skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you have got it right. I would love to think that I am fairly special in my ability to write software, but I hesitate to believe that people cannot learn something.

Its more likely that people are being taught the wrong way, rather then the idea that lacking a natural aptitude for programming you don't have a chance.
Second Update [Jan 27th]:

An opinion poll on ACTA was just published in Poland:

1) 64% oppose signing ACTA, (while 21% approve)

2) 60% disagree that ACTA will help fighting internet piracy, (29% agree)

3) 52% think that ACTA will curb civil liberties and rights, (38% don't think so)

4) 49% find it permissible to block government websites in protest, (42% don't think so)

Note: "blocking" means DDoS'ing, but not defacing or other destructive forms of "hacking".

-

Michał Boni, the Minister for Administration and Digitization has offered to resign over ACTA, but the Prime Minister didn't accept his resignation.

[The PM would be stupid to accept it, because Mr. Boni is the only sensible person in the govt, when it comes to ACTA. He actually called upon the govt to delay the signing of ACTA and to have a public debate first.]

-

Street protests continue for a 4th day, albeit with smaller numbers. (No doubt -11 degrees Celsius doesn't help.)

http://www.tvn24.pl/-1,1732237,0,1,polska-walczaca-o-wolna-s...
Was not thinking of this currently. Do you think people outside of the startup world would be interested? I'm trying to make the designs interesting enough to appeal to others.
> earned conveniences

Subsidized conveniences when you add it all up, really.

> when it clearly works fairly well the way it is

Aside from the traffic, smog, and high number of accidental deaths directly attributable to automobile traffic, you mean?
Well I find it patently offensive that your executives make statements like "we aren't here to solve America's problems" when you are an incorporated United States company whose primary userbase is STILL in the United States. You benefit from the freedom, support, and infrastructure set up by a US democracy, and you hire much of your high level talent from the US.

Apple may be a multinational and it may not have customers just in the US -- but you have 60 some odd billion dollars in your bank accounts and you turn to people suffering, starving and dying (out of house and home and not looking for free hand outs but a chance to work hard) and say "we aren't here to solve your problems."

Do you not comprehend the arrogance of such a statement?
Arguably, until traditional software developers are able to grok these distinctions, you're not going to see many of them "crossing over" to design work.
So the evolution of hipster will start with those whom gush about e-readers to those whom gush about paperbacks?
Infinite Stupidity - A Talk With Mark Pagel
Another thing to look into would be Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/). You can have all your ruby/rails specific dependencies in a Virtualbox VM and not worry about setting it up in your host OS. It also has the added benefit of easily tearing down the instance if you manage to mess up. There's a learning curve to it, especially when setting up chef recipes, so for starters you could just bake everything into the image
Agreed. Forget Pi, maybe the way we count is flawed!
>"Target is unionized"

Not around these parts.
YC startups start companies that sell to other YC startups that sell services to other startups that sell t-shirts to people who are doing startups... When we gonna reach the actual companies that provide the thick value?
We make no claims of being architected Zero Knowledge.

We're familiar with the concept from previous work, but decided it wasn't worth creating an MVP with it.

One can architect a service to be zero knowledge like the terrific job http://www.tarsnap.com/ does. Unfortunately it's pretty hard for us to do when the core value proposition of our product is that we connect your hardware to other APIs (Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter etc) (which don't follow a zero knowledge architecture).

Cheers,

Marcus
Weird to see a blog post from 2006 show up here. Especially when I read it and discovered I'd already commented on it...
I suspect Gates' business methods were relied on because the product was so mediocre.

If your product is mediocre, then you can't really depend on it to sell itself, can you? So you have to use whatever leverage you can get to get it adopted and to keep out competition.
cool

i coded some real time video effects demo a year and a half or so ago http://www.barbafan.de/html5video?video=tron
i tried to create a lib for video effects then, but ran into serious performance issues, looks like it's time to revisit that topic.
Will be rolling out a page for just getting one offs asap
That article is positively drenched in fixed mindset (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-...). Those prophecies tend to be self-fulfilling. But as raganwald says, the only evidence is that universities fail to teach a sizable fraction of the population. Maybe the trick is not to play with IDEs or whatever else they claimed to have tried, but to get rid of the computer and focus on what programs are: instructions for how to do something.

The example of "mental model of assignment" is ridiculous. a=b can mean whatever. It means something totally different to a mathematician than a programmer. Say:

"The piece of paper on the left says dog and the piece of paper on the right says cat. Overwrite the contents of the piece of paper on the left with the contents of the piece of paper on the right. What is written on the pieces of paper?"

I bet pretty much everyone would have a correct mental model of assignment if the problem was stated like that.
What of his upbringing was particularly challenging?
Understanding Map Projections
I think the comment meant that, apart from installing the package, everything else worked fine.

I would probably say something like, "isn't available after initial install" and that "you need to install all the packages you want to use".

It is one of the Arch philosophies that you don't need any packages on your system that you don't want to use.
I would counter-counter that there practically no teacher that can teach. Elementary & high school math teachers deliver a lot of practice, but that ultimately they really just aim to "teach" the kids who naturally understand math. The rest just stumble along and the system covers it up. The same is true for English, History, Phys Ed and pretty much everything.
Sometimes, the WTFPL is the appropriate license. Fun project.
Yes, but are they person enough to be subject to three strikes laws that some members of the EU have? It seems like it should put them at risk. I believe this is what GP is referring to.
You honestly feel that the Matt Cutts article about seeing his werewolf photo benefits search results? You are definitely in the minority. Look at the comments.

EDIT: Never mind. Didn't know you are a Googler. of course you agree with Matt Cutts. :)
Indeed. I would say that in truth an astronaut's life and a bunch of money are incommensurable.

The value of the article lies in showing that if agencies pretend to assign a certain value to a human life then they can become less inconsistent. (And if in this case it serves Zubrin's laudable aim of getting to Mars now, so much the better.)

For Zubrin himself to be consistent, OFC, he should have tried to assign a value to, say, another decade of Hubble data. Omitting that was, as you say, sloppy.

BTW I find it quite shocking that neither the article nor the other comments so far consider the relevancy of the astronaut's opinion of what is an acceptable risk for him. It is, after all, his life, and he remains a taxpayer like everyone else.

I guess in the future where things like life extension and legal suicide are commonplace it will be considered strange to ignore a person's wishes in this way
Actually, if you look at the formal definition of computation (see for example "Introduction to the Theory of Computation" by Michael Sipser), a lot of natural processes are in fact a computation. An atom is a computer. Photons may hit an electron giving it extra quanta of energy and it shifts orbit (it skips further away from the nucleus), or it may emit a photon and shift its orbit closer to the nucleus of the atom. So, basically it changes states predictably as it "sees" symbols (photons). It could be said it recognizes a language where alphabet are photons. Entire universe can be thought of as a computer.
"infringed my copyright" is way too calm and level headed of a charge

You should scream "piracy", "stealing jobs", and since they have a history of ignoring copyright and profiting from it, they need to be arrested, extradited and prosecuted as if they were murderers.
Talk about too little too late. 90% of my gaming is on iOS, with the remaining 10% reserved for blockbusters on 360 or ps3. Nintendo is the next RIMM in terms of company direction. The Wii U will officially usher in the next "Gamecube" era. Sad times for Mario fans.
Agreed, no accidental deaths/smog if everyone walked/biked, but that doesn't mean city+cars aren't accomplishing their job of A to B. It isn't the cleanest or safest way, but I don't think he argued "greater good" so much as "good enough". If these were deal-breaker issues for everyone, then people would walk/bike instead of use cars (or just leave the city), but clearly cars are a definite "want" item.

Which is to say, yeah, I suppose we're selfish, but then again, owning property is selfish, comrade.
I used to teach the first CS course at both Harvard and University of Washington. I didn't have this issue at Harvard, but at UW there was definitely a bimodal distribution in abilities. Roughly half the students had what I feel is a more visual / associative way of thinking vs. the focused structure you need to program.

The concept that the "non programmers" could never understand was the abstraction of functions. Like:

foo(a) {
// stuff
}

foo(b);

would confuse them because they'd get hung up on foo's parameter declared as 'a', but called with 'b'.
There's still evil at Microsoft, but it reportedly has turned inward, emanating from HR.
Making the Blackest of Black Materials
Yeah, I still remember watching it happen in class. Those men and women were all heroes, and inspired many of us to go into STEM careers.
From the article:
>To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion.

I guess it is reasonable that people have a hard time with this. They've grown up their whole lives dealing with people and animals and themselves. These act according to wants and gloss over minor errors, a fuzzy world full of fuzzy actors. Heck, even our species has lived and evolved mostly dealing with such. It doesn't make much sense to them that one typo could cause a super powerful computer or expensive device to keel over and be useless and do nothing.
I don't think most foxcon workers are actually paid 10$ a day (it's less than that). But, exchange rates are odd things, you can live on 2$ a day worth of food in the US and buying the same food in China gives one exchange rate, but comparing housing gives vary different exchange rates.

Basically, working in one of those factory's sucks more than any job you ever had and pays a lot less. But, in that economy your still far from starvation. If you want a real eye opener just compare how long it takes to buy a lifetimes worth of food in the US. 70 years * 2$ a day * 365 days a year = 51,000$. Clean water is so cheap in the US it's hard to fathom, in much of the world and most of most of history it was a major issue.
I'm not quite sure if this is serious or some sort a stunt to display "their" hypocrisy.

To me, the situation is in the same category as pirating movies from thepiratebay.org - except that those are more expensive to create.

So either they using youtube videos without the creators permission and downloading movies are both okay or not.
But that's the point: It does seem like there is an intent to deceive. From my understanding of the relevant facts, the copycat photo is meant to be displayed on merchandise right next to those that use the official one, and it seems unlikely a lot of people will be able to tell that it isn't just a cropping.
I think to begin with ValleySwag were open to either receiving shirts or printing them (esp as it was all local companies in SoMa)... but over time I think they decided to only do print-runs with their own suppliers, presumably to add to their margin.
Because in strongly typed languages the compiler is able to hunt down the most of the bugs for you in milliseconds. That's why haskell programmers suggest that if a haskell program compiles gracefully, you can assume is mostly correct and bug free.
Look awesome, I was just looking for something like this a couple weeks ago. I'll definitely check it out. If email me at jpollak92 [at] gmail, I'd happily send some thoughts your way (your email is not in your profile).
Much cheaper ways to market yourself unless you're hoping to target entrepreneurs/startups.
I (partially) agree about having a high churn rate on customers. I imagine most freelancers will use the service less once they build up a nice portfolio of clients, although I can still see a use for the occasional new client even with a full roster.

I disagree about open source. Sure, it'd be a cool open source project - but don't give it away for free yet. I'd change the pricing plan.

During your beta, find out what the average life time value of a customer is. Do they use it actively for two months? Six months? After figuring out the lifetime value, adjust your pricing accordingly.

If you find people using it hardcore for a month and then stopping, it makes more sense to sell this as a "one-off" price instead of a low monthly. If people use it chronically, you can keep the low monthly.

All that said, very cool service and I think I'll be one of your customers =)
In-house counsel (which I assume they have) is getting paid a salary regardless of whether or not they are busy, so I doubt there was a billable cost to deciding on their offer internally at Sky News..
Is this petition a joke? If we're going to try to change the copyright laws, let's bring the term back to how much it was originally: 14 years. Owning an idea for 50 years is just too much. You don't need 50 years to recover your costs on one single work.
Would it not classify as fair use? (I don't mean to defend Sky but I thought using media for the purpose of news was considered fair use).
I think it's the same situation. Our military is geared up to fight yesterday's war; the "wars" we're involved in now could be solved more cost-effectively by literally paying our enemies not to fight. The next real war, if it happens, will be fought almost entirely with semi- and fully-autonomous machines. All of the lessons we've learned will be pointless.

Similarly, NASA is geared up for yesterday's space race. We have to send a man to space! We have to send two men to space! We have to send a man to the moon! Uh, now what... We have to send a man to MARS!

Well, no, we really don't. Yes, we could. We know we could. We wouldn't learn anything significant by doing so that we couldn't learn for much cheaper here on Earth. It would be a massively expensive, complicated and dangerous tourist expedition-- a lot like sending soldiers to the Middle East, actually.

We all already live in space, on the largest, safest, most self-sustaining spaceship any of us can conceive of. The future of space exploration lies in the hands of semi- and fully-autonomous machines. There's no good reason for people to be in space, not for the foreseeable future at least.
No, it doesn't. If it's a string, it's a string: "1" + "1" -> "11". I know what you mean (it would if the first op wasn't a string), but see how this got confusing even in your short message. I'm still not sure why would you want to automate all types into a magic one that does what you want... unless you split all operators into N distinct ones giving you different results. But then you get the same result really - ops determine your results.

Again using phones example:

country + area + ending

is different depending on what the actual types are. This is simply an issue we cannot ignore. In this case I'm expecting the concatenation and the result cannot depend on "contents of the string".
From what I remember, the scribd side is even flakier than opening a PDF in your browser. And I'm not too keen on this "push our dogfood on readers" policy, either...
Well my main project is a music app, but in order to bootstrap that I put this together. I'm not YC (although Alexis Ohanian and Adam Goldstein have been helpful getting setup).
I feel like the OP misconstrued things like "doesn't work out of the box". What he meant was, "I needed to install the package to get my video driver and sound driver working".

Generally Arch doesn't install something until you ask it to.
If you need mainly to discuss your project or track changes, please drop me an email at hello@hushflow.com and I'll create you an account and we can get in touch.
Sure would be interesting to know what people disagree with so strongly that it warrants putting me in the negatives. This seems like a noncontroversial comment to me.
Essentially, the judge found it to be infringing because the evidence showed that the people who commissioned the photo were trying to make a counterfeit version of the original.

I.e., the defendant's crime was embodied entirely in the defendant's state of mind rather than in the defendant's actions or in the work the defendant produced.

The ruling[1] is actually quite explicit that the pictures in question are obviously dissimilar (10), and the ruling is also explicit that brand confusion was not the issue (71).

I think the ruling is absolutely as broad and as unreasonable as the most hysterical headlines make out. For once.

[1] http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWPCC/2012/1.html
Education is not free and it certainly isn't open. You pay for it with your taxes; the government decides what goes in the books and curriculum and unions don't let us create a competitive marketplace where bad teachers evaporate from the radar and truly good teachers compete and make two or three times the money they make today while providing a better education. Much like anything that government touches, the system is a mess and our competitors are eating us alive.
Hey gamechangr, why not grab a book on RoR (like the excellent pragprog one) and start learning it from your comfy chair at home. No need to move anywhere.
Most acquired founders aren't made execs. Most end up as Product Managers or team leaders.

Perhaps not in title, but no one with serious ambitions is going to give up his business without expectation of high-level clout, unless he's dumping it because he thinks it's a dog. You don't sell off your dream to end up in the middle of some rusty hierarchy.

The weak engineers from acquired companies can't sneak into google. They must go through the typical Google interview process.

I was talking about acq-hiring in general, not Google in particular. Hence the ludicrous names (FatFrog, IUsedThisToilet).

Getting VP-level role at top companies is very hard and if a developer of an acquired company could score a VP-level role elsewhere after the acquisition, he could probably do so before the acquisition.

It's also hard to get acquired. Not many people out there can say that they "completed an exit".

I'm not saying that it's easy to get that kind of job. I'm saying that after one's company is acquired is one of the best times to vie for an external promotion. You can ride the "star" glow, or you can become a Software Engineer 2.B/middle-division. Your choice.
IMHO, your explanation is very unconvincing. I did read it thrice just to make sure I get it.

And off-topic, a feedback for Cleartrip is your pricing is definitely not helping you. Myself and at least three other friends and my brother and a cousin start our searches with Cleartrip and finish our bookings with Yatra or Makemytrip which seem to offer a discounted fare every time compared to you or at least thats what we have started to believe so after figuring out in a few bookings before.

All the best.
That is precisely my point. We're seeing this 3 strikes junk all around Europe, and its soon before it hits the US.

If these companies violate copyright, should they not also follow the rule of law? What makes them exempt, aside the fact they helped write it?

(and honestly, legally shutting down a faux news channel by killing it's Internet would be funny)
Convert your SQL tables to HTML forms
> "Obviously Foxconn is offering them a better job than they would get elsewhere."

No. It's more likely that there is an undersupply of jobs/oversupply of workers.

If the jobs were better @ Foxconn, you'd see more currently employed people applying.
This article seems to touch on the explanation a bit more.

http://www.bricklin.com/wontprogram.htm

It's not that Johnny can't program, it's just that he won't.
Q. When Will Wisdio Add Authority Scores? A. Right Now.
I found the reference to "Node" confusing as well. There are some server-side video compositing/transcoding packages, like http://www.xuggle.com/xuggler/ but that's not what this is.
List of DNSSEC developer libraries. Know of more to add?
Analyst: Pay TV Providers Have Enough Muscle To Block Competition From The Web
I see this largely as a failure of education. You see this issue in many areas and much earlier on like teaching mathematics. In schools there tends to be one method used and that method doesn't suit everybody.

I see this at work. I've known programmers who, when they get a new hire, will basically let them flounder. I guess the basic idea is that if you're "good" you'll "figure it out" (with minimal time investment to boot). And that will work with some people. My own philosophy is that there are a significant number of people who need direction. Don't overwhelm them with "everything". Give them small, structured tasks to learn processes, small parts of the system, build confidence and give some measure of progress.

That all being said, I honestly don't know how I learnt to program at all. I can teach people who know how to program (the basics) more. But I can't teach someone who doesn't know how to program how to program.

I've come around to thinking that Zed Shaw (as just one example) is right about this. With his "Learn X the Hard Way" books he starts out by basically saying "just type this in" (and don't copy and paste). Don't worry what it does. You'll figure that out later.

I see people (in many different areas) who are under the mistaken impression they need to know "everything" before they can do anything (or even in games, make a decision of any kind). They feel the need to weigh up all the options and consider all the consequences. That's not actually how people learn (IMHO).

Children don't know any better so can just learn this way. Adults often let self-doubt, fear of embarrassment or fear of "what might happen" get in the way such that they won't allow themselves to learn.

So perhaps what universities should do is separate students who already know how to program from those that don't. Those that don't don't take ANY theory at all until they do an introductory course that starts with "just type this in". If you lack the ability (and willingness) to turn a thought into a program, no matter how simple, you're doomed to failure. This, I believe, is something that can be taught.

The ability to just try stuff and see what happens in a key element in continual learning (IMHO) and something that needs to be ingrained in programmers (to be) from day one.

I'd really love to see the outcome of this approach versus more traditional approaches.