skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah I didn't realize Python's limitations (if it has them here) were part of the mix. I strongly agree with your general point and will go one further: this has a huge impact on the kind of system that over time gets developed in that language. It conditions what gets written, which conditions what's easy to do next and eventually what's possible to do next. By making different things easy, languages bias the programmer toward thinking different thoughts. I wish more people would figure this out: it would make discussion of these things much more interesting. (Instead, all we really do is comparison of code snippets in different languages, which kind of misses the whole point.)
I believe there is a start-up that is gaining traction that is looking to remedy all of those issues. I can't remember what it's called right now, but the concept is you learn to program online in an environment that shows you where the mistakes are and also what the outcomes are to keep you motivated. Seems like an ideal situation; and frankly it's a little surprising something like this hasn't come out sooner considering most programmers go through this sort of pain... Maybe it's seen as a right of passage, if you can put up with the BS, you deserve to be a programmer?
Standard design patterns are important ... if you program in Java and similar languages. But many of these are completely unnecessary when using a dynamic language like Python - and many others.
Lots of us do use actual applications on our actual computers. If I didn't receive a GMail app with my Android phone by default, I would go download a Thunderbird-equivalent app. Web applications are bloated sacks of and perform similarly on anything smaller than my desktop-replacement laptop.
Provided it isn't anywhere near direct sunlight: a plexiglass greenhouse. Perfect scribble-everywhere breakout space. As inspired by Hub Westminster.
Com Lag: Slow Media, & The Occupation Of Online Time
Free Big Data eBooks from O’Reilly
I use TexMate for Rails; emacs for Lisp & other stuff; and vi for quick git edits and things like that (also remote edits)
Some Excellent Open Data Sources
Wow, random. I'm also taking that course right now :P My last course at the school.
Out of control licensing and regulations are why health care is so expensive in the first place.

While something like this bill would be a very good thing, I can't see it coming anywhere close to passing in the current cultural-political climate.
In this world, there will always be people who will attempt to sell you a shoddy product, and snake oil salesman.

But because that's the case, and you got a quality product, you're saying to sit tight, don't get out of the building, don't try to sell... and hope people will eventually choose you?

So how exactly is a consumer startup going to get people who want to know X to visit your site about X?
Lets Talk About Something Diabolical: A PyPy Intro (David Beazley PyCon keynote)
>This makes absolutely no sense. This is borderline an insult to system developers -- because system software is what the device is running directly.

It's ok. We're used to it. From the desktop to the laptop to the netbook to the phone, Mozilla and Google have been trying to exterminate us for years.
I'm sure the BirchBox team are lovely people and good on them for building a successful business, but they did not invent the idea of subscribing for a box of goodies.

BirchBox launched in May 2010 (source: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-11-08/strategy/3037... in which it's already described as a "NetFlix [clone] for beauty", NetFlix having started in 1999).

startupschwag.com started operating in mid-2007, sending startup t-shirts by subscription.

http://testtube.newbeauty.com/ appears to have been running since early 2007 in the exact same market that BirchBox is in.

Wine of the Month Club (.com) pre-dates the Internet, sending wine by subscription since 1972.

Why would you consider applying an existing business model to a new market to be cloning or copying; especially when there's no market overlap? Applying a successful model from one industry to enhance another seems to be the very definition of innovation.
Fun article.

However, this is a harder problem than just bilingual Swedish English. There are many other non-english-language speakers using these. What to choose?
Why would it be difficult? That's just a lazy sequence or iterator in Python terms. In fact the standard way of writing that in Python is with a function and `yield` or a generator expression, not with a class.

def read_csv(file):
for line in file:
yield parse_csv_line(line)

-or-

def read_csv(file):
return (parse_csv_line(line) for line in file)

-or-

def read_csv(file):
return map(parse_csv_line, file)

-or-

from functools import partial
read_csv = partial(map,parse_csv_line)

None of which involve defining a class.
No, unfortunately. Most of the videos going around (read: all of them) are from MWC where B2G was demoed.

The development group is VERY active on IRC and there was some chatter at the time about that. Some of the slight lags in the demo were actually parts of the CSS transition they use (originally intended to avoid accidental swipes when they wanted taps) and was tweeked to be much better not long afterwards.

More recently there have been significant improvements in the actual CSS animation on the gecko side (improvements which will hit firefox in the future) which means everything feels even faster and more natural.

At this point B2G is making significant progress _every day_ so about the only real way to get an up to date idea of how it runs is to either read the github commit log frequently or put it on a device (and currently that means a GSII)
Did you try double tap to zoom?
Seeking Technical Co-Founder
I am an institutional misfit. In an era where we are faced with titanic institutional failure, I am going going about creating my own institution through which the world can live, work and play meaningfully better in human terms.

IDENTITI is an exclusive invite-only social network and lifestyle media platform through which inspiring leaders and brands can target their select and loyal fan-base with their unique ways of living, working and playing meaningfully better in human terms.
An interesting idea. Bitcoin seemed secure at first because it seemed silly to think that an individual user could hold >50% of the total processing power of the network, but now that miners are assembling in mining pools, the risk of a pool achieving >50% of the processing power is much higher.
- Everything is already one terrible interface for everything. Make a better interface.

- The better companies will minimize this. We still depend on cloud services like Gmail, github et.. on a day to day basis. And they still mess it up occasionally.

- There are ready designers who know nothing about UI design for each particular device pumping out apps.

- Look at the linux ecosystem. I think its working out.
I'm sorry, desktop GUI applications are done for.

Someone please notify my entire computer setup of its impending death. Also, my wife, my mother, my brother, my stepfather, my father, and everyone else I know.

Hey, everyone, your computers are dead! It's time to convert to WebSmartiPhonePadTablets running nothing but web-browsers! Sure, you don't want to because they run like crap compared to actually writing native programs, but they're a growth market for corporate behemoths!
Imagining the Future of the University
A closure is essentially just a class by another name and with slightly different syntax. Yeah, you can replace classes with them, but to what purpose except to be able to say "no classes"?
Well sure, but how is the Web 2.0 bubble supposed to keep going without trying to displace the entire actual computer?

Someday they'll try and download the hardware as FPGA over a RESTful web API, too.
In Python, you can get that exact same behavior by writing a generator function. I'm sure this code has shortcomings -- it doesn't handle comment lines, for example -- but something like this will parse basic CSV:

def readcsv(file):
for line in file:
if line:
yield tuple(field.strip() for field in line.split(','))

No explicit class definitions necessary! And you can write the same kind of code. Or, if you want to be a bit too clever for your own good, you can shorten it to this:

rows = readcsv(open('data.csv', 'r'))
vals, avgs, stds = zip(*[map(int, row) for row in rows])

At no point here have I used the "class" keyword!
I agree completely. No idea if Brandon intended to sign himself up for this, but it seems like if somebody takes point on actually getting this conference started (provided they narrow it down as you suggest), that's simply the tipping point from nothing into a conference actually happening. So even if the plan isn't perfect yet (and certainly there is more to be said about than than even your comments), it still has a much larger chance of happing now that Brandon has gotten the proverbial ball rolling with this post. I am excited, personally!
Found it; Codeacademy, http://www.codecademy.com/#!/exercises/0
I'm all in favor of crowdfunding, but this sounds a lot like an excuse to gut transparency and disclosure regulations so another stock-market bubble can get (back to) going.
Where to Sell Your iPad 2 to Raise Money for the New iPad
Chrome being penalized was a bit of a special case. Google got caught (even though it wasn't directly them) and they gave a harsher punishment to themselves because they claim they hold themselves to a higher standard. The whole thing was really damage control to save their reputation, they already had a lot of scandals this year.

In reality, links are almost never seen as a negative. Which is really a shame, because it makes it harder for good-guy SEO's to legitimately build links when you can just buy 10,000 on Fiverr and not worry about it. And most black-hat SEOs buy links from many players, so even if some are discounted they won't usually still come out on top.

Google is getting better at it though. Recently they've been cracking down on blog networks. This is purely conjecture, but I do believe that links are on their way out as the primary signal.
What surprises me is that no-one mentioned inheritance when speaking about classes.
I am not a fan of classes and I prefer the functional approach, whenever possible. In my experience, I found that classes make sense as part of a hierarchy, that is, when subclassed to override/specialize methods or to describe interfaces, like type-classes in Haskell.
It doesn't. And remember, you can always go back and finish. Maybe not at the same place, but you can finish somewhere. I would suggest ending the semester though, not dropping out in the middle. You get credit for the current semester this way and you won't have to pay for it again hopefully.
Linux isn't an operating system, it's a kernel, the OS is Boot-to-Gecko, in the same way that Android is an OS with a Linux kernel.
Darth Vader's Weekend Supercar Spotted
In case anybody was wondering: other things that Alexander Stepanov wrote, aside from that paragraph, include the C++ STL.
The State Decoded: State codes, for humans.
This wasn't the norm because IE at the time couldn't handle :hover events properly on all delegations.

So everytime you used CSS :hover, you still needed a javascript shim to keep IE happy.
Oracle v Google: Android 'infringement' case set for trial on 16 April
I think your suggestions are really useful, but on the other hand, I think for something as broad as C, an initial test with a measuring stick is required before figuring out the specifics. I mean, with C, you could go in such diverse directions as microcontroller programming all the way to desktop application development. It may be better to figure out how to reconcile C's broad applicability before booking a venue.
Continuing with the rest of your paragraph in your first link:

There are many constructions that are ambiguous, there's no way to parse them and decide what they mean, that you can't trust the compiler to do. For example, you use the "less-than" and "greater-than" signs not only to mean less-than and greater-than but also in templates. There are lots of little things like this, and many things in the implementation, that you can't be sure the compiler will do anything reasonable with.

And he goes on to suppose what another CS practitioner might say:

DDJ: You've mentioned Edsgar Dijkstra. What do you think of his work?

DK: His great strength is that he is uncompromising. It would make him physically ill to think of programming in C++.

JWZ, who Peter Norvig called the best programmer that he ever worked with, offered a scathing analysis of C++ and its contribution to the failure of Netscape. (Coders at Work http://www.codersatwork.com/.) In the same book, Ken Thompson offered a similarly negative view of the language and its genesis.

For some detailed issues, read all of http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/. Funny but not funny.

I say this as one who spent 10 years programming in C++. Those dirty corners that Knuth mentioned are different with every team practicing C++, resulting in a style guide that cordons off chunks of the language.
> tldr; apt needs to absorb homebrew.

An excellent package manager that exists for 14 years already is being told to mimicry a primarily inferior set of cruthes? The world has definitely gone mad.
Do people really go to programming conferences for keynotes? My experience has been that the hallway conversations are alone worth more than keynotes.

Many keynotes sessions tend to be disappointing because there is not enough time to dive into technical details, or the presenter is not sure if they should be focusing on the movement as opposed to their technical contributions.
If so, then for the benefit of any Python newbies here: "except ImportError" is the idiomatic way to handle this situation, it it clearly communicates intent, and prevents masking legitimate errors. One fairly common pattern is to try to import one module, and if it's not installed, to go for a backup. For example, if I need to parse JSON, the simplejson library is significantly faster than the (completely API-compatible) standard library "json" module:

try:
import simplejson as json
except ImportError:
import json

I'm pretty sure I've seen those exact four lines of code in the internals of Tornado and Flask, among others.
Someone should make a JS framework to easily integrate 'Next page' / 'previous page' and map it to a universal keyboard shortcut that isn't used for other things.

It's not as easy as it should be to go from page to page on some sites and would be cool if there was a way to do it via the keyboard!
It would be perhaps be useful to throw an error saying "X object has no attribute Y, did you mean Z instead?".
A good idea.
I’m not sure I agree. Sure, programming is a craft, and the only way to learn it is to do it. But I see no reason why a book can’t serve as an introduction, giving the reader projects to complete and guidance toward completing them. Being that they lack interactivity and mentorship, sure, books are difficult to make into what beginners need. But just because they’re not the best medium doesn’t mean they should be completely discounted.
244 years later, Encylopedia Britannica is going out of print
Defining abstract datatypes and legal operations on those datatypes is useful whether you do it with objects or Haskell type classes or C++ generics. It's easy to go overboard with objects but explicit interface definitions are a lot easier to reason about then big grab bags of functions.
(46.51.216.187)
I'm not sure about the others, but Google has a sizable NYC office (and a moderate sized Boston office) and allegedly the salaries are adjusted up to account somewhat for cost of living.
Your Brain on Fiction
Setting up a server in a back room in your office is a much different task than setting up a server at Big Co. scale though, they basically aren't even the same task at all.
Like BF, Come Join us
Very cool! I'd very much like to be able to sort by popularity, so when I'm trying to find an off-the-shelf library for something I have a general sense of what has support in the community.

I've put together a pull request which aims to accomplish this goal at https://github.com/madrobby/microjs.com/pull/232.
I think that a lot of people would just like to see a direct comparison, that's all.
are we talking about a startup or a resort?
Single payer != free. Unless you manage to create massive efficiency gains in the health care sector you are going to replace health insurance premiums with health insurance taxes.
SIP-18 - a Proposal to Modularize Scala's Language Features
Sounds like he wants a distro agnostic Ports system, one that hides the dirty work of watching compile time crap fly across the screen and just gives the user a suitable package for their distro.

Either that or he's essentially suggesting we move to static compiled packages, which while tremendously inefficient from a space and security standpoint would alleviate at least some of the headaches of trying to do cross distro binary offerings.
Heh, I remember MachTen. Yes, I used it for the same reason.

And I've been using Emacs in various of its incarnations since about 1978. (The original ITS Emacs, followed by Zmacs, MINCE, and then Lucid Emacs/XEmacs, the latter still being my preferred variant.)
I hadn't bothered to look at Spotify, in terms of using the service (I was familiar with the company et al). I've used iTunes with locally stored music for a really long time.

So I went to spotify.com, read over their product and information. Checked out their plans. Decided I'd see what they can do with the Unlimited $4.99 plan.

I went to sign up for Spotify. They required I use my Facebook account.

Nope.
I hope this destroys all the scabby blogs that link everything to more of their own garbage - Mashable, Engadget, The Verge etc. Be nice to see them focus on not being shit instead of being rewarded for it.
I couldn't disagree more.

Classes are nothing but:

1. a group of data attributes, and
2. a defined set of operations that can happen on instances
of those data attributes.

If you are opposed to classes, which of these characteristics are you opposed to? Since I think it would be pretty much impossible to be a programmer and be opposed to structs or tuples, it must be the latter that you don't like: giving structs an associated set of methods that operate on them.

But having a set of methods that define the state transitions that are possible on an object is incredibly useful, for so many reasons. It helps organize your code. It provides nicer, more intuitive syntax. But most importantly, it reduces program complexity by narrowing down the set of code that can directly modify the attributes of an object.

Without this encapsulation, any piece of code anywhere in the program could be modifying data attributes in any way, and it is extremely difficult to reason about the state transitions that any particular struct could be taking.

There is no rule that says classes have to be in any kind of hierarchy at all, and in fact "prefer composition over inheritance" has been common wisdom for years now.

I recently rewrote a very useful but hard to follow JavaScript library in a more object-oriented style. The old code has a bunch of maps everywhere that can be read or written by any part of the code, and it's very difficult to follow. In a more object-oriented style the structure of the code is far more obvious, and the state transitions that each object can take are far more clear.
For me the coolest thing about Napster was all the remixes people were making. You could search for "[anything] remix" (e.g. Tetris remix, Nintendo remix, Sesame Street remix, ...) and find something awesome that would never see the light of day in a label. Some of those remixes bled through into the later P2P systems.

Napster was one of the first services to give the mainstream world a glimpse at the digital information utopia made possible by the Internet. The paternalistic distribution systems we have now are a mere shadow of what could be without the strangling influence of the media industry.
It's not quite perfect yet, but Python Tools for Visual Studio (http://pytools.codeplex.com/) is actually pretty nice. If you're used to the VS IDE, it's not a bad environment for Python development.
I wonder how Wikipedia will be ranked with this change since there are litte to no outbound links.
You're assuming that the SEO being performed is to manipulate or 'trick' users and while this does happen its not always the case.Search spiders are far from perfect in recognizing the relevance of webpages, seo helps them understand what a page is all about.

Also, not everyone understands what good content is, or how to properly markup their websites.

The field of SEO is quickly (or slowly depending on who you ask) being transformed into a much more holistic discipline where content creation, usability, conversion optimization, pr and marketing are falling into SEO's job duties. It's much more than page markup and links.
The new ipad Specs and Price in India
All new ipad 3 specifications and price in India,ipad fever never ends..
Why would I use a service that charges 10%: http://flattr.com/support/faq

This rate is way over nearly every service out there, including Paypal.

Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi claims to be a socialist on the page here: http://flattr.com/team . I guess the outrageous fee that they charge shouldn't come as a surprise...this is what socialist governments do.
Upstart: The Startup is You
Artist's drawings look more realistic than most photos
The Google guys are so smart, with enough time they'll get all their algorithms so optimized they'll eventually exclude every site from ranking on the first page of results. It'll just be a blank white page, the ultimate in minimalism and speed. It'll be an engineering feat not rivaled in the 21st century.
Having a degree from an Ivy school will help you as compared to an ordinary degree. I went to a middle of the road state school and I have seen first hand that many "people who matter" are materially predisposed towards favoring those with degrees from fancy schools. Some could argue it's rational. I'm talking about employers, investors, and even in regards to dating.

If you leave school you are likely to find work without too much trouble, but you'll be somewhat worse off than a guy with a degree from a middle of the road school. Outside of silicon valley a college dropout may face a greater headwind than inside silicon valley.

If you can become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, it won't count against you at all. Notice that they both left school for a very good specific opportunity.

The best thing about graduating from a great school is the relationships you'll build with other smart guys. I'm not sure why, but most lifelong friendships seem to be formed in school. Learning alongside those smart guys is also highly motivating.

Finally - if you leave school to get away from your parents pressure, you're letting their actions control your life. You are an adult now. Take charge. Don't let rebelliousness push you around. Choose carefully, realizing that a degree from a top school is a good opportunity.
PayPal is the obvious option. 232 million accounts and all that, with the option to withdraw by ACH, check or free debit card. There's even no fees if the recipient only has a personal account. You can use Mass Payment to do payouts in bulk. Lots of companies that run affiliate programs pay out commissions through PayPal using Mass Payment.

I don't usually recommend it, but this seems like a good use-case for Dwolla as well.