skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is what I think connecting with others means: I connect with someone when, in my heart and mind, I understand their needs and feelings.

If my everyday experience is different from a person's daily experience, my ability to connect with them decreases radically. For example, I have great difficulty connecting with people who do not read.

So, as I imagined spending 10x what I was spending before on myself, I realized that I would lose my ability to connect with a huge number of human beings. Hence, the vow.
Does anyone know, how well the Nest is selling so far?
You know how you keep talking about underserved markets? The customers look like that. Perhaps the large set of engineering talent going to build yet another TODO list app are saving themselves the heartburn.
Either position will produce at least some viscerally unpleasant situations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_cases_make_bad_law
Regarding colors, shades, gradients, and noise, try spending some time on bjango. This guy has a lot of bang for a small amount of reading: http://bjango.com/articles/noise/
I would prefer to err on the side of not using OOP at all for the first year or so. The problems it solves have better solutions if you're not using a terrible language. They also seem extremely contrived when you introduce them long before the students have any chance of producing a program with those problems, so the students frequently end up using OOP all the time when it's not really called for.
Steve Jobs is one of my heroes.

He famously called a lot things 'shit' and many people 'shitheads.'

And yet he saw something special in Dropbox. I wanted to find out how Drew did it.
what is the cause for your downvoting

Probably people reading an endorsement of Ron Paul in your post, though none is really there.
> how many thousands of artists can't make a living (and don't even try) - because they would be just ripped off.

This is the crux of the issue. I contend that more art is being created now than ever before. I know so many musicians in my personal life, I can't even keep track of all of their albums and shows. On SoundCloud and YouTube and Internet Archive I could listen to music freely given for months on end and never listen to the same song twice.

However, I have never once met a musically inclined person that decided not to make music because of GrooveShark or BitTorrent. I've never heard someone say "well, Adele is only worth 20 million, and I'll never be as big as her, so why bother?"
Are your predictions visible in the web-interface so we can verify if they hold water?
Or that his standards weren't the kind measured by a "First".
>> a function is actually an object and can be manipulated as such

A function is an object? I also read down the comments and saw something like '1' + 2 prints '12'. ROFL
In 15 years of coding javascript I've never had a significant problem with == vs ===. If anything using === got me into more trouble than using ==, but it really depends on coding style and making other mistakes that would cause a problem down the line with ===. If your coding style doesn't lead you into those mistakes you'll never see them, but other might. It's still not a good reason to abandon javascript and go to coffeescript.
Oh, I also wanted to mention, I don't have Photoshop, and that makes learning even harder.
No, "we" really do not love significant whitespace.
Getting to know the Go community
You do need a photo ID matching your ticket, but that is probably not a very high bar for a dedicated person to surmount.
I'd observe a couple things, which are much elaborated here: http://jseliger.com/2011/10/31/college-graduate-earning-and-...

1) Professors are responding to institutional and student incentives: institutions reward research, so professors prioritize research over teaching.

2) Students are, for the most part, choosing easier degrees; as a result, those degrees are prospering, and many non-easy disciplines are watering down their criteria to attract remaining students.

3) The only real impetus for change that I can see comes from two areas: a) the amorphous group of employers who want better outcomes—but they have very little leverage and b) graduates who are unhappy to discover they have a great deal of debt and few marketable skills. Again, however, they have little leverage.
Given their security record, Dropbox probably deserved (and still deserves, especially because of the unchangeable unique client ID issue) to be described in those terms.
Ryanair CEO on innovation in Europe
Io will do.

I do not think this would be optimum for new comers even thought i’m a die hard fan of JavaScript. You can teach ‘Io’ language instead of JavaScript which has all kind advantages you have mentioned and which has few set of parser rules that would be easier for new comers.

JavaScript can be a icing on the cake.
To introduce kids to programming, there is nothing better than Javascript. Instant gratification & no installations. It'll be an easy entry into harder concepts. But the way you enter does matter.
More expensive? Sure.

Less common? Definitely.

Harder? Not all that much.
Business of Google APIs 2011
Most of the news articles talking about this are from early October 2010, about the same time the Google Data Liberation Front was created.
You really should stop though. You have but one reputation and you're wrecking it.
The SHOCKING Truth about a pootly organised educational system by a hugely unsuccessful government. Living standards in the UK are good due partly to the NHS and the private sector jobs, but the corrupt government attitude of take take take yet give back little is turning this country in to a 'toilet'.
Funding to biomedical research in the US has been essentially flat since 2001. First, it was a downturn in the economy. Then, it was largely driven by a president who questioned evolution and an administration that was outright hostile toward science. Then, it was a downturn in the economy and a rising national debt.

Refusing to increase funding to biomedical research is a side-long way to slowly kill scientific progress in America. This, on the other hand, is irrational fear leading directly to the stifling of science in America.

I think it's fairly clear now, if it wasn't before, that America has lost its lead in scientific progress. I wonder how most Americans will feel when they finally realize that some other country is more technically advanced? Will the added sense of "safety" have been worth it?
> The reason Haskell is viewed as hard is that it takes basically nothing from languages you already know. If you don't know any languages, it's actually a great starting point.

At my undergrad program, Haskell was used for the second CS course after the basic intro course. It was a nightmare and drove people away from the major in droves. They just did a curriculum overhaul and one of the changes the CS faculty are most excited about is moving the Haskell course out of the spot where it crushed the spirits of potential majors.
Your definition of connecting with others would be close to mine as well, however, I think I could accomplish those things no matter what my everyday experience was or how much money I had in the bank.
That's cute; you think the system isn't broken. I'd rather not needlessly put people in jail and ruin their lives for victimless crimes than be pragmatic.
I loved this comment:

"The policy when I went to school was to start everyone with LISP. That way, if they never got past CompSci 101, they wouldn’t be capable of impersonating a real programmer.
" -- Dave Edelhart
Launch of ‘Boards’ Dilutes Quora’s Brand
You think terrorists are dumb enough to make such comments?
It is laughable to think that someone who funds research should be given an award. The people doing the actual research deserve an award leaps and bounds above and beyond the one providing funding.
More important than the software suite they use, I wish they would impose the use of open formats. After that, they (and generations of people to come) can use which ever reader software they like.
I graduated in Computer Science in 2004 from a very well respected British University. I graduated with a first. There is usually a very clearly signposted path to getting a "good degree" without necessarily having to know all that much core computer science.

My course was a four year course. The total weighting for each year was 10-20-3-40 (years 1-4). The first two years had non-optional, core CS modules (algorithms, logic, discrete maths, etc.) and the final two years had a lot of electives. If you could muddle through the first two years, you could take a series of electives in the final two years (foreign languages, Accounting and finance, etc.) that were agruably much easier.

I got mediocre grades in the first two years, but good grades in the final two years, resulting in a first class degree overall.

I regret my choices, but as a lazy undergrad, I took the path of least resistance to achieve my target (a first class degree). I was not the only one who did this. The problem is that people like me made the University look good, so I think they made it very easy to game the System. The only thing I worked really hard on were the programming assignments and projects. The exams were easy to pass provided since they had a very clearly laid out pattern, and questions tended to be repeated year and after year. If you could solve exam questions from the last 3-4 years before your final exam, you would probably ace it.
> It will test how effective the vaccine is by comparing a vaccinated and a non-vaccinated group, Kang said in the video.

So I was going to ask how clinical trials for vaccines are done, and this part kind of answers it, but now I'm curious - if there's no control group that gets a placebo injection, how do you control for the fact that people may behave differently if they think they've been given an anti-HIV vaccine? Unless I'm misreading this and "non-vaccinated" means placebo.
Once someone has decided that they absolutely want to learn everything there is to know about programming and have decided that they love it, yes, there's no point in spoon feeding. But so many of us stumble into what later ends up being our career or passion, and so our first encounter with any type of activity is almost always "hey, let's see if this is something for me." As a society, we need more programmers and scientists and mathematicians, so best make sure that we make that first impression a good one.
They are all doing a lot more than I am to fix the problem so either way, hats off to them.
Swap '_' with '-' to write code faster
The "jury of your peers" language, whose origin is the Magna Carta [1], is included in the constitutions of a number of states, so the concept directly pertains in many American jurisdictions.

There is also a considerable body of federal case law applying the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the process of jury selection. Since 1880, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a black man's conviction for murder due to the systematic exclusion of blacks from local juries [1], federal courts have consistently ruled that jurors must be selected indiscriminately from eligible members of the community. This is very close to the concept of a "jury of your peers".

1. See clause 29 of the 1297 document: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/magna_ca... ; the further origin is the first Magna Carta of 1215.

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauder_v._West_Virginia
Yes. And the ultimate check on all of the other processes is the citizenry. We elect representatives of ours to write laws, we elect representatives of ours to execute laws, and we, through the jury process, judge those who are accused of breaking the laws that we (through our representatives) caused to be put into place.

In a very real way, the citizens of the jury are provided with power to prevent injustice in the application of the laws which have been put in place in our name.
Thanks for an extremely illuminating explanation. I may be wrong, but it almost sounds like long polling and other alternatives are preferable to Websockets because of the added complexity. Stories like this also make me feel fortunate that my favorite beacon of simplicity, JSON, didn't get handed over to a "task force".
I don't think you need to be so antagonistic against the funders. Not to mention that there are different awards for different things. I think it would be perfectly fine (and that all the members involved would agree) if the researchers were given the Nobel prize in Biology and the funders the Peace prize.
Unfortunately I think that class-based inheritence is more general in concept. That is, people who understand class-based inheritence have a very small leap to get prototypal inheritence. You can pretty much just say, "Inheritence works on the instances/objects, not on the class."

Explaining class based inheritence to people who only know prototypal seems trickier. You have to explain the concept of classes and then build from there.

BTW, are there any prototypal languages that support multiple inheritence -- you can create an object from a set of an arbitrary number of objects?
I experienced how poorly CS classes prepared students for jobs in Software Engineering (I do realize they're not the same thing, but that's obviously the main degree we look for). I interviewed people who have a masters degree with an emphasis in Java, yet they were unaware of even the simplest details about how the JVM works (implementation details of String class, JIT compilation).

I felt bad for this person, I wonder if it's too late for them to get refund on that degree because it sure as heck didn't increase their earning potential.
My startup, Apptegic, www.apptegic.com is building a "user retention as a service" service. On a per-user basis, we can track events, patterns of events, and business usage (like # of photo batches sent). We can combine these to score engagement and we can segment and filter groups of users based on these combinations.

There are lots of other ways our Beta customers are using this info already. But many have asked for the ability to do targeted emails based on usage and engagement. We don't have email system integration into MailChimp, Constant Contact, and others like Paul described yet but we are working toward it.

Do you have suggestions on what a a minimal viable email system integration would be? Let people script a download of the list of emails that fit a criteria and script upload that into their mail system of choice?

If you have suggestions please comment below or contact me at kwirth at apptegic dot com.
Recovering the Lost World, A Saturnian Cosmology
Kang has been studying HIV since 1987.

This guy has been working on fighting one virus for almost 25 years. I can't quite compare what I aim to do with my startup to preventing HIV, but we certainly hope to have a massive positive impact on the world. So when I feel impatient about changing the world now, this should put things in perspective.
I like to think the TSA and their ridiculous measures actually are there purely for the "security theater"... both to reassure the ignorant public, and to misdirect potential terrorists.

Of course, I also hope the TSA, DHS, etc have more effective measures in place behind the scenes. I don't know if that's the case, but it would make sense to keep them secret.
how do you type minus then? Does this reverse the shift key?
Cinnamon: Linux Mint's founder Gnome Shell fork with a Gnome2 layout
While it's a good idea to look around what language A could borrow from language B once in a while, it's important to not fall into the trap of imitating B at all costs in A.

In this specific case, I don't think it's a good idea to do C#/ASP.Net in PHP and vice versa. Most PHP hosting environments do have a compile-once-run-many-times paradigm by virtue of opcode caching. The advantage over a typical Java or .NET app server is that you can change files and they get automatically recompiled on the fly. So for all intents and purposes, PHP is usually running a piece of in-memory compiled bytecode.

There are many MVC frameworks for PHP, for any interpretation of "MVC" you might want. I'm sure you can find one that's closely modeled after ASP.net, but again I'm not sure this is a productive undertaking in principle.
this was downvoted. Let me make the analogy clear.

Javascript is sent by a server to a rendering engine (your web browser), usually a part of displaying a page, though of course also as part of interacting with it.

Postscript is sent by a (print) server to a rendering engine (in a printer), as part of typseting a page. It is a Turing-complete programming language, but that's no guarantee it won't make your eyes bleed.

The existence of things like jquery "on top of" javascript are really no different form having Microsoft Word or Open Office / Libre Office there to 'print' your postscript file.

Like it or not, neither javascript nor postscript are:

- Systems languages.

- Desktop application languages. (As Java can be).

- Low-level language suitable for writing drivers.

- Low-level languages suitable for writing network protocols.

- High-level languages suitable for prototyping very large, complex data structures and relationships

- High-level scripting languages suitable for abstracting away incredible sophistication and power and letting the user program in a very high level mode.

- Robust and scalable applications languags, suitable for putting in a version control system and having a team of fifty iterate on it

They're niche, domain-specific languages, like a Perl regex. Would you suggest anyone's first language be the regex Perl uses? Obviously not.

Appropriate first languages are anything from:

* A fake language like Turtle Logo

* An almost-fake academic language like Pascale

* An "electrical engineer" approach nuts and bolts
introduction: assembly.

* A low-level systems language, C, or C++

* A high-level scripting language: Ruby, Python, Perl

* An interpreted systems language: Java.

* A markup language: HTML and CSS

* No language. Configuration files for nginx and other things.

etc etc.

Very, very low on the list would be something like Javascript. This would be akin to editing Adobe Illustrator files in a hex editor. Sure you could end up with an image and an understanding of vector art, but, why in the name of God would you try to learn those concepts in that way?
No, we don't. Kids who don't know better might think it's cool; it isn't.
Generally you have to jump through some number of extra hoops to work legally in a nation of which you are not a citizen. Different nations have different numbers of hoops, but they all have at least a few, to my knowledge.
Ask HN: General Consensus on Buying Content
Hello, I'm in the process of creating a heavily user content based web application. But the thing is that for the app to work as specified user content must be present.

I'm thinking of buying initial user content the first week of release, in order to fill the void of a content-less site upon completion.

What is the general consensus when it comes to buying content?

Can it actually hurt my product?
I'm a full-time javascript developer and entrepreneur myself, but I'm wondering why you don't consider Scheme instead, basing the course on the How to Design Programs v2 curriculum?

The people behind that book have spent a lot of time thinking about how you teach programs to people.

More importantly, they focus on problem decomposition and concepts that provide a great foundation for growing.

The reasons I can see for using Javascript first is because everyone has a runtime available at their fingertips (M. Haverbeke's approach of including the console was great.) and because people can immediately see the utility of the language to real world needs.

But does Javascript provide the best foundation for future concepts? Does it teach good habits both mental and in practice?

Ref:
The Structure and Interpretation of the Computer Science Curriculum
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/jfp2004-fffk.pdf
Ah. Sorry about that. I'd update the title, but don't have edit rights anymore.
How to be a good leader
I don't think they are "effectively unlimited" either, perhaps closer to "effectively dividable forever", which might not be true, not sure. However, once they are in full circulation they will be a deflationary currency, and giving someone a sliver of a bitcoin that's worth as much as what a full bitcoin was worth at X time in the past is not the same as adding more bitcoins.

I remember one of my economics professors always pre-pending "All other things being equal" before, relating any theories. I keep that in mind every time I start thinking about anything to do with economics, the pile of assumptions on how things are going to work is usually problematic.
The variability in UK university courses is pretty extreme. I have three degrees: a bachelors in mathematics ("pass"), a bachelors in accountancy (2:1) and a masters in statistics ("pass", though I averaged a "merit" I missed out because I was inconsistent), all at different universities. While I couldn't even manage a lowly third for my mathematics undergrad I worked far harder for it than the other two, despite the fact that it was the only one I studied for full-time.

Before starting the masters in statistics I took some undergraduate (first/second year) maths/stats courses at the same university (while still studying for the accountancy degree and working 35 hrs/week) and the exams and assignments were probably easier than anything I saw in the first two weeks of my maths degree. Based on my performance on those courses and what I saw of the 3rd year undergrad courses (the masters students shared one with the undergrads, though we had a different exam) I would have cruised to a first without breaking a sweat, a pretty different experience to when I was struggling to pass my degree at all!

It does make it almost impossible to judge anybody's degree and grade unless you are already familiar with the course, the toughest courses are genuinely difficult but the easiest courses are a walk in the park for anyone of reasonable ability.
Where does it stop?

Say someone is on trial for tax evasion, because they paid only 20% rather than the 30% they owe under the law. Is it OK for a juror to say "gee, taxes should only be 20% anyway, so I'm going to let him off the hook"?
US Government tries to restrict publication of details on avian flu virus
Well, I wanted to know what IDE JSLint was an expansion for, so I did some poking around... it's an online tool. Meh #1.

Next up I thought I would take a snippet from the linked stackoverflow discussion and see what JSLint made of it:

127.0.0.1.toInt();

And... it complained

So I did this:

var = function() {

127.0.0.1.toInt();

}

And it complained (yes, there's a typo)

var foo = function() {

127.0.0.1.toInt();

}

And... it 'compiles' fine, no complaints. So I thought I'd push the syntax tree button to see what was going on and it tells me:

Tree:

""

Which is less than spectacularly useful.

Oh, I went back and hit the JSLint button again and now it givess me lots of errors for the above code.

Including, but not limited to complaining that 127 occurs in column 1 instead of column 9. But then I try to enter a tab at the start of the line to achieve proper indentation... and of course it doesn't work because it is in the browser and so tab just goes and selects the next control.

Sensational.

If I had to enter all my indentation as spaces, by hand, I'd conclude that the Professor teaching this was a colossal idiot.
There are lots of cheaper alternatives and some open source solutions. Just depends on what OS you're running.
Why?

Not implying this is the case here, but what if the research is trivial, but requires billions of dollars?
Thanks. That confirms my suspicions.
If you extend that to TVs, cars, all phones, etc, real world users will care. It's less about cross platform and more about being ubiquitous.