skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Racket makes it easy to fire up a Scheme and start doing work. It's the flexible, usable lisp with libraries that I was waiting for. There's less cause to drop SICP from the curriculum when you can get a high-quality scheme distribution and tooling on several platforms :)

They should improve out-of-box usability. You shouldn't need to pick a language when you first install it - that's a barrier to new users. Have a default (the shapes one described in the getting started area would be fine), and make it easy to change.
Design is the most important part of your product if you are not creating a new market because that's the only way you can differentiate your product. Everybody is going to have the same features and what you are really selling is your design.

When you launch a new product into a new market, the features (i.e. what it actually does) end up being slightly more important than the design. The design is obviously still important, but probably not the most important part of your product.

P.s. I really like the retro-beach lifeguard metaphor for customer service.
"No country, state, region, nor city has a lock on innovation in technology anymore. The Internet has made this so..."

The first part is true, but not the second. Boston was a big rival to Silicon Valley before the Internet, and since the rise of the Internet has actually fallen further behind.
(side note, there seems to be a page linking problem)

Clicking into http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/intro.html
and hitting the title takes me here http://learncodethehardway.org/ruby/

Clicking a link there takes me to
http://learncodethehardway.org/ex00.html

It looks like that header should link back to
http://ruby.learnruby ...
First was the introduction of Like/Share/Recommend buttons for third party web sites. Now Facebook is providing a data engine for third party ads.
It seems clear that the next step is for Facebok to become an ad provider for external networks.

I think this new deal is a pretty smart way for them to test the waters with regard to privacy + third party ads.
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Groupon stripping out "discretionary online marketing expenses that are incurred primarily to acquire new subscribers” is akin to airline stripping out fuel costs as "discretionary expenses that are incurred primarily to acquire new miles".

Anyway, for example, during its last years, the well known large company i worked at, was steadily posting near neutral quarters on non-GAAP, excluding one time charges, basis. The only thing is that each quarter there would be at least a one "one time charge" that would result in the quarter being deep in red. Not surprisingly at all if one understands that the life and business in particular is just a sequence of one time events :)

(there is of course a very reasonable use of one-time charges - if company generates a profit, then good accountants would dig out some "one time charges" that would allow to decrease/avoid the profit tax)
For all the hubris about their exclusive hiring method and engineering culture, these are pretty run-of-the-mill egregious bugs to be left hanging for months. Maybe Google does not invest much in Android because it's more of a sideshow.
Yes, but they don't require the same answer.

It's certainly possible that, when condoms are made widely available in a region, this will result in more people having sex. Likely, even. The Vatican's position is that this increase in people having sex outweighs the lower average chance of transmission.

This is empirically false. But it needn't be inherently. Suppose you offered people some other form of protection that decreased the chance of transmission of HIV by 90%, and for some reason in response to this people widely abandoned the use of the condom. This would increase the overall prevalence of HIV by a wide margin.

Take a model where this device decreases the chance of transmission of HIV by 0%, while making some decent sized chunk of people more likely to have unprotected sex because of a false sense of security.* In that case, passing this out at night clubs would likely significant increase HIV's prevalence.

I see a definite use for it, but more in the way of buying a 4 pack every year and not having to go to a clinic.

*I think this model is likely correct, given what we know about the epidemiology of HIV.
Why is the West silent on China's 5-year cyberwar?
It works if you think of it on this level:

The goal of Parse is to make server stuff really easy for mobile development.

The goal of Heroku was to make server stuff really easy for Rails development.

Of course the analogy breaks down once you try to be more specific with what "server stuff" means. ;-)
You're being down voted because you missed the point. Google's lawyer was claiming that Microsoft was banding together with rivals to damage them, but Microsoft has revealed that they actually offered to team up with Google, and Google refused because they wanted the patents for themselves.

A lot of people are giving Google the benefit of the doubt for their motivations in bidding on the patents (hey, it's pro-Google territory around here, I get that), but the point of this article is that Google's blog post was a lie. They were trying to portray a pattern of behavior on Microsoft's part by which they team up with competitors against Google, yet it turns out Microsoft actually offered to bid with Google.
"Understanding the audience and their interaction" is commonly referred to by programmers as "usability engineering" (in design terms, it's also known as interaction design, which is a sub-discipline of industrial design.) It's a talent very similar to programming, and one almost all programmers are good at, for the same reasons they're good at programming: it involves structural analysis of the actions users are performing, getting into the mindset of users, a lot of problem solving and "polishing off burrs" to optimize and automate workflows.

On the other hand, communications design—what you call "pretty colors and interface"—is an entirely different set of skills, honed mainly by years of critical exposure to different visual aesthetics and artisanal practice in replicating those aesthetics to understand their composition. It's an orthogonal skill to programming—but, once it has been done and a suitable aesthetic created for a piece, it's pretty easy for a programmer to take the results (a "theme"), break it down structurally into re-usable components, and then apply those components to solve their problems. The bit the programmer is untrained at, the understanding of what works with what, has already been performed by the designer.
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Wow. Thanks!

*edit - this is NOT the same product. The one for sale has a CRI of 80, and looks different too.
What I really want (and would pay money for) is something like PhoneGap but which lets me code in HTML5 and then deploy into the Android Market and iPhone AppStore at the push of a button, Without having to use Java/Objective C.

Why has no one provided this product yet? Do the TOS for Android Market and AppStore make this impossible?

(To be clear: The deployment part is the part I want, the part that I don't want to have to fuss with)
This is amazing, I had never even connected the two points of data in such a way as to realize that someone alive when Lincoln was president would still be alive when TV is on the market.

Aside from the intense tobacco ads (the big banner and the participation gift), I find it interesting that they were playing for the amount of $80.

Accounting for inflation, that's around $650 in today's dollars. Meanwhile these days, game shows play for a top prize usually around $10k to $1mil per episode. I guess in 1956, TV itself was enough to keep people entertained and tuned in. I wonder if 50 years from now, they'll be playing for people's lives or something equally crazy to keep jaded video audiences tuned in.
Wouldn't your competitors have to follow the same norms?
And good luck contributing edits to controversial topics (i.e. anything related to the big topics like the Middle East, religion, Pokemon etc.) where the same battles are fought over and over and over again in a war of attrition. The price of victory is eternal vigilance and an endless supply of fresh troops to reinforce your position.
> the whole thing suffers from increasing amounts of link rot.

Citations on Wikipedia are a joke. At least a quarter of the citations I check are broken links or go to a wildly inappropriate or biased source.
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Agreed - the poll owner needs to add a "Not yet, but it should happen soon"
Community colleges offer an excellent education in the programmer vocation.
I took 6.001.
I love the idea of winning on design - I'm a UX designer, after all - but I question the conclusion that design is how they got all those signups. They may not have been written up in TC, but they were written up in TNW. Did they get that coverage because of the UX, or did they get it because they are in a hot market?

Don't get me wrong - from what I've seen, Groove looks beautiful and well-thought-out from the user's perspective. But a beautiful and intuitive user interface won't get covered by anyone if it's in a market that no one's interested in.

Keep killing it, guys!
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Another way of looking at it is that 1 GB/s is about the bandwidth of PC133 RAM that was commonplace about a decade ago.
why not abstract away the underlying architecture

Because it would not be an abstraction of what is there. It would be the creation of an abstraction of something that isnt there: i.e. a simulation. And indeed, this is exactly the cause of my complaint.

Its like you have a machine that deals with squares. You're suggestion is to "abstract" the system into shapes, but then build a system using circles. A shape is an abstraction of both squares and circles. But a circle is not a square, and squares are what you have. FP languages and Imperative Languages are both specializations of the "programming language". But FP is not a generalization of IP. The computer is an IP machine.

When reading SICP there were several places where I had an uneasy feeling. Something was wrong and I didn't immediately know why. Then it clicked: I'm being asked to make rectilinear geometry out of circles. First time students aren't going to make it past the confusion.

And finally, if we're abstracting away the underlying architecture, why the focus on tail-recursion (an optimization), iteration vs recursion (an optimization), memoization (an optimization)... The complaint of the original article is that the alternative books are "How To Program In Language X", instead of "How to Program". However, SICP is most definitely "How to Program in Scheme".
I am -NOT- purposing this as a mutually exclusive alternative. This should be an addition to what's already happening. No one who goes through the trouble of using this is going to say "well she doesn't have HIV, so what the hell, no condom!"

If you're already practicing to be safe, you still worry about the possibility of something going wrong, and you contracting the infection anyway. With this, you can be more certain that nothing will go wrong. You would still use a condom just in case.

Your argument is like saying people engaging in random sexual activity should close their eyes because not seeing warts will lead them to believe the partner doesn't have warts - which may lower then chance they use a condom. This would offer more information, and if it turns out that person is HIV positive by the test, you'd be eliminating your chances of contraction altogether.
This isn't really an itch because my current bug tracker does this already but being able to update issues with svn/mercurial/git commits is a great feature to have.
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I'd love to see a compare feature. For example, someone with a 40" screen might want to see how that compares to a 60" screen. Right now, you can drag back and forth to try and get an idea of the comparative size. Having two sliders would be great to overlay the smaller size on top of the larger size. You could then also display the relative screen area of each -- 60" is 50% larger than the 40" screen diagonally, but 125% larger in terms of area which is what really matters.
Wikipedia puzzles me.

Why so many deletions? The significance of a topic is very important for paper encyclopedias because shelf space is finite. A regular encyclopedia collection can have only so many books before no one can afford to buy one.

But when most of the Wikipedia contents are text - why all the deletions?
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OK, just going to answer a few points, to try to wrap this up. :)

>I'd argue it's not a silver bullet as a primary language to write an entire game / engine in w/ more discussion continuing along those lines; there seems to be flexibility gained and lost. As a scripting engine that's one thing, but not a catch all for everything.

I write a lot of the core "engine" in C++ for speed and lack of garbage creation. The game I've got on the Android market right now has about 3149 lines of C++ code specific to the game (not counting 7400 lines of auto-generated Lua bindings), but 10k lines of Lua code. Most of the game code is in Lua; is that scripting?

The engine itself has about 10k lines of C++ code, and very little Lua. I want the engine to be as fast as possible, so it's hard for me to imagine doing it in a language that isn't C or C++.

>>>putting up native dialogs, etc. that will be non-native everywhere.
>Why would you do this if you are creating an OpenGL/ES cross-platform game? Use a GL based GUI that will be cross-platform!

Geting UI right is really, really hard. For the primary game UI, and dialogs with buttons, sure, all of it happens in GL.

But if I want a list dialog, or a grid view, or a WebKit view, I'm not going to want to do my own halfway implementation -- I'm going to want a dialog with a native feel. There's no game anywhere that I've used that really gets anything as simple as a keyboard entry field completely right, if it doesn't use the native UI; there are some things better left to the UI experts.

A good friend of mine is a big Scala fan, but I haven't really explored it as an option.

The thing that kills Scala for me (without knowing anything else about it) is that most platforms I write for don't already have a guaranteed JVM -- iPhone and Windows being big ones. I mean, sure you almost always have SOME JVM on Windows, but I'd likely want to be shipping a specific JVM.

And that means adding multiple megabytes onto my package size. You've got 20Mb on iPhone if you want to be able to download over the air. Adding 5Mb to support a language...isn't an option.

LuaJIT takes up about 50k. With all its libraries. And performs on par with Scala. Which is a huge win for me. How much overhead does Scala add to an app on Android? I bet it's more than that, even with the guaranteed JVM (well, DVM) preinstalled.
> if your goal is to produce engineers that push the envelope of next generation technology beyond just computers

Then computer science isn't where you belong. There is a solid argument for teaching everyone the basics of programming, and this is it. I can hammer a nail into a wall, too, but that doesn't make me a carpenter.
That's an apologist revisionism take on what Wikipedia notability criteria is.
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Adobe's "InMarket" service was trying to provide a meta app store with channels into other app stores. Until InMarket was canceled:

https://www.adobe.com/devnet/inmarket.html
I think it comes down to memory and learning curve, especially for people who use a wide variety of systems with widely varying shortcuts.
Wow, that's truly fascinating. Seeing that 5 minute clip gives me a much better feeling for how long ago Lincoln's death really was. Deeply understanding timelines was always my weakness when it came to history, which is part of why high school history was thoroughly boring to me. Now I can saw, when my parents were 5, they saw a really old guy on TV who was 5 when he saw Lincoln shot. A lot more digestible than 1865 or 146 years ago.
Looks like phonegap has a beta project in the works to provide this: https://build.phonegap.com/

I like the look of it!
I admit to having a knee-jerk reaction. The "no more condoms for me!" comments I saw on the original Engadget article evoked some very unpleasant memories. Having seen the effects of HIV on a first-hand basis, I sometimes fail to respond to such things with purely rational objectivity. I ask your pardon for that.
Where I live in Canada we have clinics where people can get clean needles / properly dispose of used ones.
The mobile world is still in its infancy, regardless of how many years ago Microsoft was working on it. No offense, but you come off as far too emotional to take seriously in a discussion. You start with some valid points about management, but then you act like they personally spit on your car.

There's a very valid point you didn't address, which is that Google is relying on its search monopoly profits to pump a free product into a new market in order to destroy existing competitors there. Regardless of how you feel about Google or Android, that is a behavior Microsoft was once criticized for when it made Internet Explorer free in order to destroy Netscape. Just something to think about.

It's important to maintain an objective perspective on all mega-corporations with monopoly power to make sure that your emotions aren't preventing you from recognizing a villain. Is Google a villain? In my opinion, they're on their way based on their behavior of the last couple of years.
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I would claim you've got it skewed, especially for someone posting from Hacker News. Let me try and reformulate it:

If you drop a URL in that's fine, one of our bots will come by, not to chastise your edit as possible vandalism, but to fill out the journal entry for you and download the url and archive it.
On the iPad version of Twitter, even the Tweets appear to be rendered with CoreText. The only place WebKit seems to be used is when you are actually looking at a web page.
similar problem in exercise 26. It contains a link to http://learncodethehardway.com/ruby/exercise26.txt, which doesn't exist (and is the wrong domain anyways).
So where did the other $3.8 billion in revenue go ?
http://jaconda.im is #1 for developer team chat. We use its integration with git and issue tracker. Has XMPP, persistent and basically the shit.
Ugh. I don't really understand the criticism of too much "heavy math" in SICP. The calculus involved is very basic. The rest involves infinite sequences and series, which are pretty fundamental to Computer Science. Really, students only have to have brushed up against derivatives and have a basic notion of what integrals are to complete SICP.The amount of "calculus" that SICP requires can be learned in a fun-filled afternoon.
Not yet, but it should happen soon
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Sorry--good catch.
Uh, what?

Blockbuster had revenue of approximately $4 billion in 2010.[1] Where did the data come from for this chart? No operating business has zero revenue. Blockbuster has plenty of revenue, they just can't pull in enough gross profit to service their debt.

[1] http://investor.blockbuster.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=99383&p=...
Agree with the aging, but I don't think it is so simple. Voting has issues too, you are not seeing everyone's points in HN for a reason.
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I'm reminded of this:

"Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had served on the bench into the nineteen-thirties, had in his long lifetime shaken hands with John Quincy Adams and also our new incumbent, John F. Kennedy."

"Old Country" by Roger Angell. The New Yorker; September 11, 2006

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/09/11/060911ta_talk_an...
Well, the first thing to note is that the numbers are for MSM - men seeking men. That includes men who identify as straight, bisexual, or other, but who have sex with other men. You may not consider this much of a distinction, but for people who study this, it changes things significantly.

And for straight men who don't want to have sex with other men, it should still be a concern when over a quarter of new infections are suspected to be due to transmission during heterosexual sex.
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I would guess that consumers kept it. Watching 10 movies using Blockbuster could cost the consumer around $50 (in Canada, anyway, where Blockbuster is still thriving because Netflix took more than a decade to get here). Watching 10 movies on Netflix is included in your fixed monthly cost, which is considerably less than $50/month.

Edit: Or maybe what gamble said.
Just for fun, this is what LuaJIT generated as code:

->LOOP:

7fff3dcfffd0 movaps xmm4, xmm5

7fff3dcfffd3 movaps xmm5, xmm6

7fff3dcfffd6 movaps xmm6, xmm7

7fff3dcfffd9 movaps xmm7, xmm4

7fff3dcfffdc movaps xmm4, xmm7

7fff3dcfffdf addsd xmm4, xmm4

7fff3dcfffe3 addsd xmm4, xmm5

7fff3dcfffe7 mulsd xmm6, xmm0

7fff3dcfffeb addsd xmm6, xmm4

7fff3dcfffef add ebp, +0x01

7fff3dcffff2 cmp ebp, eax

7fff3dcffff4 jle 0x7fff3dcfffd0 ->LOOP
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I think that's exactly the problem though. With Comp Sci and Academia people from top to bottom, you don't get enough people that care about customer service or business issues.
When discussing it in the context of bars in college towns, I think a "in first world countries" qualification is appropriate.
Since the design and consistent integration of design components throughout the app,site,etc was so important. I hope future posts will include screenshots and some examples.

Also, I admire the way you guys use twitter and other social media to leverage your userbase. Indirectly causing your users to vote up you HN story for example. sort of win-win in that you get more exposure (and maybe more signups); I learn about an interesting new company; and your users feel like they're helping you out. (With the ongoing cascade that now they are more likely to do you favors, they feel more like a distinct community, etc)
What's the 6th word on the 3rd paragraph of page 89?
The teaching languages are only a menu option away. Most of them are designed to be used by students working through 'how to design programs' (htdp.org). I wouldn't really consider that a barrier to entry. Keep in mind most of the teachpacks implement reduced scheme implementations designed for students at a particular level so they would not be much use to anyone else as the default startup option.
Why, doesn't this add up?
I'll have to have a play with it then :)
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The main thing is, help improve the ruby code with the least number of changes. I'll have a guide written up today for folks who want to help.
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