From 2009
"What’s the difference between recommendations from a friend and recommendations from a perfectly targeted advertising network? If anything, the friend is likely to be less useful."

No. A friend is much more likely to have your best interests at heart, especially when choosing between you and the advertiser. A targeted advertisement will usually be designed to benefit the advertiser/product, and not for you.

Although, I'm interested in the potential in target advertising's version of the big religious/motivational billboards. Imagine a Google search history that seems to be leading to suicide, and then ads popping up to convince you otherwise...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning#Hume.27s_sk...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning#Is_inductio...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

As mentioned, you have a great way of looking at it, but if the goal
is strictly valid, sound, and dare I say, "clear" logic, your
interpretation runs too close to "Hume's Skepticism," the "Problem of
Induction." When we venture into the philosophical, my usual response is
to eventually go running off into the weeds, screaming. ;)

In asking the question, "Are all swans white?" can we infer the asker
has seen a white swan?

In asking the question, "Are all swans blue?" can we infer the asker
has seen a blue swan?

Though I'd prefer to leave race out of this (due to the "Chinese Mother"
nonsense filling HN), replace 'swan' with 'people' and you'll see how the
inferred premise can be false and can result in weak induction. Similar
could be said for, "Does everyone want coffee?"

With this said, it's really a philosophical debate at this point, so
it's not a matter of one or the other of us being right or wrong, and
I hear the field of weeds next to my house calling my name. ;)

For what it's worth, your induction does seem reasonable.

Lastly, I have enjoy both your submissions and your
posts for quite a long time. They are consistently good.
I work at Beevolve. One of the lessons this incident has showed us is safeguarding privacy in an increasingly open world has its own disadvantages. This kind of troll attacks will only increase as stakes get higher.
I disagree with your opinion of the liberal arts, but I will certainly agree that getting practice writing unit tests for your code on homework assignments will be a boon in the long run.
Dogs Guided Remotely By Stealth System
Lenovo ThinkPad X201(3323A38) Review and Price | TECHGADGETSITE
Thanks for a great CES
I had to post this because it the title appears to have been taken directly from my linkbait tech headline generator -- although it's a real story.
I've taken a few courses suggested here and just a small bit of warning: Make sure you're going to enjoy, or at least be interested enough, to learn something.

I've taken Psych. I've taken Sociology. I've taken Philosophy (both Logic and otherwise). I've taken technical writing courses.

Other than the logic courses, I hated them all. I hated them to the point where, though I passed, I did not take anything out from them at all. It just didn't interest me.

All I'm saying is that as you read these suggestions, try to make sure that you are taking into account that there's something you want to get out of the class so that if you end up not liking it you can focus and try to get something out of it. -- I didn't, even though I could have.
Google Fighting Spanish Law Requiring It To Remove Links Based On Privacy Claims
DreamIt 2010 graduate chiming in here.

I have to agree that DreamIt was a fantastic experience.

> 1-on-1 mentor system is great – nice and in-depth
> communal space is great – led to more communication and collaboration than would have existed otherwise.
> focus on business/strategy is great – they could develop this even more in future years, but they're starting w/ a great approach
> speakers were good and always well balanced in their backgrounds & discussion topics.
> pro-bono legal aid is top notch – we would have racked up thousands of dollars worth of legal fees spending so much time speaking and working with partners from such a great firm.

Overall a great experience, and we'd do it again in a heartbeat if put back in time knowing what we know now. Also, I'm very glad to hear that they're coming to New York this summer! http://dreamitventures.com/
Articles like this illustrate why the media should be delivering statistical data in ways that people find easier to think about and avoid common pitfalls of statistical understanding. The mean (typically called 'the average' in publications for a general audience) is a subtle thing which reacts in ways that are hard to predict to some changes in the data [1]. Other statistics, like the median, are much more easily reasoned about and don't succumb as easily to weird numerical behavior.

It would be great if the media would steal some of the techniques of exploratory statistics (like the Box plot[2]) to make statistics more approachable by a general audience. I am certainly not advocating dumbing-down the data - but rather presenting it in a way that isn't as hopelessly misleading to people who don't have a strong background in statistics.

[1] If Bill Gates came to my party, what would happen to the mean net worth?
[2] Which, as I just learned from Wikipedia, isn't named after well-known statistician George Box.
If you're in Europe, you should definitely check out Seedcamp. My company, Brainient, won in 2009 and it's been awesome ever since. I blogged about it here some time ago:
http://emigal.com/2009/09/28/how-to-put-your-startup-on-ster...
From these you said, I only miss the typesetting.
If they add some new fonts, and differente typography. It would be more awesome!
And one thing, I think all books for people more then 14 years old, are in black and white. Lol.
You mean like this:

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2008/11/junk-patents.html

Or like this:

http://www.conceivablytech.com/4823/business/the-ultimate-pa...

?
Thanks all for the many interesting suggestions!
Why designers should code
Apple Sues Nokia in London Over Patent for Touch-Screen Scroll
I have a lot of respect for the NS Basic family of products - I remember using the NS Palm Basic maybe 10 years ago and then later reviewing the offerings for windows CE for a UK computer magazine.

Having just had a first go at using PhoneGap to package an HTML5/CSS/JavaScript app for the Android platform I would be interested in trying anything that could cut out some of the software layers in that stack or simplified the process (although I suppose I might get used to it).

<edit> I jumped in a bit too quickly there - and I have now watched the demo videos. You don't end up with (say) a .apk package for Android but you do end up with a web App that can be presented in full screen mode - neat.

Any plans to go the next step and create "native apps"?
The UI is minimal but pretty busy at the same time. I guess minimal isn't the right word, because it is a bit overwhelming. I would add splashes of color to the most used or most important 'function' on every page to help the users focus.
LOLCats... Yes, you can haz $30m
If it makes you feel any better, StackOverflow caps your rep gains to 300 per day, so assuming that most of those upvotes occurred in bursts when the question was first answered and then at subsequent times when it was linked to from elsewhere, you probably wouldn't have gotten quite that much.
I can't believe that someone would use a language that didn't have an IDE/interactive debugger. It's like going backwards in time to the early 80's. :-)
Game programming, music visualizers solve the problem "Make something people want".

> What about using programming languages for the challenge of it (brainfuck, whitespace, etc)?

I think this is one reason lots of programmers get into a rut where they only want to use a specific language and get depressed using anything else. Using a programming language for the challenge of it is good fun, but it's not really a worthwhile use of effort often.

I agree, 'programmer' has many definitions, but at the end of the day, we "program" to make a product that we or others can use. How that product is made and what tools were used isn't that important. It's the fact it's made at all that matters.
http://www.prosperity.com/ is the source of this study. Skip to this to see the list without Forbes' layer of editorial and ads.
I took Environmental Science and Evolution and Biodiversity. Both jolly interesting. Expanding the breadth of your knowledge is always good. Your best bet is to pick courses that interest you, that you will enjoy.
Text messaging does add value. Remember having to call, leave a voicemail, then listen to a reply voicemail confirming plans?

"Meet at Joe's at six."
"Ok"

Value is not the same thing as cost. The cost to carriers is low, but the value to consumers is high.
Just create some excel spreadsheets and import the data into them from SQL. Then you can munge it all you like using pivottables.
Well not entirely free. It will cost them something in court and legal fees right?
It doesn't hurt that its interface is far more pleasant to use than select's, either.
I started Joystickers with 2 other founders and we had to part ways with one. It was messy, but we're all still friends.

I bought an investment property with a different friend and our friendship has definitely suffered. We don't hang out for fun nearly as often as we used to.

It really depends on the dynamic between the friends. If you guys are comfortable butting heads without taking it personally, then go for it. Think twice otherwise.
Curriculum vitæ is latin. Most french words have latin roots, but that doesn't make them latin words. A literal french translation of CV would be something like "le cours de la vie".
Why do they split article into 5 pages. I do not read such sites. Is forbes such poor that they increase ads view rate in such way?
Is game programming solving a problem?

There is a game to be made, and the problem is that it hasn't been programmed yet.
There's no clue on your site and now you leave all this text here? I'm not going to read that or visit the site ever again.
How not to market using social media
CanvasXpress - Javascript graphing with HTML5 
Has anyone worked with CanvasXpress (http://canvasxpress.org/)? Curious how it compares to other libraries like Protovis or gRaphael.
When I think debugger, I think gdb, which is fine to a point. But after a while, its interactivity becomes a liability. I don't want to have to set the same breakpoints and watches after a recompile, every time.

The integrated debuggers in IDE's are much better, particularly the Java ones. The C/C++ ones have the problem that they will work fine on code compiled with debug symbols, but on release code they're awful.

And when it comes down to it, the really hard to fix problems are the ones that only show up in the optimized release code.
Managing your online reputation? This is actually a blog post promoting Beevolve's monitoring services, and reveals that the company apparently failed to do the obvious: Contacting him directly to ask why he tweeted the comment in question.
Agile in a Flash (Cards)
I know many people here charge $150/hour. 15k/week for two persons working 40 hour each is about $187/hour which doesn't look unrealistic to me. That's not to say they're cheap, they certainly aren't, but if you consider that a company has many expenses beside employees salaries then it's not that high.

Perhaps the biggest thing here is that you must hire a pair, so it actually comes to about $374/h, but if it's true that you get the job much more quickly with a pair then I don't see the issue.
Great to hear. I like what you're doing and will definitely continue to check it out when you add new features. I don't agree with your stance on referrers (which isn't a Google problem any more than it's a HN problem), but I like rooting for the little guy.
In Norway, Start-ups Say Ja to Socialism
Wouldn't one simple defense be to have the OS pop up a window requiring the user to hit a specific unpredictable key (or short key sequence) when a new keyboard is plugged in?
Thank you for your first-hand experience!

I was curious about Pivotal's consulting work, because even very good software consulting companies go downhill quickly when they try to scale. Joel Spolsky described it perfectly: I don't need to name names, here, this cycle has happened a dozen times. All the IT service companies get greedy and try to grow faster than they can find talented people, and they grow layers upon layers of rules and procedures which help produce "consistent," if not very brilliant work.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html

If Pivotal has a nucleus of really talented people, it makes sense for them to become a scalable product company. (Although I'm not really convinced by Pivotal's proposed pricing plans, at least for consultants with several smaller projects going on at once.)
I was in Rwanda last summer teaching a class on programming/entrepreneurship centered on mobile devices. The ubiquity and penetration of Nokia phones there is pretty incredible. Even some of the poorest of people have cell phones. Essentially, they are the only form of computing device for many of them, so it IS their smartphone. There are many services and businesses centered around SMS applications that are very useful. Rather than expensive plans, there are people lining the streets selling prepaid "airtime". Their 3G network is also just as fast as any I've had in the US despite not being connected to SEACOM (although this may be due to lack of traffic on the 3G network, I had a Nexus One Google provided while I was there). Nokia was one of the sponsors of my program because they see how valuable the African market is with their explosion of cell phone growth in the past few years.
I really enjoyed my Sociology courses. It's good to learn "the big picture" of how societies and cultures as a whole work and interact.
I remember a friend of mine having to get on AIM on his phone to tell people not to text him because he was over his limit.

It's really amazing how quickly and firmly "Our bill this month is how much because of unexpected overage charges?!" has been planted in American cultural canon.
One of Beevolve's well-wishers (@mikerbrt) has already approached the troll to see if he wants to reveal his real identity. He is yet to get any answer.
I think you missed the point he was making. His argument is not about good or bad programmers; it's about the nature of programming.

He asserts that the "fun" parts of programming tend to be the most regular, and thus an experienced programmer tends to automate them. In other words everything that works disappears into a library. Everything that doesn't work or is too flaky to automate is now front and center. The OP believes working with these things is not fun.

I tend to disagree with this though. (see comment elsewhere)
I'd recommend you take an intro to macroeconomics course. You'll learn about how monetary policy works (interest rates) and that will help you your whole life. Understanding economics helps you understand business trends, investing, and it gives you more perspective on current events.
Maybe Nokia has 41% of the market today, but back in 2006 they had 76% of it (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian). They're losing ground like an avalanche, Symbian is quickly becoming irrelevant in this world.
I agree, and yet I hesitate. People who have taken one or two philosophy classes are often insufferable and not least to themselves (or so I suspect). E.g., there's no broadly accepted 'answer' in epistemology (can we know things? What does it mean to say we know something?), and in an intro class you're only likely to be introduced to the problem and a few of the historically popular responses. These may lead you to conclude that philosophy is a lot of sound and bespectacled fury, signifying nothing or else that your newfound cynicism about knowledge constitutes an important superiority over naive mortals.

Epistemology is just one example. Whatever tickles your brain in an introduction to philosophy--whether arousing your curiosity, 'clicking' with something long felt, or leading you almost to despair--you should treat as a diagnosis. Valuable information, no doubt, but almost worthless to you unless you go on to seek treatment, that is, to study it further.