skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While these "first programming language" articles seem to be perennial favorites, we've reason to be skeptical on many grounds.

First, the authors never seem to be someone qualified to design a curriculum. No doubt they are all qualified coders with a reasonable amount of work behind them and a good understanding of machine fundamentals. However, curriculum design is a specialty, with it's own pitfalls and peculiarities. We may as well ask these authors what a good technique is for thoracic surgery is. They're equally qualified.

Second, while the authors are not qualified to design a pedagogy, they certainly seem to feel that they are, based on their own idiosyncratic experiences. This borders on egomania. "I learned C/C++/Java/QBasic/Lisp first and look how awesome I am. Therefore, everyone should take my obviously optimum path to learning the One True Way of coding." Is there no room for others to learn differently? To take a path different from one's own and still come to the same fundamental understanding and skill level?

Third, and finally, the various authors' lack of imagination considering curriculum design is staggering. Can they not imagine a gentle introduction to algorithmic science via any of the Turing-complete languages out there other than their first language of choice? Is there no room for variety? For example, can any of them answer definitively whether it is better, for any describable subset of students, for them to (1) "learn the hard way" by having to interrupt their focus on the problem at hand to compile c code into object files, hand them to the linker, and then run the executable or (2) forgo the 'obviously essential' details of x86 architecture so that they can hit Run in their lisp/sheme/python environment and see the immediate results? Clearly, in the first case, those that get through the trial by fire will have an easier time learning other languages. However, couldn't that be an indictment against compiles languages as a first language; that the learning curve is too steep?

In the face of the infinite variety of students, learning styles, teaching styles, learning environments, available hardware, and (most of all) pedagogical goals, I'm reminded in this case of a wonderful proverb taught to me by my high school English teacher: It is better to shut up and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.
Put the demo video on the main page. Let people can play it immediately because I really don't understand the whole point of the website.

Auction with price negotiation?
Sell things in non-auction way?
Sell things in Alibaba.com way?
Negotiate price in Alibaba.com way?
And, how to buy without searching? So, I have to click every category one by one? And, "looking" through all the items instead of "searching" through all the items?
This "predicament" is interesting to me, but not for the reasons that a lot of commenters are pointing out. Previously I didn't understand why someone would license their open source project under a BSD-like agreement as opposed to GPL. On the surface, it looks like you're completely giving away control of the work you've done, and that the only beneficiaries in the deal are those who aren't doing the work.

This situation made me realize the possibilities that a BSD-like license offers to both the original authors and subsequent contributors. If the project is interesting enough, it is feasible that multiple contributors could get hired by different companies to work on proprietary forks of the original BSD project, possibly with some kind of initial "payout" for signing a non-compete.

This seems to be a much better alternative to the GPL model, where the main alternatives are consulting, selling documentation, hoping for enough donation money to support you, or (the longshot) getting hired by a company which uses the project to continue open source development, bug fixes, and in-house modifications.
This is dead on: "Whatever you choose to learn as your first language, the key is to learn from great code."

It's also worthwhile to learn a lot of other languages. Do it as soon as possible in your career, especially Lisp and C. No matter what language you may use, you'll probably benefit from knowing these two. The danger with any "first language" is that you may never learn a second.
Yup, One thing to add is PHP is good language to start out if you want to be a PHP Programmer / Web Developer and no plans to move over to something else.

But if you want to be a generic programmer or get in to the field, it will save a lot of time and hassle if you start out with C/C++/Java. Those cover all the major concepts to begin with, and switching to PHP or any similar language would be very quick if not instantaneous.

Then again, I think it's even a better idea to start with something fun and something you really and feel like you are getting rather than jumping to something really complicated.

There is no one-size-fits-all language to start with, it depends from person to person.
Cool hack but basically useless... You could just hide the USB key in the wall.

Also, you might want to encrypt the data too.
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Se...

"1.) A computer-implemented method for facilitating an exchange of items, comprising:receiving from a remote computing system information about an item offered for sale by a seller, the received information including an indication of the item and an indication of the seller;determining item listing criteria for the item by analyzing transactions associated with the third-party item exchange, the transactions including sales of other items that relate to the item offered for sale by the seller; andfacilitating sale of the item in the third-party item exchange by electronically providing an item listing to the third-party item exchange, the item listing based on at least the received information and determined item listing criteria.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the received information includes at least one of an address associated with the seller, a customer identifier associated with the seller, or payment information associated with the seller.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein the received information includes at least one of a textual description of the item, an image of the item, an indication of a category that includes the item, or a product identifier associated with the item."

"The method of claim 1 wherein the facilitating the sale of the item includes at least one of notifying the seller that the item has been sold, providing shipping materials for the item to the seller, or providing payment to the seller."

"40. The method of claim 30 further comprising, initiating a payment to the seller based on a price paid by the buyer and a commission."

You're going to need to pay at least 10,000 (and probably more for such a confusing area) for a patent search, and another 10,000 to develop your innovations on this kind of marketplace into your own IP if you want to attract investors.

You may already be infringing (although this is not a patent that has been granted yet).

If you left that lawyers office feeling at all optimistic, and asked at all the right questions, that lawyer probably wasn't good.
The Internet Browser for Kids
You could just hide it in the wall, but it wouldn't be easily accessible. With modded usb->rj-11 cord I can easily access my usb key, and have it hidden when I'm not accessing it. Of course, if someone finds my modded usb->rj-ll cord, they will catch on quickly.
The Seasteading Institute encourages floating nations, hosts conference
Rafael rambling: A couple of interesting DSLs
Herman Miller Embody - Aeron 2.0?
Don't forget to stuff the kernel buffers with a few (or many) megabytes of data before getting those connections 'stuck'.

The amount of time it will take for them to die off (as per the TCP spec) is 'infinity' since there is no provision in the protocol itself for detecting unresponsive peers. If your operating system implements a hack called 'tcp keepalive' then those connections will die in a couple of hours in a typical configuration.
Lift Chairs by Pride and Golden at All-Lift-Chairs.com
Best Lift Chairs
Omnifocus is definitely one of the best task apps out there. The UI is fantastic.

Have you ever wanted to use it for collaborative tasks?
Put up? Fyodor described exactly how the attacks work (attacks which have been widely known for a very long time). The only thing he didn't mention here is that you can abuse selective acknowledgement to make one variation of the attack especially destructive.

Oh, and you can attack clients. That's a new entertaining possibility that nobody thought of before.

Until the patch is ready? I hate to break it to you, but there is never going to be a patch for this.
My senior year I scaled back my studies to < 10 hours a week (including class time and papers) and spent 60+ hours a week working on a startup. It was absolutely the right decision. I had my expenses paid for, got to live with all my friends, yet still had lots of time to work on my startup.

The only thing I might suggest is that if you don't have a clear idea, you might want to consult for a while in the target industry. That way you can learn the industry, meet the right people, and understand what people will pay money for.
I don't think there can be a category killer, because I don't think task management is a problem which can, in general, be solved with software.

Some people will find a solution which works for them, which fits in with their particular style of working, but for me at least these kinds of things require too much maintenance to actually compete with my current ad-hoc memory-based and almost certainly horribly inefficient system of doing things.
Rand's fiction is better than her non-fiction. She makes a good artistic case that selfishness is not a priori evil and is often good. However, if you are looking for rigorous philosophy or social analysis to support such viewpoints, then I would suggest one look elsewhere.
You're going to need to pay at least 10,000 ... for a patent search

From where does that information derive?

http://robertplattbell.blogspot.com/2007/10/i-cant-afford-pa...

If you do not want to perform your own search, or want a more in-depth search performed, many attorneys and professional searchers can do a Prior Art Search for you. We do offer this service at the present time. Our fee for a basic Prior Art search is $500.
Why Lisp? Wouldn't any functional language do the same? I'm not flaming here, just wondering... I learned SML which was OK, but it didn't change my world. I still like writing code in Ruby better.
And then we could publish it and get rich!
The Man Who Stuck His Head Inside a Particle Accelerator
It is still shooting yourself in the foot. There are a lot of questionable design decisions that will take a while to unlearn when PHP is your first language. The OO model is still a little screwed up, and uglier than C++ even, because of lack of namespace. There are arguments for and against it, I wont get religious. But if you want to be a "programmer" then you must move quickly from PHP. If you want to only be a web developer... fine. PHP is a baby step, even if you stick to dynamic languages.
Inspiring Papers
Huh! Interesting idea. I'm not a Chicagoan, but it's a nifty idea and I wish you the best of luck.
They've been predicting that since, what, the 20s? I've seen every attempt to give personalized information and it never works. In fact, every attempt I've seen is nothing short of laughable.

The problem with that concept is that it assumes we know exactly what it is that we like, and that it's easy to communicate that. Neither assumption is correct. As we learn, we constantly adjust what we like, at a fairly extreme rate, and it tends to be impossible to express in any way other than the extremely specific.
The Shared Suffering Hypothesis, or setting things up the way everyone else does
Microsoft Windows Cloud to debut in late October at PDC
Could you think of any big flaws with starting out with PHP? Problems you'd want to avoid?

I don't care much for programming: I'm much more interested in design. As such, I really don't think I'll need to learn anything beyond PHP and Javascript. Are there things that I, and people like me, will run into because we don't know any better from other languages?
I'm not surprised that it is common, as it definitely makes sense the way you describe it. I don't think it sounds terribly devious. That is the only way it is sensible for a lot of companies.
There are some great books for Scheme in particular. Many of them are geared toward the art of programming itself, rather than how to do X in Y days, which frees up the curriculum for exploring things like recursive forms that a student in a hurry would almost certainly just hack around, without learning the fundamental idea.

Also, learning Scheme as a first language almost guarantees you'll have to learn a second language. ;)
Free version of Ruby in Steel
Where’s the Money in Online Video?
Share Your Life Story with Tokoni
Not always true. I learned Pascal, and then Ada first (in college). Haven't used since then, but I had no trouble learning C, Java, Lua, or Python later on. Lisp was slightly confusing, and I remember hating C++.

I think the key is learning well at least few kinds of languages. C (is a must), an object oriented language (Java), then a scripting language (Python, Lua, Ruby, Javascript, or Perl), then a pure functional language.

Of course, often in real life, often you end up using what is being dictated to you, but a good programmer should be aware of what's out there.
Even DJB's code is buggy. (And some others too.)
Dropping out of high school contains much more risk, though, and things are much harder.

Don't drop out of high school, just treat it with kid gloves. High school was when I dabbled with things I thought I might want to do later on (I started a community web site, I wrote and self-published a novel). As a result, in college I find that I have not only the freedom to work on whatever projects I want to, but I go into those projects with perspective and useful knowledge.

In the end, the tactic doesn't matter: only the results. You'll find people in any field that were homeschooled and people who graduated with doctorates and spent 10 years working at some generic job, just waiting. If it gets you where you want to be, do it.
37Signals on naming your company: don't use an "oogle bazoogle" type name
If you try your hand at machine learning, you learn very quickly that 95% of your amazing bright ideas don't work. The thing you learn by reading about popular algorithms isn't how ingenious they are - their popularity tells you the key fact that they often actually work.

Google is an AI company, they just don't advertise the fact. It's quite possible that someone in Google already tried an approach like this, and found that it didn't really work. A lot of people had similar ideas about the Netflix Prize and it didn't work for them.

I don't mean to sound too discouraging here. It's just that brilliant new notions for data you can integrate into your AI algorithm (and search is an AI algorithm) more often than not turn out to simply... not... work. So you don't get enthusiastic about an idea like that because it sounds good - you really do have to try it. If it turns out to work great in practice, like PageRank, then you might have a Google killer on your hands. It's just that the practical performance is hard to guess by eyeballing what a good idea it sounds like.
I'm assuming this bug is an instance of a more general one, where people write if(... = ...) when they meant to use == instead?

Hence, here, error-handling code will be improperly invoked irrespective of whether they get a given error code or not.
I do wonder how these Godin posts make it up to the top - especially this one.

It's an old book, the message is fairly generic, and almost everybody knows what it is. The review is bland and offers no further insights.

It makes the front page.
RFC 2324: Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)
I was thinking "markets work poorly when it comes to public goods & externalities", but I suppose you can add "politics makes people crazy" and "karma is annoying".
Your comment reads, "I like PHP. I've seen bad Java code."

Congratulations, you just used 250 words to say nothing.
For some interesting examples of integrated Unicode, have a look at Project Fortress, Guy L. Steele's Fortran-killer.
I know the hard work behind such a project; I strongly recommend that you take all criticism easy, focus more on getting the best out of them.

You may not build the next eBay but your idea can evolve around a better niche if you remain focus, don’t weight the first impressions against your hard work, and don’t let your feelings get in your way. Make it your mission to build something that people can actually use.
Telefonsex
Dirty Talk am TElefon, das ist geiler schmutziger Telefonsex. Je perverser desto geiler, habt ihr schon einmal Telefonsex am Telefon ausprobiert?
Really? Make sure that is the first thing you do, otherwise people other than your friends would balk at signing up.
Music for you
Grammy Award Winner Adam Ayan for the first time masters Sajjid Manuel, an Indian Pop artist from South India. Listen to his music online, it`s free!
This is a great idea. Just need to make sure this feature doesn't get spammed.
An Open Source Cloud For the Enterprise
Sure, ants can work harmoniously because of genetic incentives, but how is that really different from the way cells work together in a human body? Selfishness is inescapable and constant, like the speed of light. Justice and individuality are illusions, like time and space, that become meaningful when determined in terms of selfishness. That which is selfish is an individual; that which is an altruist member of a greater being is like a cell in an individual.
if people followed patents there wouldn't be internet as we know it. No Google since they weren't the first search engine, not eBay, since they weren't the first auction site, not Facebook since they weren't the first social site.

I say go all in. Noone is going to bother you about patents until you are successful, and at that point you'll have enough $$$ to fight back. Or the whole patent system might get reevaluated. I mean if you look chances are some asshole has a patent on a "reply" button that "facilitates the transmission of your reply to database servers"
" Java and its adherents have been the only group of people I have ever encountered that insist on wrapping a perfectly valid markup language like HTML into A FREAKING TAG LIBRARY, THAT JUST OUTPUTS HTML?!?!?! "

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/xhtml/...

I don't know if the Java tag library you mentioned is as good as the one in GHC, but it sure is useful to be able to combine pieces of html while maintaining type safety.
I see many well intentioned founders that do not have well defined stock ownership plans in place in the first 6 months. In order to tell the difference between a scammer and a well intentioned person that is simply shy of defining the options you have to judge the person's character and past history.

The way I've dealt with this problem is simple. ShellShadow is not my first start-up (both as founder and as one receiving equity from founders). I have solid equity contract in place from day one. I know the value of a good key employee and can quantify that value in the equity contract from day one. Additionally, my contracts are short and easy to understand with no legal double talk.

This approach works for me and I would like to see others that supposedly have "done it all before" to follow this approach. If your a leader, act like it!!!
What's the public good in this situation?
Google is an AI company, they just don't advertise the fact.

Google has a strong preference for adaptive algorithms, but I don't think this makes them AI...

For the most part the Intelligence part comes from users, not from machines - What Google do well is leverage this.
The author might want to take a look at some of the existing clustering search engines (e.g. Clusty, http://clusty.com/). If that could somehow be bound to a user's social network, then it might, maybe, possibly could work.
Eli Lilly set to buy ImClone for $6.1 billion
Am I the only one who shudders when an essay starts off talking about "XP" or "Agile"?
The main problem is the popularity of PHP. There are some great PHP developers out there, but because of the popularity many of them are not good. And you learn how to code from the people around you.

The other problem is that both Javascript and PHP encourage implicit casts, which are great but lead to subtle issues you probably won't understand unless you learn a stricter language.
Indeed. In fact, putting the USB device on the premises itself is a problem, as someone could simply disassemble the wall to find it.

If only someone had invented a way to securely transfer data from one computer to another without the need to transfer physical media. Now, that would be a game-changing invention, I tell you. Probably a startup or seven in that idea...
Each task has a language or two which will fit the task the best, but don't get hung up in the finer details like which language you should use. Use which ever language feels right, and invest your time into the application itself.

(just don't use BASIC)
School gave me the time to think and dabble and develop a lot of my personal philosophies and perspective. The business world tends to do the opposite because of the endless drive for fast and cheap. Either way, you lose one aspect of your individuality and gain another.

The idea of improving "how things are done around here" - the process - is what ultimately excites me about business. Others, I think, focus on making the best products, on building a great community around the company brand, or on improving the world's condition. And I think it is these high-level endeavors that should be one's focus, no matter what the specific business is. If you don't know which of those interest you, get a job in the field you like, and the business problems you want to solve will reveal themselves quickly.
Thing to note: Facebook is written in PHP.

I laugh so hard.
In self-reflection, why did I comment negatively about Mac on YC News, where everyone is an Apple fanboy...?

Oh well.
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Parsing Expression Grammars: A Recognition-Based Syntactic Foundation
The best first programming language is whatever lets you do what your goal is. Whether it be to learn how to code in general or to accomplish a specific task. The best second language is one that lets you fix the mistakes you made when picking your first language.

The trick is to find out what the mistakes are (talking to people is very helpful here) and to find some language that compliments the first one so the mistakes even out. Or at the very least to make you realize how good you have it with whatever language you chose to use if you're still convinced you're a perfect programmer and don't need to learn anymore (though, in this case, there's some other advice that would be more beneficial for you to hear)
Hint: I prefer a real desktop app for this sort of thing. If there were a cross-platform app with a decent interface that we could use for managing team to-dos I'd be in love. :-)
Thank you so much. Exactly what I was thinking. The great thing about hacker news is the feedback and wisdom that we can get from other like minded and smart folks.

We are pretty flexible in changing ideas to make sure we build something that people will like and use.
Yet another example of why you should always compile with warnings as errors and warnings set as high as you can tolerate. Oh, and if you have a static type system, you might as well use it by preventing implicit casts to bool.
So, you need a job? Man, do resumes suck