skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a shame that they let their ideology be shaped by being against something rather than being for something. What an awful place to be.
> If you don't live within their control, they don't want you to see the propaganda they put out on their "British Broadcasting Corporation" (BBC) television stations and web site.

You mean you don't pay for the TV license since you're not in the UK and you complain that you can't watch their tv? Shocking...

I really don't understand your approach to this - propaganda? restrictions of a regime? very oppressive? There are some things I disagree with in the UK, but you're trying to watch a TV channel they want to get paid for. It's that simple - there's no point in dragging politics into this one. I'm definitely against silly country filtering using geoip on services that don't allow other means of access, but in the context of what's happening in other countries, let's not call it "oppressive", please.
That problem is easy to solve. Kickstarter makes it easy to set limits on the total number of rewards (often pre-orders) you offer.
The extra keywords aren't going to reduce the "errors and weird behavior", the fact that they will be block-scoped and not function-scoped is what will eliminate the confusion.
This would fail badly on a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_linked_list
absence of projects like this would make their arguments look weak.
>> marketing material with implicit message: "use Basecamp.Next, not Asana, Trello, Sprintly, or other products".

Of course, that is exactly what this is. But he does provide very good (and in my experience accurate) reasons.
Any half decent programmer uses algorithms everyday without even knowing it. Algorithm is just another word that encompasses a massive subset of other words that in reality DO NOT matter. A word is of no use if you don't know the definition, but a definition is plenty useful all on its own.

I think that's where people get scared. Just look through many of the examples above and you'll be surprised. There's no mystery to them, and I'm sure many of you (conscious of it or not) have implemented many of those many times.

Algorithm is efficient and concise code. All the different names and acronyms flying around are just a way to apply your efficient and concise code to a particular problem.

The seemingly tougher algorithms make so much more sense when they are applied in a situation of your own. If you start becoming conscious of your uses of code, it'll all get easier.

I'm sure you're doing just fine, and if you stop thinking of the word "algorithm" as some deep dark abyss of complex problems and knowledge, you'll discover it to be something that you may have done before, or it'll be something new to apply to your next project.
I disagree that anyone is "naturally-inclined" to be better at algorithms, or coding, or abstract thinking. Rather, approach it as if we've been a blank slate that has picked up techniques and patterns of thinking, as throughout our lives we've been confronted with problems that required a new way of thinking. I'd reckon that someone you see as "naturally inclined" has simply encountered problems before that lend themselves to abstract in a similar way as these new problems they face (algorithms, architecture, speaking Japanese).

If you believe my paradigm, then you start to realize that not only is your mind extremely flexible, but that by focusing on a varied set of similar problems, you can start developing a framework to pick up more skills faster, and thus develop that "natural inclination" in the field you practice.
They do have nice visualization tools, but they don't self-update. https://farm7.static.flickr.com/6178/6162056538_ffbf3363bb_o...
"There are enough tools now for these teachers to find one another rather than been islands in a school."

This is not true. I've been teaching for 15 years, and I've looked every year or two for good online ed communities. There are some good ideas out there, but every one I have seen has a significant shortcoming: over-commercialized, technologically inferior, poorly moderated, diluted by the whining and complaining that plagues staff rooms...

The value of a true HN clone is real. I'd love to see someone make an exact clone of HN, called Educator News, if pg would be fine with it. I can't run it, but I'd sure help moderate it.
I'm probably alone in saying this, but I hope most of this stuff never sees the light of day.

What makes JS powerful is its simplicity. "var" or no "var" gets you local or global scope. Done. Want a constant? Make a global variable and don't change it. Want to really make sure its unchangeable? Make an accessor function.

Scope in JS is very simple to understand and quite versatile once understood. Adding more layers of complexity does not help.

One of the strengths of js is that every thing is an object(almost). So the bit about "no more need to abuse objects as dictionaries" is a bit odd. Since most things are objects, you get the power to treat functions, types, literals, etc in interesting ways.

One of the strengths of object literals is that you can use them as dictionaries. obj.foo === obj['foo'].

I love getters/setters and some other improvements like strict mode. However I am very much against what seems like an unnecessary cluttering of the language without fixing some of the long standing problems like ==/===. For me, I almost never use == so it should be gotten rid of. Make == === === for example.
"With great fanfare some big company will announce what awesome synergies are in store now that the youngsters have “access to all the resources they need to take it to the next level”."

Perhaps this is a bit of an outlier, but this is how the Heroku acquisition was framed and it does seem to actually be working out well, no?
Try reaching out to Giant Media (giantmedia.com). They match up viral videos/targeted media ads with demographic-appropriate websites. They can help provide some additional monetization.
I'm a great algorithmist and a mediocre programmer (by my own tough standards at least), so there.

Everyone has different skills. One of the real arts of building a team is figuring out what each member's top skills are, and divvying up the work appropriately. That's actually more difficult with a top-notch team because high performers are often good at everything -- but there are still areas where they absolutely shine vs they've learned a skill that didn't come as easily through practice and perseverance.
Can you provide specific examples of this?

Because there are only a few major acquirers of security software/hardware companies (Cisco and Symantec being by far the leaders) and I have never observed this mentality among those companies; there are absolutely VCs that tend to make investments in IT security companies, too.

It is also the case that what is true for Sequoia --- the top tier of the top tier of the top tier of VCs --- is probably not true of the asset class as a whole.
64-bit bitwise operations would be a big help.
That cuts both ways. Expecting the same quantity and quality of work to enjoy without a system that compensates the people who worked hard to produce it is also expecting something contrary to human nature. You can get so far with volunteer works, but ultimately we've all got rent to pay/kids to feed/etc.

Oh, the same old fallacy. How does that fit in with the studies that shows that "pirates" buy a lot[1], with the year over year MPAA record profits[2] or with a game company getting $1000000 before the game was even made?

[1]: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110727/16233815292/anothe... http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-898813.html

[2]: http://www.zeropaid.com/news/92692/piracy-who-mpaa-celebrate...
I guess as long as the name is memorable...

seems like a very smart acquisition, congrats!
Music piracy has been going on since they copied sheet music with pen & paper in the 17th century (yes, they were called "pirates" all the way back then). You don't need tech know-how to run a photocopier like some of our teachers did when we didn't have enough textbooks. It's not "a few people" with special skills.

Also, I need to point out that Copyright is not the only way to make a living. People really will give artists money without a threat of jail time. It's completely unnecessary.
A Proposal to Fix Online Identity
Hi there,

It might be a bit more helpful if you can explain what kind of people you are trying to connect with. A majority of HN has some sort of web startup experience.
‘Apple Should Be Worried If Anyone Else Has Any Success’ School of Thought
VEVO CEO tries to explain their hypocritical act of piracy at Sundance
What are these solutions? I help run a moderately-popular failblog exposing sexism in gaming, but aside from a few isolated cases, the advertising "interest" we get is people wanting to set up link exchanges advertising acai berries or whatever.

I'm presuming this is because the good ad networks don't need to look for sites to display on, but I haven't found anything else that's as good as AdSense. (And due to TOS, we can't run AdSense.)
Alan Moore refuses to have anything to do with the movies, and true to his predictions they seriously butchered the character.In the movie incarnation, very little remains of Alan Moore's V, except his hacker/trickster nature and a certain panache.

The literary V is an anarchist, somewhat disdainful of ordinary people's subservience, and decides to destroy the apparatus of the state whether the people want it or not. The book ends with England in chaos. The book hints that a figure like V is always needed, no matter what kind of government you live under.

The movie V is an outlaw, but he's still more of a liberal reformer. He gets rid of the bad leaders, while leaving the state intact, and then gathers people together to witness a symbolic action. In the movie, it's clear that being V is only necessary when you have a bad government, then you can get on with your normal life.

Nevertheless, Moore believes that truly iconic characters take on a life of their own and become humanity's "gods". And in some ways the V-figure is evolving beyond the media portrayals. Not as prickly and disengaged from humanity as the book, while jettisoning the 9-11 truther nonsense of the movie. Maybe heading for true "trickster god" status; a friend of humanity that destroys structures that constrain natural developments.
Why would you rather be able to hack something together than to understand the underlying theory? In my opinion that value system is backwards. I think the most respectable skill is algorithms, and innumeracy should be as embarrassing as illiteracy.
Lets take all the worst parts of C and add on top the worst parts of Java? So we can tell if we have memory leaks, but not where or why?

Why? What am I missing? Program and C or program in Java.
Unfixed
I agree with geuis above, JavaScript scope is simple to understand now. There is global scope, and there is function scope. That's it. And there's a certain elegance to that.
How close are we to truly photorealistic, real-time games?

Who cares? Does anyone really want that?

Players don't come back again and again to games like WoW or Farmville because of the graphics.

There's an argument to be made that obsession with higher and higher degrees of pixel-slinging has crippled the triple-A games market, leaving real invention and creativity (and ironically enough, the truly staggering hits, in terms of P/E) to the indie scene.
Distributing personal files without being subjected to fraudulent DMCA takedowns, like the ones that Warner Bros sent to any file containing the string "the box".
It's going to be very difficult to provide the same things Facebook does in a decentralized way (I've thought about the problems around such a project a lot and written up my ideas for an approach in a series of blog posts at http://carcaddar.blogspot.com/search/label/ClearSky - I've outlined the big problems and proposed workable solutions for all of them, but the implementation is difficult and will be hard to get right).

Justin Frankel released WASTE in 2003 and it does the basic P2P friendnet thing, but without a great user interface, ability to log in via the web browser from any random Internet cafe/computer lab, and a load of luck ("traction"), it's not going to work.
You taught in k-12?

I have no experience in k-12 teaching other than the project I was on two years ago. The project I mentioned in my previous post. I definitely have a negative bias toward what is done in k-12 but my experience two years ago made it clear that my views on what should be done to fix k-12 education were not based on sound evidence.

I do have 17 years of teaching experience in higher education.

I once co-taught a class with a colleague. She taught the first 8 weeks. I taught the second 8 weeks. It was calculus II. Students getting Cs and Ds under her did quite well with me and vice versa for the A/B students. Personality plays such a great role in the whole issue that I've begun to think that there is no way to fix education. I think it is a hugely complicated issue and that positive results are local to a classroom and the personality of the students/teacher.
Are you saying that they were as decentralized as Tribler?
I think the 'We came up with something better' comment is interesting as we really didn't see that coming - but somehow everything seemed to fall into place.

(Btw I'm the other Co-Founder :) )
What is up with this text on your home page, above the fold:

(*subliminal message - it's like a bright sun rising from the east, shining down rays, giving life to websites)

It is almost invisible text, a strong spam indicator for Google's robot. Maybe you were banned for suspicious web design?
Not to mention Microsoft, Craigslist, Broadcom, Godaddy, SAS, Dell, Siebel, Oracle, Cisco, Github, Zoho, Atlassian, Mailchimp, and more.

Oh wait...those were all started and built to very significant revenues without VC (at least not until they were already large and successful).

And that's just in the tech industry.
UMA works very well. Take the data that would be sent over the cell radio and send it over a wifi IPSEC connection instead. That is pretty much it. Heck it will even do realtime handoff between cell and wifi (in either direction).

The reason why it isn't very widely used is because that requires a very low level of integration. Typically the radio and wifi processing code have to be made by the same company and in the same chip. Blackberries have used UMA for years where it is fantastic. But you can't just add it to a random phone because it is almost certain that there isn't that level of radio and wifi integration available.

I've been in Sri Lanka talking to someone in Philadelphia using UMA (which connects to Tmobile in Washington state) where the traffic was going half way around the world and back again. It works perfectly - the other party didn't even know until I told them.

The newer Kineto solution isn't doing UMA because it can't - the radio interface and handoff isn't there. It does still work, but their code is buggy.
Does anyone have experience with Clojure using openjdk6 for ARM? I've got one of those embedded devices (armv5) and I'm curious what the performance is like with such a minimal amount of memory (~128-512MB).
New Modular Solar Towers Promise Easy Green Power
Theodolite App for iOS is Breathtaking
Of course it's my opinion. I think it is a worthless activity. I would never use it. Others would be successful with it. That was my point to Patrick. He found some activities worthless and abstracted that to an opinion about worthlessness in the classroom. In a classroom with 30 people some are going to find virtually any activity worthless. You can't please everyone and so making a general statement about worthless classroom activities is not helpful.

I didn't accuse Patrick of hypocrisy. I accused him of irony. Big difference.
"Organized crime" or just regular crime?
In this workflow, the configuration being applied to a server is whatever people happen to have rsynced to it. That may allow for quick iteration in their QA environment (as long as people avoid stepping on each others toes), but wouldn't it be better if the sandbox and production servers pulled their configuration from the sandbox and production git branches?
Cash Mobs (Or How to Make a Flash Mob Look Useful)
I ask the same. How does she know this?

I know this because, this trend (shutting down secure network protocols) started on and off, like 1 year ago.
extortionists.

There's a growing band of pirates (the web kind) who hold sites to ransom via their massive botnets, in exchange for payment -- 'protection money'.
New power source discovered
There's a possibility he's been killed, and the comments there are decrying the use of Kimchi to describe Asians as racist?
One approach is to structure your program in reasonably-sized modules, as usual, but to write parts of your program in a literate programming style. If a particular module is algorithmically tricky, for example, I've found that it often helps to write down very narrative-style comments, and try to organize both English narrative and code for easy reading. This helps make the code better, and for some reason seems to make difficult algorithms easier to keep track of while I'm writing them. I've written some of my best code this way.

Literate programming doesn't need to be all-or-nothing!
systems fail for many reasons at once.

Disagree.

Now, I will allow that very complex systems can mask that root cause.

One might _never_ be able to find out the root 'why' for a number of reasons: lack of time, inability to see into the black box where the failure happened. Perhaps everyone is dead, the data you need destroyed, the widget is lost under the ocean.

And that sometimes the root cause failure isn't a hard technical thing but something squishy like 'we failed to budget for disk space' or 'the CIO insisted we do it that way'.

But there is _always_ a root cause.
Is it safe to have MacRuby as dependency on your iOS apps?
Should be able to use Type.prototype.method (e.g., Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty).
What is the logic behind waiting to release Hollywood movies outside of the US?
That's exactly my point. Students remember the content and the professors from those who took pride in their work and made class exciting and interesting. I acknowledge that the process is evolutionary, but from a personal stance, I have had professors who have gone beyond the information or examples listed in their resources to expose up to date examples which created the ability to relate and better understand.

As I said, and you conversely reiterated, if the professor makes class exciting, captivating and relevant, students will enjoy coming to class more times than not.

These professors aren't the ones having to worry about students notes being redistributed.

I do agree that our education is ripe for significant change as well... on all fronts.

"Particularly if people are ignorant of the value of the things they are sweeping aside." ??? Just as many other industries are being reshaped due to technology and innovation, the same goes for education. Grade "A" content and self learning material are more accessible now than ever. A teacher is no longer necessary to learn.
I was just thinking about how I could use something like this last weekend. Looks great, time to try it out.
Ask anyone who's been there and they'll tell you that load balancers only make DDoS attacks harder. Unless you have something like AWS AutoScaling, they'll just generate more traffic - and if you do, it would quickly become a financial DDoS. That's why sites like Yahoo.com have been taken out: you have finite server capacity but the attacker merely has to find another another exploitable system somewhere on the Internet.

The way you deal with a DDoS is hard: you can try to identify distinguishing characteristics of the attack so traffic can be blocked as far out as possible and you try to figure out who's behind the attack so you can get law-enforcement involved. Otherwise you're just playing whack-a-mole with compromised home computers all around the globe…
IPad 3 rumors: iPad 3 resolution comparison with iPad 2
Dreamliner spells out "787" & Boeing logo over US during test flight
And now how about a "dirty secret" for Kineto Wireless mentioned in the article several times. When their code is running on an Android device, even when wifi calling is disabled, it spews an endless stream of messages to Android's log (aka logcat). Often several messages every two seconds. Almost all at Error level even though it just appears to be signal strength information. This is ridiculously amateurish. It is highly annoying as a developer to have to keep filtering this crap out. It also implies they don't bother to check what is happening with their own code.

I have emailed their support who didn't respond. I even wrote a Google Plus post about it:

https://plus.google.com/110166527124367568225/posts/h4jK38n4XYR

I often find their code gets wedged too. It gets into a state where it isn't working, but you can't enable or disable it. The only recourse is to reboot your phone.
Algorithms aren't really something you can just sit down and bang out. It takes a certain amount of time to do the abstract thinking, put the details on paper, then implement. Coming up with a famous algorithms that we hear of everyday won't happen overnight. They are hard to design, thats something you have to accept and move past.
You seem to be implying that a publicly-viewable github repo or active stackoverflow account are necessary conditions for coding outside of class.
I've found that most people will correctly do

1 - 4^2

The answer is -15.

So what is

0 - 4^2

Most will say -16.

To be consistent we must agree that -4^2 is -16 since it is the same thing as 0 - 4^2.

It takes a while for students to understand this. I still get calculus students who mess it up.
As I understand it, eastern european criminal organizations (I hesitate to use the term "mafia") control pretty big botnets, and use them to do exactly this.

Although github is sort of an odd target for them to be going after. Maybe their hired geeks are just testing their own software - github seems like the sort of place that would figure out how to defeat a DDoS attack, and by learning how, the black hats could improve their tools.
...like rational, scientifically backed arguments, will burst MPAA/RIAA's bubble. For anyone on the outside, the findings in this article are common sense. So is the fact that MPAA/RIAA's business model is severely broken. Yet, that doesn't matter when you have Washington on your payroll. Unfortunately.
Couldn't they just keep adding IP's to some blacklist (not htaccess, but something more efficient), and the attackers will eventually run out of IPs to attack from? There's only a finite # of computers you can really have control of. So you end up blocking some innocents, but you take care of that after the attack is over.
But why Github? Wouldn't a less tech-savvy business be much more likely to cave in, and have a better cash flow? (e.g., porn and gambling sites?)
It's a joke, and was made after the fact. My attempt at humor. I think you might be the only person that has noticed it.

And it wasn't my website that was banned, but rather the AdWords account was permanently suspended. Google's crawlers/robots have no issue with my website.

> (*subliminal message - it's like a bright sun rising from the east, shining down rays, giving life to websites)

I just noticed one day that the boxshot was the color of the sun (yellow), and is displayed on the right side of the website, which is east, and is the direction where the sun rises each day. I thought it was fitting, considering the sun gives life, and the product does the same for websites.
New source is Twitter? How is this a story? Seems like everyday there is a trending topic about a false report of a dead celebrity.