skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone has an opinion on what language to start with, and I suspect that there is no clear answer. However, I would recommend you start with Scheme/Lisp and read "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html).

This book is a classic and outlines various fundamentals of computer science and programming. Scheme is the type of language that lets you just code without worrying about all the unnecessary things that hinder the beginner.

From there you should move to C++ so you can get used to object oriented programming and have a better idea of what "modern" languages are like, but I contest that SICP is the best book to use to start programming.
Every job I've had, I got through personal connections.

I did event videography up until last fall (went away to college), every gig I got was because I knew person planning it (theatre: I knew the director, weddings: I knew the wedding planner)

I had a day job working at subway last summer. I got the job by going to the manager (whom I've known for many years) and asking for the job.

My current internship is at the same company my father works at. I went to the CTO and asked for an internship. It probably helped that my dad works there.

I've also applied for several jobs. Every job I applied for at my college I was turned down for, every other internship I applied for told me "lol, freshman".
Genuine question: how do you do that?
"he attempted to correct a code analysing weather-station data from Mexico."

This annoys me, and it is everywhere. It indicates the writer has no idea what they're writing about and presumes that it's not a process but a matter of getting the right answer. "Hold on a sec, let me get out my Little Orphan Annie's Secret Decoder Ring."

(sibling deleted and moved here)
Probably because they're 3-5X as expensive as postdocs.
Isn't Couch already out of style?
This is the #1 reason to stop illegal immigration and provide for a reasonable level of legal immigration. We create an underclass that either doesn't have legal rights or feels that they don't have legal recourse, and so they are ripe to be exploited.
You won't see any clean code written by scientists until (major) journals make it mandatory to submit code for peer review and publication.

When it happens, I hope that they'll manage to agree on a sensible license (even though I won't set my hopes too high).
Profit from the inevitable Google+ app platform launch
I first read this when I was 13, and what I learned about MIT's culture really stuck with me. Great book
The point is that since software development is not their main goal or background, their practices tend to be ad-hoc. We know the value of testing and documentation, but they do not. People don't know to stop doing something until they know it's a bad practice. And they're not going to know it's a bad practice until they discover that fact on their own (which can be a slow process) or someone teaches them (faster, but potential cultural problems).

That they should is basically a given in the article. The question is how to make it happen.
TriggerTrap -- a hackable, universal camera trigger
Pretty unimpressive... Don't they have some of the greatest minds in the world working on this stuff?
I'm lucky to be in a lab with enough funding for this. This is rarely the case. In medical science it's easy to get large grants and pay programmers in something like biology the programmer is usually that guy that learned perl since he's already getting paid to do science.

Grad students probably wrote the majority of the tools used in my lab and it shows because when they leave the knowledge of the different issues and bugs in the software that they had goes with them. Years later they resurface and no one has any idea of the thought process of the original author.

It's quite annoying. We have such a project right now that is a basic piece of software we use for all our research. There is no current funding for someone to sit there and clean up the code. Most funding agencies want new work not maintenance work to be done with their money. There just isn't any incentives anywhere for this.

Someone will just reinvent the wheel probably.
The thing about scientific code is that it's often a potential dead end. The maintenance phase of the software life cycle is not as assured as it is in industry.

Writing good engineering software is not the scientist's goal so much as demonstrating that someone else with a greater tolerance for tedium (also someone better-paid) could write good engineering software.
I think it has the highest ratio of "people support it" to "politicians and DC media absolutely will not even mention it let alone give it credence", so people tend to bump it up on places like twitter because it's the only time they can express the viewpoint.
The drug question always seems to come up as the #1 question asked when a vote is put to internet users. And every time Obama dodges/laughs at the question.
Project Dyslexie
Similarly, from Zed Shaw (http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/advice.html) :

"People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines."
No, that's not correct.

I have loaded several track to Spotify on my PC, and can listen to them using the client on my phone without having to manually load/import them there. They sync automatically when you connect.
NYTM Review - Biodigital Human, City Pockets
Hi Brandon, I appreciate the quick response. I would, at the very least, work with a copywriter rather than formulating your own copy (there are plenty that will work for free, to build their portfolio). In the meantime, I look forward to the substance :)
Dan Frommer Quits Business Insider to Start 1 Man Tech Site - SplatF
Weebly hiring iOS developer to create an app for our 7.5M+ users
I've been keeping my Facebook account only to avoid losing out event invitations that some publish only via that channel. I've not really logged in for any purpose in a long while.

Facebook has lost a lot of user trust with their arguably shady practices. I think there are many of us who want to be in on the whole social networking thing, but don't want it on Facebook.

Then there's Google's almost monopolistic leverage using Google's services to give Google+ its much-needed bootstrapping boost.

Whether all of this is enough, or is more or less than the actual relationships already captured in Facebook -- I don't trust anyone to really know.
Thanks for your comment! :)
I'd love to have Dayta for Android, but I'm no good at Android yet. Anyone want to help?
You're right! Him and Brant Cooper, his co-writer, are brilliant CustDev pros.
Java 7 Fork-Join Calamity
What's your take on Customer Development?
This seems at odds with the statement from the article

"There needs to be a real shift in mindset away from worrying about how to get published in Nature and towards thinking about how to reward work that will be useful to the wider community."

EDIT: What the heck is wrong with this? We have two opinions on the perceived value of programmers in scientific enterprises, one from someone who works in the field (David Gavaghan) and another from Zed Shaw. I'm highlighting that Zed's perception is not universally agreed upon.
Not launching a separate app for video is certainly a nice feature.
there's http://dukgo.com
What an excellent idea: Generate new jargon that's incompatible with the jargon used from the field you suck at.

Perhaps concerned scientists and editors should reject the bifurcation here and take on the lingo of the field that creates the tool they have to use and need to learn better as a first step in learning to program in a more responsible manner?
I did some work on data visualization for the astrophysics department when I was in college. I started to work with the simulation code, but found that the math was sprinkled everywhere, which made it really difficult for me to make structural changes without risking the integrity of the program.

One of the most elusive skills for self-taught programmers is how to structure code properly. A good architecture would allow domain experts and non-expert programmers to coexist, but that would require throwing away a lot of existing spaghetti code written by domain experts, which is not going to be a popular decision.
I wouldn't bother learning a language that isn't of general use, I also wouldn't learn an odd/heavily-non-standard language within the first or five (so you don't learn bad habits). As I understand VB and Basic are common examples of this. There are a lot of ways to improve on what you already know, e.g. lua would build on your javascript knowledge.

If you've failed so often, don't keep trying, but read some motivational/self-improvement books. Ask HN for them, I haven't read any.
One of the main sources in the article is a study from the 2009 Workshop on Software Engineering for Computational Science and Engineering. One of the workshop's organizer's has a report of the overall conference which is interesting: http://cs.ua.edu/~carver/Papers/Journal/2009/2009_CiSE.pdf
Custom Labels – Fabulous Marketing Tool
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Reddit Moves Into New Offices
1) It's a funny question to retweet, 2) it's something the president does not typically get asked about, and 3) As far as problems facing our country, it has a relatively easy answer, IMHO.

I'm sure more people are worried about the economy, but "how are you going to fix unemployment?" is neither a fun/funny question to ask nor is it likely to produce an interesting or novel response.
Vitriol? Certainly not from me - I think I've been perfectly civil, and I am trying to understand the situation.

I don't think your explanation holds. Pagerank is based on reputation (created by links and other means which Google isn't very specific about), more than on contents. jquery.com has a pagerank of 8, so it can't be all inaccessible to Google. The GP says that blog.jquery.com is inaccessible. So how does jquery.it get a pagerank of 8? Your explanation would look correct if jquery.com had a pagerank of 1 (due to misconfiguration) and jquery.it sneaked in with a rank of 2. But this isn't the pattern.
You could try building one. Almost every major Javascript framework starts with a Todo list as the Hello World project. Apparently, developers take that Hello World a little further, then start charging for it.

</rant>
it's not either one of you, it's our setup. that and the fact that i neglected to directly cache the page before it hit, so our server is about to burst into flames.

soon as i can get back into to shut things down and cache everything it'll go back to normal. ish.

apologies in the meantime.
It's usually outside of the scope of what you can pay for using a grant, and grants are currently the "standard" way to fund science. In this particular case also the permanently part won't get along with with grants being given for specific goals and also for fixed periods of time.
Interesting read; not a lot of universal truths about re-writing. Which is actually a good thing because there are none. The decision to re-write is highly dependent on the context in which it is being made.

For example, a large legacy application in operation for over a decade with a huge volume of customer data is completely different monster from a smart phone app. Re-writing it in another language is a pain in the ass and if you're really, really successful nobody will notice the effort you put in. It won't make you any money or friends.

Still, there are times when it's just necessary. Even large legacy applications can be replaced given the right parameters. You can write an interface layer to the old code and extend it in a new language. Write an exhaustive amount of unit tests and acceptance tests against the legacy wrapper API and slowly replace the legacy code behind it with new code that is better written, faster, and more reliable (or what have you).

I think the most salient point of this article is to know what you're re-writing. Good acceptance tests and functional tests will help A LOT in making this decision.
I think this is somewhat regional. I'm from Canada, and no one I know uses AIM. MSN seems to be the most common chat program, although Skype is increasing in popularity.
Just give it time, it's eventually consistent.
who's jeff by the way?
Body Bombs Added to America’s Air Security Concerns
Basic is really not terribly relavent or useful at this point. I'd consider good old Javascript. Its syntax is derived from C and gives you a foot in the web-world. It's also easy to get started as you can start with any text editor, a browser and there is no compiling or development environment to configure (a huge obstacle I think other programs forget btw - setting up and getting your IDE working is not so simply for a beginner).

From Javascript you can use your knowledge and move to just about any other langauge (C/C++, Java, C#, Actionscript are examples of other 'C' derived languages). Plus, Javascript's popularity is on the rise and it's a good skill for any programmer to have in his toolbelt (you are bound to run into it at some point in your programming experience down the road).

As far as putting programming skills to practice, I agree with the sentiment of others - come up with a pet project, even a simply one to learn the ropes. For example I use to always start by writing a simple contact/address book program; it contain all the elements you'd need to know for most business apps (a list of records (addresses), the ability to view 'details', add new records, delete records and edit existing data).

You should also consider taking a computer programming class at your local community college. That way you are assigned simply programs, have other classmates to work with and talk about sticking points with; of course the teacher is always an option to get some real feedback when you are stuck which is something a book alone can't provide.
Thanks for the advice. I'll definitely look into it :)
You've got cause and effect backwards. People that pick these languages up don't start off as "true programmers", they become "true programmers" because they pick up languages like this.
How much does Netflix spend on postage each year?
This is also true in business. You should always remember that you're not just a developer or a programmer but that you're solving business problems. That's the only way to truly make yourself invaluable.
All of your posts since http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2698286 are dead actually. A mistake, I hope.
They don't do email delivery of the magazine, but they do in fact have an email newsletter that announces it (and new books, etc): http://pragprog.com/resources#account, as well as a sitewide RSS feed that announces new issues as well: http://pragprog.com/feed/global
It's probably not intentional, or even recent. Scientists have been using computers to help solve their problems as long as computers have existed.
Ich verstehe Sie, aber ich wohne in der USA und kann nicht mein Frau und Tochter nach Berlin umziehen. Ist es so schwer, Deutsche Muttersprachler zu finden?

Viel Gluck!
I had to look this up after you mentioned it. Looks like it was run by a company called US Videotel: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/minitel-usa/inde...

I know the US also had some trials of teletext (text pages over broadcast TV) too, but I think that was even less successful than videotel.
Facebook lists seem to be equivalent of Circles. Why should I be using Google+ except that it is from Google ?
Taking Back the DNS
Every day lots of new names are added to the global DNS, and most of them belong to scammers, spammers, e-criminals, and speculators. The DNS industry has a lot of highly capable and competitive registrars and registries who have made it possible to reserve or create a new name in just seconds, and to create millions of them per day. Domains are cheap, domains are plentiful, and as a result most of them are dreck or worse.
http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2010/08/start-spreading-news...
Why would it be problem to learn both Scala and Clojure.

Your friends that struggle with C++ are just begginers, they'll learn over time.

If one is really a programmer, it's not the language he has to learn, it's concept that can be easily applied to different languages. And the chance is that those concepts are not that distinct or unique, and that you already know some of them.

Functional programming, STM, macros, ... nothing new, just 20+ years old repackaged concepts in a new wrapper package (language) and a new API.

That being said, go learn either Scala or Clojure. After that, learning the other one will be much easier.
Yes, but I also have quite a number of friends who do not use Gmail for one reason or another, so FB's video chat is a welcomed.

I also don't understand what's with all the hate towards FB because they are implementing something other services have.
Most of these Point seem to ring a bit hollow. MongoDB gets criticism: therefore it's the new MySQL? Or because they both use open source licenses?

I'm not saying that MongoDB isn't growing. I just think that it's way early to pronounce it as a replacement for MySQL.

These kinds of provocative but false titles belong in the cheap tabloids, not on the front page of Hacker News.
I'd like to refer you to my, rather opposite, take on this. BTW, this worked VERY well for me.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2309405
Tempest-from-hell seen on Saturn
I've been programming for years, and I probably couldn't make Pong in C#. Game programming is a very different beast. If you want to do games, I would look for a specific framework (maybe PyGame) and tutorial.

If you just want to learn to program, I would stay away from games for now.

Either way, it sounds like you just need someone who can give you hints when you get stuck. If you go the gaming route, any of the major frameworks should have a message board and people willing to help. Ask for their help. Be specific in where you're getting stuck, and most people will be plenty helpful.

If you ever want some to look over some non-game code (like I said, I don't do games), feel free to send me an email. My email address is in my HN profile.
In BC Canada, when you change your address they just ship you a dot matrix printed version of the new address with a small sticky bit on the back to stick on the back of your licence. I don't think changing it to something outside of BC will work.
Not necessarily, it looks to me like your comment was serious. Unfortunately a lot of people think that just because it's Google that they are going to favor sites that have AdSense on them, or even that advertising via PPC is going to help your organic ranking.
Eminem Sends Facebook Users to Hell in Violent Promotional Game
thank you comex, I did not actually found how to decompress it, I keep trying with pdf-parser with no luck
I'm finishing up a degree in Computational Science where we are essentially trained in computational and mathematical techniques used in the physical sciences, and all I can think about is becoming an artist.

I don't think it's the science that adds value, I think it's the programming. The thing is, programming allows you to automate, simulate, measure and visualize complex processes. Science is all about complex processes, so if you have more powerful tools available to understand them, you will be much more valuable. Add to that, many of the physical sciences are hitting limits of physical experimentation and require simulations for further understanding.

I don't think the power of programming has truly shown itself, it should revolutionize every industry. It brings with it a different attitude towards solving problems and opens up new realms of possibilities. Social sciences are finally starting to look like real science thanks to big data and we have new knowledge industries. I'm personally most interested in how much art and education will change thanks to new powers of interactivity.
An example: being mentioned on Reddit
Sprinkling a little Twitter pixie dust on an infographic doesn't make a pure politics story germane to HN. Flagged. Please do likewise.
Just look at the backlinks to jquery.it and it should be pretty clear why that site ranks in Google for jquery-related searches.
I emailed you the details so I'm not taking this thread OT (and so I don't look like I'm spamming HN.) If anyone else has this question, eric at linkup dot com is a good way to reach me.
>> If you’re in a hurry to download a copy of the latest jQuery revision

Pardon? If you download just any jQuery without even checking the domain you are downloading from, then you are very careless. That's just like typing your Paypal password into a form on a website that was linked in an email that looked like it came from Paypal...

Your copy of jQuery will be able to see anything that happens on the site you are writing, send any user password to a external server, read session keys, query your API for any data as a logged in user, etc. You could even build a botnet out of modified jQuery libraries.

Whenever you download executables, make sure you know where they are coming from!
So...how long has Facebook been withholding video chat from their users? Sad and sorry. Thank you Google for giving everyone a superior product. Keep it up!
This is a great question for new users of jQuery, or indeed any software I need to download and integrate with my software/website. When a user is hit with malware, it affects just them (and maybe their email/facebook friends). If I download malware and incorporate it into my software, then I'm now distributing it to my users!

So how I do it is I look for the community. github is a good place to look. HN is itself a good source of vetting. Google, certainly, but not the first link I find. In fact, when I first heard about jQuery, I didn't assume that the "real" site could be trusted either: if I'm going to install this on my site, and serve it to people who trust me, then it had better be trustworthy.

Now imagine I run a tutorial website, and people come to my site because they trust me, and then they install software they copied from me (or my links), and distribute that to their users. Wow. Kudos to the author: I think it was bad form to blame google here, but the fact that he admitted it all does a lot to reestablish trust.
We probably do the same thing with terms originating in physics every day, and I'll wager they hate it.
Frankly, I'm a little surprised this hasn't been tried already. It was in a Batman movie 3 years ago, and the idea surely wasn't new then.

If I wanted to bring down a plane badly enough that I procured an explosive device and brought it on board, it doesn't seem like it would take a tremendous amount of additional resources to get that put inside me with some sort of remote or timed detonator. You wouldn't even need a great surgeon - just one who was able to keep me alive for a week at most to allow for time to get to the airport, etc.
Wow, I don't think you want that comparison.