skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ingenic co-founder here. I agree, the claims you quoted come off as sensational. We'll definitely be writing more substantial pieces soon. Our apologies -- email me at brandon@ingenic.com i'm willing to share specifics.
Python is a good language to start. You should definitely avoid BASIC. Quoting E. Dijkstra:

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Why does asking a question about it make it the biggest concern? It's a simple issue with a clear way to decide and most people simply want him to go along with his repeated promises of not using the fed to raid dispenceries, which is exactly what the AG is doing right now.
Source? A new release came out a few months ago and I don't see anything on the site saying it's dead.
Something I heard from one of my professors once: "A programmer alone has a good chance of getting a good job. A scientist alone has a good chance of getting a good job. A scientist that can program, or a programmer that can do science, is the most valuable person in the building."
In reality, where people use money to purchase goods and services, the exchanges cannot unilaterally decide to advertise a best bid and offer price worse than reality and then pocket the difference.
It's a legitimate issue. The War on Drugs is an abject failure that has cost billions of dollars and left millions of lives either lost or destroyed through violence or imprisonment. It's a moral disaster, as well as a financial one. The only reason it continues is because voting to end it would be politically difficult.

When good politics back up terrible policy, it's reasonable to ask the head of state why he supports them.
Yeah the site blows, I still can't connect.
Spotify is an awesome service. Now we need Netflix to come to Europe.
Indeed, here in Argentina MSN is the default chat application.
WebCL scores first demos, GPU accelerated apps headed to your browser
New C64 gets stacked against the original (video)
Does net neutrality protect mobile tethering apps?
The system has a very simple view of the market. It keeps a current score. Above a certain number, it buys, below another number, it sells. But it's programmed to believe in a general upward trend in the market so it won't sell at a loss, unless the score falls to a lower-bound. Even then, it won't sell, it'll just b---h at me via SMS until I tell it what to do in the form of placing a standing sell order that will either liquidate when it hits a certain score that I define or cancel itself if the market starts moving the other way. That logic was added because of the market "panics" at Mt Gox (The big one everybody knows of was preceded by a smaller event that shook a lot of market confidence there)

Ok, so the score itself... More than anything it's using the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_oscillator. Since the market doesn't every Close, it calculates every hour. It uses a moving average of a number of periods. If we had a normal daily close, convention is to use a 3 "period" (day) moving average. In my case, the number of HOURLY periods used in my moving average is based on the volume being traded (depth of market).

I tweak it often in ways that truly bada-- automated trading systems probably do automatically -- to try to input market sentiment into the algorithm -- and I try to automate more and more of that as I have time. But I've made attempts at that which, when run against the corpus of market data I have, just don't work.

I've had a lot of fun building this, and it gave me chance to play with Mongo, something I've wanted to do for a while.

My advice: Go for it. Yes, the MtGox issue was deplorable. But I didn't actually lose any money and never really felt i was in danger of losing money, aside from just not being able to participate in the market when it was down. I plan on integrating other exchanges like https://www.tradehill.com/ as they expose APIs. ...I do scrape them for info, though. And it would be very easy to place trades thru their web UI if i had to go that route to dump mtgox entirely. But I don't like adding that complexity and failure point.

Oh, and living in the US, I used Dwolla to fund my account. If you want to do this at all, open a dwolla account and link your checking account -- it took me at least a week to get their microdeposits approved and my first deposit to clear.
Seems we're loving the "war on..." tagline these days. While I agree with the sentiment, I feel like the marijuana debate may need to be more of an analysis than a war.
Off-topic but...

In India, if you look like an Indian, you can pay $20 and get a passport with obviously-faked documents. You can get a driver's license for $5 without ever driving anything.

If you are a woman, it's the simplest thing to take a small-sinister-object past airport security. Buy a large book, cut a small-sinister-object-shaped hole, put the thing inside and pretend to read the book while waiting for security checks. You are asked to place the book on the table while they check you. They don't look into the stuff you put on the table, unless it's a wallet.

Sometimes I wonder if I miss it all.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:redmonk...
No. Skype lost ~$7M last year and has close to $700M in debt. This was the biggest objection on the price MS paid to acquire it. See http://mashable.com/2011/05/10/microsoft-acquires-skype/
Download and install a .jar file for Mac users? Yeah, my mom is gonna choose that over FaceTime ...
also a public ledger of all transactions.
The cynic in me supplies that with "if there's bottomless money for health care, which there isn't".
Facebook Tweaks Terms for Using Its Virtual Money After Antitrust Complaint
I'm wondering if it's the Skype technology itself has a problem. I haven't looked into it too extensively, but through experience, group calls (without video) in Skype tend to be choppy, and filled with problems (people dropping off, etc).

In comparison, I've paid for a 200 slot Ventrilo server for the last 3 years. While this is centralized, it's on a shared server, and I doubt the majority of NA/Euro connections wouldn't rival at least a 20-slot Ventrilo server in terms of hardware and bandwidth. Ventrilo GSM 6.1 44khz codex transmits amazing quality, regardless of whether I'm speaking to 1 other person, or 199 other people.

Does anyone actually know the reason for this?
> it would make sense to learn both Scala and Clojure

Stop dreaming... unless you're a true programmer at heart (or mind, really), there's no way you can learn new languages just like that. My schoolmates, very smart people, have huge problems even learning C++ (without most of pointers, but with inheritance, virtual classes and such), although they all know Matlab and possibly other languages.

Thinking in programming languages is hard, even though it may not seem so to those proficient in many languages. Each new language, Scala and Clojure/Lisp especially, have their own "weird" features and are quite far away from Java/C++.
> If her friends move, then she'll move.

And every of her friends will move if the other friends move, etc. But in reality, it is enough if only one of her friends, the most influential one moves, and then all the worker bees will follow.

> Because everyone she knows is on facebook.

But why is everyone on facebook in the first place? Because one of them, the group leader, the early adopter, the trend setter, decided first, then the rest passively followed. If the trend setter again decides to go G+, the effort to move off Facebook will be less then losing the queen bee, so they will follow again.
Around the start of last year's summer I lost my driver's license in my mom's car after she dropped me off at the airport. (I foolishly took it out of my wallet before hand so it fell out of my pocket.) Anyway, they let me through with just my college ID which is pretty low-quality-looking to boot. They did put a sticker on my bag that supposedly marks it for enhanced scanning (they never rifled through it though) and they lightly patted me down.
Interview with Furne One of Amato Haute Couture, Part 3 of 3
It does, it has a little "Add Person" button in chat windows. Same as Gmail does.
What were you working on when you hit the brick wall?

Was there a specific problem or just a feeling that you should be able to do more but didn't know what to do?
I think the "biggest concern" refers to the Re-Tweet analysis...it had over 4900 RTs, far beyond anything else.
While I'm not saying it's a bad idea to have voice and video, something makes me think implementation and release was hurried after Google+ release (EDIT: I'm sure they've been planning for a while, but I think Google+ prompted Facebook to push this out the door. I am, however, only speculating.), and that there are things that should be taken care of.

> The idea is similar to the way google added voice calling to gchat.

Voice-and-video chatting for Google Talk (which came out in 2008, remember when I said catch-up?) and was similar in that you could contact your google-talk friends with voice and video, sure, which is what they're enabling users to do today (2011).

While their page (http://www.facebook.com/videocalling) has an image Facebook + Skype, I would assume I could use it to connect with my Skype people as well, but that isn't the case.

Expansion to potentially add this in the future would be a good marketing ploy, however.
The website that actually works, in this case...?
http://noahhayes.com/ical/resources.zip
I recently forgot my driver's license, and I showed them my student ID (which did have my picture on it), and a couple of credit cards and I didn't even go through extra security. The TSA website makes it clear that you can get through security without a government-issued photo id (although they do discourage it).
Why not just hire comp scientists or programmers permanently? Adjust the company model, permanently segregate the work?
Do you have any insight into what makes jquery.it rank so highly? I thought a pagerank of 8 was very difficult to attain. Was this done with just some SEO, or did some mega-popular site link to them by mistake?

This is the real problem here, because people do have a lot of trust that very highly-ranked results on Google won't hurt them.
Videochat: The Cupholder of Social Networking
This is one of the worst info graphics I've seen. The graph shows nothing. It took me a couple minutes to realize the numbers outside the box are related to the stuff inside the box. And worst of all what does time zone have to do with anything? The only thing that was even semi-useful was the tag cloud.
PDF is the IE6 of document formats?
Iwould also definitely give Python a try, I have personally seen Python as a basic language to start learning how to code in action and it is very effective to teach the basics of program. Zed Shaw's book is a very interesting way to learn progamming with Python, though I don't have any references about it's effectiveness... http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

If you want to do something a little different you can also try subsetting Haskell as per in most of the courses found in http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_education#Hask... That is the approach they take in the University I studied CS, and it's an interesting one to combine with learning Python as a fist language.

Also, be wary of EWD quotes about teaching computer science, since they are sometimes a bit cocky.
"fried chicken" as a single term wasn't in my db, but I'll add it shortly. Thanks for letting me know.
I would pay for this too. I used to read magazines like Entrepreneur but they're filled with ads and full of fluff info. If it actually contains stories of substance, I'd pay a small subscription every month for it. Go for it!
"MAJOR BUG! Google search engine found to be open to SEO abuse!!!"

Except that this wouldn't be news. And because it wouldn't be news, the blame falls entirely on the author.

The author got fished. Kudos for letting everyone know about it. -kudos for blaming google.
This is so true. I work in a research lab and I'm trying to interest myself more to the science and it's really helping my coding work. It's easier to improve software when you know what your users need.
As a general rule, researchers do not test or document their programs rigorously, and they rarely release their codes, making it almost impossible to reproduce and verify published results generated by scientific software, say computer scientists.

Just stop doing that!

Seriously, testing is not wasted effort and for any project that's large enough it's not slowing you down. For a very small and simple project testing might slow you down, for bigger things - testing makes you faster! And the same goes for documentation. And full source code should be part of every paper.

Many programmers in industry are also trained to annotate their code clearly, so that others can understand its function and easily build on it.

No, you document code primarily so YOU can understand it yourself. Debugging is twice as hard as coding, so if you're just smart enough to code it, you have no hope of debugging it.
Why is this page making my CPU thrash?
> Advocating for "proper link formatting or better content presentation" reflects the fact that you've never had to dig deep into the complex SEO, user, customization, and other general business requirements that arise when running a CMS.

Erm. I don't think you understand what I meant. I meant if a URL is too long to fit within a block of text in your medium, enable hyperlinking it with short, descriptive link text the way just about any media other than twitter or plain text (or HN markdown, but I digress) allows. Have we already regressed from the concept of the well-made hyperlink?

I appreciate that designing URL structure for a site can be difficult. I don't think it's as hard as you make it out to be, because just about any free CMS package will take care of SEO'd URLs for you and set up redirects even if you change your content. Hell, you can customize all of this in Wordpress without touching code. But that's an orthogonal problem, and shortened URLs neither contribute to SEO nor constitute a viable long-term URL structure for any site.

> Short urls are valuable because they allow people an ability to simplify the increasingly long urls for use in many different mediums without the worry of breaking or losing portions of the url.

This is what I don't understand. OK, sure, URLs get long, but they could be long before we started putting keywords in them, that's not new. Besides email or twitter, what media are you possibly talking about where I'm dropping bits of a URL on the floor? And if bad email clients can't linkify long URLs properly and twitter won't allow proper link formatting, why are we just rolling over and enabling their problems?

>Twitters 140 characters is part of what defines them. There will always be short message mediums, ...

They could and should make an exception for URLs. Imagine tweeting:

URL shortener controversy all over again!
[Read it on HN|http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2734728]

and the URL portion and formatting doesn't count toward the limit, only the link text part. Visually, that's only 55 characters worth of information, and that's how the limit should be formulated. You can't tell me that http://bit.ly/blsa23848 is more informative or contributes meaningfully to Twitter's character limit by virtue of it being shorter than my formatted link with link text. In fact, it's less informative, and obscures the link's true destination without deshortening (and as the OP shows, deshortening is fallible).
Things I see them both doing: playing catch-up, stumbling on user experience, appealing to the lowest common denominator rather than the leading edge.
If there is no group chat on FB then I think they are loosing by a point. People don't use Skype's because it is not free while for example iChat allows you to do video chat for free (for limited number of people). Now Google will allow it for free, and my expectation is that people will start using it. This may be one big plus for Google+, and a way for them to attract more people.
I want to write a "software style guide" for journalists and their editors.

Software and Code are both mass nouns in technical language.

"Code" can be in programs (aka, things that run), libraries (things that other programmers can use to make programs), or in samples to show people how to do things in their programs or libraries. Some people call short programs scripts.

When you feel you should pluralize "software", you're doing something wrong. You might want to use the word programs, you might want to use the word products, you might want to just use it like a mass noun "It turns out, thieves broke into the facility and stole some of the water", etc when talking about a theft of software "It turns out, thieves broken into the facility and stole some of the software".
+1 for open sourcing. I'd love to help! This functionality is something I've been wanting to create for a long time, and was starting to get serious about it until I saw your app today. (My approach would have been far less user friendly though, using javascript / js data structures to store data, keep the whole app in a folder stored in Dropbox.)
Why do we need a "Github for Science"?  Imagine "Science for Github"
http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started...
> If you want to have a one on one video chat, and your friend list is hosted at Facebook, the new Facebook video chat is a near perfect product.

Michael seems to be ignoring the fact that GTalk has better video chat than skype (and has for years).
Things Everyone Should Do: Code Review
Freakin' sweet. Namesake is the best lately, sets a new standard.
Discount Cialis
I've got a 3gs with an old tethering crack on it, and am considering upgrading to 4.3.3 to get this jailbreak. How can I be sure that this will work for me, and how do I go about tethering afterwards? Googling only seems to turn up some app that I have to buy from some other store (a cydia store?). Is it more complicated than the help.benm.at tethering hack that I used?
Facebook, Skype team up for video calling to compete with Apple's FaceTime
Probably the latter. A friend of mine was sort of encouraging me with ideas and he bugged me to add a comments box to each image so people could add and read comments. I failed at that after days of attempting it. I also wanted titles above the images but couldn't integrate it into my admin script because how the script was setup was to iterate through the "uploaded" table of the database and display the results. Basically once things got a bit more complicated than just merely echoing images to the screen, I crashed and burned. This is the case with pretty much any language I use. I've made Space Invader clones with Python (using tutorials, understanding what was going on) but when it came to keeping scores, title screens and stuff, again I'd crash and burn. And today for instance, I've been reading up on C# and I've attempted to create Pong but I can't even get sprites to draw lol.
love that title/cupholder analogy. Recall recent article about the relative non-use of video calling/video chat - despite the general sense for years and years that it would be how we were all going to be communicating in the future that is now.
WebOS is vulnerable to XSS, zero-day exploit found
that was a really clever way to get me to sign up for twitsprout.
I am totally willing to pay more than £10 a month for Spotify model. It's just so much more convenient. Besides, on Spotify I started listening to music which I would never buy otherwise.
Would Windows 8 apps be likewise open to this sort of web programming language-based vulnerability?
Unfortunately, geo-tagging in the Twitter API is still hardly ever used -- in almost 100,000 #AskObama tweets, less than 500 of them were tagged. At the same time we felt that location was an interesting metric, since the country is often politically divided along state lines. The time zone is the best compromise we had. It's not perfect, but the fact that the numbers match the "stereotypes" shows there's at least some merit to this approximation.

Glad you liked the word cloud at least -- I've gotta say, you've been our toughest viewer so far ;) Thanks for the feedback though.
beatpanda, if you haven't seen this article in Technology Review, it's a good read: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37718/ and discusses co.cc. It's definitely the case that we saw a ton of spam on co.cc, which is one of the reasons why I posted at https://plus.google.com/u/0/109412257237874861202/posts/eanX... to remind people that if we see enough spam on a freehost, that can affect the reputation for the entire domain and result in us taking action on that freehost.

It remains to be seen to what degree co.cc can remove or clean the amount of spam on their domain. In the mean time, if you want to have a long-term presence on the web that's also in Google's index, you could get your own domain name or check out other freehosts such as WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, Posterous, etc.
>unless you're a true programmer at heart (or mind, really), there's no way you can learn new languages just like that.

Becoming a "true programmer" isn't something that you're like born with; it's not like there has ever been a Paul Erdos[1] of programming coming up with novel GC schemes at the tender age of three -- it's a result of the combination of a sincere interest in the process of coding and the pursuit thereof, and the former can and usually does follow from the latter, as long as you are careful to try to move no faster than is natural for yourself and have the patience to continue at such a pace, and if you're like me and you constantly need external stimulation you should find some, but in any case it certainly isn't magic.

[1] -- Erdos, quite famously, could calculate the number of seconds a person had been alive when he was three.
Or fun, if you're into that sort of thing.
I'm repeating some of my advice given on another post that was pulled down due to a downmodded parent.

If you want to do something a little different you can also try subsetting Haskell as per in most of the courses found in http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_education#Hask... That is the approach they take in the University I studied CS, and it's an interesting one to combine with learning Python as a fist language.
Actually it's a science thing. In a scientific context "code" is understood to mean "program". For example: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22population+synthesis+...

I'm not sure why this is though.
1. I want go to Somaliland - teach africans
2. Please vote http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2735547 - i need opinion. If it full shit i must know
It will be possible to audit BitCoin banks in a way that's not possible for today's banks. Specifically, transactions are public, although anonymous. Even so, it ought to be possible to perform a kind of traffic analysis against the public block chain to determine whether a group of addresses are participating in fraud (in the form of fractional reserve banking) given that initially a customer has to send their BitCoins to some address owned by the bank.
I'd imagine that if they are a perfect duplicate of jquery.com, and jquery.com is constantly returning a 500 error page to the googlebot, then all the content on jquery.it would be "unique". There is so much of it, and all highly relevant content, that it's pretty much a no-brainer that it's pagerank would be so high.

That said, I find it funny that there is so much vitriol against Google in this case when, as has been noted above, it's likely a misconfiguration on jquery.com's part.
Do they not have x-ray machines?