skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For starting out programmers, I think it really doesn't matter which language that's used, as long as the language supports strong type safety, the ability to create data structures, and, ideally, also has garbage collection. Java, Python, and Ruby all work for this. In a perfect world, the language would also support C-style pointers, but GC is more important feature for a brand new programmer.

Initially, the goal should be to learn primitive data structure concepts and usage(i.e. ints, char, strings, pointers, etc.). After that, they should learn more complex structures, like linked lists. These should be taught without referencing the built-in standard library structures. After that, simple sorting algorithms can be taught(including recursion), as well as OO concepts.

Teaching all of that in a GC language is nice, because it removes a lot of the memory management that starting out programmers always get caught up with. It lets the student concentrate more on the concepts than on tricky memory issues. That can be taught latter.
I always hate this quote. You should always ask people what they want, you just shouldn't literally deliver what they ask for when you can do much better.
The Silicon Valley mirror-tocracy
I'm surprised every time I hear Python users claiming unfamiliarity with pip. Until it's as familiar to folks as indoor plumbing, the more pip publicity and tutorials the better.
I have never even met the majority of my clients. I could be black, white, red, or blue for all they know. The colour of your skin may not be a choice, but how you decide to ingrate into the industry is.

A programmer's job is to observe constraints and find a solution given those constraints. Racism is just another constraint. It is a constraint that is not fair. It is a constraint that we should not have to deal with. But, given it does exist, should it stop a good programmer from doing well in the industry? I'm not so sure.

This industry in particular comes so many unique options for work environments. And there is presently so much demand that you can basically write your own ticket. We should definitely be working to stop racism, and all kinds of judgements of others, completely, but in the meantime there are options for those who find themselves affected by it.
Sharing Business Earn with Web Hosting Company
> I am wondering if retail's version of low latency is in seconds or tens of seconds.

I think you're off by an order of magnitude or two.

Our fund doesn't really worry too much about execution speed and we'd only tolerate low 100 millisecond latency. 10's of milliseconds is what we'd prefer.

Many firms want to be lower still.
Even though my main language is Ruby these days, I'd still prefer to teach Python, it's much more readable to non-programmers. Ruby has lots of weird short-cut syntax which just confuses newbies.
The current situation is more analogous to car owners preferring a different kind of horse. Or even people not owning any vehicles still preferring a new kind of horse rather than a car even after cars came out.

From http://allthingsd.com/20111005/nevermind-the-iphone-5-wheres...

But the BCG study isn’t an anomaly. Forrester conducted a poll earlier this year and got the same message, with an even starker gap between Microsoft and everyone else: “Only 9% of consumers considering buying a tablet actively prefer an Android tablet — compared with 16% who prefer iOS and 46% who prefer Windows.”

When I wrote about it back in August, I found this so puzzling that I got Forrester researcher Sarah Rotman Epps on the phone to confirm that this wasn’t some weird typo. Nope, she told me.

And it’s sort of common sense: “When we survey consumers, it becomes very clear that Windows is still a very popular brand,” she said. Apple has sold tens of millions of iPads, but Microsoft has sold more than 400 million Windows 7 devices.
this post is definitely real. i emailed the address on the ad, and they sent back a surprisingly dismissive reply. they open rudely, begin to say they made an error in judgement and then backhandedly defended themselves. pretty uncool, i'd really like to know who the company is.

here was my initial email:
http://lilpuff.us/non-bro

and the reply from secretstartup@gmail.com:
http://lilpuff.us/rY6D8r

and the original listing, cached:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WEsG46N...

also, just to note: the fact that they put "non-bros still welcome to apply" suggests that they were aware that brogramming might come off as a men-only requirement, but did not see this as a problem.

also consider the use of "still welcome to apply" vs. more positive or friendly language, e.g. "we love non-bros too!" which still utilizes the term in question, but is welcoming and follows the tone of the posting.

and i spoke with multiple men and women (who do and do not work in IT) who found this pretty offensive.
HP Project Moonshot hurls ARM servers into the heavens
You need to set up your gmail account as an Exchange account. I do this and it syncs everything like it did for me on Android.
Spy Watch or Spy Pen – Which Is the Better Spy Camera?
Plantronics CS50 Wireless Headset System
Plantronics CS50 Wireless Headset System helps you keep up with business and stay in touch.The Plantronics CS50 Wireless Office Headset System gives you the freedom to roam up to 300 feet in a typical office environment, talk for up to eight hours without recharging, answer and end calls when you're away from your desk with the touch of a button.
I wonder if more people would learn shorthand if the devices could make it an input technique competitive with touch typing?
HP's new ARM-based Servers
Yea, why is this going to the White House instead of Congress in the first place? Anyway, personally I think it will deadlock in Congress for years like the net neutrality mess thanks to companies like Google. The key would to be keep it going until the content industry dies (or at least the lobbying) which will take years (I like to compare it to end of support for XP).
The "preview" skin is available on Google Apps.

I activated it on a new domain yesterday:
http://i.imgur.com/PoQ2F.png
To summarise: fuck you very much
I think the general consensus is that a full life is more than 56 years.
It's basically just a styling issue though. Couldn't they just provide a "netbook style"? Consider that tablets are about the same size and tablets are probably going to be the "common case". Unless of course they are providing a specific "tablet style".

Another poster indicated that the theme automatically resized based on window dimensions. I'm not seeing the new theme (merely the "Preview" theme in the list - there's a "Preview (Dense)" in the theme list as well).
The conversation view is much, much better. I can't wait to check it out.
My first two steps: I started from nothing with Pine's Learn to Program, and then moved on to Learn Ruby the Hard Way.

http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/

After you've got the basics, the best way to learn is to have a problem to solve or need to address. About halfway through LRTHW I started making notes on little programs I could try to build once I'd finished the course. None were very original: a custom contacts book, a script that scraped football scores and added them to a text file, a simple single-serving website that told me the weather for my area. My learning spiralled out from there.

Finally, this is an online version of the famous Pickaxe book, which I found to be a good reference. I wouldn't recommend it as a first port of call if you're new to programming, but once the terminology (object, class, method, variable etc) has sunk in it's useful for looking things up.

http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/

Have fun!
> This is even difficult to do when what you're trying to model is not the physical world, but a computer system.

Indeed. A couple of days ago, somebody posted a fascinating image of memory latency (http://www.bitmover.com/mem_lat.jpg) in a comment here. Getting to a model of a computer system which captured all the subtleties in this graph isn't easy - and this is only one aspect of real computer behavior.

Abstractions and approximations are extremely important in science, computer science included, but I am often disappointed by how little thought is given to the implications of these approximations. In comparison, getting excited about floating point error is much easier.

This is not a criticism of Sussman or his talk in any way, but just an observation on many computer engineering and computation papers.
Because you have never experienced any racial problems in the high tech field means that there are none? Everyone else is lying about it?

Projects like the NewME accelerator exists because even if you "make something awesome" in a normal environment, getting attention is hard. You add to that being a minority and the road gets a little rougher. Not in every case but in a lot of them.

This isn't about black and white. This is about humans having natural prejudices even if they don't intend to. Nobody is claiming that the valley or the high tech field in general is full of racists. In fact the opposite is true. It is probably one of the more progressive job fields you will find. But that does not mean there is not a problem. There are biases in the field and one of them includes racial. Pointing it out does not mean everyone in the field is racist. They are just presenting one more problem for geeks to try and solve.
I'm in Denver right now, and it would take an enormous catastrophe for me to move back to NC.

I have no Twitter account, but my e-mail is in my profile if you'd like to get in touch and discuss things further. I went to college there and lived there for a couple additional years, so I can give you my thoughts.
What can we do better? YCW12 Reject: Droptype
We received our rejection letter to YCW12 after our biggest day in terms of traffic and positive feedback; so we figured it might be time to turn to HN for some honest feedback and some ideas on what we can do to improve our app.

The basic premise is pretty simple: Write in plain text, format with Markdown, put in your Dropbox, automagically publish on the web. That much works right now, you can (please do) sign up using your existing Dropbox account and play around with it: http://droptype.com

You can also create sub-directories and it will sync those as well. Every file or directory you add has a publish button you have to hit before it goes public.

We also support a couple MultiMarkdown metadata attributes (Title and Summary), and you can drop a readme.txt file in any directory and it will show up when you visit that directory on Droptype (we install a readme.txt for you to show you how the app works).

There's a few things we know we need to do and are working on them:

1. Themes - I'd like to see this working like Jeckyll or Hyde where you can configure the look of the site by putting files in each directory. We'd obviously need to have a few prebuilt themes.

2. Domain name redirection

3. RSS

4. Publishing a directory should publish all content already in there

5. Better navigation once you're reading a file

6. Integrate with Facebook, Twitter, etc to autopost to different services.

7. Syncing of other types of media - images, video, audio

We also have a few pretty solid monetization ideas, but I rather not get into those right now.

I guess the question is what can we do to make the service more compelling. It seems people that get it think it's a pretty good idea, but we're not getting as much people creating content as we'd like.
Introducing GitHub Enterprise
(bump) Would be great to hear an answer to this.
Thanks, but I already know what fork does. My point is that "fork" is precisely how one spawns a new process, and there is no other way to do so.
They can't give course credit or award degrees.

There was a relevant quote posted recently by "tokenadult": “the diligence of public teachers is more or less corrupted by the circumstances which render them more or less independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions.. . . . The privileges of graduation, besides, are in many countries . . . obtained only by attending the lectures of the public teachers. . . . The endowment of schools and colleges have, in this manner, not only corrupted the diligence of public teachers, but have rendered it almost impossible to have any good private ones." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Part 3, Article II (1776)
Really stop reading Techcrunch :)
Honestly, computer systems should be approached and treated as though they have the complexity of the physical world. They're composed of a bunch of different parts, some moving, some distant, all accumulating all sorts of interesting bottlenecks and errors at the edges. The starting assumption that a given computer system is simple and ought to yield easily to analysis and modeling is a red flag in many situations.
Palo Alto, CA - Euclid Inc http://euclidelements.com/jobs

Front-end Web DEveloper

We are looking to bring on a front-end developer. This person will be responsible for the core product’s interaction design and implementation.

Tools & Experience
Ideal candidate would have some formal education in computer science, but ability and experience are paramount.

Some expected areas of expertise:

* Charting libraries/data-visualization systems

* CSS, Javascript, JQuery, HTML 5

* Ruby or Python a a plus.
Want to build and launch an app in a month?
You no longer have to be scratching your head about this one, they just added two games to the bundle. Misnomer no more.
Burlingame, CA (Burlingame is near San Francisco Int'l Airport) - TellApart http://www.tellapart.com/

We're hiring Software Engineers, senior and junior, as well as Software Engineers specializing in machine learning.

We help eCommerce companies "TellApart" their high value customers from the rest by collecting and making sense of their customer data.

Here are some technical challenges you'll face at TellApart:

- Scale--build systems that handle tens of thousands of requests per second under strict latency guarantees on behalf of hundreds of millions of users

- Predictive modeling with huge data sets--build predictive models that evaluate hundreds of thousands of features in milliseconds

Email me at wei@tellapart.com if you'd like to find out more.
> Configure WPA on OpenBSD: ifconfig <interface> nwid <ssid> wpa wpakey <wpakey> up; dhclient <interface>
The equivalent on linux is left as an exercise...

wpa_passphrase <ssid> <wpakey> > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
wpa_supplicant -i<interface> -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -B
dhclient <inteface>

Everything is easy when you know how to do it.
Github:enterprise
Raptor Rage
While I tend to agree that modeling and approximation error are usually greater than floating point error, floating point error can be more devastating in practice because once you realize you have a floating point problem, it's much more difficult to work around.

When we develop models or approximation schemes, we're usually cognizant of the fact that we're fudging some things - we accept the limitations of the model, or we have an epsilon parameter or five in the approximation scheme that we can tune if we need better accuracy. Since we need to build all the machinery in code to solve the problem at all, it's pretty easy to tune it when we find that machinery lacking.

But we usually have little choice other than to hope that floating point math of some sort will be "good enough", since we're reliant on the hardware for performance there. If doubles don't cut it, it can be a pretty substantial project to retrofit a mathy algorithm so that it has higher numerical precision, and it can be all but impossible if we're already compute-heavy and don't have many more cycles to waste.
Los Angeles http://www.leads360.com

OpenVBX Developer | Short-term, remote-friendly, US citizen only

http://engineering.leads360.com/post/12202543481/openvbx-dev...

Front-End UI/UX Engineer | Full-time, on-site, H1B-friendly

http://engineering.leads360.com/post/11740013553/were-hiring...

QA Analyst | Full-time, on-site, H1B-friendly

http://engineering.leads360.com/post/11881785761/were-hiring...
Links for 2011-10-15 [Digg]
Wikivote and Government by (all) the people
Of course that's not the claim being made by your parent. The argument is about how widespread it is and its effects. I'm pretty sure most people would find his story strong evidence for one side of the argument, assuming they believe it. I'm also pretty sure most people will choose to believe it exactly to the extent it agrees with their predetermined bias.

As a white male living in a rural area as a kid and in metropolitan areas as an adult, and having a black best friend, my anecdotal evidence supports a more limited effect than is commonly claimed in pop culture. That is, to the extent that there is willful, systemic, malicious racism, an individual's self-reliance (why this is becoming a dirty word in our culture, I do not know) is significantly more powerful.

I respect people who think the system is flawed and want to dedicate their lives to making it more ideal, but otherwise I think it's healthier to believe your success comes from your own decisions. That's not literally true for ANY of us, but it's best to believe it. It's similar to the recent study which showed that children do best when they believe success is more dependent on how hard you work rather than what your IQ is...which is not the same as it actually being true that success is more dependent on how hard you work rather than what your IQ is.
>> "GitHub Enterprise is priced at $5,000 per 20 users"

How does this fare against other enterprise hosted scm/version control products?
AUR is part of the problem that Debian Linux seeks to solve. AUR gets you 32,000 packages with uncertain quality and provenance. It's about two steps from downloading a zip file of binaries off the internet.

Debian has 29,000 packages that conform to a set of policies, with careful change control and vetted, active maintainers for each one.
Mountain View - drchrono.com (YC W11) [full time and interns]

We're looking for more engineers and salespeople to help us revolutionize healthcare through mobile and web interfaces.
Our stack includes Python/Django, iOS, Android, but you don't need to be an expert, just ready and willing to learn fast!

Our product supports thousands of doctors who depend on our systems daily to provide quality care to their patients, iPad in hand.

The usual startup benefits included: competitive salary, healthcare, whatever hardware you need to be most productive.

email: jobs@[our-domain-name].com

http://drchrono.com/jobs/
I think you're spot on. Microsoft seems almost obsessed on demoing and talking about these lofty products, the Surface is another example. Real artists ship, as someone said..

What's interesting is that while Apple had the perfect pitch for the iPad (simple web browsing device), the form factor and touch screen made it possible to use it for almost anything. Now you see pilots, doctors and musicians use the iPad in their work. It's obvious that it's not limited to content consumption.

Here's an idea: Make an app (or a framework) allowing two iPads to be connected over WiFi or with a special "dual iPad" cover that would make the app span the screens of both iPads. With this, you could recreate the Courier experience on a shipping device, priced at $800.

If the iPad can do screen mirroring to an Apple TV, why not to another iPad? (Because Apple says so, of course. :)

Stuff like this is starting to happen in a small way with WiST compatible music apps.
Technical debt is a rabbit hole that goes deep, really deep…
I agree, actually, which is why I made that aside.
Wildlife Tours India-Exploration of wildlife adventure | Merrx
It doesn't require deuterium.
WGC HSBC Champions Live Stream Watch PGA Tour GOLF 2011
Linode saw this post and called me. They apologized. There was a glitch in the cancellation system. I did cancel on the 30th (and they verified that), but due to the glitch, the cancellation didn't show up. So they made it right and are refunding the money (the monthly charge and the 5 dollar fee).

Kudos to Linode. They did the right thing. My entire experience with them (now that this has been corrected) has been very positive. I would recommend them to others and will use them again someday.

I would edit my original post to reflect this change, but it's no longer editable.
"Creation vs consumption" is a completely false dichotomy. By far the biggest constraint on "creation" is the person operating the device. We have no shortage of guitars, computers with attached keyboards, and cameras, yet there's not a notable surplus of great music, writing and movies.
For an actually creative person, the surplus of accessible content is inspiration to create, not some sort of impediment. Actually creative people also see limitless creative potential in these "consumption devices".
San Francisco, CA or Arlington, VA. Full Time

OPOWER
http://opower.com/
http://opowerjobs.com/

We leverage data and behavioral science to change people's energy consumption habits. Help the environment through energy conservation and help people save money.

Java, Rails, Hadoop - we have a culture where taking initiative and having a good design will result in a system in production.

Great perks and a chill yet super productive atmosphere.

Open positions vary from associate software engineer to lead to management level. http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/jobvite.aspx?b=nnvY6hwI
Speaking as someone who has absolutely no interest in getting high, I support legalization, mostly because I don't think the government has any business telling people what they can or can't put into their bodies, because marijuana convictions account for an astounding number of people in our prisons, and because we already legalize, regulate, and tax alcohol and tobacco, both of which are demonstrably unhealthier than pot. That's just for recreational usage; I think that the medical approach is even easier. Again, we already legalize and regulate medical narcotics far more dangerous and addictive than pot, and there's a fairly long list of medical benefits associated with it.

I think it does a lot of disservice to the issue to just write it off as "lol, potheads want to smoke up, they're the only ones that want this legalized".
Interesting to see they are forwarding links from the Firewall Install page (fi.github.com) to this.

Edit: We first launched the precursor to GitHub Enterprise, GitHub Firewall Install, over two years ago.

Same pricing, but better branding. I wonder what else has changed?
A question I would have is what problem are you trying to solve? From a quick though it would seem to be solving the same problem tumblr / posterous is solving?
perl has better support for symbolic file name and directory traversal.
Here's why I've been confused about that I think:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link.

Maybe we could get more flagging if you updated the guidelines or renamed it "junk".
An HTTP load balancer that is configurable at runtime (from ep.io)
Anyone not understanding NATO phonetic alphabet has no business working in a call center (or using a telephone, in general), even if English is not his or her native language.
Mountain View, CA - Full Time - http://solumtech.com/careers/

Solum gives farmers the information they need to grow crops optimally. We build automation equipment, have a chemistry lab, and are building a fertility model from our rapidly-growing set of soil data. This means we have a real impact in producing food while minimizing pollution from fertilizer runoff.

We are around 15 people strong and are hiring across many disciplines, including Software Engineering.

Drop us an email at jobs@solumtech.com if you are interested!
Beside losing Buzz I don't see much stuff happening. Besides, Google Reader is losing notes as well.
where is that to be found?
Show HN: Meet the Experts