skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In other news, programming is CHALLENGING.

Not everyone can learn it and building something that is useful requires skill and experience.

Doesn't matter the language, toolkit or number of tutorials at hand - building software is a difficult profession. You can't learn how to practice law or be a doctor by spending a month reading tutorials - why would anyone expect this to be the case in software development?

My path to web development was as follows: learn how to think properly (BA History) ;) -> learn software development basics (2 year certificate in Software development, primarilly Java) -> First job maintaining Basic (BBx) code for application built in 80's -> contractor working with prior built custom PHP code -> Full time developer working with Symfony, Drupal and now Rails. Not to mention all the basic sys admin knowledge I've picked up (apache, zeus, perl, shell scripting, networking, etc...)

If I had walked into Rails right off the bat, I would have had no idea what was going on. Having a solid understanding of Java servlets, MVC in general and 4 years of prior programming experience meant I picked Rails up rather quickly. Rails isn't my barrier, it's ruby, and syntax isn't' much a barrier for a good programmer.

One thing I wish I had was a better background in Computer Science or Computer Engineering. The actual physical reality of how computers work often baffles me and having knowledge of how a CPU works at a base level would definitely make me better at my job. As would a real knowledge of algorithm design.
Using advisors to raise money
ComScore Posts $3.3 Million Q4 Loss – Hit Hard By Nielsen Patent War
Indeed, the obvious way that society has found to achieve these things is ... video games.

It's eerie how now that computers are intertwined with our lives, the idea of an advancing virtual reality, able to give interesting experiences, is not something people fax poetic about anymore. The computer has already been assigned to some other category in most people's minds. Yet virtual reality will still advance and eventually give nearly any experience we might imagine.
Hiding (And Restoring) Files and Directories from Finder in OS X
Congrats guys. We've had a few Mailgun customers ask about a service like this so we'll be sending them your way.

We may want to implement a tighter integration going forward, as well.
Is The Best Travel Search Engine Around The Corner
> Brainstorming is often used to solve a problem now; you don't always have time to wait for something genius to emerge (which might not even be related to your problem). Brainstorming tries to emulate that situation by having people interact more.

That's not what I got out of it at all. In the U.C. Berkeley experiment, simply giving the same number of people the suggestion to "debate" caused them to have far more ideas, in the same amount of time. Brainstorming doesn't have people interact more -- it has people interact in a specific way (no criticism), even though that has since been shown to actually be harmful to developing ideas. It's not to save time.
Lion keeps track of your downloads
I think another subtle thing some might overlook is that you specifically said "serving." That is something like 2 oreo cookies or a handful of baby carrots. It would be a different story if you ate two baby carrots and then half a package of oreos.

Most people would probably make themselves sick before getting too many calories under a reasonable interpretation of this hierarchy.
I personally think software "engineering" should be considered a craft/trade. We should be apprenticed and developed under the direction of masters.

You can learn this discipline on your own, but you'll always be second rate to a developer who learned under tutelage from someone else. Whether it's in school or in the workplace, learning from others is incredibly valuable.
Honestly there is some truth, but if you want to be a programmer(not a coder) no company, no person can stop you. I agree that companies like TCS etc. get mainly maintenance work but nobody is forcing you to stay there only, if you don't love a job, don't do that job..
If you want "experiences", they're there for the taking at any cost from free to $OMGk.

The problem isn't so much providing them (although other posters address the issue of cost), it's whether the customer does, in fact, want to do his part. Go to a movie theater, look around, and ask what percentage of attendees would, in fact, want to spend the next 2 hours going thru an approximation of what they're going to sit there, mouth agape, staring at. Most wouldn't, even if they could - which most couldn't.

The opportunities for experiences are there. Skydiving. Romance. Wilderness adventure. World travel. Competition. Artistic expression. Whatever. Spend as much or as little as you like, in both time and money. I've seen all kinds of "experiences" appear and flourish in a few decades. Lots of people participate in them, as the height of our culture allows and facilitates unprecedented indulgence in luxury "experiences". Oh, they may not be as objectively exciting, but subjectively they can be fantastic (first time I did paintball - about the same price & duration & space as a high-end movie - it sure wasn't a James Bond film, but instead of "that was neat, now what" I drove around the city loop twice screaming in residual endorphin rush).

The key is audience participation. Anyone can jet off to exotic locations for wild times for just a few days' salary, and for even just the price & time of a movie go leap out of an airplane or take a romantic walk. Most, however, would rather push a button and say "here we are now, entertain us."
I attended a Startup Weekend event... It definitely gave me a boost in energy and enthusiasm and ended up presenting me with multiple opportunities for learning and for work. There should be other local or national events that could also fit the bill.

Definitely look for opportunities to collaborate with others--working with a like-minded team can push you further than you could get on your own. Contributing to open-source projects will be a boost too.
Agreed. How about making it also a two column structure and give more prominence to the book cover / image?
A Techie With Foodie Ambitions
What Angie's List Knows About Customer Reviews
The business of naming things is interesting because most of it is bullshit for startups. This applies to everything from Igor's frequently mentioned and unscientific naming guide (turns out great names are the ones that Igor has made up...) to the tips and tricks-y blog posts that pop up every now and then. There simply are no hard rules and very few guidelines that startups can actually follow.

You would think that there would be a couple of well-referenced research papers on the subject given how much resources are allocated to naming products and businesses.
Very nice. How does the interface compare to the native browser?
Being in the information security world, I have to wonder what percentage of these requests are based in malware? I know at least the latest version of ZeroAccess/Max++/Sirefef (which we managed to get before the AV vendors released definitions for it) uses it quite heavily. That's one of the symptoms we used to diagnose computers from a strictly network-level standpoint. No one on our network should be using Google DNS, so any computers who were making requests to 8.8.8.8 were likely infected (confirmed using other signatures).

That amounted to about 100 requests every day per infected computer just from us, and ZeroAccess isn't the only one doing it (and isn't a rare trojan).
DNS has nothing to do with ping response times. A ping requests the IP address from the DNS server and then does the ping. On most systems the DNS is cached locally, so multiple requests will use the same information.
Professors at my university do prove things in the classes I mentioned above, but I was attempting to make a distinction between courses where the emphasis is the proof(Abstract/Contemporary algebra) and courses where the emphasis is the process (Matrix methods). Sorry for any confusion.
Glad they're doing something about the CDN issue. This is the main thing that keeps me from switching to Google DNS.
Relevant video by Martin Odersky covering Scala 2.10:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqQNqIy5LdM
Slides:
http://mrkn.co/s/video_martin_odersky_what_s_next_for_scala,...
Animating a Million Letters Using Three.js
Ask HN: What's the best country for a new startup
Why?
Okay, thanks for giving me the connection to the first amendment, but it still means nothing, because Path is not the government. The legal "protection" is about whether the government can force a reporter to divulge his sources. It is not magic fairy dust that imposes storage requirements on third parties.

I don't think disregarding someone's opinion because you've found a significant fault in some of their opinions. I'm not an expert on everything, but then I don't post articles on things I'm not an expert on. If the parts of an article I can can evaluate turn out to be incorrect, then I can reasonably infer that the rest of the article is of similar accuracy, even if I can't personally evaluate it.
I don't think that DNS lookup time is included in ping's latency numbers. It probably does the lookup once per run, and then caches the IP. It wouldn't make sense to to the DNS lookup once per ping.
Online surveillance bill targets child porn: Toews
interesting that they were able to identify that there was bug without being able to say what it was or how it happened.
There are significant costs with GIS data, maintaining and insuring the accuracy of the data as changes are introduced among them.

Keep in mind that GIS data is constantly revised as ownership of parcels changes, infrastructure is added or improved, properties are rezoned or receive variances, or when the aerial photography base layer gets updated.

Much of that data is legally binding (e.g. zoning districts) or critical to protect the public (e.g. fire hydrant locations) or important for environmental planning (e.g. wetland locations). Municipal GIS data isn't just some mailing list mined from magazine descriptions.
Like most industries, health care tech can benefit from rapid user-oriented iteration (users = anyone, not just doctors, but doctors are frequently not engaged). Unfortunately the "enterprise" forces and entrenched interests hold this back. IT leadership needs to embrace a more agile model for the end users to see significant gains.
I was particularly thinking about things like order and group in list comprehensions[1]. Turns out the paper introducing them was actually from 2007, so maybe it's not that recent :). (I thought it was newer than that.)

[1]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...

Here is a random video I found earlier where SPJ talks both about this in particular and the exchange of ideas between Haskell and .NET in general: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ
Working 16 Hours a Day and Still Loving It
"How do you get that inner Zen back where you can focus on personal projects and really enjoy what you do?"

It might be a personal thing.. but the "inner Zen" relies mostly on self confidence, and it is ok not to have it constantly. Especially when approaching new things with lots of unknowns. It is actually cool to experience a discomfort, since it sparkles fresh ideas. But again... sometimes.

Why can't you enjoy your personal projects now? If choosing a "tech stack" is a problem, then choose literally anything that has a live and matching (to you) community around it. You are looking at Rails, and you like what you see, people you talk to (IRC, forums, groups, conferences)? Go for it, and have no fear of missing out on anything.
Can you turn the point data into a color contour map and place a recently updated map on your home page?
That is very well put. It is a shame that JS got its scoping so very upside-down, because it means that tiny changes in code can cause incredibly confusing and initially undetectable bugs. `with` is basically an infected bandaid on a broken system. It seems like it's helping until you notice the smell.
This makes me sad. As a father of two girls, I'm always available to build blocks, legos, and castles. I've even introduced the older one to my own HTML5 games. She's great at using the mouse now and can even use Chrome's auto-complete to get to her gaming web site by herself (we're working on full urls, but the alphabet comes first).

However, come xmas and birthdays, the family continues to shower them with traditional girl toys (dolls, stuffed animals, kitchen sets, pink toys, pink blocks, pink legos). Whenever she opens a present, and it's pink, my stomach churns. It's almost to the point where you feel like giving in. I certainly wouldn't take away their girl toys that they enjoy, simply for the sake of gender. They should be free to play with what they choose. I just wish society (the older generation and especially marketers), would be less insistent on specific gender toys.
I think part of the problem is that it's a very difficult question to quantify - we can't control the inputs, we're not totally sure what we want from the outputs, it's unlikely that a uniform process will work to get the outputs we want, and we don't have the materials to guarantee a uniform process from start to finish.

On the input side, each incoming class is different: they vary across geographic and socioeconomic lines, they're all affected by factors which occurred years before we ever got them in a classroom to begin with.

On the output side, we really _Don't_ know what we want. It's easy to say, "students who can read, write, and do math," but the devil, as always, is in the details - how do we measure that in a way that doesn't immediately become a metrics problem á la No Child Left Behind?. More than anything, we need to foster successful individuals - but we're not sure how to do that on a large scale and the education system is but one part of a child's life.

The answer in a lot of ways seems to be "Very Good Teachers" - but what makes a good teacher? What sort of support structure is required? Are we willing to pay for enough Very Good Teachers? Do we have enough? Can we train more?

Further, to what degree does the attempt to constrain the education system so we can quantify the results inhibit individuality? In assuring a child knows his multiplication tables, are we imposing a system that will prevent that child from the free expression that would eventually lead to a great artist? Many of our finest works - the pieces of art by which we define our culture, spring from people who would, by any other metric, be considered failures by a system intended to raise successful individuals.

All this is complicated by the fact that the end result of a good education system ultimately is a good society - something we won't know until 20, 30, 40 years later. Everything else is a proxy: We think a high college attendance or graduation rate will get us there, we think more scientists and engineers will get us there, we think more well-rounded individuals will get us there, but ultimately, we don't know what makes a good society, nor what works to get us there.

I think there are improvements we can make, teaching methods that work better than others, and probably ways to quantify some of those differences, but ultimately, we don't even know the bounds of the problem we're trying to solve in education.
Brett Victor's Principle
Luttie. that's cool to say. Love creating lutties.Amazing launch for video lovers.
From outside appearances the manufacturers don't want to aid their competition by working in the open, and Google needs a next gen device to target. Now that Google is a manufacturer, they could publicly develop on a Google/Moto device.

It's probably more complex than that, but one can always hope.
1) Use your network. Each one of you has valuable connections from your time as employees. That's where you start.
2) Plug yourself into the entrepreneur ecosystem where you are. Regardless of where you live, there are small business people hustling and making it happen. Easy places to start - coworking spaces, creative communities, incubator / accelerator type places, and of course coffee shops.

Once you understand the ecosystem the community will help you solve all of those problems. You'll probably need to either have personal portfolios or come up with something together, depending on your experience - at the very least have resumes for everyone.

@natemcguire
I too am a n00b with Rails but I'm more of a reformed PHP programmer like the article describes. I can confirm that most framework tutorials are difficult and, as you say, feel hollow. The reason for this seems to me to be because there are about 10 different things going on and the tutorial can only really put a major focus on one or two at a time.

You first have to understand programming concepts themselves. This means iterations/loops, variables and assignment, etc.

Then you have to learn how language X implements those concepts. So you find out if you have to declare types and get the hang of the syntax itself.

Then you have to get into databases, how those work and the planning as you say.

On top of all that you then have to learn how MVC works which means you'd better get comfortable with OO programming, then learn at least 3 more languages if you don't know them already (HTML, CSS, js). Then you have to know how the server interacts with your code, and on and on. Oh, and don't let me forget learning your tools. The command line, your deployment tools (even if it's just FTP), version control, servers, and your text editor. There's a ton of stuff to wrap your head around just to write a simple blog script!

If you're new to programming and learning any framework you're screwed. You end up just copy-pasting code that you have no idea what it does and you haven't learned a thing. I think the article makes the real common sense point that in programming, just like any skill, you have to master the fundamentals before anything else. A lot of words and explanations just to say "learn the basics before moving on or you'll never learn anything". But I'm glad he said it, it was a good article and made sense.
Spot-on. It's incredibly difficult to measure intelligence, and learning could be defined as the delta of intelligence on a particular subject. The best way I can think of would be real-world application of the knowledge (in the form of applied projects), but that gets to be too time consuming and expensive in a world where "education" is mandatory to the point of being a commodity.
Not a dangerous setup as much as a misconfigured one with dangerous side effects.

The problem is easily resolved by having Apache respond with a 404 to any requests for non-existant static resources. Which is of course what it should be doing in the first place.
I'm not sure its really accurate to call the Copenhagen interpretation the "standard interpretation"? I'm given to understand that either a majority or at least a plurality of physicists subscribe to the Everett Interpretation.
Aereo: Live Broadcast TV over the Internet
It's mentioned all over the place in the paper:
http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/064.pdf
IPhones are for days, iPads for the nighttime
I take it you didn't read to the end :)
Zynga sued over use of personalized game content patents
Bingo. If I'm up for a complex meaningful story - of which there are many in my queue - I'd rather go do something. Dropped the DVD subscription in favor of streaming-only precisely because when I'm brain-dead enough to want to watch something I want to grab something suitably unenlightening from a menu of options, not whatever highbrow disc is sitting on my shelf collecting dust.

When the Great Netflix Psychotic Break happened, about a million customers came to the same conclusion.
I always tense up when I see people quit their job with no revenue plan, no prototype, and no idea of a team.

I'd much rather have the experience of building a bunch of test projects and really exploring who I worked well with in my free time after work and on weekends, and have a definite fundraising, demo or beta with users, or other traction before deciding to quit my job. It not only makes the move easier, but it also is a good test of the people you're working with. Are they interested enough in the idea to spend their free time on it? Do you enjoy the work? Is it fun? Are you solving a core problem?

I've seen people leave their day jobs for a "to do list app" "startup". That is not a startup. It is a project for understanding how to build things and gather people around and idea so that when you're ready to do the thing you want to do, you have made enough mistakes with little projects that you don't waste your time doing them when it really matters.

Bottom line is this: leave your job when you have a solid plan, not a dream. Study the start of Adobe Systems. They knew when to leave and when to stay.
PYTHON MYSQL developer fro Bay area , ca
> They had the option to pay us or switch to Google Public DNS.

Do you mean to switch away from Google Public DNS?

> Guess which they did?

How much did it cost them?
You should set DEBUG to false in your Django settings file for production. I got a 404 from [1] (probably you are tweaking some stuff?) and can see all your URL patterns...

[1]: http://www.hackershelf.com/login/guidelines.htm
Functional Reactive Programming concepts on top of Backbone.js
Dwarf Fortress 0.34.01 Released
The Effect Of A Facebook "Recommend" Button (On Conversion Rates)
That's the only reasonable use for ==, IMO.
Woot! We've been a beta tester of LaunchBit for a while now and their team has been super communicative. Excited to see them continue to evolve!
Enabling accessibility in Windows 8
This is a painfully accurate article. I can say this as an Indian Coder.
My philosophy is that the length of a variable or function name should be inversely proportional to the size of the scope it affects. This means that if a name is only local to the current procedure then it hardly matters what you call it.

I have no problem with his use of a procedure with the signature "let rec loop acc s .... in" when it is fundamentally a placeholder recursive control structure. Such a signature is as much a common boilerplate pattern in OCaml as "for (i = 0; i < length; i++) { ... }" in a C-like language.

That said, his top level procedures are named things like "apply" and "updates" which are possibly too generic, but OCaml has a nice module system so the names need only convey meaning unambiguous with relation to each other; there is no global namespace to pollute.

This is a common problem of clean functional languages: their declarations can be unambiguously correct with less specificacy. Function declarations need not specify subject and object of the sentences they represent since these can be inferred, they must only specify the verb. But this means skimming becomes less fruitful: one must read everything to understand anything.
Took me a while to figure out who the "we" is (OpenDNS). Might be worth stating it in your comment.
Really not fond of giving out my e-mail address, so here's the direct link for the app:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/eyeredux/assets/HTML+for+Mail.zip
Movies trade gargantuan fixed costs for low marginal costs. Probably a trillion dollars over the last 100 years has been spent making, distributing, and screening movies. Theaters are a channel where a studio can expect to put $100M in and get $75-200M out, $10 at a time. (more if you count shady Hollywood accounting). Not only do unique experiences have much higher marginal costs, there is no channel or business model for huge amounts of money to invest in producing these experiences.

To put in perspective, he listed 2 experiences that might have thousands of visitors a week. Eyeballing last week's box office results, it looks like ~$150M across major movies. That means 15 MILLION people went to the movies last week just in the US.

Movies are a cost and effort-effective way to be entertained, and a predictable and profitable way to invest huge amounts of money. That's why there's everywhere.