skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Saying programming is writing is like saying building something is 'speaking to materials'.

When you look at software, what you see is not a language, it is a machine. A machine that is presented in humanly understandable and communicable form, but nonetheless, something with a particular kind of underlying determinate structure.

Yes, the main part of the conclusion is the same: you have to learn by doing. But because software is design -- rational manipulation of objective 'material' -- knowledge about how it works is also an intrinsic part of doing it well.

Design means creating something through clear knowledge: we go with particular design ideas because we can predict their outcome and effect. This is the knowledge about that the article underestimates. We choose quicksort not simply because we have immersed ourselves in social norms, but significantly because it has been proven asymptotically fastest.

That kind of determinate knowledge that programming by nature can have is important. It is missing something to lump it in as just being like spoken language learning.
Don't they have to either way?
Is Seattle different?
Amazon 2011?

Does Microsoft's 20-year-long campus expansion count?
To move your data you will need to sync to a mac and then manually move your data. Copying from a iOS device is problematic, but that is true today.
> P.S. lets hope you're not in a "smart car" when and SUV forgets to stop behind you "too late" at a major intersection.

Maybe that means we need to question that large SUV with a single occupant and an always empty cargo hold. Or perhaps why as a society we do not find it acceptable to "risk our lives" in small, light cars yet we find it perfectly ok to "risk the lives of others" in our large, heavy "car-trucks."
We have a lot of hackers joining the group from other cities of India as well.

If anyone want to plan a similar event in other cities in India, I suggest to use our Meetup group at http://www.techmeetup.in and leverage the existing user base.

In that way we can build larger base and utilize the same mailing list.
Never read Chronicle of a Death Foretold?

In programming, do you have to worry about phonology, slang, or number agreement?

The guy's deeper point is that programming is a language acquisition task and we would do well to take the rich set of lessons from ESL and foreign language learning and apply them to CS learning. Will all of it stick? No. But there is fertile green field to plow here.
Does anybody else think that the EU is going to jump on Apple eventually the same way they jumped on Microsoft and browsers and make Apple provide a way for users to select which storage provider they want to use?
Google and all Google properties were down in central North Carolina for about 15 minutes just now: confirmed by others in this area on totally different ISPs. I wonder if it's related...
Maybe all the rumors about curved glass weren't for the iPhone 5 but for the new building windows :)
You really need an about me page. I don't care nor do I want to read your blog, I want to know who you are and what you bring to the table.

Having links to work you did do nothing for me. Did you design and code the whole site or did you just create the search button? You need a separate page just for your work that explains what you actually did.

I don't mind a contact form to be honest, but that also should be its own page. You should provide email and a link to an actual resume on your about me page and/or home page. If they would like to use your form they have the navigation option to dive into that page. Majority of the time they will email you from their mail client so that it is documented.

Your page shows how good or bad you are. What it shows me currently is that you have some design skills but your UX is terrible. The Organization of content, easy of use and relevance of content is done poorly. Create some page flows and really abstract pages for a single purpose not an all in one page that shows everything. I want to get to where I'm going and bounce not search.
News up
News up is a social news website to add and read the latest news in all areas
It's important to keep in mind that when the Pentagon was built, a computer was a person who did calculations and documents were sent to the secretarial pool to be typed; so the number and roles of its occupants were quite different. The space has been re-purposed over the past 70 years.
I fully agree, but it easy to fall for comfort, and lose flexibility.

It's pretty much the same with iTunes: I can ditch OS X and switch back to Linux. However, I will not be able to play music and movies directly from my media player to the Apple TV2 without much effort. Also, synchronizing music from Banshee or Rhythmbox to my phone is not possible (until libgpod supports iPhone 4).

iTunes/iCloud (/Google Apps/Facebook) will be the next Microsoft Office. You will be locked into a platform because your data lives there. It's clever.
The people who trot this line out too much tend to be assholes in my experience.
Indian Innovator
If you take a closer look at the area, you can see they'll actually houses rather than office parks. They actually appear impressively dense by California standards. It's a lot harder to buy people's houses than a corporation's floors.
No, I live in a city with woefully inadequate public transportation, and I drive everywhere I go.

But, I lived in Germany for 5 months and only rode in a car 2 or 3 times, and Germany doesn't even have the best public transportation in the world.

Public transportation will require a lot of tax money, but roads require a lot of tax money too.
Bank Not Responsible for Letting Hackers Steal $300K From Customer
Implementation Lessons Learned from Failures
Domain hacked, illegal content uploaded, DHS siezes for copyright infringment
ok. we're working on that now
Financial services industry operates more like healthcare and law than say consumer products with regard to pricing practices and competition (in the context of advisory, not lending). You wont find a lot of doctors or lawyers bragging about how low their rates are because price is a perceived indicator of quality. That being said, a convention began a long time ago that a fair price to pay to a top notch bank is 7% and everyone has stuck to it. If you were a client and were quoted 8%, you would demand to know what makes you different than the hundreds of other (perhaps weaker) companies that got a better deal. If you were quoted 5%, unless the circumstances were extraordinary, the dozens of companies in the pipeline are going to expect the same treatment. So the question to the investment bank comes back to this: why rattle a system that works and is accepted as is?

To be frank, price competition exists in banking but most companies dont care about it. There are a lot of IPO's that take place and you'd be amazed how many of them "fail". You just dont hear about them because they are so small and underwritten by smaller banks. Big/successful companies dont care about the arbing the 100-150 basis points and risk jeopardizing the success of their IPO by picking someone other than Goldman.
Got it. That does make sense; the article and comments just didn't really seem like that was specifically what people were worried about. Given that I see no other reason to care, though, I assume you're correct.

Personally, I'm not so worried about Facebook being able to recognize me. I'd be more concerned about to whom they might give that data. I can definitely see room for a lot of concern there.
I'm not sure if what I'm thinking is correct (or even technically possible) - but couldnt it be possible that what they are envisioning is the Rubinius architecture being the one true Ruby and having two backends : C-Rubinius or Java-Rubinius.

What it would mean is that the C-Rubinius and Java-Rubinius releases be simultaneous: you can choose to pick one or the other based on your surrounding stack.

This would mean that they fund both Jruby and Rubinius till they can be merged.
If it hadn't been for student loans, the money wouldn't have been there to support the increase in costs. It's a problem similar to health care: some people, at the end of their lives, will spend $500,000 on treatments that give them another 6 months of suffering. If it was your own money, you wouldn't do it. If it is somebody else's money, you will.
I bet that Jobs has had a dream about this building for a while. Finally, he gets to do it.
As always, if you know other open-source OLAP or data-processing stuff, I'd love to here from you.
And extracting nitrogen from the air is a very energy intensive process. Energy which comes from petroleum and natural gas.
Know when your bus is late with live transit updates in Google Maps
Third richest man in China lives on $20 a day, eats same meals as workers
They're not nearly the same thing. The scope of modern literature has hardly moved in hundreds of years. Compare Updike, Roth, or Mitchell to Dante or Shakespeare -- they'd seem like near contemporaries in programming.

In contrast, in the past, programs to do Newtons method or compute trig tables were often the full scope of a program. You certainly never had a Halo 3, Windows 7, Google Search, or WordLens application written even 50 years ago.

Good literature isn't about automating increasingly sophisticated processes. Programming is all about that. This leads to increasing complexity of programs, where the goal of software engineering is to abstract/hide as much of the complexity as possible.

The only things they really share in common is that they're both written in text. If programs were written by soldering wires no one would make such odd acquisitions (do EE relate circuit design to writing literature?).

I think we give this slashdot author far too much credit.
Happy IPV6 Day!

* I tend to lose karma anytime I make a joke on HN. I don't understand why as I believe it doesn't contradict HN guidelines. Maybe I'm just not that funny? :-p
"The next Buddha will be a Sangha." — Thich Nhat Hanh
This represents the end-game that people warned about, over 5 years ago. The rampant over-militarization of police forces.

Washington Post- "Overkill: The Latest Trend in Policing": http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02...

It's so easy to get an overkill response, phreakers conduct "swatting" as a prank. They'll call and impersonate someone, and cause a SWAT team to be dispatched to the real person's house.
On the other hand: no privileged corner offices.
I know, I was trying to highlight there's another option from Adobe itself. I found it after trying to use the nsplugin wrapper itself and failed to do so.
Lost me at the Rand quote.
Good point indeed. The functionality is already there, but Apple will surely simplify things and cause widespread adoption.
How to Track Google +1 and Facebook Like Button Clicks
Hope to inspire some !!!
No IPocalypse, but the IPv6 Transition Still has Risks
Try changing the case of the letters, I had the same issue.
Russian President Proposes Creative Commons-Style Rules Baked Into Copyright
China’s Cyber Attack on Google Presages Era of Digital Warfare
WordPress.com Adds Twitter And Facebook Accounts To Put Comments
Very interesting talk -- I think. Too bad I don't know how it ended because as the email input prompt appeared I closed the window immediately.
Or legistlate to allow it so that 3rd party hardware/software products can connect to the Cloud?
> The fewer ways to express something, the better.

Your last sentence could be rewritten "It is better to express things in as few ways as possible", or "Having fewer ways to express something is better". English, however, allows you to omit the main verb for the causation in a parallel construction, you were able to write it shorter, and with a 3-syllable climax after a pause at the end for effect.

Shouldn't programming languages also provide many different ways to express things?
Maybe there's "One more thing…" about it, and the whole thing rotates.

You know, I wouldn't be entirely surprised, either.
I think you can check off everything on this list and still write inscrutable code. The worst code I've seen is code that was written so that only one person understands what's happening -- the author. Typically the code has too many branches and ridiculous call stacks. The writing analog is a run-on sentence.

This usually happens when the programmer at fault is really smart but still hasn't learned that at some point in the future, someone needs to come along and understand the code he/she wrote.

Maybe we need editors?
Why opt-out? Because the apathetic 95% of the userbase will never opt-in.

What Facebook should do better is intelligently set defaults. Defaulting On for everyone is stupid. Defaulting On for people who already have privacy settings that indicate they would be ok with it is much better.
The secrets of Node's success
Having eight feet of steel behind you makes a lot more sense when you get rear-ended by a drunk driver going 45 mph while you're sitting at a red light.

>The industrial food system is another. Our food, which could be grown from local sunshine and local compost, is instead grown in distant places with pesticides and fertilizers made from petroleum and natural gas. Meanwhile the sun beats down on our cities only to fall on ornamental grass and concrete. Food waste is hauled off to putrefy in landfills. Normal and absurd.

This has more to do with humanity's insistence on living in places which cannot reasonably produce enough food to sustain the local population. The Phoenix metropolitan area, located in an Arizona desert, holds over 4 million people; Moscow, just shy of the Arctic Circle, is home to 11 million.
"Macintosh" was also chosen because it's acronym-proof
Tech Wizards of the Silicon Forest
Usability Issues With Our Online Store Uncovered By A Clueless Customer
The Attraction of Laws
I think good writing is conversational in nature.

I don't think writing code works that way.
There are still orchards in Cupertino?!

Not for economic reasons. Modest houses on modest lots sell in the seven figures there. Whoever owns the land could make huge money by selling to developers, but presumably the city council has made it clear that they won't approve a zoning change. Apparently, the people there already really want there to still be orchards in Cupertino, if only as a memory of what was.

Sounds like Steve Jobs wowed the city council, but after paying some attention to SV local politics, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the community rallied against this.
As for d), do they experience category 4 or 5 hurricanes?
Some sites that don't have AAAA DNS today:

www.apple.com

www.amazon.com

www.sony.com

www.oracle.com

www.ibm.com

www.intel.com

www.adobe.com

www.ebay.com

www.dell.com

www.hp.com

www.nasa.gov

www.hotmail.com

www.wikipedia.org

news.ycombinator.com
I've also heard 'Forthy'.
and similes often have a wobbly wheel to begin with.

It's one way the may be distinguished from analogies.
I don't think it would make financial sense for Apple to move to SF.
Yes, but I read the article to imply that we were spreading petroleum on our fields, versus the alternative: rotting garbage. If the argument was an energy argument, I would have expected some mention of energy costs associated with composting (orders of magnitude worse than large-scale energy infrastructure)? The comparison wasn't apples-to-apples, and I wanted to clear up the implication.

So, sure, we use energy to create fertilizer. Instead of mining it and shipping it, or going without. Again, if it wasn't the cheaper alternative we wouldn't be doing it.
Use a fake email. The entire video is truly inspiring and worth watching.
Do you think web designers need an understanding of the fundamentals of art?
I can't see it. Where is the HTML5 version of this?
"Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer." -- Edsger Dijkstra

As a programmer coming from a linguistics background, this sentiment has always resonated with me. As much as math is a part of my job, recognizing the transferrable skills from human language use has probably been the primary reason that I've been able to land programming jobs and write fairly successful code.
No, it's true. Cow milk is not essential part of the human diet. The "Got Milk" ad campaign is not a government-sponsored plan to get people to eat a healthier diet, which is what most people think it is.
I think to really discuss this you should send me enough coins to get a return flight to hang out with you for a while, I'm an awesome guy and totally fun to hang out with. The first step is to party hard for a few days then we can settle down and talk about all the concepts I have in mind, of which there are many. I'm sure that within 5 days we can have some completely bullet proof ideas nailed down! :)
1Nv3ovJQJ3xnNkJUiLBdVW1LmLszoxYJe5
At Cornell anybody can walk into the library and find books in the stacks. Go to Harvard or Yale and you'll find armed guards in their way.

Cornell's libraries are gradually disappearing; they quit buying CS conference proceedings in 2008 and 95% of the books in physical sciences and engineering will be going into long term storage where you can only get them with a library card.

Recent literature will only be available by using a computer connected to the internal internet of the school, and there may be a time when all of those computers are behind a locked door and need a password.

As for "people engage in academia because they love it" I've seen at elite schools that 80%+ of the researchers are people whose parents were also researchers who started drilling into them with a young age that their life would be complete failures if they did anything else. Often they'd run so ragged publishing and perishing that it's hard to believe that they enjoy anything at all.
Tayib,
Overall, it is a nice portfolio. The flow from the top left logo to the "get in touch via email" button works well. A few things stood out at me.

1. Get rid of the Emerson quote. On a smaller display, it hides your contact information.

2. "Spam my inbox" sounds pretty negative. When combined with using a contact form (not how I like to email people) it would prevent me from writing you. Also, you call this email, but it is a contact form.

3. "Write your kickass message here". I'd change this - not because of the swearing but... "kickass"? I like the enthusiasm but I do not have a kickass message for you. Keep the enthusiasm, iterate on the message.

4. Keep the contact form but visually integrate my email address into it.

5. You're going to get a lot of comments about your form. I think it is a nice form, one of the better ones I've seen, visually, but some people will find it hard to accept that you have a big focus on user experience if you continue to use it. Not me, but some.
The Dangerous Mr. Khan
ok. it's done
Why are there no good online voting/election tools that are also free?
(Alternative question: If there are, can you point them out?)

I'm looking for a voting/election tool to conduct a large variety of surveys.
The type of survey may be anything from less serious ("pancakes or cookies at the party?") to more serious/official/anonymous (elections).
Surveys are typically small: there are few questions with possible answers being mostly yes/no or a list of candidate names (elections).
The number of participants in the surveys might become large (<10 to >1000). Fancy features (e.g. statistics, user behaviour, ...) are not required.
For the more serious surveys/elections, reliability is a key requirement.

There are a large variety of survey tools online available, which I would categorize like this:

1. Professional: They offer a range of plans (usually a basic plan/trial is free) and are rich in features; they typically work well.
PROBLEM: Usually expensive; their low-end (free/cheap) plans are often limited in users (e.g. free for <30 participants).

2. Hobby: These are limited in features but free; they don't always work well.
PROBLEM: Unreliable. It's hard to get people to vote as it is. People receiving multiple invitations to vote is problematic. People receiving no invitation to vote is unacceptable in some cases (e.g. elections).

I'm a firm enemy of NIH, so it would be preferable if some alternative could be found.
You're right (well they look like pretty nice apartment complexes) Streetview: http://goo.gl/3Qdhs

Property prices just went waaay up there. Cash in and sell/lease to Apple employees, I'd imagine.
Not really the same failure modes.

Really? Because except for the first one (which we have compilers to thank for), your three remaining points apply equally well to a lot of code I've seen.
Tracking Google +1 and Facebook “Like Button” Clicks
thanks! tell them to add too!
I read Mlodinow's book (The Drunkard's Walk) last year and really enjoyed it.

Somewhat ironically, I seem to have become anchored around Kahneman & Tversky in terms of this line of research. Can someone recommend a good counterpoint? I'm looking into Gigerenzer now
Tips Menghapal Vocabulary [Kosakata] Bahasa Inggris # 1
What data, specifically? The only thing that comes to mind is music, but that lock-in already exists with iTunes.
Except that code isn't really that far from what you might type. I've spent a lot of time working with code that uses templates heavily (including "well designed" libraries like Boost) and it's just a god-awful mess. Make an error in instantiating a template class and you get an error message that refers to code deep in an STL header. Want to make your container class iterable? Get read to write dozens of lines of inscrutable boiler-plate code. Even something simple as iterating over a container is braindamaged. Before the auto keyword you had:

for(vector<some_really_complex_type>::iterator itr = something.begin(); itr != something.end(); ++itr)

Then you need to use "itr." It's a pointer-like thing that isn't quite a pointer, and when you hold pointers in your container, which you often (usually) want to do you have to deal with a pointer-to-a-pointer which is almost never pleasant. And when you deal with keyed containers you have to remember the iterator actually points to a pair so you have to do .first and .second (why not .key and .value?)

Braindamage doesn't even begin to describe it.
> programming is a great way to have the zest for life sucked straight out of you

If that's what you really think then maybe you should go become an ESL teacher in Japan, or at least try a new position that may fit you better. I find good programming roles to be highly enjoyable, challenging, and rewarding jobs. Sounds like you might need a change - shake things up a bit, re-examine assumptions and that sort of thing. It's very bad in the long run to hate your job.
I would like to add this that when you are actually doing the non-lazy work of interpreting a novel, you do as well.
Turning off cancer’s growth signals
Yes, but this process is infamous for being capricious, for rejecting apps for their basic purpose, for taking unexplained weeks to process, on and on. So yes, it worked for you, once.
Sending more characters with Unicode via an SMS API
What you think code reviewing is for?
Engine Yard strikes a deal with Acquia
I kind of assumed they would be using the cutting-edge Bloomenergy Boxes.

Fuels: Natural Gas, Directed Biogas

Input fuel pressure: 15 psig

Electrical efficiency (LHV net AC): > 50%

http://www.bloomenergy.com/products/data-sheet/

http://www.bloomenergy.com/
Any member of the public can visit a local university or large public library and get access to any book or journal article they desire.

At my local university library the online journal databases are only available to students and faculty. Members of the public can only read the paper journals.
Please, folks, we are predominantly suspicious of big government and over-policing, however not all subjects that happen to interest us belong in this forum.