skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used these before on a travel site - fantastic. Some of the icons are a bit too over-worked (ie. they don't work well small, and they're a little too detailed) but overall, a huge set of icons really well designed. Only issue I had with the site (a while back) was couldn't find a big ZIP download of all icons, or PNG files. Had to go to some other big creepy download site for that. Weird.
really? Because fonts on the web are so much easier to deal with than PNG files?
I basically agree with the OP that Dive into python is a pale replacement, but at the same time there is something to SICP's critics. Peter Norvig seemed to think most people would get the most out of it after getting some experience, and the HtDP authors definitely have a point about how much heavy math is involved. It's still a wonderful book, and won't be lost, I'm sure.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R403HR4VL71K8

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/jfp2004-fffk.pdf
Bullsh^^t raldi, I don't find anybody "lacking" and that's not fair to say. You asked a question, I answered it.

This is the last round of your game here I'm going to play, but fine, here goes:

I didn't explicitely say in my previous example that there's people in that burning building or victims being robbed, but I thought it was implied.

We value human life, not buildings and stuff.

If firemen routinely died running into burning buildings to save the building they wouldn't be very impressive. You'd imagine they'd be doing it because somebody is paying them well and if that's the case, that's the risk they take.

Highrise construction workers are not up there risking their life in a way where, on a moments notice, almost as reflex, they thrust themselves into peril to save a life.

They're doing it because they want and love the thrill and because they're well paid.
The beauty of Scheme is that it makes the underlying language mechanics transparent. The mental models I acquired from SICP for the process of computation have served me well across a dozen languages since.
adding more content for discussions

http://twitter.com/#!/bradsmi/status/98902130412355585

Brad Smith (Microsoft General Counsel):
Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no.
Why do most people or companies start a new business? Because they acquired the patent for it? No. It's because of consumer demand or the possibility of creating a new market, in which case you actually want others to copy you, because they validate your idea. Usually, new product categories sound pretty crazy at first, but by having others copy you, they're basically giving you social proof for your business, and saying you're not crazy for making that type of product.
For a technology that took significant money/effort/time to develop, I can agree with patent protection.

An odd position, as it penalizes the thoughtfully elegant lateral thinking solution, which is arguably harder to do.
Landing a Job At Google: Matthew Epstein's Journey
Isn't this kind of old. It was a kickstarter project several months ago. I thought it was shared here
I've been using a few of them lately; they're great. However, I wish they would expand their wonderful noun project to include verbs and adjectives and more. (Yes, it looks like they take the noun part rather serious.)

Sure, there are nouns/icons like running (http://thenounproject.com/noun/running/), but I've had to abandon a number of searches on their site after realizing I'm not searching for a noun!
No, in Canada, like the USA, they drive on the right and the steering wheel is on the left. So the immigrant cut into oncoming traffic to pass on the left. The immigrant had to zoom to make it in the gap between oncoming cars, and left far less room for all parts of the maneuver than a Canadian would have been comfortable with.

The Canadian driver freaked, veered right to get away from the crash, and hit the car beside him.
It's the opposite way round. The side that's not facing the Earth has fewer craters.
> Predatory pricing exists when you try to take over a market by selling something so cheap, other competitors are driven out

This is what happens when innovation threatens dinosaurs. Phrases such as "predatory pricing" exemplifies a fundamental misunderstanding of how pricing works, or markets in general.

People forget the whole point of the market is to serve the consumer. The point of the market is not to protect the interests of old tech giants because they can't compete with free. They're willing to prevent consumers from enjoying the satisfaction that Android has to offer because they want money for doing what Google offers for free. By this logic I should start a search engine that charges $10 a search, then sue google for anti-competitive practice.

Everything about business is predatory. Every time a company releases a better product it is predatory to their competition. Offering an edge your competitors can't handle is kind of the point. If Google's pricing is so "predatory", why doesn't the competition do the same? Because they're ethical?
Trick | How to Neutralize or Depersonalize Google Search Results
I think that starting with Python is a fine choice. Please keep in mind that it's just the introductory course-- these students are going to be battered with CS theory later on.

We are graduating around 20% fewer students in CS than we were in 2004. We need to find a way to make CS more accessible. I'm not saying that we should make the whole degree easier, but I think that having an easier & more practical first course would be good. The students might not learn as much theory, but they'll get the adrenaline rush of being able to code quickly and do some real damage with their code.

## EDIT: It was a 36% drop from 2004 to 2008. Here is my source: http://marketing.dice.com/pdf/Dice_TechTalentCrunch.pdf
> Also the point of SICP being language agnostic is fairly false.

I remember reading a bit of Eli Bendersky's SICP blog posts[1], where he started with the premise that he was going to work through SICP using Common Lisp rather than Scheme. I think that lasted through about half of the first chapter before he moved back to Scheme because he found it too hard to handle the differences between the two - I don't remember what specifically Common Lisp was lacking, but I remember he made it seem like a huge stumbling block.

[Disclaimer: This comment is based on a half-remembered perusal of only a couple of blog posts well over a year ago. Contents may not adequately reflect reality.]

Edit: I may have been badly misremembering. From Eli's "Conclusion" post[2]:

> Also, I originally planned to reimplement all the code do all the exercises in Common Lisp. Later I changed my mind and decided to use PLT Scheme for some of them. Eventually, I’ve been using both languages interchangeably, which is a good thing, as I got some practice with both.

[1] - http://eli.thegreenplace.net/category/programming/lisp/sicp/

[2] - http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2008/04/18/sicp-conclusion/
Well, the question was about Python, which definitely doesn't have those things. If you want to me to justify Scheme, how about code-as-data, which is the entirety of chapter 4?

> That is not an uncontroversial opinion, and does little to make the case for SICP to people not already convinced.

That was not an unconsidered viewpoint, if you read what I wrote. I said "for its fans". I am not attempting to make the case for SICP; that book doesn't need my help.
The problem occurs when one of these real name zones becomes a monopoly.
Libertarian Communitarian-ism: Robert Nisbet and the Quest for Community
You're right. They look beautiful at >100px on a typical display, but many look quite cramped if you try to match their dimensions to the height of your standard paragraph font.
Update to the story is here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2844001
Jordan Shoes For Cheap
Fill it with ads. Profit.

See also: http://josephstalin.com/
Raw Video: Mubarak Arrives in Court
State television has shown former President Hosni Mubarak being wheeled into a defendant’s cage on a gurney at the start of his trial on charges of corruption and ordering the killing of protesters during the uprising that ousted him.
SBIR.gov
Alternative virtualization platforms are proliferating and get better all the time. Vmware has an early lead like Palm did and is correctly optimizing revenue from that lead but down the road ... where is palm today?
Sorry to see you get downvoted,I too suffered the same fate from Apple fans a lot of times on tech sites.

The answer is simple:

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-is-a-religion-neuroscie...

They don't need paid PR when the best techies like some of the ones on HN are abject fans of their beloved company. Gruber makes thousands per ad off his pro-Apple RSS feed ads.
Ram prices recently fell dramatically. (the really dramatic drop is that 8GiB modules are now priced reasonably; it used to be you'd pay 2x or more per gigabyte for higher-density modules, and now the price per gigabyte drops slightly as density increases, I mean, until you get to the 16GiB modules, which are still ridiculous.) This change has triggered a surge in ram density in newer servers.

It looks like VMware is trying pretty hard to capture most of the surplus value created by the cheaper ram.

I mean, it's been long said that VMware will look at how much money you can save by virtualizing and consolidating your old hardware, then they try to charge just enough less than that number to make the project still worth doing; In the past, I think, this has been seen as more reasonable, as vmware is helping to create some of that value.

Moving to grab some of the surplus value created by cheap high-density ram, something VMware has nothing to do with, I think, has been seen as unjustified and greedy in the SysAdmin world; it remains to be seen if still charging by the gigabyte of ram but just charging less will be accepted.
I hear you, but I do think there's room for some humor. It would have to walk a fine line, for sure, but it's doable.
Sounds to me like what he's trying to say is that using patents isn't such a terrible idea as long as you've actually used it to make money on your own products. I think that's not an unreasonable statement to make, whether or not you agree with it.
I love SICP as much as the next person. I've spent vacations devouring it while despairing girlfriends try to get my attention. Seriously, it is awesome.

But, being realistic, an incredible amount of value is currently being created by software engineering. Value to society, and (hence) value to those who can practice the craft. I'm not surprised that so many schools are teaching software engineering, instead of computer science.
Copyright should protect UI

But it doesn't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_v._Borland
I'm generally a lurker, and not a programmer, not highly opinionated on software patenting, but to me the analogy was perfectly clear.

Bogus patents = military power

useful innovations = effective societies.

Trying to remove bogus patents/military power and shift the center of gravity over to useful innovations/effective societies, isn't nefarious despite advantaging one particular party.
No wonder it's familiar...
> Anyone have advice about how I'd go about "diving into functional programming"?

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...
Hold the presses everyone, Gruber just bashed Google.
Predatory pricing exists when you try to take over a market by selling something so cheap, other competitors are driven out – or prevented from entering, since they couldn't recoup the costs involved in developing a product.

Fair point, and that got me thinking:

Would you say the same about the iPad?

Would you say that Apple is stifling competition in the tablet space by making a tablet that's really good and reasonably priced? That's also technically speaking, stifling competition right?

Yet, I don't think anyone would argue that Apple is doing anything unfair.

So what's the difference?
> Everything about business is predatory.

By that reasoning, Google should have either bought the patents or taken their lumps when they lost, right? If business is inherently predatory, whatever predatory groups wish to form are free to do so in the advancement of their own interests. Why is it for Google to bandy about anticompetitive concerns, crying "DOJ!" but not their competitors?
They won't see the nagwall. We only had 48 hours :)
Let's definitely harass people who express viewpoints we don't agree with.
.NET exists largely because Sun didn't want Microsoft to create an incompatible version of Java. As such, .NET should really be compared with Java rather than native code. In that context, it's been pretty reaonably successful. Arguably, it's earned Microsoft more money than Java ever earned for Sun.
SCIP winds up making sure that you understand what is going on by writing Scheme interpreter in Scheme. How would your translation handle that material?

Writing a Scheme interpreter in Python would force people to learn all of that Scheme anyways, and it wouldn't feel like such a revelation that you understand what the interpreter is actually doing.

Writing a Python interpreter in Python would force people to learn a lot more about parsing techniques. That would add a lot more material, and the code would be substantially more complex, thereby obscuring the pedagogical point.
"It's quite another to collude with other companies to buy up huge patent portfolios for the sole purpose of extorting your competitors and stifling competition.."

Wait I'm biased but according to you, Apple is using this for the sole purpose of extortion? Come off of it. Back here in the real world Apple has probably paid out many times more in patent suits then it has or will collect any time soon. Why can't Apple be using these defensively as well?
Humor? Over 60 million victims of World War II and their living ancestors surely would disagree.

Use it to teach history. If that's not your bag, give it away.
What do you mean? Any normative statement is ultimately an ethical one, so any position on the proper use and law of patents is an ethical position as well.
Skype has been using the VPx codecs for as long as they have done video calling. if VP7 was good enough for them, there's no reason why the new and improved VP8 wouldn't be. they aren't moving to any new technology here, nor are they embracing VP8 because it's open. they are merely upgrading to the latest version of the same codec they have always used.
> The Economist claims that the US has the best freight rail infrastructure in the world

We're talking about the greatest country on Earth. Even with the best freight rail infrastructure in the world, it may still not be up to American standards.
I think you'd have to look at the margins and intent involved.

If Apple was foregoing any margin, and perhaps even operating in the red in attempt to prevent competition, that would get a little touchy. For example, if tomorrow Apple slashed the iPad's price to $150 just to fuck over the rest of the market, that'd be weird.

But the thing is, Apple isn't invoking the DOJ or crying "anticompetitive." Google is. So they need to have competitively clean hands if they want that to mean something. I'm not sure they can claim that.
Did the soviet union ever used their nukes offensively?
I work 40 at my day job, then I easily put another 40+ into my startup.
List of official Google forms
Ssssh, you're screwing up Google's PR. :-)
"So if Google had acquired the rights to these patents, that would have been OK."

It's a war. You have to take arms to defend yourself, but it doesn't mean you're happy about it.

Gruber is almost bipolar: his insight on the industry is usually pretty interesting, but he becomes borderline retarded when he starts posting about Apple competitors.
No, I installed this system before Gmail existed.
CPython doesn't have built-in tail call optimization, but that's not a fundamental property of the language, just a limit of that particular implementation. One that can even be hacked around in Python with a decorator. A decorator, by the way, is a Python feature that depends on closures, which are themselves quite commonly used in Python.

You have some very strange ideas about Python that appear to have little relation to reality.
An impressive suite of icons in a nice minimalist format. But...I guess looking at a large number of these, linguistic expressions seem to be less complex per concept than the iconographic equivalents.
They come in svg format, which work on most modern browsers as well
On the other hand, railroads don't make enough money owning the tracks to make a significant investment in expanding the rail network.
I run adblock on every browser on my computer, but the iPad has no such tool, and that does really harm my browsing experience. I try to stick to Instapaper.

I have no problem with companies making money off advertising, but generic banner ads are not the way to do it. Companies that get it right:

* Podcasts: TWiT, TWI, 5by5, etc… (heavily engaging, tip filled, ads for real products)
* Forrst (sponsored posts done right)
* Apple … they're just so pretty!
Yes. It has been on HN several times and it is about 8 months old:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1981370 (239 days ago)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986921

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2003817

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2629937

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2712978

Dupes are very common on HN nowadays, despite some people claiming they're not :-)
Gruber is fairly critical of Apple at times but generally takes a "I wish Apple would do X but I understand why they're doing Y (or ~X)" position when he does so.

Apple's a company that hasn't missed that often or that big recently though so it's hard for me to judge where he should have gone hugely negative on them in your view.
Your comment re: multiple identities is exactly right. I don't understand why people seem so surprised to hear this sentiment coming from her, though - Mark is already on record on that topic:

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Facebook's policy from the top down seems to be that you are only ever entitled to one identity - period. If you were foolish enough to be born into an environment where expressing yourself solely through that one identity can get you in to trouble and/or killed, that's your own fault.
Who Rules America: An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%
All those except for the loose morals are reasons I will never move to New York city.
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A single paragraph insulting a work does not a convincing argument make (perhaps the fact that it starts off very slow is good in introductory textbooks?). Nor does an assertion of how Scheme is "considerably less complicated and idiosyncratic than Python" convince me that all Python textbooks must, by necessity, be worse than Scheme textbooks.

I'm entirely willing to admit that SICP is better than Dive Into Python (well, I would be if I had a copy of it around so that I could verify this). I'm just saying that the article does little to convince me of that (and quoting parts of it at me does even less to convince me - if you think that I didn't read it thoroughly enough, just come out and say so).
> Software patents are a joke, just listen to this now famous 'This American Life' piece: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/w....

This is a fantastic episode but you don't seem to have paid much attention: it's a piece against patent trolls, not patents.

Patent trolls need to go, but the jury is still out on software patents.
Seamless Web Now Known As Seamless
Seamless Web, the online food ordering service, has changed its name and will now be known as Seamless. The company will operate on Seamless.com, a domain name it appears to have acquired in October of 2010.
The new 61a will still try to (roughly) follow the old 61a/SICP curriculum. Dive into Python will (I think) probably just be used in the beginning to introduce the language.

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/61a.html
Specifically where it says "in 2011-12, 61A will be taught ... using lecture notes based on SICP".
SICP is a great book. Its abandonment is a sad reflexion of the gradual descent of programming teaching from principled discipline into an introduction to the process of trial and error. While most developers probably spend the majority of their time experimentally cobbling together applications from blackbox components, this they can and probably must learn on the job. What SICP tries to teach they cannot -- the most fundamental idea in programming:
The evaluator, which determines the meaning of expressions in a programming language, is just another program.

We are starting to embrace again more featureful languages and regrettably accepting that the majority of programmers will use multiple languages regularly. Therefore SICP seems more appropriate than ever!
Your mixing ip protection with software patents. Avatar is protected by copyright. Nobody disputes the need for that. Even hardware patents are often fine. To "patent" the idea that (and this is one of many examples" ) you can buy something with only "one click" is silly. There are probably patents on filling list boxes, ordering checkboxes in thee columns, goofy crap like that. This is why HN people (many of them programmers like me abhor software patents. )

Patenting a specific very complex algorithm -specifically- might be ok, but general ideas are not.
This is actually a very old technique to light windowless places. The cleverness is using a bottle of water for a nearly zero cost implementation.

On sailing ships, they would install deck prisms to get light belowdecks. You can still buy replicas: http://www.scientificsonline.com/deck-prism.html (note that the flat side is on the deck, the pointy side goes down to spread out the light). A more modern implementation: http://www.boatdeckprism.com/
It is in the customers interest that these patents not be used against Google. The patent trolling being done by Apple/Microsoft/etc against Google is raising (or at the very least attempting to raise) the price of Android phones.

Raising the cost of a product through litigation is not in the interest of customers.