skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a 10 year old son who seems a natural to take an interest in programming. I tried starting him with a Basic interpreter cause that's how I started, and he struggled to stay interested - largely due to the non-graphical nature of the output.

The next thing we tried was Kodu from Microsoft (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/). He found that enjoyable - very visually appealing and you can get something basic but interesting running quickly. Getting something moderately complex became hard however due to the limited palette of design tools.

The next step was Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) which is a step down in eye candy but a step up in control. You get a lot more flexibility but it is still very approachable. Everything is visual as well, which makes it really easy to see what's happening. Scratch allows variables and lists, control flow structures, etc and thus gets into "real" programming.

However, Scratch has some big limitations, especially around instantiating new 'objects' at runtime. I think the next logical step forward is Stencyl (http://www.stencyl.com) though there's some additional layers of abstraction that are causing a little consternation.

I keep trying to push Python and Java, but for my son at least, not being able to start with something visual is a big drag. Maybe next year.
I'm not sure if this is a big deal. There is probably a big line of lawyers fighting to be the next to represent MegaUpload. Assuming they have the cash of course.
Wow great stuff. I just wanted to say that I appreciate you sharing this with us. Bookmarked :)
What I find problematic about all of these new online education startups (Udacity, Khan Academy, etc) is that they tackle the problem by simply providing online equivalents to traditional didactic learning methods like lectures and textbooks.

A professor standing in front of a group of students lecturing is definitely easy for the professor and cost-efficient to scale up to larger class sizes, but that's just not how a lot of students learn. I'd wager that most HNers learned programming through actually writing code, even those who learned CS through a formal program. In the humanities, I'd argue that the most effective way to learn is through small discussion groups, not a distinguished professor explaining literature or philosophical works to you. Just throwing that up on the internet is an easy way to expand your audience, but providing higher-quality educational materials doesn't do anything to improve the quality of how we educate.

The internet has a lot of potential to improve the quality of education, and there are tons of awesome startups working on it (companies like Codecademy and Coursekit come to mind), but I personally hope the future of online education doesn't look too much like Udacity.
While some recruiters get a cut of the salary, others operate on a fixed contract. I know of one company that pays a recruiting firm $110-$150 per hour, and the recruiting firm only pays $50-$60 per hour.
I think there are a lot of people disagreeing with "Don't state the number first" but it's important to be open to new ideas.

This article is meant to make you stronger and offer some new tricks in the negotiating process. You're certainly not learning and expanding your game if you're convinced that you don't need to do anything different.

I think its important to think about what the author is really saying: Can you find out what cards their holding before they know what cards you have? Can you? It's tough, its challenging, that's the point.

The more information you have before you start making decision the better decision you're going to make, period. When you start throwing out numbers a very big decision has just been made, theres's no going back at that point.

If you're worried they are going to laugh at you, or be offended, they won't be. This is not a war, it's an interview, a chance to make an introduction and meet somebody new. Sometimes you can make connections in the interview even if you end up not taking the job. You're dealing with people, not robots. No one is out to get you. In fact, they're considering hiring you and working with you everyday!

The point is learn new tricks and push back a little.
I felt the same way. There was no information as to what the product actually was, so I just left at the first screen. Like you, I assumed it was an attempt to game HN.
It's a universally agreed negotiation tactic to make the first offer

Well, your argument was going better before you went this far, because now I'm going to have to ask you to take it up with Roger Dawson, author of the fairly-well-rated Secrets of Power Negotiating, from whom I learned the tactic of never naming the first number.

And, while Dawson is probably exaggerating his status as one of the best negotiators on the planet - because he's got to be prepared in case you negotiate him down ;) - forgive me for betting on him against you.

(Dawson's logic, by the way, is pretty clear: All else being equal, the default pattern of a negotiation is that one side names a number, the other side names a different number, and you compromise somewhere in the middle. And you're the second person you obviously have a big influence on exactly where the "middle" will be. If you want to end up at $125k, and your partner goes first and offers $120k, you know to ask for $130k or $135k, and now things go smoothly... but if you're asked to go first and you name $130k and your partner flinches and then says in a quavering voice that the budget will only stand $70k "but maybe we can make a one-time exception", now the "compromise" point is anchored around $100k and you're going to have to negotiate much more skillfully to claim your remaining $25k.)

Does anyone have a negotiating book to recommend that offers fundamentally different advice from this?
Okay. So it sounds like you could market this to the venue as a buzztime type service as well as a tool for any MCs they employ for live events. Thanks again. This is useful information in helping shape the idea further!
I like alot the conventions mentioned here. It would make development a lot more pleasurable.
So it will just be you and the early risers that engage in this? Usually when I spend time with friends, it starts at a 2pm bbq or morning trip to the zoo and ends with an event in the evening, like a movie or what have you.
I've always heard that yes, Elsevier is especially bad. They charge more, and make more profit -- but the higher price comes entirely from the market share lock-in, and not from any additional quality/service.
MatchFWD - Simplified Social Recruiting
This is from 2005, but it looks like his firm, Hogan & Hartson, is the counsel for the MPAA (scroll to the bottom of the PDF):

http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/canspam3/516736-00114.pdf
The key is to give out the number first at 200k/year then settle for 180k/year
Mobile Minute #93: RIM’s changing of the guard won’t erase their contribution
Star Wars Uncut proves the Internet can create unique art
How did you process the html?
And let's not forget that Twitter and FB both have search features (actually I'm not sure about FB, I've never been on it, but it has to, right?), and furthermore, they're both in their ways trying to obviate search by providing what people want in other ways. That's the premise of FB as a Google killer right? That social is undermining search as the way people get information on the internet?

Setting aside how absurd I find that notion to be, it seems to me that the whole G+ project is a response to that threat, and it's a response that says "I can duplicate your functionality a lot easier than you can duplicate mine, and it adds a lot more value to my major service to duplicate your functionality, than it adds to your major service to duplicate mine."

It also seems like a play to get access to Twitter and FB data. Google uses free data on the open web. If you don't allow them to index your data for free, why would you expect them to include them in their search results?

As a user, I want Twitter and FB to give Google all of their data, and I want Google to run all of that data through their algorithms and give me the results that are the best, regardless of what service it's on. From where I sit, it doesn't seem like Google is the player that's in the way of that happening.
Yeah, my idea was to just give the MCs a tool for which they could get their own questions from. They're making $15 an hour while the service charges between $150 and $200 to the bar.

The bar is generally happy to pay it as a good trivia night will fill the place up on a Tuesday which is generally dead. Even if they're not going to town getting drunk, it's pretty much guaranteed to be more active, and as well looks active so that they can draw in more people by looking lively.

If you could BE the question vendor, you could do so fairly straightforwardly, charge a minimal amount, and then market to the MCs. The MCs then become their own marketers to bars. Now they can charge $50 an hour, still undercut the services, and everybody wins.

If you charge something like $10-40 a month for the questions, you're in the green too.
Having sampled it, I'm not sure of the value of a broken api that might improve later.
SOPA is back
Guess what folks SOPA is back!

Reports are surfacing that Hollywood is lobbying EU countries to put SOPA rules into their laws..

Currently, Canada and Ireland but expected to reach others..

Now what?
The Facebook page has an option to get posts as RSS feeds. Here is the link : https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=305891199451158&#....
Lawyer says MegaUpload case could take years
SmartScreen addresses the security 'hole' that is the user itself. I'm curious about what you are really asking them to address here? I'm not seeing a solution other than for the OS to only run signed code. What OS is secure from arbitrary executables that the user chooses to run?

I agree that it is annoying, but I'm very interested to hear what they should be addressing here.
A friend of mine turned me on to the audio version of this book, "Negotiating Your Salary: How to Make $1000 a Minute" [1], many years ago.

It's more about a mind shift than rocket-science techniques, but I can attest to increasing my income by tens of thousands of dollars by putting its ideas into practice.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Negotiating-Your-Salary-Minute-Revised...
This Week in Location Based Marketing #61: NearBuy, Digby + Scott Kveton
Nice collection of folks but the page could use more meat on the how part.
As a non-politician with no connection to politics other than as a voter, I have consistently encountered material differences in my rights and standard of living depending on which party was in power.

Your "politicians are all the same" meme might be popular with people who are too lazy to learn about the world, but it rings hollow to anyone not living in willful ignorance.
Polish prime minister home page defaced as a protest to ACTA
I'm not a lawyer. I've only read a lot about SOPA. The problem with SOPA was never that it allowed copyright owners to take down infringing content (well, that was SOME people's problem with it, but not the majority I think). The problem with SOPA was that it allowed said copyright owners to completely ignore due process, and disabled websites in a way that introduced a huge security risk to the rest of the internet. In the Megaupload case, due process was followed, as far as I know. Grand juries were convened, warrants were obtained, etc. etc. The plaintiffs were forced to prove that they had a valid case before action was taken, rather than the "shoot first and let the website owners figure out why they were taken down later, maybe" approach that SOPA entailed.
Mobile Morning Coffee: Thorsten Heins Edition
SOPA and PIPA: How it all went wrong for the MPAA
Thanks for the reply. I know it's a small thing, but the ability to reply to a comment like mine with a perfectly level head says a lot about the character of your company.

I want to make clear to anyone who comes behind to read this that I believe you. Anyone with questions should take a moment to look at your profile.

Kudos to you guys and good luck with your product!
This is also a great reference:

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javascript...
This paper seems unreservedly in favor of larger windows. http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36640.html

Based on our large scale experiments, we are pursuing efforts in the IETF to standardize TCP’s initial congestion window to at least ten segments. Preliminary experiments with even higher initial windows show indications of beneﬁting latency further while keeping any costs to a modest level. Future work should focus on eliminating the initial congestion window as a manifest constant to scale to even large network speeds and Web page sizes.
Key: never tell them your salary. Then, be the first to give the number at 2X your current salary. Then come down a little eg, 5-10% lower then 2X.

Get a bunch of offers, let them bid it even higher.
>"I received a comment that this is untrue for startups by someone today. For a funded startup which has enough engineers to warrant a foosball table, the company payroll is well north of $100,000 a month."

I'm 90% sure that was in reference to this post:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3499480

Our most recent round of funding at the start-up where I'm working was 750k. (http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/24/smartots-raises-750000-offe...)

That has to cover everything for about half a year, including developers, artists, lawyers, rent, travel expenses, regulatory costs, etc... And we've made it go pretty far and will likely raise a much larger round in the near future. I'm sure everyone at the company would love to be making more money, especially those who have worked in richer countries. However, even a couple of developers pushing for the kinds of salaries that pattio11 is would mean the start-up burns its cash, the founders lose their invested time and money and worst of all, we don't improve kids' education.

Of course there is always the chance that those two guys have such beastly skills that they can get us market dominance (and profits or a much larger investment) before that happens. Would you take that gamble?

Disclosure: I don't speak for the company, I'm not privy to top level strategy discussions and I don't own any of it or represent it, etc... I do like what we're doing, though.
Dodd accused of “bribery” over SOPA remarks
The scary part is that, if they had a jury like the one that hit SAP for $1.3 billion and a judge who didn't reduce that, it might theoretically have been possible. Especially if anyone actually believed Oracle's astronomical damage numbers the way the SAP jury did.

Thankfully, they got a decent judge who won't put up with that nonsense. It looks like they will be left with, at most, a small damage award. And that's assuming they don't keep shooting themselves in the foot while aiming for the moon.
Toward a more inclusive naming policy for Google+ (pseudonyms and nicknames)
Looks like a job for eternal vigil.

Bummer. That's usually kinda tiring.
Google does not own 90% of the market and their product is free as their competitors' products so there is no harm to consumers.

As for Yelp, they asked to not appear on Places and Google told them to use robots.txt if they don't want to be indexed, and the rest is spin and PR.
I'm playing with the Reddit api.

It works but what it gives you is complete dump of their page, 150K, say.

It would be nice to get just the tops of the comment trees instead. But hey, its there...
Take advantage of all that extra time.

Um, no. Getting up early might minimize distraction, but it doesn't give you extra time. The amount of sleep you need is, to very good approximation, a conserved quantity. And to get up at 4:30 or 5, most people would need to go to bed between 7:30 and 9. Hello, sunrise; goodbye, social life.
That's when Nixon only had the Secret Service making sure he didn't get shot, he didn't have officials making sure questions weren't asked that could breach national security, etc.
Update: Fundamental Oracle flaw revealed
I think JSLint should probably get a mention when discussing best practices. It can be rather picky but most options have toggles. (I'm particularly not fond of having to put extra spaces around operators. var j=2 looks better to me than var j = 2)
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Wow, this should be your one and only starting point for anything which starts with HTML5. Kudos to the team, great job guys, makes life lot easier for everyone.
How about "please don't use stuff that makes rendering horrifically slow on relatively modern hardware?"
Building iOS Dialogs with JSON
From the link:

"While we encourage clever code, and less mainstream languages (Hirewolves have a functional bias), these things are less important."

I think it would be nice if they told you why they favor functional languages. Do they have a higher percentage of openings with employers already using FP for things like concurrency, distribution, fault-tolerance? Clever coding and functional languages are great, but there is also the idea of using the right tool for the right job, which may not always be FP.
I'd like to suggest a "comfort challenge" for patio11: apply the principles in this article to increase your stated income ($70,000 [1]) by a factor of three without compromising your quality of life. I bet it can be done.

[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/12/21/bingo-card-creator-etc-y...
What hath Bob wrought? Looking back at Cringely’s 2011 predictions
Command HQ was 1990. The Ancient Art of War was way back in 1984!

The Ancient Art of War was an awesome game. I started working on a clone for iOS, but I got lazy. <:)
Visual Event 2, Bookmarklet lets you debug events attached to DOM elements
In my experience delivering Ubuntu boxes to elementary aged children, they are generally unimpressed. This isn't to say you will have a similar experience. I am interested in how to pull it off, so let us know when the time comes.
yeah thats more syntax issue. alot of the time when I hate reading javascript, when it has no structure to it.
I don't mean this to be insulting to anyone, but, isn't it often the case that these types of security guards are not the highest educated? I don't mean to say that they're are stupid, I think it has more to do with empowerment than intellect. Higher educated people are usually high-achievers and because of it they have a natural sense of being on control of their lives and therefore feel empowered.

For many of the TSA workers its the first time in their lives that they are in a position of power and they will quickly abuse it, especially when group pressure comes into play. It's like the bus driver syndrome.
Hobby to Livelihood: So You Want to Become a Web Developer
Some googling around gets me a cost of $120,000/mile to install overhead telephone wire. So, for example, if you have a tiny town of 200 people that's 15 miles away from anywhere, running a phone line out to it will cost $9,000 per resident. Which sounds steep, but possible to self-fund.

On the other hand, if you have one guy on a farm two miles away from the next nearest neighbor, well, adding a phone line costs as much as building a second house.

The interesting question for society is, should these people have phone lines? And if they should, how much of the cost should they bear themselves? And how far should we be willing to go to run phone out to increasingly remote areas?
What happens if I were to write in Stephen Hawkings's name?

You should have an email verification using the public email addresses for these academics.
Yes, but in Brazil only crimes against human life (murders and attempts) are decided by juries. What you describe is a good reason for judges to be cautious about what they admit the jury to see.
Good managers know that it takes more than the sales guy to close the deal to make that $5MM deal work. The sales people know this, too. Aftermarket support and/or production issues mid-stream are the bane of our existence. When it goes well everyone deserves the credit.

Now that I have that experience if I saw a non sales person place something like the above on their resume I would be very intrigued. Not because they're claiming responsibility (which I don't read into that) but because it says to me that they see their place in the whole system and how they contribute. That is really rare and really valuable. Like you say it's harder to see it when you're not in front of the customer, but if you do see it I think it means you're probably an "A" player.

For example, I used to sell heavy equipment to the concrete industry. In the back shop there was a manager of a unit that did about 25% of the work that needed to be done to build any machine that I would sell. He didn't have any direct contact with the customers. He didn't sit in on any sales meetings, and didn't have a very good idea of the forecast that was coming (unfortunately). He was absolutely critical to making each sale happen and each customer happy and he seemed to understand this. Without him it would have been very difficult to land the deals that we did. He absolutely deserves to place that he was critical to building an $8_figs business area on his resume. And by doing so I think it shows that he has vision beyond his area. I'd work with him again in a second.

He was "far" from the money but it didn't seem that way to me. He could just write on his resume that he was a Tool and Die Maker that managed a small machine shop of about 6 people. And it's true, but it doesn't do him justice.
Google+ relaxes real-name policy, allows pseudonyms
What really threw up the red flag for me was that he didn't want to only know what I earned at my current position, but the 3-4 previous positions before that, including my reasons for leaving each job.

I can understand he wants to find A-type winners that are on a rising arc instead of slumming for a job, but that took a lot of balls to ask.
Verizon 4G USB Modem not connecting to the internet
Verizon 4G USB Modem not connecting to the internet
I was having problems with my MacBook Air using a Verizon 4G USB Modem connecting to the internet I was only showing a 3G signal an It wouldn't connect to the internet.

Here is what I've found. Some times the modems aren't getting the latest PRL update. So now what?

Here are a few steps to help you get the best out of your USB Modem

1. Open VZ Access Manager.

2. Before you connect. Press the Alt+D form a Mac Or Ctrl+D from Windows.

3. Type the password "diagvzw"

4. Open the settings an choose 4G only press ok.

5. Now connect to the internet. (This will force the device to look for a 4G signal)

6. Make sure you got a 4G signal you could see in the bottom left in VZ Access Manager. Or if you see the "blue" light

7. Disconnect and redo step 2 3 and 4 but now choose "Global"

8. Reconnect you should get a 4G signal.
Eli is not adding anything to the discussion. S/he is not disputing the content of the article; just the motive. Are we going to have an SEO discussion about every article that makes it to the frontpage?
Google+ Finally Allows Pseudonyms
In general I like the app but the comment view text is too small for me on an iPhone/iPod. I also wish that the comment view would allow for rotation (as that usually increases the font size and improves readability of text layout). These issues caused me to ultimately switch to another HN app (but I still have yours installed in the hopes that this will change).