skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is the utility of teaching people arithmetic other than increasing the number of "mathematicians"?

This highlights an important aspect of the immaturity of software development, we lack the terms to even talk about it with very much detail. We don't put everyone who knows any amount of math in the same bucket, we don't even put people who know vector calculus and differential equations in the same bucket, we appreciate that there are many grdations of skill and differences between people who know a thing to some level of competence and people who use that knowledge intently in their occupation.

The same is true with programming. Just because someone knows the basics of programming doesn't mean they are a software engineer. It doesn't mean they are capable of building or working on large, sophisticated systems. It doesn't mean that they necessarily must take up programming as an occupation either.

Similarly, taking a wood shop class or learning basics of automotive maintenance doesn't make one a carpenter or a mechanic. But that doesn't make those skills useles either.
Ways to escape technological addiction... hmm

That is something I've had to deal with myself. First of all, I like working out and playing soccer so I try to do as much of that as possible. At least a few hours a day or so.

Otherwise, find a book and don't just read in the house, but go to the park or outside. Remove yourself from the ability to be on the computer (and if you have a smart phone, leave it at home).

If I start doing things, like reading, while I am at home I usually end up checking HN or something :P Try to remove the ability and the urge will follow. It takes time and effort, but giving your eyes a break and doing other things is well worth it. Even if you aren't necessarily "productive" when you are not using the computer, it is still better than being unproductive in front of the screen all day. If you are a programmer then do some lawn work in your break instead of checking HN, facebook etc. Go for a picnic with your girlfriend
Econtalk.
Excellent hour long interviews by George Mason Econ professor Russ Roberts with leading economists.

http://www.econtalk.org/
"I haven’t bought an app for about a year. Neither hardware nor software excite me very much, after whatever brief (and usually painful) novelty has worn off."

It's probably because I'm so immersed in tech stuff at work, but it's hard for me to understand how such an imaginative science fiction author can be so... indifferent about the technology he uses.
I think the notion that a framework should simultaneously be suitable for someone who can't use a bash shell and able to host some of the worlds largest web applications is a little silly. You have to know what problem you're trying to solve. MVC alone is a bit much for a beginner.

Beginning programmers should not start with large frameworks. Period.

"So I ask you: if a platform is so complicated that it simply doesn't support new developers, can it survive? By analogy, is Rails turning into the C++ of web development?"

This is so tough to answer. From my perspective, the question is completely absurd. It's like asking "if a semi-tractor-trailer is so complicated that a new driver simply can't drive it, can it survive?"

Programming is conceptually difficult. Even with the best tools we have today, and probably the best tools we have tomorrow, programming will remain a challenging task. As the problems become bigger and more complicated, so do the tools. Rails is large, so there is a lot to learn. The notion of a framework is that we should avoid solving the same problems over and over again. People are often frustrated that it can take a year or more to really learn the Rails framework, but it would take orders of magnitude more time to solve all the same problems Rails solves if writing from scratch.

The more relevant question is, "What problem are you trying to solve, and does the Rails framework help you do that?"

A garden spade is fine if I want to plant a few daisies, but if I want to build an inter-continental pipeline, I'm going to need something a little more robust. I'm also not going to stick a 16-year-old driving permit holder at the helm of a multi-billion dollar tunnel boring machine.
any other of a hundred US import shows

Ah but that's not a fair comparison. For a show to be imported to the UK (with a much smaller population) it will have to be quite well ranked US TV show. They aren't going to be importing the bottom quality 25%. As a result, you're probably seeing the best USA TV there is.
Software Engineering, a little bit of history.
I agree with this author completely. To his point George R.R. Martin thinks that fan-fiction is a bad exercise that doesn't force you enough out of your element.

People write your own games and change them enough not get sued(hey, at least you get to be creative)
actually....... that just changed very recently.

The World Service is now funded from the license fee combined with commercial revenues (eg selling World Service news to NPR).

In some ways it is a good thing that the government is not funding BBC World Service as that removes an argument for bias (not that I ever saw any when I was seconded to work on World Service Russian and Spanish language sites).
Measuring the black web
4.8 Million
Add support for more feeds, ideally a plain default for RSS/Atom, and I'll be excited to try it. I'm currently using http://memolane.com/.
You can vary the initial conditions a bit and make several runs. Then you can see what the most likely outcome is, given your uncertainty.

If you don't know what the initial conditions are, how will AI help?
I wrote software which scans a hard disk for email in any of 6 formats, converts them to Mbox (eg, standard, with emails one after another in plaintext), creates 2 indexes (full-text and SQL) then lets you search all your emails with a Lucene query (full text of email bodies) or an SQL query (MySql or PostGres or SQLite - SQL database of common email headers). It doesn't run on 'the cloud'; it's a Windows application.

An example search is 'All emails from "geocities.com" between March 2009 and April 2009, with attachments.

I haven't found anyone who wants such a program. Anyone here interested?
Hi. I'm Sebastian, and I don't lie very often, certainly not about ridiculous stuff. You're conflating two stories:

1. I had a mugging attempt in a bad part of Saigon (by the slums by the river after exploring) and I kicked one of the muggers in the stomach and shouted at the other.

2. I got into a shouting match with a gangster in a McDonald's who had been yelling at the employees and spat on the floor, and was otherwise being a jackass. I told him to knock it off, a shouting match ensued, and later two police officers came, one with riot gear.

The closest I ever came to jumpkicking was when I got into a fight in a brothel when they tried to shake me down for extra cash afterwards. I kicked one of the guys after he grabbed me roughly. But even then, I didn't jumpkick - that's more of a movies thing than a real life thing.

Anyways, I can understand your skepticism, though the rudeness is unnecessary - you could just ask if you wanted details.
We rolled our own PHP framework which is using the Smarty template framework. The DB is MySQL. We're using a light wrapper around the native mysqli library. Pretty standard stuff right now until we get big!
Well that's all well and good, I'm just worried that they're going to release another new fancy phone next year and I won't be able to afford getting it (which I will want to.)

Glad to hear that the upgrade is worth it though!
Video: NY Times reporter visits North Korea
http://i.imgur.com/F2mNP.png
Curebit (YC W11) Wants To Optimize Your Referral System
Care to give a few examples so we know which angle you're coming at this from?
async, non-blocking, event driven. This is exactly what real-time web frameworks are about.
A "dependent claim" is one that is based on another claim (it is dependent on it). For example:

> 2. The unit of claim 1, wherein the input reflects a request to schedule maintenance.

An "independent claim" is one that doesn't. E.g.

> 1. A unit, comprising: a memory; a transmitter; and a processor, coupled to the memory and to the transmitter, [...] an input received from the user interface

It's a forest, the roots are independent claims (no parent), all the rest are dependent (have a parent). Um... I don't know if it's allowed for a claim to depend on more than one claim (i.e. have more than one parent; multiple inheritance), but I've never seen one. Cycles are right out.

(example are from the patent in question: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...)
I agree, but it hasn't even been available for a week. Both kinds of stories will come out in time.
Review of Payment Evolution Payroll Services for SMBs in Canada –
A good manager should be technical so that you can engage him in a very technical conversation and he should be able to follow along. But I don't think you specifically need to be a coder to do that, I've seen other good managers come from non-programming backgrounds.

That being said, my best manager was a former coder-turned-manager. When he was coding, he wasn't the most brilliant coder in the group, but neither am I. He knew about the coding process and how long things take, etc, so that was genuinely helpful.

But what made him my best manager was because he knew how to keep us shielded from the BS from customers and upper management, and he genuinely cared about our professional and personal development. This garnered a great deal of loyalty from me and my other coworkers, so he was able to get a lot of good work from us in the years that I was with him.
How interesting.

Google was bashed for taking so long to respond, and for not backing their developers on the cases, etc. It turns out, they were taking their time preparing to fight the patents and invalidate them, and in the end, it may be their attack on the patents themselves that saves the day for developers on all platforms.
A dependent claim is like a #include for lawyers that don't like typing.
I don't think the OP meant copying was bad. I got the impression he/she is OK with it as long as it's done right.
I couldn't agree more with this. On my Droid X battery life is horrible if the GPS receiver is enabled. The GPS receiver is supposed to turn on/off only when an app requests the phone's location. This works 95% of the time. The other 5% the GPS never shuts off and drains the battery completely. I asked other Android users how they deal with this, turns out they shut the GPS receiver off completely. They then manually turn it on before opening Google Maps.

Also, there is no easy way disable all sounds. I thought I disabled sounds using the master volume. But it still says "Droid!" on power-up and beeps on power-off. After trolling the forums, the "Droid!" sound is controlled the by the "SD card read" settings. What's up with that?

When browsing, clicking on a PDF link downloads the PDF. I then have to go to the download notification and manually open it. I just want to view it.

I could go on and on. The whole Android experience is full of frustrations.
As the non-technical co-founder of a tech startup, commit comments are consistently the most enjoyable part of my job. Reading things like "tell me your secrets!" or "I think I destroyed the entire database" followed by "nope, still there" always make me laugh.
That's awesome, love the domain name. You got a nice list of moods / emotions; it took us a long time to just pick 9.

Do you do any crazy reporting - like the average mood of a Monday compared to that of a Friday? I think that stuff could be really interesting, which is partly why we built moodbeat.
I build a special-purpose frontend to libvirt using Mojolicious 1.33 back in May. It was already a very easy to use and capable framework. There have been 62 releases in the five months since then!

https://github.com/kraih/mojo/blob/7321e4c7b83a19286b3309df5...
Get this man a lion heart medal!
The Kindle Fire Review | Features | Good & Bad Points
Should I buy the Kindle Fire. Is it worth buying?

This review turns the spotlight on features, services as well as potential downsides and hidden catches.
How do you know? If he was a legitimate partner in the original LLC/Corporation, he may have equity rights that the other owner ignored, buried, etc. You have no idea. From his post it sounds like the founders didn't have a formal setup but had a gentleman's agreement which was ignored. It is not just "OK" to ignore a gentleman's agreement.

Maybe they had something formal, maybe they didn't. Either way, there are laws governing how the "four D's" are handled if nothing is stipulated on paper. The four D's are death, disability, divorce (ie partners decide to separate, which is what happened here), and departing (amicable separate through pre-arranged buyout/exit terms).

In any case, let this be a lesson to everyone else to have these situations pre-contemplated and agreed to in writing :)
I would sincerely hope that my colleagues always assume that there WILL be problems that impact availability when dabbling in production environment.

I'd rather have a guy spend whole day making sure everything is working and rechecking, etc.

I also hope that my colleagues will have the foresight to test an update/deployment on as fresh mirror of production environment (or a representative subset) as possible.

And I'd say that this is ESPECIALLY important for NoSQL environments.
For iOS/Mac development, Ole Begemann's http://oleb.net/ is invaluable, especially for the monthly link roundups.
> I don't know if it's allowed for a claim to depend on more than one claim (i.e. have more than one parent; multiple inheritance)

Sort of, but probably not in the way you're thinking. You can write multiple dependent claims (although they are generally disfavored in the U.S. and cost extra in fees). But say you have something like this:

What is claimed is:

1. A chair comprising a seat and a plurality of legs.

2. The chair of claim 1, wherein said plurality of legs comprises four legs.

3. The chair of any preceding claim, wherein said seat is made of plastic.

So claim 3 is a multiple dependent claim, but the way it would be interpreted is basically as having the scope as if it were written as two separate claims: one depending from claim 1 (thus covering any chair with a plastic seat and some legs), and one depending from claim 2 (thus covering any chair with a plastic seat and four legs). So it's just a concise way of writing something that would logically expand into more than one claim, which isn't really the same thing as multiple inheritance in programming.
The Quote Commercial- Elements of Successful Sales Pitch
Start Here, Build Everywhere: Announcing Foundation
Outside of the first sentence, I do nothing but agree with you.

Edit: I just re-read what I posted in this comment, and I think I was unclear. Just stating that my initial response was in agreement with yours, though that might have been easy to miss if you were skimming.
Ask PG: Is there any chance of getting points displayed again
I'm just wondering if theres any plan to bring back the points being displayed for comments.

As I find it rather disorientating not having them, as it makes it more difficult to know which comments to read.

We could always have a CSS style to hide them for people who don't want them.
Also I believe sites like Reddit 'fuzz' their points displayed to help prevent gaming the system.
As a piece of oak furniture I have no opinion whatsoever on this topic.
The article says the tool runs locally.
MUSE is a Java applet that runs locally.
Why do you need to make it at the same time as the I/O?
Why Occupy Wall Street is Bigger Than Left vs. Right
The sense I get is that he lives one rung up the ladder of abstraction.
The British (more specifically the English) are the original creators of the English language.
vimtutor was very bare-bone in my memories, and wasn't going through much details on text objects. This was a rather good article, text objects are awesome.
No, the work I described is not done by the typical developer. When's the last time you coded your own malloc ? Under the covers, though, malloc has to a lot of expensive bookkeeping of the sort I described that modern GC doesn't have to worry about.

And GC can be more efficient in terms of memory usage as well. Modern GCs compact and so avoid most loss due to fragmentation. Where malloc will generally leave blocks partially unused, GC can allocate objects consecutively with no space between them, even if the objects vary in size (though there may be loss due to alignment, but that loss will occur in any memory management scheme).
Seems like he's in it or the right reasons, but possibly too late.

At the very least he'll become more efficient communicating with his dev team & management than before.
Hopefully this will do a lot better than their last attempt at video, joost, which turned out to be a complete failure.

http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&i...
The linked article seems like the Ebenezer Scrooge in charge of the BBC have banned simple down to earth homely biscuits. The article uses phrases like "a couple of Rich Teas and a chocolate digestive are an extravagance" and "there were some very nice custard creams. But apparently they are very expensive".

However biscuits can vary a lot in price, from fancy brand name biscuits to white label, 'own brand' biscuits. I'll also bet the employees were picking them up in corner shops at an even higher mark-up. As a result the BBC was probably paying too much per biscuit. Since it's hard to (a) enforce a maximum price per biscuit (who's job will it be to count the number of biscuits per packet? :P), or (b) institute an organised corporation wide biscuit-buying-and-distribution system, they probably went with the simplest approach of banning paying for any biscuits.
The only reason campaign finance is an issue is because voters vote based on television advertising. So the real root cause is a lazy and easily manipulated electorate, which can further be pinned on things like useless public schools.

I don't think this is a good idea, but I think if you actually restricted the vote to the so-called "1%" you might even get better government. There's no conspiracy by rich people to ruin the country for everyone else.
Where did you get this 5x number? As for reference counting, that's rather time-expensive, and does horrible things to the cache in multi-threaded scenarios.
I remember being taught BASIC in elementary school as part of the standard curriculum, which was now a long, long time ago. And this was just a small rural school, literally surrounded by farms. My parents both talk of learning how to program on punchcards in high school. They struggle to use a computer, let alone program one, so I'm not sure it was of any real benefit to them.

Though once you've covered basic algebra, you're basically there. Coding itself is super easy. The more challenging problems come from understanding the nuances of your stack (which comes with experience) and understanding more complicated algorithms (which is rooted in higher level math). That all requires much more time and effort than an intro course in elementary school.
Out of curiosity, do you also call California "Cali"?
I'm being serious, but also snarky: Don't do schema migrations.

I saw a talk by Brett Durrett, VP Dev & Ops at IMVU last week. They don't make backwards incompatible schema changes. Ever. Also, on big tables, they don't use alter statements ever, because MySQL sometimes takes an hour to ALTER.

Instead, they create a new table that is the "updated" version of the old table, and then their code does copy-on-read. i.e. they look for the row in the new table, if it's not there, copy it out of the old table and insert into the new table. Later, a background job will come through and migrate all old records into the new table. Eventually, the old table will be deleted and the copy-on-read code will be removed.

It's a lot of extra work, but they think it's worth the effort.

I need to finish my blog post on the rest of the talk...
I've followed Sebastian's blog for quite a while now, and have no idea what you are talking about. Perhaps I missed some crucial post? Just doesn't seem like a fitting description of his blog.

Anyway, I recommend everyone to take a look at his writing and to judge it yourselves. I think it's good stuff, and has inspired me to push myself harder.
Very sad news indeed. As a contributor to Code Quarterly (the only one it seems) I was willing to put in the work to make it a success. It truly seemed like a publication that I would like to read. And that's the thing isn't it? We complain that there is nothing for "us programmers", but it seems that if we want it we need to create it. Otherwise we'll just need to settle for the dreck found in the grocer's aisle. You can never have too many articles on building the ultimate game machine.
I've always found that hackers should hack and business people should just conduct business, but each with as deep an understanding of the other as possible. One of our co-founders both programs and helps on the business side, because he insists on it, and it just doesn't work. However, his understanding of what we do from a business perspective and our non-tech cofounders basic understanding of programming has proven crucial to proper planning and communication.

Great post, I digging it.
What a horrible name, trying to tell someone about the site would prove to be difficult.
Rather, Morbo and Hypnotoad both manage Mojo::Server::Daemon workers.
A pretty thoughtful look.

Me, I basically got my Nexus One because I have no credit, and did not want to pay AT&T's special iPhone rates PLUS give them a $500 deposit for a few years.

I think the dude was using the wrong widgets. I've got my calendar and the phase of the moon on my Android's home screen, I've got quick access to basic music controls as well.

Stuff I miss from Android when I'm using my iPad:
- zooming the web page does not reflow, I am annoyed by this every time I have to choose between squinting at tiny text, or scrolling a tiny window around readably-large text.
- Share menu. It feels so primitive for me to be limited to whatever options a program's written; if I want e-mail sharing that should be provided by the e-mail client for everyone, once, instead of by a random handful of developers who think "share this via email" is a good idea.
- I really hate that iTunes insists on backing up all my apps to my computer, what a waste of space. They're on my device and Apple's servers.
- Oh yeah and the whole "plug your device into your computer to sync" thing is so 1994. Apple is just starting to get there.
Google-Backed File-Sharing Empire Cancels NASDAQ IPO
Its always a good thing to know the work that your employees do, it helps evaluate their strengths and it helps in understanding the priorities of their requirements. I remember a manager at one company saying that programmers liked to have two monitors because it made them 'look impressive.' I asked if they really thought that reason really entered into the top 10 for the request and they were convinced that since they could do their entire job with just a lap top screen than more than a single big screen was a waste. Sad, so very sad.

It is also important though to keep track of what you don't know. It is never good when you have a manager who has been out of the thick of things long enough that they have lost the appreciation for the subtlties, trying to direct design decisions. I find this is hardest for managers where they were the primary coder on a project before it grew too big and they ended up managing it, and now it has evolved beyond their original understanding of it but they haven't realized that yet. Awkward!
Chrome's implementation of this feature is absurdly broken. You can disable it by turning off two-finger page swipes in System Prefs -> Trackpad. Still looking for a way to disable it for Chrome specifically.