skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't found that to be true at all, but maybe I'm editing different articles. I've gone through on a bunch of math topics that I know a fair bit about and reworded things to be understandable to someone not steeped in jargon and I've always gotten a positive or at least a neutral response.
This is probably another unapproved translation as zed said his book was meant for teaching python and we need substantial changes for ruby.

The other book basically translated the code from python to ruby while keeping much of the text the same I don't know if this is the case with this one.
There is a reason why Steve Jobs is successful :)

As a programming single-founder, you have already taken the first major step! You realize your core competency and your weakness and the importance of filling that gap. I wouldn't be that disappointed because I know of a lot of programmers that don't even take that first step. Most of them don't value design because its a foreign world to them.

The biggest recommendation I would have for you is to find a designer that will take your framework and elevate it to the user experience that makes sense to the world...

The Groove team definitely nailed it when they said that design is an important element...
Isn't the treatment absurdly expensive compared to the median income? How many can afford it, and what do we let happen to those who can't?
You can't engage gradually - if you don't get everything exactly right first time you just get spat out with little or no feedback or encouragement.

Designers of user interfaces have learned over time that you need to engage gradually and give positive feedback for the good bits, while gently removing the bad bits. WikiPedia seems to do exactly the opposite.

User Hostile rather than User Friendly.

More, in the push to become a "proper" encyclopedia the markup has become remarkably baroque, making it almost impossible to get to know what to do. The macros and other procedures that work behind the scenes are nearly impossible to grok given the lack of tools to help.

Overall, it's simply groaning under the mass of twiddles and has no elegance.
1 to 3 of your above list are about determining and uderstanding, not influencing. Sure, ultimately this would be about influencing, but you can't really do that without the former being well-understood first. Arguably, the former is actually more important to national security concerns, too (the set of identities on the internet >> the set of those you will interact with and be able to influence)
Ah yes, thanks, we discussed it several times over on the arc forum (e.g. http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10791)

I was asking more about code in the wild that uses accumulate instead of the naive recursive formulation. That's typically what we mean by idiomatic.

I see foldl often in haskell, but rarely in scheme. I'm not disagreeing that it's a great idea, just that this is how it 'would have been written'. Personally I find the naive recursive formulation plenty clear.
Presumably a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the English-speaking world has been picked. So Wikipedia really needs to draw contributors from outside Anglosphere to flesh out history and culture articles.
It's approved - check the domain (same as LPTHW)
Non minified and non link code to the above amazon link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F3PKTK/
Tweaking what's there isn't so bad. Anything substantial is rapidly punished unless perfect from the start.
Yes, exactly. Rob asked permission, and did a good job doing the translation. My problem with the other attempt was it was half-assed, done without permission, and then left to rot so I had to field frustrated students asking me when it'd be done.

This isn't quite idiomatic ruby, but I think it'll be a good kick-starter for someone who knows nothing, and I'm looking to get people to help mold it to be better.
Uh, given that Zed tweeted this out, and it's up on the learncodethehardway.org domain, this at least has Zed's tacit blessing.

I don't know at that point what you mean by "unapproved"
> first world countries

Nice qualification. Guess where the majority of people in the world don't live. Guess what the countries with the highest HIV infection rates are not.
---------------
but if you're a heroin user then you can literally get put in jail for trying to use clean needles.
---------------

Many pharmacies have programs for drug users to buy clean needles, no-questions-asked for exactly this reason.

I am not negating what you said, I'm am sure there are elements of the program (or accessibility) that make it a less-than-perfect solution, but it does exist.
This looks like an approved translation to me:

http://learncodethehardway.org/

Also, from the linked page:

The prose in this translation is nearly 100% identical to the Python version with the exception of a few paragraphs that have been modified to be relevant to Ruby. All of the code exercises and required libraries have been completely adapted for Ruby. In other words, Zed did all the really hard work.
Where is the source for the quote from Zed Shaw? The link doesn't mention it at all.

I know Zed Shaw railed on a previous translation to Ruby; I'd be curious to know the backstory here about why this one is different.

edit: Nevermind, in a different HN thread[1] Zed talks about it.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2846671
Functional Beauty
Royal Bank of Scotland plans to shed as many as 2,000
Surely then you are opposed to The Pill and other contraceptives that do not hinder the spread of STDs. A major, if not the primary, reason people use condoms under usual circumstances is to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

This device is not a substitute, nor will anyone with a conscience and a brain present it that way. It is something to be used in addition to existing technologies and sensibilities. It is about increasing available information so that people are able to make more informed decisions.
Almost.

> [programs are] designed to provide the banks with greater profit and allowing them to offload risk

Yes, the Fed is essentially paying the banks to loan money. It's not because the Fed is corrupt, though. It's because that's how bad the economy is.

Normally, banks will happily lend money. But when the risk of default is greater, as it is in a recession, banks are stingy with loans: they only loan to those with better credit-- and at a higher interest rate.

Bank liquidity is so tight right now (yes, it's their own fault) and the economic outlook so dim that if they had their druthers, banks wouldn't lend at all. If that happened, the economy would have an even worse outlook.

Luckily, the Fed can encourage banks to lend by giving them a discount on money (usually around 0.25%). Right now, however, the Fed can't give a discount because the rate is already at 0%. Thus, the present situation of the Fed basically throwing money at the banks, begging them to lend it out to the broader economy.

This is what is known as an edge case.

Don't like it? Join the club. What's happened since 2008 has sickened the remaining responsible, ethical folks managing the economy. But it's not right to impugn the Fed with the actions of a few irresponsible investment banks. If you read Sorkin's account in Too Big to Fail it's plain to see how Paulson and Geithner's actions amounted to making the best of a bad situation. In their case, it's important to distinguish between the appearance of impropriety and actual impropriety.
Live stream|online tv|live tv link all over the world
It doesn't even need to be that desperate. I understand the math, and I play the lottery every once in a while for the same reason that perfectly rational people visit casinos: it's fun and carries a non-zero chance of a payoff that is more life-changing than the money I spend on it. Being stupid is not a requirement.

We spend our money on plenty of things that offer negative monetary returns in exchange for pleasure, comfort, and entertainment. Premium beer, in my case.

Besides, it's not constructive to consider only the straight monetary expectations of lotteries when discussing their socioeconomic implications. Poor people are generally not buying tickets because they think it's the mathematically correct move.
How can we help? I can't find the source for this on Gitorious.

Edit: nvm, it's here folks:

https://gitorious.org/learnrubythehardway/learnrubythehardwa...

Cheers!
Apologies i figured a link to the site was more useful than the link to the tweet:

http://twitter.com/#!/zedshaw/status/99151723142184961
An analysis of the accuracy of forecasts in the political media
Zed here, this one is different because Rob asked permission and then did a great job actually completing the translation. It's not totally idiomatic Ruby, but it should be a good start for people.
Postgres Open schedule published
The security flaw is that it accesses the internet.
Sure as fuck a better idea than not testing a date.

Get real people.
Social Network Analysis and Visualization
PLC Controlers, Stuxnet, and Kinetic Attacks: Black Hat 2011
I personally have not had a need to use XMLHttpRequest in my 5 years of js development, so I find it very strange that it accounts for 8% of hangs in IE. Is there some design pattern MS devs use in javascript causing this problem?

Pretty much every JS framework encourages async requests and managing deferred objects. Also, why are people still doing JS calls inline and not at the bottom of the page... or at least on domloaded?

I don't think XMLHttpRequest specifically is the problem, sounds more like a multitude of poor coding practices that create blocking situations.
Patio11- Design is not just about pretty colors and interface... its more about understanding the audience and their interaction before delving into creating the best user experience. Therefore, what you suggest could be a temporary quick fix that will not give you the results for a sustaining business.

You can never expect a kickass programmer to also have the best design chops. They require different forms of thinking. So stop giving false advise to programmers on enlisting design skills and instead partner with the best designers!
http://www.amazon.com/Philips-Ambient-Dimmable-Replacement-L...
Will France Go Bust Too
Had Google joined the bidding, they would be unable to use the patents to defend against Microsoft. Microsoft would win.

Google played this tactically horribly. First, their first goal should have been to get these patents off the table. For example, for the Novell patents, MS wanted them so that Apple and Google couldn't sue them with it. But part of the deal was that MS immediately sold those patents to Attachmate. They own none of the Novell patents now (although they have a perpetual license to their use). So clearly MS wasn't planning on being offensive with the patents. It was purely a defensive play.

Second, by not joining in the bidding Google overplayed how much they are worried about these patents and other patents held by the members of the consortium. Things like that are what drives up prices. And it's like blood in water. Companies can smell when they know you have a weakness.

Google should have just taken these patents off the table, and then continue to fight their current battles.

Now they have their current battles to fight. AND they have 882 Novell patents that they can be hit with. Then 6000 Nortel patents. Whoever is running Google's IP planning I think needs to be replaced.
> I merely want the test to come with very easy to understand instructions so that people know what results really mean.

Do you see any evidence that it will not?
The repo is here: https://gitorious.org/learnrubythehardway/learnrubythehardwa...
"Without having to live in a dorm" ... I thought living in a dorm was the best part of college.
Any Git users out there with an opinion on the staging area? I use mercurial and find it annoying to have to fix up my working directory for a check in, and think a staging area might be nice. On the other hand in day to day running I would forget to stage a file and have lots of oops forgot to stage something commits. How does it work out in practice?
Euro crisis: Barroso warns debt crisis is spreading
More importantly, it needs to draw contributors from outside the Anglosphere to work on languages other than English.

English wikipedia has 3.7 million articles. Spanish has only 810,000, Chinese just 300,000-ish, and Hindi less than one hundred thousand. That's the top four most spoken languages in the world right there.
Yes, it can be better than doing nothing, but it's a rational choice only if there isn't anything else you can do that offers a better chance of multiplying your money by 25.

Consider a lottery that sells tickets for $1 and pays back an average of 50c per ticket, with only one prize: the $500k jackpot. (This is pretty much the most favourable case for trying to raise the money by lottery.) Then each ticket has a 1/1000000 probability of winning, and (roughly) if you buy $20k of tickets then you have a 1/50 chance of winning.

Instead, you could go to a casino and bet all your money on one spin of the roulette wheel. Assuming that the game is fair but has single and double zeroes, your chance of winning is 1/38 (instead of 1/50) and if you win you get $720k (instead of $500k).

Or you could sink a lot of money into a troubled company whose stock price is very low and hope it recovers dramatically. I don't know how often such opportunities exist that have even a 1/50 chance of paying off 25x in a hurry, but I doubt it's that rare.
Apart from the usual wikilawyers warring and reverting everything, I've also recently found lots of bots come by just to tag edits, which were correct, as possible vandalism, etc.

Plus the problem mentioned in the article that it's no longer "okay" just to drop a url into an article, everything has to match some bizarro world template that no one would ever want to fill out given their lousy pay rates.

And for all that, the wiki staff is too stupid/poor/unimaginative to automatically download and archive what the urls in the articles point to, meaning that the whole thing suffers from increasing amounts of link rot.

It's also fun to contribute a new article and then see it nominated for swift deletion because it rubs someone the wrong way and has violated one of a trillion different little wiki policies all put up to justify reverting/deleting otherwise fine content.
So you did first chapter of Scheme book in Haskell. Ie, in a language authors weren't prepared you for. And you get errors you're not expected as authors couldn't prepare you for them.

I think that's pretty straightforward thing that happened with you. The same will be with Scheme if you do some chapters from Learn You A Haskell.

Also, Haskell type system is one of most logical out there. Most type systems are either build around some weak logic with many exceptions (dynamic languages, C++, Java, C#), or just build from some limited number of cases (Ada, VHDL, Verilog).

The Haskell type system incorporates a logic system (some kind of constructive logic, I think). You actually learned that logic while "fighting the compiler" and you did some of first session with "proof assistant" which Haskell compiler/interpreter is.

So I think you're complaining for nothing.

Not that I stopping you, just my thoughts. ;)
Most of my editing is creating new short articles that are far from complete (often one or two paragraphs), and I haven't had problems. I do tend to cite at least one source per article, though (the place I got my info from). Is that the main reason? Or am I just lucky? Or choosing unproblematic areas? Occasionally someone or a bot slaps on a "this article is a stub" footer, but that doesn't really bug me.

The one time I ran into trouble was a pretty edge case: my article on internet-meme rapper "Average Homeboy" was deleted, though it seems to now have been recreated. When I write articles on almost anything that isn't internet culture, there doesn't seem to be an army of evildoers looking to hassle me about them (say, on a CS theorem, castle in Greece, Prussian general, or a city hall in Minnesota).
The article from the old discussion mentioned that lottery merchants were violating a number of rules by letting these high-rolling customers run the ticket machines, etc. I wonder how they'll enforce this new rule if they had trouble enforcing the rest of them.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828122
http://twitter.com/#!/zedshaw/status/99153296811507712
If this guy wants to play with the physical sciences, he could build a potato cannon, electroplate a cup with silver, or hack an Arduino board. Radium is just inherently dangerous.

I would like to know where you get your evidence that we are falling down some slippery slope where restrictions on home experiments in the physical sciences are getting stronger, and that programming is headed towards the same direction.

I don't see why anyone would regulate programming. Mostly, it's harmless, and even useful, and not dangerous. The guy in the article was playing with radium in an unsafe way that could have contaminated the apartment. He had a meltdown on his stove! It never occurred to him that this might be possibly illegal until several months in! Does this look like a guy who actually knows what he's doing when it comes to radioactive stuff--not your cute little computer viruses, you know, that send spam or maybe hijack a few cycles, but the kind of shit that gives people birth defects and cancer?

Sorry, dude, programming just isn't in the same class as nuclear physics. Don't worry, we won't be regulating it the same way.
Barclays to cut 3,000 jobs as profit sags
I like the premise of the article, but I feel there is an unspoken assumption made by the author that most people can touch-type or are willing to learn how.

Consider this command:

play 10 random country then "Teenage Dream"

A proficient touch typist can rattle this off in < 10sec but a "hunt and peck" or other ad hoc typist will be essentially trading pecking at the screen with a finger on the mouse to pecking at the keyboard with the same finger.
I want to believe that its because Facebook is showing them a bigger 'vision' but this smells like $$ to me...

People can be smart but sometimes the short-term allure of happiness (in this case the payout) can harm their long-term growth and impact to the world.
Its amazing we actually got to see an eyewitness of something this historical on tv. The fact that tech had evolved this fast in this man's 96 years of life is amazing in itself. Just imagine going from a time where you didn't have electricity in your home to having a camera recording you. The cigarette ads are irrelevant.
I'm confused by "Silicon Prairie". Is that Boulder, CO?
I have taught short programming classes for total beginners, and had the most success by following the first chapter of SICP.

1. It explains what computation is. Total beginners generally have no idea how a program executes and what it does. Explaining it using the substitution model is extremely helpful.

2. It introduces functions right away. This is a way better introduction than trying to explain type-related nonsense like "this is an integer, and this is a floating point number, and this is a string, and these are operators."

3. It avoids IO as the first thing people do. This helps avoid the problem of people thinking that printing "hello world" to the screen is equivalent to returning "hello world" from a function. Beginners should write functions which return stuff, not worry about whether the gets function (Ruby) returns something with a trailing newline.

4. Minimal syntax. Beginners have a hard time with semicolons and begin/end blocks. Python? You're kidding. Beginners don't understand whitespace indentation until they've been programming for at least several days, and making things align right is a horrible thing to throw at them.

I'm willing to accept that SICP's requirement of knowledge of basic calculus makes it a high barrier for many students, but frankly, it's the only book I've seen which introduces beginner concepts in the correct order.
That's a technicality. Would you be satisfied if they tacked on a statement that said, "We think this is an important metric because it shows our current profitability given the exclusion of non-recurring startup costs." or whatever version of that that the SEC finds acceptable?

Granted, I'm speculating as to their pitch as to why this is relevant, but the numbers are exceedingly clear to any investor who reads it, regardless of their spin (or lack of spin).

Do we really want financial statements packed with management's perspective on why the numbers are important? There is a balancing act there as well. The more you demand explanation, the more you invite abuse and salesmanship into what is supposedly a factual report.

Too little explanation and you get a frustratingly difficult to read report. Too much, and you may as well be reading a marketing brochure.

In the grand scheme of financial shenanigans, this one barely registers. At worst, it's a poorly explained, weak argument aimed at painting a pretty picture of the company.
Also Haskell slowly approach dependent type system with type functions (type and data families).
Picking the right niche gets you most of the way there IMO
For Hindi in particular, there's a big competition-with-English issue. There was a study at some point that Wikimedia commissioned that found that most educated Hindi-speakers preferred to read and contribute to the English Wikipedia. IIRC, one of the reasons was that they felt it promoted Indian culture to a more international audience if they wrote an article about an Indian location, or novel, or historical figure, in English. Another reason is that a lot of higher education in India is in English already.

(Also, anecdotally, the South Indians I know would rather use English than Hindi; their own native-language Wikipedias, like Kannada, are too small for them to consider them viable, and they see English as more "neutral" than Hindi in domestic political terms.)
I will list your site as a sponsor for our Business website in Europe for $50
I hope I get to learn something about proper technique. I could never toss them over a 2-story house.
Idly I've wondered if there was a way to turn the efficient markets model on it's head. Rather than gathering a ton of predictive information to try and get another 2% efficiency, instead use the already efficient market activity to predict other things. For instance if oil prices drop GM should start ordering more V8 engine parts instead of I4. I'm sure this already happens at some level.
Chrome runs a separate process for each tab, and that process includes the layout engine and the JS engine (V8) running in tandem. V8 has to be able to block the layout engine from rendering, otherwise it will draw invalid page states. The execution model (greatly oversimplifying) is that the browser runs a tight loop that monitors for changes to the DOM state and input events, and then synchronously executes JS code bound to these events (and the native handlers if they are not overridden), finally re-rendering parts of the viewport that become "dirty".

In a browser that isolates tabs into their own processes, like Chrome, try opening a tab for www.google.com and then enter this in your address bar:

javascript:document.getElementById('lst-ib').onclick=function(){while(1);}

When you click on the search box the entire tab will freeze, because the tab process is stuck inside the JS engine running the infinite loop function we bound to the click handler. It's not a matter of bad browser design, that's how the JS execution model is intended to work.

"Web workers" is the HTML5 proposal for running JS code that does not block the event loop. They do not have direct access to the DOM and can only communicate with JS code in the main event loop via a message passing API.
Parse (YC S11): A Heroku For Mobile Apps
Incidentally, be careful with rental cars. There are codes out there which cause the quoted price to go up!