skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most. Stupid. Idea. Ever.

JavaScript is a language that misses a lot of important CS and the most important of all is language build in modules.

Apart from that you should start with either a fully functional language or a fully imperative OO language. These are theoratical distinct language classes. And JavaScript is in the middle, you will confuse people.

At my university they started with Java.. also not the best choice. However OOP is very important and just neglecting that initially is not a good idea.

From a theoretical point of view, javascript is not the best language to start with. In fact as a language, its quite inferior to other function-imperative language such as Python.
Perhaps I am missing something here. I looked at the demo page in FF10, Chrome17, and IE 8, and I see different spacing in rendering across those platforms (mostly in IE8, but FF10 and Chrome17 are not the same either)

http://i.imgur.com/SMwHD.png
Correct me if I'm wrong on this:

Those may be unique for your browser right now, but if you were to update your fonts or your plugins, that would generate a completely new user and all their information about you would be lost. Same as if you delete your cookies, but I bet it happens more frequently.
I can see something good come out of it, but couldn't the same be done by having a public annotation tool that any programmer could use to express his concerns about the code but without having the ability to block it? Truly bad code could be dealt with in the same way you would if you found it in the repository -- talk with the guy who wrote it.
This is different than MailChimp, since it's fully integrated within wordpress.
It's fun to use! Drag > drop > send!
The pencil seems to work better, perhaps because the graphite has some resistance. I usually feel it a bit when I use a key.

In this case, the people in the warehouse were unable to carry metal in because the delay at the metal detectors would mean they got no break time. The nub of pencil would be ideal.
Most cables don't run on the seabed.
I think jQuery Mobile will dictate how your HTML looks like to a certain degree.

Oh, absolutely. But it uses standard elements a lot- so a textbox is an <input>, a dropdown is a <select>, and so on. It depends how much you depend on their UI defaults, but in my case I've found it a very simple process to bring the UI over. It needs some CSS tweaks to look pretty again, but the rest "just works".
Quest for quirky quantum particles may have struck gold
Not sure how well that would work in practice but it resonates well with me. What hooked me was the title and the word free, the advantage with free is that I don't have to make up my mind on how much it is worth. My first reaction was that I could, since it was free, just grab it and see what it was.

But the instant I came to the site I felt guilty. I ended up paying the suggested price only because the suggested price was sensible (if the suggested price had been more I'd probably would have paid less) and because leanpub seems awesome (just found out about it). Since I know nothing about the book itself I didn't take that into account when buying, it could of course be worth much more.

EDIT: DRM-free and giving me multiple formats to choose from (and not forcing me to select one) is awesome and is one of the reasons I really wanted to buy it. Otherwise I would have had to strip the DRM first (I don't accept DRM on e-books that I buy, even if it makes me a criminal).
Very similar to a proposal I made a few years ago for signing of SCRIPT tags: http://blog.jgc.org/2009/09/solving-xss-problem-by-signing-t...
Tell HN: Come learn how to solve Stripe's Capture The Flag
I think that may be a bit over-the-top...
How PayPal and Apple’s Fraud Policies Punish the Honest User
In mid-November last year, I woke up to the sound of my inbox suddenly being flooded with new messages. I have things set to alert me whenever PayPal, Wells Fargo, or iTunes emails me because I know that means that money is either being given to me or taken away. To my surprise, what I discovered that morning was incredibly concerning, and would result in what could be the most frustrating customer experience of my life.
Ask HN: Anyone else has problems with Dropbox?
Dropbox reverted my files to old versions once before. Now it happened again. I am not going to use this service anymore.
Don't take what's not yours.

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\QUIX.TXT

x among the hens, the fly among the
honey. He has defrauded justice, and opposed his king and lawful master,
for he opposed his just commands; he has, I say, robbed the galleys of
their feet, stirred up the Holy Brotherhood which for many years past has
been quiet, and, lastly, has done a deed by which his soul may be lost
without any gain to his body." Sancho had told the curate and the barber
of the adventure of the galley slaves, which, so much to his glory, his
master had achieved, and hence the
I got these on Chrome and they work quite well together:
AdBlockPlus, Ghostery, DoNotTrackPlus.
I guess they are available on Firefox too.
At x264 we've been doing code reviews for years -- the effect is so dramatic that I'd never do anything else ever again if I could help it.

Every single patch is reviewed by (at a minimum) both main devs, and preferably some other people too. The effects are many.

Everyone understands, to some extent, all the code that's committed. We don't end up with black boxes that only one person has any idea about.

A huge number of bugs and bad design decisions are caught. There isn't a programmer in the world who can't benefit from another person's perspective. Code review forces discussion about the choices made in a patch.

Finally, it also lets less-experienced programmers join in; you don't have to be a super hacker in order to comment on parts of a patch, and we welcome comments by literally anyone. There have been many bugs or dubious choices that were found by people who had very little knowledge of the overall codebase.

Working without code reviews is the sign of either an egotistical programmer or a project that has been so resource-crunched that the result will end up as a pile of hacks anyways. I would never recommend it outside of testing and prototyping.
My previous laptop was a Dell XPS M1330. It ran linux well, although the fingerprint reader never worked properly for authentication outside of Windows. Unfortunately, it was one of the many laptops from many manufacturers that included a defective NVidia graphics chipset. Dell issued a firmware "upgrade" that simply cranked up fan speed (making the laptop run noisier and consume battery power quicker). They also extended the warranty slightly. My particular laptop lasted until a week after the extension and promptly fried itself. Arguably, if I had not dutifully installed that firmware "upgrade" it would have burned out under warranty.

So, I knew what had happened to my laptop. The symptoms of a M1330 with a burnt out graphics chipset were common knowledge online. I didn't feel like buying a new laptop right then and there, so I decided to contact Dell and try to pay for a replacement part. I was routed to a call-center in India where the employees had a set script and absolutely nothing would deter them from following it. Even though I knew what was wrong and just wanted the part to fix it, they told me I had to pay them $50 so they could diagnose the problem themselves. i.e. $50 so they could move to a different section in their script and, if it was well made, tell me what I already knew! I tried to escalate the issue, but no luck. Dell had clearly dumped their customers on this third party call-center and cut all backwards lines of communication.

I know other companies may be little better and this mess was really Nvidia's fault, but I refuse to send more business to a company that I know will do everything in their power to avoid taking care of me. They provided a hot-fix that they knew would just barely delay failure until my laptop was off warranty, and then they treated off-warranty service like a money-making third-party contract.

Dell ultrabooks? No thank-you.
"A lucrative market that he said is worth $3 trillion," sounds like a nice market to be. In the last couple of years it looked like Dell was meandering. If the whole time they were internally focusing B2B it will pay off. I know our company, runs entirely on Dell's systems, a high end retailer. Michael Dell's supply chain is great.
http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct...
What is the incentive to do that? You are essentially going to stick your neck out (there can't be a bug in this, it was approved by Fullname, it says so right here) with no benefit to yourself.
$205,000,000 of Funding For Big Data Startups
They're all reading from the same books, thus the same mistakes.
>We aren't a company that designs cool phone hardware."

That's just where we make 70% of our profits :-)
The real problem is the `MacBook Air`, not security...
If the goal is to learn JavaScript as a first language, maybe it's better to first learn it on Codecademy. Otherwise I really use Khan Academy for everything. Also, JS is not a good first language for anyone. Never.
Or any one?
Yeah, I'm thinking about that. I really like the idea of going to Austin but the reason I'm thinking of SF is because the software / data scene there is off the charts. A friend of mine told me yesterday it's like what Paris 1910 was for painters.
Haptic feedback would be great but there hasn't been any evidence of the feature existing.
It's "industry news" rather than something that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

Although "News" is in its name, I think HN would be far more interesting without it. News includes industry gossip - and HN has more and more of that. And pg's guidelines don't actually mention news. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Certainly, the iPad 3 is covered on TV news.

Don't get me wrong: I'm interested in it, but I can get this news everywhere. e.g. http://www.reddit.com/r/apple
Was happy to pay the asking price if not more - stopped as soon as I had to use PayPal - dragged the slider to zero.
Ahh - agreed. Getting around PDT for $2,500 and having incredibly cheap leverage makes for an interesting market (though one bad trade and your done - you have to put it all on the line with such a small account)! Though if you do not have that much capital, jumping into futures/options trading against the best in the world - you will get your head chopped off. The far shot of a reality such as the one on reddit is not a good one to try to reproduce. I definitely recommend he read "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. While it's obviously a biased book (even just taking into account the title) - it does shed some light on the subject.
Maybe Microsoft gives jobs to smart people and lets them work on whatever they want just to prevent those people from working for its competitors and possibly changing the game unpredictably. Microsoft has nowhere to go but down. It's probably worth it for Microsoft to pay them not to work for anyone else even with no intention of productizing their research activities.
There are two issues here: leaving out levels of technical implementation detail ("I don't care about the specific DPI of the display, just that it's higher than before"), and using Apple-coined phrases to do so ("retina" rolls off the tongue much more nicely than "very high-density").

I'm not sure whether you were originally taking offense at the first, the second, or both; how would you feel if instead of talking about 'retina displays' people just said that the iPad 3 would have a 'higher-density screen'?

(as a sidenote, Android technically does have an equivalent shorthand for the various pixel densities the OS supports, but I don't know of any Android manufacturers who actively advertise a "XHDPI" display)
More likely they are better at avoiding the authorities. That is what I usually try to do.
Apologies.

From your comment, "Dell is using a worse panel in their 13" 'ultrabook' than Apple does in their 11" Air", I assumed you interpreted the 720p resolution as strictly 1280x720 instead of being concerned about PPI as both the MBA 11" and the Dell have the same resolution.
That's not strictly true.

First, most EDFA (Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers) need power to operate since the lasers that perform the pumping action are local to the doped sections of fiber.

Second, most submarine cables make extensive use of Raman amplification which leverages the transmission fiber as a gain medium via forward or backward pumping of lasers with frequencies chosen to produce Raman gain.

In both cases, you need an amplifier every 70-100km (150km in some cases) in order to have a usable signal on a long span.
My guess is that the Chinese open source community is still developing at the early stage where forking & learning from those popular/successful open source projects is still a common scene. When community grows bigger, sharing/contributing would certainly be more common. It's certainly a good suggestion for them though.
How To Grow Your Business By Answering Your Customers' (Real) Questions
I am regretting not getting the 11 inch. I have the 13 and it is a delight. I travel by coach bus to work and it is a delight to work with.

The small screen size does not bother me. The only bother is when something starts eating CPU, battery starts draining fast. So GitXL = kill often. CPU is good enough. I am not playing video games here. SSD is f-ing awsome. No DVD drive is a mitzvah since I never use it (I have no DVDs anymore even for purchased software).

The only downer is the lack of ethernet plug, but can be remedied by a purchase from apple. I need it from time to time for network admin purposes.

Edit: The AIR's physical form makes it very comfortable to type on. 99.9% of the time I am using it with no mouse, no keyboard, no external monitor. In fact I got so used to it I do most of my development on my recliner.
I used to have that, but nowadays I never close my browser anymore. I don't switch off my notebook, it only goes to sleep. I only restart the browser when it crashes (not that often these days) or some OS update forces a reboot.
Crunch time at TechCrunch: Site has lost 35% of its traffic since September
The ways in which an anti-authoritarian outlook manifest can vary widely. I mean, we stereotype it as a "smash the system, direct action now" thing, but creativity, intellectual curiosity, and a sincere desire to reorganize the system(even through completely legal, above-board means like electoral politics and entrepreneurship) can all get demonized as viewpoints that challenge the establishment. Once collective views are in place, the discussion in most people's minds is over; it takes a strong individual effort to work your way back to truth.

An great example of an authoritarian stereotype controlling the debate is in our discourse about anarchy. In any mainstream forum of the USA, the mere mention of the term is an impossibility - the assumption of anarchy equating to chaos dominates the discussion. Instead, many of the concepts from anarchic literature are now shared, in a modified form, via the less besmirched term of "libertarianism." We don't equate the Tea Party movement with anarchy, yet the connection is all over Wikipedia.
Indeed, looks like an extension of that to HTML and images. With the HTML is signed, then scripts just need to be hashed, not signed with your key.
Development is mostly prototyping -- you may work on a big project but you end up prototyping a solution to each of the small problems that happens (you know exactly how to solve a problem? great it takes little time to actually write the code, which means you will spend most of your time working on what you don't know) during the development.

After you have tryed different approaches to solve a particular problem and selected the best one, you want to hand the authority to decline that solution over to somebody who hasn't worked closely at the problem and has looked at only one solution for a few minutes? That can only end badly.
I'm not sure about the haptic feedback rumors. Apple doesn't have a strong history with risky, new, experimental technology. I think their style is more that of waiting for a technology to mature a bit before integrating it thoughtfully into their product.

If you look at products like iPhone or iPad for example, most of their features had a first, proof of concept not-too-usable bare-bones implementation on other systems years ago (iCloud, Facetime, Siri, App store, iTunes, pre-iPhone touch screen devices that almost worked... ). This has lead many to complain that Apple unjustly implies that they invented these. What they often do instead, is take existing technologies and add Apple magic sauce to make it "just work". That's what they are good at.

I just don't see them releasing something experimental that has even a small chance of not working as advertised.

EDIT: As linked below, http://senseg.com/ seems to suggest that this technology is more mature than I've anticipated. Still, if this at least half works I'd first expect to see it first on an Android tablet and a year later on an iPad.
I do find it somewhat ironic that the demo page includes the old

> If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/demo/

I also find the name "collusion" unfortunate. Part of my paycheck comes from advertising, and I include google analytics on my site. However, I also work hard to have a crystal clear privacy policy and I don't opt in to the shared analytics logging for my site, so the data only goes to me. But I'm lumped in with the scummiest of ad networks.

Mozilla, of course, offers a free browser. Their funding ultimately comes from the "collusion" they're talking about here and the search traffic they generate feeds it. More directly, you can argue that they sell our search data to the highest(?) bidder. Why isn't DDG the default search provider? Why aren't third party cookies disabled by default and the Do Not Track header enabled by default?

These are actually hard questions, and trite soundbites that ignore actual economics and the tensions inherent in the internet we have today do us no favors. Transparency is the answer in many of these problems we've created for ourselves, I believe, but we need to be able to talk about them with equal intellectual clarity.

edit: as an example, I really liked EFF's Peter Eckersley's quotes in the ars technica article on DNT today:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/can-do-not-t...
I'm also working on an Android group project (3 students) backed by a repo (svn in our case). We're sharing 1 tablet and relying on the emulator a lot. We actually have planned prototyping to Android phones similarly as you did. Can you say more about how this worked out for you?
It reminds me of Latanya Sweeney's work in 1990 that demonstrated that 87% of the US population can be identified by just their gender, zip code, and full date of birth.

An interesting project might be to create a database having a table with the useragent hash as the primary key, and associate each identity in the user table to a number of these useragent hashes.
Really? It works fine for me. That said, they could do with paginating their comments, or something- take this page for example:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/28/2829143/apple-ipad-3-event...

full of comments (with images!) that slow down the page load.
I wouldn't buy it. 15 inches is too much for the bus. 11 inches is idea.
It looks like they've gotten access to Samsung's Exynos 4412, which is definitely not a sub-$20 part.
Outsourcing core business responsibilities
I would disagree in this case. The mere fact that a JS engine is present in any browser alone makes it compelling for those that have never programmed before. There really is no setup, and the OS becomes (to a degree) irrelevant. Further, javascript is an easy language to prototype in, and, at the basic level, easy enough to teach and write.
That is part of my point.

The other half of my point is that in some transactions, "should" and "fair" don't matter. Either the terms make sense for them, or they don't. Terms that make sense aren't fair? Can't reasonably accept them? Ok. No deal.

VCs are professional deal makers. They can't code, they can't round HTML corners, they can't even write copy. Their one skillset is optimizing the problem of allocating other people's money in small companies for optimal return.

Parent commenter is right in that you should push back and negotiate as hard as you can. If you're a better bet than any of the 10 other prospects they're prepared to fund instead of you, you might win. Otherwise, nope. But there's no sense getting angry about it; nobody can reasonably say that a venture capitalist is obligated to fund anyone, on any terms. The sole moral obligation of a VC is to obtain the maximum return for their limited partners. Some of them bend over backwards to try to make things better for company "operators"; in a very reasonable way of looking at things, the VCs who do that may be the ones who are acting unethically.
Possibly, but isn't the entire carnival of Apple the same?

Tell me which bit of my post was not factual?
Is there anything like this for landlines?
no it was me, thanks
More important people (author, publisher) have commented on this already, so this is nothing but a very humble additional opinion here:

I think you have the best reason to take the author up on his offer. You cannot purchase it. He offers you a way to get it for free. That's a good match.

For me, I came to that site lead by the title. I like raganwald's contribution here and expected something like a free 'Learn Python the hard way' style thing. Or a blog-articles-in-pdf. With maybe little (publishing!) effort and just a heads-up for the people here.[1]

Seeing that it is actually a book in progress I left. I cannot pay for purely technical reasons (No credit card, this country doesn't want to give me one and my home country revoked mine when they didn't see any incoming salary for roughly a year). But I earn a pretty damn good salary here and got money in the bank. So _I_ would need to feel guilty for free-loading if I just grabbed the book.

You really shouldn't. And good luck anyway.

Edit:
1: Actually, after rereading raganwald's comment I think that is pretty much correct. But the site says 'Note: You are buying an Alpha Book. New essays will be added on a regular basis, and you will receive updates for free.' so I don't understand how this 'sunk costs' works in this case?
That's good news - Dell's (and HP's, for that matter) business machines are simply awesome. I'll never buy a consumer laptop again - heck, the M4600 and M6600 are faster and better looking (IMO) than the most expensive gaming laptops - why would I ever go for the latter?
> For a scientific study it's really lacking facts

How so? All you've read is one blog post about it. If you want numbers, there's some freely available in the supplemental information that goes along with the published study (at the bottom of [0]). Full-text is probably available through a local library.

Regardless, there's 7 total studies, of which you mentioned one, and the least interesting one in my opinion. Additionally, it's never described as a causal relationship (despite the Ars headline), and there's no reason it needs to be. "X predicts Y" does not say anything about whether X causes Y. There's nothing illogical about it.

Unless you want to imply they doctored the numbers or don't know how to calculate a simple correlation, I see no reason to question their motives just because you didn't like the results they found.

[0] http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.abst...
Think about it: When I point a projector at a white screen, and display an image with black regions, those regions are actually the same color as the white screen they're projected onto. "Black" is entirely defined by its contrast by the surrounding regions, so just having less-bright areas will give you at least an approximation of black.