skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "I was freaking out when I couldn't solve some Project
> Euler questions, and pretty much lost all of confidence in
> my programming abilities for a while.

I've read way too many people online suggest Project Euler as a way to "teach yourself programming". This is almost a sadistic suggestion. Project Euler is way too hard to teach yourself programming.

Evidence: nearly 180,000 people have solved problem #1. Only 76,000 have solved problem #10. Losing 60% of your audience by problem #10 is pretty bad question design for learning.

Anecdote: I've been programming for over 25 years. I was near the top of my class in a top-10 computer science university program. And I've solved 30 Project Euler problems in the last 3-1/2 years. But I still can't solve problem # 18. I've worked on it off and on since December 2007. Only recently, quite by accident I learned that it is probably a "dynamic programming" question, which is something I've never done before.

Never lose confidence in your coding ability because Project Euler stumps you now and again.
Linus's solution is to write software that people run and use daily.
I agree and disagree.

I spent a few years at a college before going to a university, and the (average) quality of teaching was actually higher at the college, for half the tuition. So insofar as post-secondary is about the stuff you learn in class, college is awesome. And I used to recommend it highly to any high-school-student who would listen.

However, there are some other benefits that are in short supply at colleges. Your peers will, on average, be less intelligent and less dedicated. And even if your peers are worth cultivating, you won't be living dorms, which means less parties (could be a pro or a con), but also means less close bonding with those same peers. Your instructors will not have openings in their labs where you can work for slave wages during the summer, getting five times as much real education as you got the preceding 8 months.

And ALSO, "cut the price in half" is completely disingenuous. Tuition is a fraction of the total cost of school: there's fees and books, of course. But more importantly, there's opportunity cost, usually represented by some kind of unskilled pay, perhaps $20k/year. In Vancouver in the early 2000s, college will run you roughly $250/course, and university $500/course. That sounds like half the price, until your calculation includes that $20k/year in lost salary (plus $1k-$2k in fees and supplies). Suddenly it's a $26k vs $22k, which is no savings worth talking about.
This is vim's 20th birthday. Bill Joy's vi screen editor was written (based on ex) c. 1978 I believe. GNU emacs was begun in 1984, though of course "EMACS" has a much longer history going back to TECO on the PDP-10 in the early 70's.
Cep Telefonu Tamir Kursu
Cool, sounds like you guys have done your homework. Will be neat to see the blog post.
Would you need executable and writable at the same time? The JIT generates code into a writable+non-executable memory, and then makes it readonly+executable.
Zen and the Art of Making
Sounds interesting. I have so many yahoo accounts. I make a account each time I try their products. I then loose interest and the account. Maybe I'll keep this one.
rails dbconsole is the same thing. (it runs psql for you with args as specified in your database config)
False dichotomy. People are capable of doing more than one thing. I'm a designer who writes code. Developers can learn design basics, and doing so will serve them well!

You're right though about practice. That topic is on my outline.
Barcelona a octavos de Champions
Google, hire some Mac/iPhone developers to do the job.

This is what happens if you hire 'generalist' and reject Mac developers by asking some scaling and data center questions.
Usage varies wildly according to demographics. The largest site I manage has IE at 44%, and it's a quite "non-technologist" market. My blog has IE at 1%, tied with Android, and a webapp is at 81% Chrome.
Network Marketing Success, How Does Self-Esteem Effect It? Five Keys
This looks like it could be an interesting book, and I'll most likely buy it when it comes out. In the meantime, another great book is "The Non-Designer's Design Book":

http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin-Willia...
Why would I need school to learn programming?

It's funny, because that's my attitude towards the liberal arts. I took almost nothing but math, physics and CS in college, and then went on to get graduate degrees in CS, but I read history, politics and public policy on my own. Also some econ and financial stuff since 2008 because I decided I wanted to understand it.

In contrast, the two history classes I took in college were awful. You could just as easily flip your anecdotes - I learned an amazing amount from my technical courses, things I just wouldn't have learned by reading books on my own.
FYI, for the expected control-a behavior press the 'a' again after control-a.
I'm all for getting developers some design skills and I'm sure the book will help. That said mastering anything takes time. Could you give a designer a Rails for Dummies book and claim "Save thousands by not hiring a developer"?

Update:

I'm a full time developer now but I graduated with a design degree. It took me two years of full time development to become a competent developer. Mostly because when I started out I didn't know what I didn't know.

From time to time I pick up design gigs, but I'm a mediocre designer now, mainly because my skills have atrophied. I obviously have a leg up on my dev colleagues, but that's not saying much! However if I had a startup I would definitely hire a pro designer. They're not really that expensive, think of it this way; you're a developer your time is worth, what $100-150/hr? Spend your time developing and pay a designer $50/hr.
Don't think "sell gold", think "make computers faster and cheaper."
>This looks like a machine shop class project.

That was my immediate thought upon seeing it. Those vent holes on the front in particular. It's a simple design and seems close to looking good, but it's missing the machining know-how. It would look like a dumpster next to a MacBook Pro.
I think you've already crossed the bad PR threshold, at least on HN.

Substantiating your claims can only make your position more legitimate. It's hard to take this seriously based on hearsay.
but with lots of clients and websites it becomes a faff to track the payments

how can it be difficult to track payments? either an invoice is paid or it isn't.

for the billing system i wrote and have used for years (http://corduroysite.com/), the home screen lists outstanding bills, outstanding invoices, and open projects. if an invoice is past due, it stands out in red, and (optionally) customers are emailed every n days past its due date.

but to answer your questions,

1. i use corduroy, add recurring services to each customer account, it generates invoices for all recurring services billed on a given date (monthly, yearly, etc.) and emails the customer an invoice. if they have a credit card on file, the card is charged, the invoice is paid, and the customer is emailed a paid invoice receipt instead.

2. corduroy, yes.

3. yes.

4. monthly for pretty much all services (email hosting, web hosting, pbx hosting, server support contracts, etc.). domain registrations are added as yearly services, so when recurring billing runs that one month, it will add the yearly registration and monthly hosting on the same invoice.

5. yes, but it wasn't available at the time i wrote my system so i made my own.
Gl�cklich
But where's Google's iOS record of success that should make us overlook this error? The Google Maps app is pretty good...
> He seems to be under the misapprehension that libraries would be impossible or extremely difficult if you added restrictions to the language.

It seems to me that the restrictions he's talking about adding to the language are akin to making JS closer to Java, not closer to Haskell. Those similar restrictions - in Java - make extending an existing library much more difficult since you can't do things like add methods to an existing class/object; that method has to exist elsewhere & take the object you're extending as a parameter. This isn't an issue in Haskell since functions don't exist on an object, but are defined outside the types & operate on them.
I love the idea, but I don't think the page does a good job of selling itself on design merits. Your eyes immediately go to the tertiary copy ("The new eBook for bootstrappers..." etc) because that's where the highest contrast is highest.

The ostensible header ("Become the designer...") is almost invisible (I didn't see it for the first 30 seconds). My eyes keep wanting to drift back down to where the contrast is higher.

So paint me as skeptical.
Carbonite privacy breach leads to spam
Thank you flaggers for all your love.
Thanks - our network is fairly small with not more than 10 boxes. Graphite looks good, I'll check the documentation.
A lot of people who buy this book are going to be developers who think that they can learn good taste in design from a book. It doesnt work that way.

Its all about practice, feedback from someone knowledgeable and iteration. Open up photoshop and try to create a design. You will bumble around like a fool for the first day - even if all your trying to draw is a smiley face.

But as you do this and as you scour the internet for tutorials and start practicing, it gets easier.

Get feedback from someone in the biz (it takes 10 minutes to look at a design and give feedback). Heed the advice and do more designs.

And all said and done the information to do this is already out there on the internet.

All in all, for me, it was just another case of overcoming my learned helplessness.
Is Facebook Too Big To Fail?
I tried to code on an iPad, but just couldn't get used to it. I'm glad it is working for you.

It should be interesting when there are versatile graphical programming languages for touch devices (LabVIEW, etc.).
OCaml, the ultimate refactoring tool
IANAL either, but my understanding is this: RH didn't actually purchase an asset of any sort, what they paid for is a limited license to copyrighted material. The distinction between owning an asset and licensing one results in them actually not having anything, valueless or otherwise.

Getting a license is different than owning an asset because you don't own anything, but rather someone gives you permission to make use of an asset that they own (or have control over). The only right that the license covered, was the right to sue people infringing on the copyright. The finding in court was that you cannot license just this right and no others. Thus, RH never really obtained this right.

So, in total, RH does in fact have nothing: they never had an asset of any sort, and the right that they attempted to obtain by licensing was determined not obtainable by licensing. The only thing they they attempted to obtain was the legal permission to utilize that asset; having found that permission is non-transferable, they have nothing at all.
Here's an idea:

The current problem with dating sites is poor response rates from women.

Many sites have tried to solve it by scoring candidates and only letting you see candidates that meet criteria---i.e. reduce messages sent, and boost chances of being a match.

Why don't we instead treat it like a SPAM problem. Only show people the type of messages that they've responded to in the past. Don't necessarily believe what they say about what they like, trust their revealed preference.
There's too many variables for people to be crunching numbers like this... while I went through university I lived at home and worked at jobs that paid $17/hour minimum. My total take home would probably be comparable to that of a person making less but paying for room and board. I say this with the assumption that those who skipped post-secondary education in favor of a job moved out of their homes almost immediately.

So where are those types of values in the calculations?

Now that I've graduated my starting job is ~$60k with a $20k annual raise once I've been in this position for a little over three years. There's not one friend that started work directly out of school that I can say that for.

Not to mention my degree allows me to venture to the upper ends of this company where education is a requirement while they'll plateau in seniority because of that.

Again, way too many variables and gray areas for us to do a number to number comparison because no two situations are identical and the idea of "average" or "typical" probably only makes up a small percentage of personae anyway.
Federer defeats Nieminen 6-1 4-6 6-3 in Basel
And most of the information geologists are using comes from investigating the earthquakes around the Geysers geothermal plan in California.

The conclusion was that removing material from underground and not replacing it with supporting structure causes subsidence, and depending on the structure, punctuated subsidence which is basically code for an earthquake.

Draining aquifers has a similar effect although the rate at which an aquifier is drained is less noticeable.
S.M.A.R.T. design for S.T.U.P.I.D. users - great read
I think I will buy this book when its out. I like the free preview of the book after subscribing my email. It will be an interesting book to receive.
You do not submit your code to Apple. They do run some automated scans on your binary for calls to undocumented API's, and they do run your app and check for certain issues that are important to Apple. It's an approval process, not a testing process.
StatCounter (http://gs.statcounter.com/) paints a different picture where IE crossed that line an year ago. It's numbers are reasonably consistent with data from sites I manage.

Chrome is growing wildly in Brazil, envy us: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-BR-monthly-201010-201110

edit: Russia wins :(
Happy Birthday Vim, The Venerable Text Editor Turns 20
To be fair, he attached a keyboard to it and worked mostly through ssh.
Are they like SSNs in that they are dangerous information to give out? The grandparent post just wrote his in the comment and doesn't seem to concerned.
That's the point. You don't get segments that you can mark as executable if you are a third-party app. The only code that's executable is the code segment of the compiled binary (that's signed by apple and won't be executed if it has changed since it has been signed).

Trying to mark memory as executable will cause your app to be terminated. Jumping into non-executable memory will also cause your app to be terminated.

Aside of protecting you (as a user or as a developer) from a big class of security issues, this also ensures that nobody ever gets to run code that's not loaded from the App Store (and thus would generate revenue without giving a share to Apple).
Why not allow for C extensions to Javascript, and create a compiler capable of easy generation of these extensions with optional typing?

An example of this would be Cython for Python, which lets you get to C speed within 1 to 5% slow down due to interfacing with Python, and it has you write in a Pythonic dialect of C/C++.
Ahh yes I was thinking of Apogee Electronics, thank you that clears things up.
You're obviously right. But I don't want to be a great designer. As I said, I've got by with modifying ThemeForest templates but that's always someone else's design. I'd like to work on my own design fron scratch but, at a minimum, I'd like to have more design knowledge when selecting and modifying those templates.
5 Must Do's For Start-Up Inbound Marketing
Still, it would be nice to be able to create groups to watch and filter repositories and users on GitHub.
Usually you can work it out where you handle the final submission of the app to the store on your own hardware so that your client doesn't have to purchase a Mac that they won't use for anything else.

For development, I can't see how a ~$200 premium of a Mac mini over a maybe-too-cheap-for-a-development-box Wintel machine is much of a deciding factor.
I don't have a source handy, but I'm pretty sure Maps.app for iOS was written in-house by Apple.
Mark Zuckerberg Stands 9th on Forbes List of 'World's Most Powerful People'
From my experience you are correct. STEM programs are about critical thinking, problem solving and planning for undesired outcomes. An Engineer is taught how to constructively deduce the situation so that a beneficial proposal can be generated.

The classes I took that are "arts" classes or "business" classes taught models and programs that are supposed to be blindly followed. I failed to see how they were ever applicable because they ignored the "human factor" that exists in all real world problems. I'm seeing lots of companies/depts fail because they're being run by people who were taught these principles. They're encountering issues and trying to apply a dated/loosely correlated model to solve it and almost dumbfounded when it utterly fails.
Ask HN: Where can I find the HN of Manufacturing Operations?
I appreciate the wealth of information about technology offered by HN. Hence, I am looking for a software/hardware hacker community/resources focused on manufacturing operations.
I am aiming to capitalize on the oportunities arising from the pain ubiquitous in Oil/Gas equipment manufacturers and mom/pop machine shops (to which a great percentage of the labor is outsourced) in Texas. Time to bring Oracle at al. down from their ERP pedestal.
There is an world of difference from rejecting an app for "duplicating functionality" and for bugs. If Apple rejected it and said they would take it once it was fixed, the only blowback would be from those who thought Apple was lying. No reason to cater to those folks. More likely, we wouldn't hear about it at all.

It is indicative of a larger problem I have with the App Store. I am not a fan of requiring a review process. But once you crossed that bridge, make it a damn good and tough review process. The amount of crap that gets through is amazing. You already pissed off people who don't like apps getting Apple's approval, you might as well crack skulls and make sure there is real quality in every app.
I bet the figures wouldn't change much if it was a world wide survey.

One of my friends said something that always stuck with me (mainly because I burst out laughing when he said it):

"Its called WORKing not FUNing, so STFU we all hate our jobs"
Telling your boss you don't like your job isn't a great plan. Your boss' job is to produce results, not be your therapist. If you are prepared to leave your job, then maybe being candid with the boss could be useful, but I wouldn't recommend it.
Designer’s block: A Q&A with Aaron Scamihorn
well, i think the point is more "any time you're designing (or learning to design) is time you're not coding" (which, let's be honest, the times that you can actually be doing both at the same time are few and far between) for some folks that's not an acceptable tradeoff, for others it is.
all iOS owners should use the Mail.app. it takes a little extra battery but Apple did it right...
I added these to ~/.mozilla/firefox/random.User/chrome/userContent.css and restarted firefox. I wrapped the changes in a `@-moz-document domain("www.google.com")`, just in case.

Shame a CSS hack can't get the sharing features back!
Maps on iOS was written by Apple. They get their tiles from Google, but they wrote the client code.
Americhrome
Of course I have never programmed in Haskell, so perhaps I am showing my ignorance, but my impression of Haskell is that it has all of the type restrictions of java plus many, many more. My point is that a language like Haskell (or Java, take your pick), can still have easy to use libraries written for it.

Sure, you can't change the methods of a class has at run time. Who cares? Like I said you can just create an object wrapper, sometimes called a decorator if you are into design patterns, that has all of the methods of the original object plus a few more (or even a few less, doesn't matter). This gives you all of the functions of the original object plus more, just like modifying a class at runtime does. Possible in Java, possible in Haskell, possible even in JavaScript.

The only difference is that you have to explicitly call into the wrapper classes. You can't expect objects that you instantiate from outside your library to have these methods.

But again, who cares. If you want to use the cool new library functions, use them. Otherwise don't.

Specific example: if we are talking about jquery, you can't expect document.GetElementById('foo') to have special jquery functions. But you can expect $('#foo') to have them, which is the same thing so you really have nothing to complain about.
That's a good answer to Zach. I'm having problem of too much noise when I follow a lot of projects and people on GitHub.
Two things:

1) The anthromorphization of Siri as "she" really bugs me. It's software. It's not your assistant, your chat buddy, or your pet. It's an amped-up ALICE. This anthromorphization ascribes attributes that don't exist in the software like sentience and actual intelligence. It contributes to point 2, wherein:

2) If you're underwhelmed that Siri isn't perfect, it's because you were sold perfect - Apple has some of the best marketers on the planet, and they sold you a science fiction dream and then you were disappointed when you didn't get it. The long and short of it is that Siri isn't a learning, adaptive AI - it's a voice control system with a short-term history and some clever responses baked in. It's a very good voice control system, and the developers have done a great job of giving the appearance of a personality, but it's basically an evolved Speak-N-Say.

If you stop expecting Siri to be a Star Trek shipboard AI that can understand the intent in your every query and return information to you instantly in perfectly-inflected English, you'll be a lot happier (though probably a bit less impressed) with it.
The whole idea from Dark Sky came when I was stuck at a rest area off Interstate-90 in western New York. It started to downpour and I had no idea how long I'd have to wait if I wanted to stay dry.

Even looking at the radar map online didn't help. It was nearly impossible to extrapolate mentally the stuttery radar animation.
Scaling down the Mac Pro
They don't really need to come up with one as much as just implement it. Gold standard's always been [Alt|Clover]-Tab; or even F3 (Apple's mapping for Exposé/Mission Control, even marked as such). I understand there's no easy way to dismiss the on-screen keyboard when you're using a hard keyboard either.
Or at least make it fun (game).

Or make it more valuable. If being on specific Twitter lists drove more followers or was perceived to be important then getting people to put you on specific lists would be important.

But it isn't. Now.
The weirdest Google-ism I found was when running the desktop version of Reader on my iPad: single-finger scrolling was turned off! I had to use two fingers as if I was using a Mac trackpad.
peepcode has been charging for screencasts for years now
Man this makes me want to use Clojure for something.