skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Also: get in touch with the Teens in Tech guys. They're awesome.

curious why you'd recommend this? As a casual observer and not at all familiar with what they've done beyond the "public" stuff, they just seem like a group of teenagers with some dumb luck. Their "conferences" seem surrounded by "drama" (he said she said whaa whaa stuff) that you'd expect from high school students, their actual products are pretty pointless (the blog gets 1 post every few days and it's either about some free product they got or their friends ~~application~~ startup and their apparent "blogging platform" thing died after a few months and was just a wp-mu install.

From what I've seen of "them" it seems he'd gain nothing from them. It's just a group of kids with connections doing nothing but making whatever is hip and happening and abandoning it for the next thing. See each of their twitter profiles, every few weeks they're the "CEO" of a new "startup".

The only "high profile" (in the HN esque scene) teenager I'd think of recommending is Mark Bao, he's actually doing things.
The sucky thing about being a CTO (or C*O)
Accurate data from http://topsy.com/twitter/towerbridge, http://pastebin.mozilla.org/1248326
I used to agree, until I ran into a bunch of inline StringBuilder Java XML where no schema existed, and simply converting it to Scala at least ensured it was well-formed while we reverse-engineered a schema. I agree it's not something one should use much (well, maybe with Lift), but wow, is it ever useful when it's useful. I agree, doesn't hurt much; helps massively when you need it.
Your site seems to work well, and is a service I could have made use of a few months ago. Finding reviews and scheduling local services like this often leads to a million dead ends using google and traditional search.

Right now, in Kansas City you have one provider with no reviews, so for me it has not yet solved the problem, but it is a great start!
You are doing good. Dont over-complicate things, and keep having fun along the ride.

If you need any advice/opinion regarding programming or software development, feel free to e-mail.
Did you consider learning biology?

You sound smart and comfortable with solving problems with a computer, yet you do not seem to be satisfied with developing applications for people to use in everyday life. Perhaps your calling is to develop computer programs to solve scientific problems. I am extrapolating from my experience here. I am an astrophysicist and do simulations for studying problems in stellar dynamics. It is really fun, but sometimes I wish I had the background in biology to have the option to switch to that field, since there seems to be tons of interesting problems and really smart guys there; in particular in molecular biology and in brain research. I think if I knew what I know now when I finished high school I would go for biology and not physics (this does not mean I regret my choice though, I do not), or at least take a few biology courses.

Unfortunately I cannot recommend many books. The only decent biology book I have is "The Molecular Biology of the Cell" by Alberts et al. It is really good. I have the feeling others here can make better/more recommendations if you ask. This is not necessarily an engaging book.

Good luck!
really want to do this, I'm gonna get in the IRC chat
one of the better written articles out there for some one new to the language. Also like the fact that some of the funamentals of functional programming are also briefly introduced in context.
Bill Venners, owner of Artima, is a co-author of the Staircase book, and author of ScalaTest. He has embraced Scala more than most.
I'm sorry if I was unclear. In their post, Sofa wrote, "We’re committed to securing a great future for [Versions and Kaleidoscope] outside Sofa". I noted that they have not been particularly good stewards of Versions over the past two years, and that therefore the situation couldn't get much worse by handing it off to someone else.

I don't really disagree with the point you make below about software licenses, and that when you buy a license you're paying for the software as it exists today, right now. But I think my take is more along the lines of nestlequ1k's. When I bought a license for Versions, I went into that "relationship" (ugh) with the expectation that Sofa would continue to improve on it, and that I've have the opportunity to buy future upgrades. That's unlikely to happen at this point. So yeah, I got what I paid for, no argument there, but I can't deny that I'm disappointed with how things turned out.
HTML5 vs Native: The Mobile App Debate
See my answer on Quora to "Will Scala ever remove XML literals?" http://www.quora.com/Will-Scala-ever-remove-XML-literals

Summary: No. At the time that Scala was started, built-in support for XML showcased one area were object-oriented decomposition failed and functional programming proved quite useful. Today the benefits of FP are more well known, and it's generally agreed that if Scala were starting from scratch it would not include XML literals. However, given that XML literals are in the language already, that large code bases have come to rely on them, and that they generally don't get in the way if you don't use them, it's unlikely that they will be removed.
My Git aha! moment was when I discovered "git add -p".

I use it all the time now to break my work apart into multiple atomic commits.
Wow. I think you and I are in very similar positions. Although you've got a decade headstart on me: Win. I would say our interests and current set of skills overlap quite a bit, this is what I'm doing to get to the next level:

- Find a mentor. This is really important. IRC + StackOverflow is a good substitute, but you need somebody who you can go to with your dumbest questions and who has infinite patience.

- Pick something you think is cool and copy it. Wholesale. Don't even worry about doing it well, just get it to work. I made a couple HN clones for different domains just to see how it works.

- Take a break from programming and get a different hobby. Preferably something that makes you work with your hands (metal-working, cooking, painting (PG FTW) are good).

- Take a theoretical CS course at a local university. It will really help elevate your thinking about computation and problem solving.

Hope that was at all coherent/helpful. Good luck!
Same excuses I've been reading since I first started using Linux around 2001.
I've always thought that the best response to "Privacy is less important because I've got nothing to hide" is what I call the "privacy lets you pick your nose" argument. There are plenty of things that we like to do in private, that are not illegal, but which, if revealed publicly, would cause substantial embarrassment. For example, picking your nose, watching porn, lip-syncing to cheesy music in the bathtub.

All of these things create individual pleasure, and thus overall societal utility and value. (That is, they make people happy.) To effectively deny people these individual pleasures by forcing them out into the open would be to reduce overall societal utility. Thus, privacy benefits society by enabling people to engage in legal, but potentially embarrassing, behavior.

(I happen to like Dan Solove's work a lot, and I think he is ultimately coming to the same conclusion as me, but his argument seems to rely on accepting his definition of privacy, while I think that the above argument simply attacks the "I've got nothing to hide" argument head on.)
Trademark is the normal legal foundation for protecting a name. But trademarks are limited by industry and geography, so attempting to enforce them on a single global namespace like Twitter or DNS is always going to end up with conflicts.

However, this is probably the best way to protect a name you use on Twitter: register a trademark and let them know that you're using your registered name as a Twitter handle and want it maintained for your business/organisation.
"Government regulation of personal freedom is a fine gauge for overall freedom."

Some of us disagree.

"How would you have done it? What issues would you have selected?"

The most important things I would look at are education outcomes of the first and second quartile (of household income) and the diversity of employment available.

I would also look at pollution levels, highway fatality rates, incarceration rates, certain crime rates, certain disease rates, services received for those dreaded taxes, entertainment and cuisine options, we could go on...

Big towns don't become cities and cities don't become big cities and big cities don't turn into metropolii through coercion. They're big because people run away from South Dakota and never go back. Freely.
Nope, kleiba correctly interpreted my comment :)
Everything now is working... but it's a pain in the ass to get everything working. I've been using Linux since 2001-2002. I'm scared of updating anything because of what might break. I love Linux ideas and principles but shit man I wish it was easier. Easier != windows/mac
It's unique in being far more than a language: once upon a time, it was an operating system

Well, it shares that distinction with Oberon, so, not unique.
Google Summer of Code is only offered to college students.
It may also be interesting to study whether freedom is a leading (or lagging) indicator of prosperity, as it is likely that laws have a gradual impact, not an immediate one.
Such essays should be included in the literature given to students who are choosing a major.
154 websites that store your password in plain text
Fascinating! Recently I've been falling in love with Prolog and it's possibilities particularly when it's fast and embedded in a Lisp.
I think the debate is more about self-learning vs a formal education.

Moreover, a CS degree is overkill for most of the programming people do.
...because what scala needs is more api-breaking decisions...
Shoot me an email when you get the chance (in profile). I started young, too, and while I'm certainly not "prodigy-aged" at this point, I rather enjoy conversing about being a young programmer :)
How to Make a Living of Language Design
I am far from an expert on Romania, but would guess there are two more factors?

- Lack of trust in the society, which ought to generate a cynical attitude. It is the parameter which seems most different from [Edit: West European] countries. I assume this is both from the communist history (secret police etc) and that the present politicians are more or less the same thieves as before 1989.

- A Microsoft domination in the infrastructure. Open source seems more prevalent on Linux/BSD/et al.
The Root of All Squares
Many species in the animal kingdom camouflage themselves, so they won't be eaten by predators. I wonder if you could convince one of these animals to stop camouflaging themselves with an argument that the predators won't hurt you so long as you stop doing anything that might attract the predator.
Do they have actual plans though? There has been talk of .NET support since the beginning. Basically I wouldn't hold my breath.
I'd just say, think of the cool big project you want to do first and just let that dictate which technology you use to solve it.
You seem to be listing a variety of quality of life issues, which I don't think is quite the same as 'freedom'. I'm not suggesting that it wouldn't be worthwhile to investigate those issues, just that it seems to be a different focus than the linked report. Your focus would seem to compliment rather than refute the goals of that report.
Python 3.1.4 new release
Well, it is pretty rude of them.

But yes, if you want to maintain a reliable presence, you have to pay for it.
Reminds me a little of a Mycon podship:

http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/Podship
Those aren't even the important numbers. With 22x the number of articles and the ratio of small and mid stage startup to tech giant articles half of what it used to be, even finding the articles in the noise is a joke.

Then, once found, we have to deal with the quality problem you mention.

TechCrunch left my reading list almost a year ago for these reasons.
Doesn't surprise me if it's in a 20k loc program. Very easy to overlook the obvious.

That said, like the previous comments, if someone had seriously looked for this issue, you'd have hoped they'd have found this pretty quickly.
This immediately makes me think of David Brin's _Sundiver_.

Or X-men's Cyclops.
Isn't AT&T dead? SBC bought the name, not the company.
Agreed. It won't be long before Google can link up any writing you've done under your real name with all the things you thought you posted anonymously. A writer's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writeprint is hard to disguise without ruining the message.
Scala looks complex on paper, but my experience has been that in practice it's not that bad. If you're designing a library you need to think hard about types but you can put together an app very quickly in Scala and with a lot fewer initial bugs than in a dynamically typed language.
Try http://thestartupfoundry.com/
Passions such as art history are far easier to pursue in life by constantly reading books, going to museums, and attending lectures. Computer science is impossible to engage with on a casual basis. It requires a massive and highly focused investment of time and energy, ideally with the world’s best teachers guiding you at the same time.

First, I don't know that I agree with the first bit. One may certainly dabble in art history (or many other liberal arts-type majors), but one won't get quite as much out of it as someone else who dedicates hours and hours to it over months and years. This holds true for all deep, non-trivial subjects.

Further, one certainly /can/ 'engage with CS on a casual basis'. People do it all the time, and they certainly don't always have "the world's best teachers" to guide them. Mentors, teachers, and professors play an important role, but many people do quite well in their chosen fields without that extra boost.
You completely misstated your position and need to learn how to express yourself in English.
Calculating PageRank with NumPy
Putting XML literals in the language just feels wrong. On the other hand, they've turned out to be damn useful when you're writing the back end for a web application.
Especially for the people in the audience asking themselves "is this like X, but with i and j?" ... "Ahhh, it IS like X with i, j AND k. Now I get it."

Which you hope to lead on to "Now why can't X just add these features? What makes /this/ company better than X?"
Kathy Sierra is always worth the read. She stopped blogging regular a few years ago due to personal reasons. If you're therefor not familiar with her writing, it's worth a look.
I must ask, why the name “Gridless”? Surely HTML/CSS frameworks and grid systems are completely different things? The name almost seems to suggest that the use of a grid is a bad thing. Just the way I perceived it :)
Very interesting. It is interesting to compare the reviews of Great Expectations and Les Miz. They correctly called Great Expectations a masterpiece, but the Les Miz review was simply awful.

They spent half of the review complaining about how the author was paid too much for the book and how the poor publisher had to suffer so much trying to sell it. And then they attack the book for trying to replace the bible (!!!) for being too nice to the poor and unfortunate and being dangerous for the undeveloped minds of ordinary people. And then they say: "The bigotries of virtue are better than the charities of vice." Unfortunately, the author of that review probably did not live to see the second world war and realize how wrong he was about that.
All freedom can be understood in terms of the authority that is displaced [1]. The net amount of liberty, strictly measured, is always conserved [2].

Individual freedom is a restriction upon xenophobic groups; economic freedom shifts the needle in favor of those with the capital; emancipation grants rights to slaves and strips them from slaveowners. The water flows the other way too: you can talk about the "freedom" of Kim Jong Il or Stalin to murder their own people.

The entire political discourse in this country (and, to some extent, HN) will be frozen until we can move past merely reciting mechanically that helping one group comes at the expense of hurting some other group. If we put half as much energy into either throughly examining the moral underpinnings of which groups should be elevated or abased[3], or empirically studying the possible utilitarian effects of this[4] as we spend reciting talking points at each other, we would have a great many of the world's problems already solved.

[1] Understand that I'm trying to be morally neutral here, "freedom" and "authority" are being used descriptively, not prescriptively. Obviously a great many of us have strong opinions that slavery is bad, etc.

[2] By this I mean in any individual exchange, you are taking freedom from one group and are assigning an equal amount of freedom to another group. Human perception can differ a great deal: punishing a murderer has an enormous negative burden upon an individual, but it has an equal and opposite impact to society at large, albeit amortized over a great number of people. This can be hard to see in some cases. Also, I am not claiming that a policy in the long run cannot raise all ships; that is a function of tenth-order consequences, and I (and the parent) are talking about first-order ones.

[3] And by this I mean: is it right to take something from this group and give it to this other group? Under what circumstances? Is inequality bad? Is it bad in proportion to the amount of inequality? Is it still bad if everyone has a sufficient floor of resources that meets their basic needs? These are interesting questions; our current political discourse is not.

[4] And by this I mean: What are some local maxima and non-local maxima for economic output as a function of regulation? If we plot creative output as a function of IP law, what will the graph look like? Can we do empirical studies to confirm or refute the underlying basis for legislation (controlling phenylephrine reducing methamphetamine production, for example)? These are elevating questions that inspire us to learn about our world. We are nowhere close to having this kind of conversation.
IOS 5 Changelog and Thoughts
> I was tempted to switch into art history
> to escape the huge engineering workload.

My association with friends in the fine arts indicates that that would've been a horrible decision; probably depends on what college/university you're at, but while engineering majors seem to have a pretty consistently high workload, visual design, music composition, and art history majors seem to get periodically slammed with horrendously massive workloads.

I thought about switching to animation for a while, and then realized that there's no way I could handle the load in the introductory-level classes. I suspect it's because there're lots of people who would like to do fine arts, so they make all of the 100-levels incredibly intense to filter in just the ones who are really talented and dedicated.

Sometimes I wish they'd do the same thing with the CS department.

> Computer science is impossible to engage
> with on a casual basis. It requires a massive
> and highly focused investment of time and
> energy, ideally with the world’s best teachers
> guiding you at the same time.

I believe this to be true as far as the theoretical, mathematics-based discipline of computer science goes. But it should be noted that you can become a fantastic programmer with very little formal CS background and casual engagement.
Not to be rude but I'd like to ask you for advice.

I'm fourteen, and I'm in a similar situation, although worse at programming. All I know is web, and some low level. Neither very well. The best thing I've made is probably a fancy pastebin (for plain text) in Sinatra.

Here's my advice (question later):

From the part about fearing that your ideas suck, you should ask someone and see what others think of it. They probably aren't that bad. You need confidence within reason.

With web programming, don't start with Django. Sinatra is good for practicing and getting used to moving data, so I would recommend web.py (the equivalent for Python), just because it's like Sinatra (disclaimer: I've never used web.py).

I got confused by SQL and SQLAlchemy. I like MongoDB better. It's easier, in my opinion.

Once you want to do something complicated, beyond a pastebin, then move to Django.

Learn CSS and design and something like Illustrator (logos, background images). I used to open up Firebug/Inspector, select something from a web page, and see what came up. Then I tried to duplicate it. Probably not the best way though...

Here's my question (to everyone, not just you):

What should I do to make the most out of my time?

I have the opposite feeling with algorithms and data structures. They feel like a waste of time when I could be making something, but that's just my delusion probably.

We can continue this over email.

Edit: don't stress over learning something that takes too much time. There's no rush. Also, web programming is useful because you could provide a service/subscription. That is, you make a mobile app which works with a web site/central server.
i'm 16 and am on the other side of your world, still loving technology, but avoiding programming in favor of the design/content/consulting side... i've joined sparkmuse.com in hopes of finding someone to partner with me, but i think i'd probably have more success if i had programming knowledge. if you want to build something, i'd suggest checking that out. shoot me an email- m at squealingrat.org- i'd like to talk with you about what you've created.
Well, if you're thinking about weekends it is (364/365)^n*5/7, so it doesn't make a difference for the maximum.
Thoughts on Twitter as a Communication Medium
Scala already compiles to the CLR, but support for it is nowhere near that for the JVM.
Acronis Softwares Giveaway(both free and discount coupons)
t.next == nil

I don't give a fuck whether it's called null or 0 or nil or whatever, or whether it's amazing or surprising or shocking. Every single pointer has null as a possible value, which means Go suffers from what I think is the biggest possible mistake a (non-scripting) programming language could make (and I'm not alone -- Tony Hoare thinks the same). The worst thing about all this is that we already have a well-known and well-studied solution in the Maybe monad, yet the Go designers buried their collective heads in the sand here.
Brief Introduction to Vacuum Tube Audio Electronics
The set of problems for which Go is the best programming language to use is empty, simply because Rust exists. Rust has non-nullability, immutable shared state...
I read many years ago that '%s%s' % (a,b) was faster than a + b, the reason given that it was done in C. But after reading this thread and trying myself, it seems to be false also. On Py 2.6:

python -m timeit " '%s%s%s' % ('aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa', 'bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb', 'ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc') "
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.201 usec per loop

python -m timeit " 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa' + 'bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb' + 'ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc' "
10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.136 usec per loop

Perhaps it changed in new versions of Python, but either way, I guess I'll be using the % form less than I used to.