skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: pairing in Ruby with someone who hasn't coded since Z80 Assembler?
The guy in question is very smart, & is a subject matter expert for a system I'm helping build in RoR + backbone.js. I've managed to persuade him to join in one of our Hack Days as a coder.

The catch is, the last code he cut was Assembler for a Z80, back when they were mainstream. He tells the most awesome story of when 'remote debugging' meant calling the security guard at a distant location & talking him through patching code at a terminal :-)

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to approach pairing? I'm thinking ping-pong pairing, combined with a gentle introduction to as few infrastructure items as possible (Git, rspec, bundler, TextMate).

Any advice or experience would be greatly appreciated ...
Good stuff. How bout accumulable premium/discount rate for each user based on his or her gross referral sales? wait, I smell Amway in the air.
It's not a matter of infrastructure. It's a matter of belief: people who are looking for safety and refuge from inflation aren't going to move their money into a less-liquid, less-tangible asset with no track record (relative to alternatives.)

Moving cash into bitcoin would make sense if there were some inherent advantages: better returns, more liquidity, better privacy, more stable values, faster transactions. So far, I don't really see any of those being offered; it's essentially an experiment, and folks who are using it are either doing to speculatively or for curiosity value, not economic reasons.
I use RFC 1345 digraphs in vim to type unicode characteres. In RFC 1234, λ is l* and → is ->. To type the above, I just input l_*x y -_>x+y where _ means backspace. This is easy to learn, fast to type, and covers most of the useful unicode characters.
Point taken, good catch.
> It does, however, draw my attention to that comment.

There is a subtle feedback loop in there. After all, a comment that draws your attention will then be more likely to be upvoted by you and people acting like you.
I'd be more interested in something that'd prevent this situation from happening:

smartest comment
--smart reply
----more discussion
----more discussion
------correction on more discussion
--smart-ish reply
----more discussion
----more discussion
----more discussion
------not-so-smart reply
----uninteresting reply
----downvoted comment
------comment on why parent was a bad comment
------another comment that's essentially the same thing
----a bunch more downvoted comments
2nd smartest comment
[etc.]

Basically, the 2nd best top-level comment is buried below the entire discussion for the best comment, even if much of that discussion has been voted average or negatively.

A possible solution could be to collapse all the replies except for the few quality ones and show a [more] link, much like reddit.

EDIT: This very comment exemplifies my point perfectly.
I am currently building a social eLearning site and I will proactively never call what I'm building as an LMS. LMS' key words are "management" where I'm building a site that will facilitate learning not just manage it.

I agree that the big game changers are live work collaboration and video chat and the standard Google has set is absolutely great. As a recent grad (may, 2011), working on group projects was absolutely essential to successful learning and by being able to allow similar interaction online is a win-win.

We have both those features in the site we're building...and the reason we're not too terrified of others using Google's APIs is that the user will ultimately still need a Google account to use them even on a different site.

If OpenClass is truly open, why make everyone sign up and then also sign up to Google? Not everyone has a Google acct. What about all the countries around the world that would benefit from a true "OpenClass"?

Check us out at www.cloudeas.com...our landing page is still not up yet as we recently started this project but with the amount of traction this article is getting, it's needless to say our landing page will be up today (tonight at the very latest).

We are 5 recent grads that feel the exact same way you have about blackboard---absolutely sick of it and it actually distracted us from learning rather than enhancing it...we decided to build our own: built by students but designed for professors
Hello - we are a big company with an infinite amount of lawyers

We are claiming, without having to show any evidence, that you are violating one of our patents but we aren't to going to tell you which one.

If you pay us money we will leave you alone.

If it turns out we were lying we still get to keep your money and there is no penalty on us.

And we don't need patent reform?
For reasons too complex to explain here, even some systems, like Gmail’s, that don’t allow intruders to make millions of random guesses at a password can still be vulnerable to brute-force attacks.

I'm curios as to what the reasons are? How do you bruteforce a gmail account? Surely Google will not allow you millions of tries?
Researchers lock down Android to keep data from walking out the door
Let's be fair, in Objective-C, this could be actually more like

NSIndexSet *indicies = [allRecords indexesOfObjectsPassingTest:^ (id obj, NSUInteger idx, BOOL *stop) { return [obj someField] == someFieldFilterValue; }];
filteredArray = [allRecords objectsAtIndexes:indicies];

rather than what the article had in mind.

EDIT: oh, someFieldFilterValue was an integer, wasn't it. Fixed.
My problem seems to be that despite desperately wanting to use Haskell for some decent sized project, it never seems to work out as my best option. Right now I'm interested in writing a metro styled app for win8, and even for the server side portions I feel like I'm better off just using CouchDB instead of any Haskell solution that I've seen so far. Before that it was yet-another-web-based-UI-library so my choices were pretty much coffeescript or javascript. Perhaps it's because I like to have fun with UI, but so far anything I'd like to actually spend time on -- Haskell just doesn't seem like the right tool for. My best use of it so far was solving project euler problems, and considering how much I liked it, it feels like a shame that I have nothing better to use it on.
I'm probably too late to this discussion, but I work at a windows shop, and use ubuntu at home and on servers, so it is an irritation that the ubuntu UI has become more mac-like, starting with the close button moving to the left-hand side. This is mainly because I find it inconsistent. I have put off upgrading ubuntu for this reason, currently I'm on 10.04.

What I don't like about ubuntu since 10.04, is that it the UI has become "opionated", without having the customizability that pre-gnome desktop managers have.

Specifically, there should be options to put the close/minimize/maximize buttons on whichever side I prefer, and whether to use mac-style menus or windows-style menus.
Sorry for the ambiguity - I guess I'm looking for a better domain modeling tool, not IDE. I'm aware of UML but always looking if there are interesting tools from other trades that might apply to programming/modeling...
My question: Is OpenClass going to be hosted by Pearson or are they going to leave that up to the schools like Moodle does?

Just reminds me that "there's no such thing as a free lunch"...
Adam Carolla, Keith and the Girl. Nothing to do with tech, but they make my day :D
yeah, I don't understand all the attention given to bitcoin. It's not like it's a system that's immune to systematic manipulation. Anyone operating under the assumption that bitcoin is a stable system is naive.

I'm open to being wrong about my assumptions.
It's seemingly infinite amount of tries because after 2-3 failed password attempts, you get a captcha to do.
That's a great question as to why anyone would use a currency whose valuation had dropped to 10% of what it was.
http://www.kitco.com/charts/popup/au3650nyb.html
Password reuse by end users puts even a relatively well secured site like gmail at risk of user passwords being brute forced.

Break into a less-well-secured site, steal the password file, which may use something like md5. Brute force offline. Then, try that password and username on a more secure site like gmail.
IMO, the plethora of poorly written articles and tutorials is the ultimate culprit here. You'll find few go into detail regarding file extensions vs. mime types, file permissions, file ownership, or anything under the hood. When a beginner is left to their own devices with some sample code that doesn't mention the implications of not taking security seriously, we're left with swiss cheese implementations.

This may inherently be due to PHP's age. As an early dynamic language, it could be expected that the earliest shared source code and tutorials would likely contain bugs.
Currently Google requires you to have a Google acct to use any of their API's. So a site like OpenClass will probably have to cater to that...really hope they don't expect people to use two types of logins...

Instructure's Canvas also used Google APIs and yes, you have to have a Google acct to use certain things like GoogleDocs within their site...
8 Useful WordPress Tips to Adorn Your Blog
You know that they don't just give the money away to banks, right? It's loaned. They have an obligation to repay it.
Not for one thing or another, but you can find lumberjacks discussing Stihl over Husqvarna for hours on end.
Thomhartmann's Channel - YouTube
The post covers material outside of Vim's help system (e.g. some Vim scripts that create new text objects), and provides a different presentation that might be helpful to someone learning the concept. I think that's valuable.
Wow. That's a huge vimrc config (1350 lines!) filled with gems, I am going to go through it and steal them for my vimrc! :)
Perhaps those who see no value in point races also shy away from polls?
I actually wish reddit would get rid of displaying karma; gaining karma has just become a game and is honestly causing more problems over there than not.
GE's Next CEO Might Not Be A U.S. Citizen (And It's A Pretty Big Deal)
Depends on the type of site/application. If your application is managing customer data that can be updated 24 hours a day, a few minutes of down-time might be okay, whereas rolling back 6 hours of data (and losing it) is definitely not okay.
That seems to be exactly what haskell is suited for solving, math problems. Which is great and wonderful when you are doing math related problems or things that are heavy in math but when you try and go outside those bounds that is when haskell becomes much much harder to write and work with. But alas that is both what makes haskell nice and hard to work with.
You can download it here:
http://www.gregsadetsky.com/aol-data/
> Calibre (ebook management software)

Please, dear lord, someone fork this and fix the god awful user interface.
"Pyramid scam" is not the droids you're looking for. "Pump & Dump" is more accurate.
Amazon's core business has huge revenue numbers but really crap margins. They're walmart.

AWS, while a much smaller revenue number, has crazy margins compared to retailing. That makes it interesting out of proportion to percentage of revenue, especially if you believe the cloud will continue to grow.

Same thing with Kindle -- vertical integration, and capturing margin along the way, using their huge retail footprint.
Mustache, ERB and the future of templating
Oracle R Enterprise - big data analytics
Others would argue that you can architect your infrastructure/application so that you don't require down-time for changes, ever.
Crippled person is less likely to fight too.

That does not mean that we need to cripple everyone in order to prevent fights.
Luakit is definitely an interesting project. I'm checking it out, but I'm not ready to make it my primary browser, if only because the user documentation is bad enough that the best way for me to figure out how to open a URL is to read the configuration files.
Flicker-free compositor replaces
Would love to see that blog post since a lot of people struggle with schema changes, particularly 'alter table'.
I'm glad I switched to 1Password and switched all of my accounts to a different randomly generated password. I'm sure I'm using it in some insecure way but at least all of my passwords are different.
> people who are looking for safety and refuge from inflation aren't going to move their money into a less-liquid, less-tangible asset with no track record (relative to alternatives.)

I will. The point is, at the margin, some people will. All and at once? Never! The more adventurous and tentatively? Yes.

Now it all depends on relative outcome of different strategies.
Word. For those with a mousewheel: on some browsers you can hold shift and roll up/down to scroll left/right.
We do, but have found - particularly in IE variants - that performance is so haltingly slow that we may as well not bother lazyloading at all.

There are also some Flash of Unstyled Content/Unloaded JS issues - but we should probably fix this on our end. The challenge with that is Facebook have the freedom to change iframe dimensions at any point, thus breaking thousands of pages again.
live interactive calendar/agenda widget as well as a live todo list

Which widgets do you use? I've tried CalWidget but I've seen it crash quite a lot and I think it actually slows down my home screen.
All the startups focuses too much attention on web/mobile, i'd totally invest in something like that over any web/mobile company right now.
ICloud syncing in practice
Search for web design examples by keyword and example
> They create the products that they think are perfect.

They create those products that they believe will make them the most money.

No apple product ever built past or present was 'perfect' when it was released, but it was more than good enough and typically a notch or two above the competition with an associated price tag.
Bittulips?
Excellent. I myself fall between "political" and "aesthetic" in my own writing. This article is a great mirror with which to reflect on my own prose tendencies and think crucially about them.

Thanks :)
No GOP Senator Supports Bill to Protect Online E-Mail Privacy
I, too, found myself susceptible to reactions based on karma score and, personally, it wouldn't bother me at all if the scores never come back. If given the ability to view karma scores, I would leave them off, since I'm self-aware enough to realize that -- when karma scores are enabled -- my comments are of a lower caliber.

However, I'm not against allowing users with a certain level of karma the choice to view karma scores on threads if they really feel that HN is better with karma on, which it seems like a fairly large subset of users (or at least a significantly vocal one) wish for. I think that StackOverflow's successful moderation policies (and, to a lesser extent, HNs own) have sufficiently demonstrated that extraordinary members of a community can handle the responsibilities that come with increased privilege.

For example, I suspect that, if pg allowed individuals with high karma, such as yourself, to choose to toggle an option such as "view karma scores", no flood of dumb comments from high karma individuals would suddenly manifest. Further, I think that the transition from default karma displayed to our current situation has allowed anyone who has invested significant time in the community an opportunity for introspection that wasn't previously available. I'm now able to evaluate, personally, how my comments and behavior were effected by the display of karma and I'm less susceptible to the psychological effects as a result.

Of course, even if there isn't a significant negative aspect to allowing high karma individuals to view karma scores, it's still hardly worthwhile unless there's some kind of positive impact as a result. Perhaps mollifying the community would be enough of a benefit? Maybe a more pro show-karma individual would be better qualified to comment on the potential upside. My feeling is that it's possible that some subset of HNers exist whose experience with the community is improved by having karma scores enabled and, as such, it would be beneficial to allow them the possibility of a choice.

P.S. You guys want an intern, yet? :P
if you use the same password on multiple sites and any one of them gets hacked, hackers can brute force against the stored hash to "recover" your original password, which is probably tied to an email address.
Its apparent that people are finding value in them aside from their speculated worth. They are using them to facilitate anonymous transaction and more easily transact internationally. Whether those use cases are valuable enough to keep people using bitcoins, I can't say.
All I have to say is "wow". The commenters here are atrocious. If you're going to rage against BitCoin, (and I'm no huge fan), at least bother yourself to have half a clue what they are instead of spouting lies here in some vicious attack on them.
I definitely agree with your last point - part of the reason why I decided to take a machine learning class again from Prof. Ng was because I still had a sense of unease that I wasn't quite getting the topics that would really be important when I'd implement machine learning algorithms (whatever they end up being).

Mostly though, I'm just hoping I can find a place to work with plenty of ML people to learn from :)
Great points.

Google knows they are infringing MS's patents, that's why they are shopping for their own war chest rather than going for a trial.
Pharma should acquire software startups
The intellectual property system that lets you sue your competitors because they are using your IP is a privilege. It's not a right. Not a human right. It's not in UN or otherwise ratified lists of human rights - right? And corporations aren't person anyway.

So, it's a privilege, so the public does have the veto power. If it says, "no patent racketeering" - they don't do it or cease to exist as a legal business.

The problem is that nobody is there to call the veto.
About a year and a half ago. It wasn't terribly different than I expected.

Look, if you love it, great. But don't go giving the rest of us a song and dance about how wonderful it is, because there's more vibrancy in a chunk of San Jose I recently stayed in, considered to be a relatively dull Silicon Valley city, than in downtown Detroit. If you don't think it's a city in a very bad place, there's a word for that: denial.

Also, I remind you, I'm talking about Detroit, not the region. The region is getting on with life. Detroit is still struggling for breath, and it has become clear that the fate of the region isn't at all particularly tied to Detroit, because the rest of it isn't sinking with it. There's literally no possible way to have a more vivid proof of the fact than by demonstration.
Authentication-As-A-Service Gains Steam
With the trend of SOA and webservers like Mongrel2, perhaps its a good time to start putting the more esoteric languages in production in the form of small services (w/ ZeroMQ for example).
If the startup founders create the company specifically to sell a worthless product to investors, then yeah, it's a scam.

Also Bitcoin is not a company, any more than US Dollar is.
"3. Notification bar. I can always look at the top bar of my droid and know what, if anything, needs my attention. Or at the very least, why my phone made a noise in the last few minutes."

I find Android widgets valuable for a similar reason. I have widgets for task list and upcoming calendar events with the "Quick Event" app to quickly enter new ones. I never have to go out of my way for this information and it's there unobtrusively reminding me.
I realized the current system works pretty damn well when I thought "I wish these were points were visible!" upon seeing a heavily up-voted comment of mine. I quickly realized that this is a really bad concern to have when commenting. There is such a fine but significant difference between getting feedback that let's you know people like what you say, and publicly displaying it. The former is the natural desire to be right/smart/insightful, the latter is actually the desire to appear right/smart/insightful to others.

I think we've all seen this pattern of fame at any scale: Smart but unnoticed person finally gets attention for their work, people notice this and the person appears smart and worth listening to, after time the person's focus shifts from the smart work they did to work maintaining the reputation of being smart.

I think it's great to get some form of acknowledgment that your ideas are generating positive feedback, this encourage thoughtful comments and provides a real reward to those primitive parts of our brain that want to be the big monkey. But any further and the big monkey starts to be the one doing the talking.
No. Why should it? I don’t understand, are you implying it should?

I don’t think personality flaws of the creators that don’t impact the product are ever a good reason for not using a product. That line of thinking doesn’t even make sense to me.

(Note that I’m not talking about products where the personality of the creators also impacts my experience of it. I’m perfectly willing to give up on a restaurant – even if I quite like the food – if the waiters are rude and annoying. Now, the food might be so great that I’m willing to overlook those flaws but at the very least the personality flaws figure into my decision. I can, however, happily use Facebook without ever being confronted with Zuckerberg’s personality flaws.)
For almost 4 months it looked like Facebook might unseat google as the #1 site on the web, in spite of their claimed growth in 'active users' Facebook has not been able to take the top spot, and the weekend swap (when google and facebook would temporarily exchange places as #1 and #2) is no longer happening.
Thanks for that. I needed a good laugh today. :-)
good thing I made a bunch of money by trading BC intra-day when it hit mainstream.

seriously, did anyone expect this to be a "new paradigm"? it was a fun toy for financially-minded engineers and traders, but I can't say I'm surprised to hear that it's in free-fall.

i wonder where the bottom is? Once it drops well below USD1.00, I think I'll buy a bunch on a cheap bet :)
The first thing I did was to back them all up onto her hard disk, with Thunderbird—and then back up those archives elsewhere, just in case.

If you care about your mail, you should be doing some kind of personal backup with any service like this. I just fire up Thunderbird, like the author, but I'm sure there must be a lot of scripts and programs out there to do local gmail backup.
Can someone give a concrete example of themselves using Bitcoins for something other than speculative trade ?
> I'm in the school of thought that anyone who says Bitcoin is a pyramid scam is trying to scam Bitcoin and/or intentionally depress the value of BTC for personal gain.

That is ridiculous. Anyone who criticizes Bitcoin is automatically a scammer themselves?
I am the author of "Practicing Ruby" ( http://practicingruby.com ). It's a paid newsletter but I offer it for free for anyone who can't pay for it, and try to release back issues relatively frequently.
According to PG (I can't find the exact comment right now) the exact opposite has happened - posts with a lot of points get more points, not less.

The reason probably being that when you look at a commentscore you assess whether it has the right score, and if it doesn't you vote it up (or down). If you can't see the scores you can't do this.
If only user IDs were obfuscated too... it is really annoying to see e-v-e-r-y s-i-n-g-l-e c-o-m-m-e-n-t of few high-karma users constantly upvoted to the top of every thread. The very same popularity contests, just a different angle.
I like the shout out to go at the end. If you haven't tried that language yet I highly recommend it.