skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I looked up those two papers: "Python CS1 as Preparation for C++ CS2": http://www.cse.msu.edu/~enbody/fp039-enbody-revised.pdf and "Performance of Python CS1 Students in Mid-Level Non-Python CS Courses": http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1734437 (email me if you'd like a copy, it's behind the ACM paywall).

Neither of your claims is supported by either paper. Rather, they seem to support my claim: starting language isn't a predictor of success.

Conclusions from the first paper: When ﬁnal exams were compared for a CS2 course
oﬀered before the Python transition with a course after the
transition no statistical diﬀerence was found. The ﬁrst CS2
course after the transition contained a mixture of Python-prepared and non-Python prepared students. There was
no statistical diﬀerence in the performance between those
two student groups.

Conclusions from the second paper: We conclude that starting students with Python has not
had a negative impact within a C++ based curriculum. It
would have been nice to conclude that the Python students
did better in these courses, but the evidence does not appear
to support that hypothesis.

With that said, I do agree with the authors that exposure to more languages, environments and tools is a good thing, and for that reason, I'd prefer using Python, then switching to C++.
Half-Life HeadCrab Zombie Rendered in WebGL w/ animation
>it's going out of your way to subvert the site's business model

When people sneak snacks into a movie theater they are not thinking "I am going to subvert this theater's business model". They are thinking "The normal way of getting snacks at the theater is unacceptable to me".

The same is true with AdBlock. Nobody thinks "Mwahahaha, I'm going to financially ruin some content creators." They think "if I see one more punch-the-monkey ad, I'm going to punch an actual monkey".

I mute TV commercials, I change the station on the radio when the commercials start, and I use AdBlock by default. If I really like a site, I will turn AdBlock off and see if its ads are acceptable. Usually, though, I turn it right back on.
Yes, the Flash analogy was probably a poor one considering the ubiquity of iOS - you can no longer make the argument about not having to cater to people without Flash, because at this point there are so many of them.
If anybody interested in more info please send an email to incirusa@gmail.com with a brief explanation why you are interested.
I will send you the demo link.
They announced yesterday that as a result of water-proofing it will have a special plug.

"Pebble's USB cable is custom cable because the watch will be waterproof and can't have a big hole for the regular USB socket. We will be selling extra cables as well."

I'd rather have micro USB than waterproof, IMO.
Superzied Header Designs in Web Layouts
I suppose it depends on your perspective. When I see people posting endless streams of pictures of their kids, home improvement projects, vacations etc. it appears just as narcissistic to me as posting pictures of you at the club or next to your brand new BMW. Everybody has their preference on what to indulge in throughout life but the universal constant is 'look at me'.
And then start billing the calls after someone builds a successful business on them. ;-)
For my money, something that looks like a C API with very obviously impossible things going on (passing "naked" names of primitive types like int and float) makes my personal WTF-o-meter go to eleven immediately.

I (of course) had to start reading the code to figure out what was going on, and saw that what looks like a function call is in fact a macro. That explains the "how" but (again, for me) it really doesn't come close to making it feel natural.

C code should look like C code, and you can't write a function that takes a bare "int" as an argument.
You might be in favor of dropping DRM, but that would in no way provide publishers with comparable access to the Kindle customers.

Kindle customers buy titles using 1-click from their devices or from the Amazon website. How does just 'dropping the DRM' compete with that distribution channel?
…but Javascript code is pretty worthless without the server-side API, HTML and CSS that goes with it.

Well now, that depends heavily on what you're doing with the JavaScript. Our JS, for example, is far from worthless and we already have problems with people ripping us off.
As exciting as Meteor is (VERY!), their approach to licensing kills it for me. The products I am working on cannot be licensed under GPL for a large number of reasons, and their "talk to us and we'll see what we can do" policy puts too much risk into my business plan. At the early stage of product development, I don't necessarily know the finer points of how my revenue model will work. If there's a fixed fee for a commercial Meteor license, then I can put that into my business plan, see what kind of impact it has under different scenarios, and make a judgement call. But a "let's discuss your revenue model and see what makes sense" approach simply can't happen during the earliest stages of product development. Which means that basing my product around Meteor would introduce a potentially catastrophic risk into my business, should their licensing terms turn out to be too onerous, once that conversation can finally be had.

So, with considerable regret -- because it looks awesome -- Meteor is unusable to me. I'm certain that many other people are in the same boat.

Its developers say that they've chosen this license because they want maximum contributions from the community. By seriously limiting the size of the community that can use Meteor, they've chosen the wrong way to do it. I would strongly urge them to reconsider their choice of licenses. The MPL[1] would probably be the most compatible with their aims, since it requires any modifications to the core Meteor components to remain open source, while allowing the inclusion of closed-source components without violating an aggressive copyleft. This is a constraint that I would be very happy to live with. Choosing between an agressive copyleft or whatever is behind the mystery curtain labeled "commercial license" is not.

If the Meteor team wants to fix this, they can either:

1. Clearly state that they require a commercial license for commercial use, and state the price and terms of that license upfront (the Sencha approach). Or, better yet:

2. Switch to a license such as MPL, BSD, or MIT.

The former will allow commercial developers like myself to begin adopting Meteor; the latter is guaranteed to produce a much more robust open-source community around it. If Meteor is to become the next Rails, then that's what it needs to do.

Barring this, I'll just wait for other enterprising developers to take the Meteor concept and re-implement it with a more permissive licensing scheme. If Meteor is as good as it looks, then this should happen relatively quickly.

[1] http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/1.1/
Compare Hello, World! in the two languages, in terms of new concepts that need to be known to understand it. In C++ you need to know about including <iostream> and cout. In Java you've got all that class, public, static, blah blah nonsense.
How We Built and Launched PairMixer
Apart from three things, I don't use any of these technologies. The three things and why they're relevant to me are wired internet (because most DSL+Wifi boxes suck), desktop computers (laptops don't pack the power I need, esp. gaming but also compiling) and hard drives (this is going to change when SSD's get big enough).

The reasons why these things are relevant to me don't apply to the vast majority of customers out there.

Although I still like desktop PC's since they're upgradable or at least some parts are recyclable. An old laptop is worthless piece of junk, parts of a desktop can be reused. A little overclocking and some memory just resurrected my old desktop for $100 and it's good for 1-2 more years. On the other hand, my g/f's macbook (newer than my desktop) is as good as junk now. It won't fluently run new OSX (and websites are too heavy) and the crappy GPU makes it useless with Linux (bad drivers -> crappy video playback).
Agreed. I logged in just to upvote this response.
The sad part is they can't realistically choose to use python any time soon, because the language is undergoing backwards incompatible changes. Until python 3 is the norm everywhere it's tough to teach to such a moving target.
Setting aside your vacuous insult-flinging...

Fobbing someone off to a patronising "how to enable JS" page is more of a waste of time than showing them a screenshot & paragraph description of what they're missing out on. It's about as much effort, and drives them away, while giving them a preview may actually earn you a customer - the very opposite of "wasting time".
A combination a bootstrapping issues (arguably minor, of course) and the minor complexity of building the package, plus the workshop-friendly approach contribute to the zip directory distribution method.
Don't blame the platform for enabling people to be who they really are.

I think the issue here is that McLuhan was absolutely right when describing how the medium actually transforms and filters the messages that are sent through it. It's worth reading "Understanding Media" (or "The Medium is the Massage") because one of his key points is that the apparent content of the messages being sent across a medium is a distraction for what's really going on (the societal change brought about by the medium itself).

In the case of social networking the medium is broadcasting a message that it's normal to continuously stream updates, pictures etc. about your daily life as if the people following you cared about that. The fact that they do care about it is simply a sign that the medium is shaping society to the social network's particular medium.

Also, it's worth considering the difference between a one-to-one sharing of something (let's say a picture of your child shared with your mother) and the broadcasting of information to a chosen social group.

The former is a personal interaction which has many subtexts (proud parent showing off their child, wanting to connect with your own parent), whereas the broadcast does not have the same depth. It's just "look at me".
I'm always impressed by the number of domains Microsoft registers. What's wrong with microsoft.com?
The last time I checked, GitHub has 0 ads on it. And they're clearly not making any money off of their users, because features like paid accounts don't exist. It's impossible to monetize a product without slapping tons of intrusive advertisements all over the place.

/s
Nine planet solar system found, with room to grow
I didn't notice the correction :-) In that case, yeah a unit test will definitely help.
Fair enough. I find NoScript alone does a good enough job of blocking ads for my liking.
Maybe I understood it wrong, but, wasn't the point of this showcase to show how it should look rather than how to make it look like that in all of the devices?

I think it wasn't meant to be the kind of thing you open in your different devices and look how it looks rather, this is how content should adapt, does it make any sense?
Hilary Rosen banked millions destroying Napster
Well, donors should be mindful of who they give money to. cough+Diaspora+cough
> For instance, one big portion of the people browsing without Js are disabled people working with screen readers and such.

Shouldn't we fix the screen readers, rather than fixing every website?

Any solution to any problems that begins with 'first change the world' is not a valid solution as the project will never get past that stage.

The world would be a much better place if the effort and money spent on making ramps was spent on wheelchair provisioning and development.
Yes, but it doesn't matter because Iran will detect those nukes in midair and lash out in retaliation before they land.
ISTM that Instragram appealed to FB simply because Google+ has a very convenient automatic upload of all pictures taken by the phone. You can then easily choose which circle or person(s) to share these pics with, or not share them at all and just know they're safely tucked in the cloud. AFAIK FB didn't have this feature. I'd say that at $1bln they overpaid, though.
Both parties are able to see blurred thumbnail sized pictures, before the exchange commences.
It's extremely complicated. The verbosity is not just LongerKeywords, it is endemic.
with JS, people who are opting-out should blame themselves

No, I'm going to continue to blame that subset of JS coders who consume far too much of my CPU/memory resources. Thanks to them, I got to watch my browser slow to a crawl and become so unresponsive that it was difficult to even close the tab containing the offending site. The simplest solution is to have JS off by default. A whitelist system is nice for non-offending sites (I've never had this sort of trouble with JS on, say, HN).
Python is great, but I recommend that schools should start programming classes with Unity3D. Within the first class you can have objects with physics bouncing off of each other, and by the end of the course you can have a legitimate game to play (that can even be sent to your phone or tablet).

The "javascript" variant is fairly straightforward and if you take it far enough can be quite powerful. At first the students can just hack things together, but as they go on they'll learn real programming.

Also, the basic IDE is free.
Collective Idea acquires Harmony from GitHub
Looks good.
It will probably never happen, but I would love to see a job board that had the employer rate the quality of candidate they are looking for and (using the same scale) the salary. Something like this:

Applicant Quality: Top 50% 25% 10% 5% 1% 0.5%

Salary for this pos: Top 50% 25% 10% 5% 1% 0.5%

In short, it would be great to call out those companies that want employees in the top 1% but are only willing to pay in the top 50%
A particularly egregious one: I went to download Google Chrome with links (the text mode browser). Google's download page for Chrome requires JavaScript. I know Google has been falling apart, but really?
You can spend the rest of the day thinking of practical and non-practical uses for technology such as this.

I'm more interested in this tech as I see it as humanity's next, and perhaps biggest, step towards the singularity. The introduction of eye optics such as this is going to create a very clear division in our culture.

Just like my grandmother wants nothing to do with a PC there will be those who will want nothing to do with wearing, or implanting anything that gets them closer to their computer.

You can argue that those who have never touched a PC/Internet have evolved differently than those who haven't. So to the people who do embrace this tech will spin off and start to 'evolve' at a different pace/way than those who do not. This isn't like an iPad though. It's pretty easy for most to digest why that's better than always lugging around you laptop. I don't see this tech being so popular among the masses. However, I do see it being very popular among certain pockets of people.
If you are interested in this kind of stuff, Effective Java is a must-read book. Long, good explanations of how to do stuff right.

Also, the 2nd edition covers up through Java 1.6.
Didn't you read the article? Damn the worth! We're all unique snowflake rockstars and all our meals and coffee mugs are blessed by our specialness. Share all the pictures!! (insert crazy meme guy with a paintbrush) Join the photo revolution man.
The tool is for demonstrating what's meant by "responsive design" to lay/non-web people. So it isn't trying to show how a non-responsive site without any "magic css/js" like meteor.com might display, or replicate the behaviour of any specific device or mobile browser. It's specifically NOT designed for actually testing designs - you need to do that with actual mobiles and tablets.
(who cares what language it's written in, or same-order-of-magnitude differences in how big the executables are?)

That last reason there is about the length of the filename, not about the size of the file. I don't think anyone's supposed to really care, no.
- automatic integer-to-float comparison to accommodate bigger integers. A horrible hack to squeeze a little extra performance in naive benchmarks in computers with no native 64 bit integer support. This really makes no sense whatsoever now and may have had some partial justification in the early 90s, prior to PHP4 even.

No, this is not unique to php. Many popular, comparable languages perform an int -> float conversion. For example, Perl:

$ perl -wle'print "20938410923849012834092834" + 0 if "20938410923849012834092834" == "20938410923849012834092835"'

2.0938410923849e+25

- This is not a philosophical debate about typing styles or the existence of perfect type conversions. PHP's problems in this regard are relics from a dubious past.

Conversion from string -> number, and loose numeric types which auto-convert to float are near universal in loosely typed languages, out of necessity -- if such a scheme doesn't work consistently it can't be used at all. This brings me back to my point. You said "IMO this conversion should fail if the number represented is not valid, or fall back to arbitrary precision math". My response is that you cannot provide such a rule on the basis of "is it valid" because there is no such thing as a "valid" type conversion -- ALL have precision loss. It is inherent in the datatype. When I said "you may be underestimating the difficulty in predicting whether a particular decimal number can be accurately represented as a floating point type" you should perhaps read that as "you cannot do this, it is not possible".

Instead you might suggest that no loose conversion, no loose typing be permitted in a language design -- and I would agree wholeheartedly. But your suggestion that this be handled on a case-by-case basis depending on the numeric value is fundamentally unworkable. Big integers are not the only area this type of problem presents.
really great. Anything like this for SVN?
I think the same can be applied to requiring Javascript however. Personally, I've never seen a website that delivers content that absolutely needed it. Certainly the ones that do use it well do it to enhance the site you are browsing, but if you turn off the Javascript then you only have a slightly less full featured experience.

If you can't access a website because Javascript is turned off, then I think you are overcomplicating things anyway. There are obviously cases where it is required, but as the author states, it should be pretty easy to explain why you need to enable scripting!
Reminds me of boost.python, which is also macro-heavy.
I'm 25 and was using comal in high school, seems to have been a particularly rare language.
Using the web without JS is pointless. Just turn it on.
Office Filing Cabinet
British government backs calls for research papers to be made freely available
So it's more sane to spend money just so that you can waste several dozen hours a year watching these shows, that will have ultimately no consequence in your life. If you want to do that it's absolutely fine, but there is no reason to deride someone for their views just because they don't match your own decisions.

P.S. I love Breaking Bad and Justified, but I don't have a need for a TV any more, still have one, but rarely turn it on. If I want to watch them, I just go to Amazon/iTunes/Netflix/Hulu and stream them.
My reaction was: what havoc is this going to do? and spent 20 minutes learning what the issues were. The manual at http://gitmanual.org/git-config.html doesn't say what the default is, but I feel safe in assuming the default is not to tamper with the original files. The git author's reputation inspires trust :-).
Also, after switching employers, you can roll your 401k over to an IRA and invest in whatever you want.
I thought this post from that blog was interesting: Why "MathBabe"? http://mathbabe.org/2011/06/13/why-mathbabe/

Actually there’s another reason I ultimately decided to call this blog “mathbabe,” namely when I googled it[...] there’s another site with a very similar name which simply shows nearly naked women next to cliff notes on basic math subjects. WTF?!? It is ridiculously obvious to me that math babes should be doing math, not adorning it. So I kind of had to call myself mathbabe after that.
This is an interesting story and I think the guys did a great job on PR but PR is not the end game here. How are you going to get women to sign up? And paying women to be "virtual girlfriends" doesn't count (or at least that's a different business).
You do have the right to tell the retailer what price they must sell your product. It's called a contract. The retailer doesn't have to accept it.

Without Apple, the publishers had no meaningful alternative ebook store so Amazon always had the upper hand in contract negotiations, even going so far as to threaten to delist their paper books if they didn't accept the terms.
That's kind of a silly view. You would rather spend 6 months "writing code" than spend 1 day negotiating a contract that would save you 6 months of effort?

What if sending them an email that took as long to write as this HN post would get you a quote?

Psychology of product purchasers is fascinating.
There's one very important user who doesn't run Javascript: Googlebot. If your site displays no content without scripting you are invisible to search engines. So this blog post's advice to display some static fallback is useful; not for the NoScript weirdos but for SEO.

Hopefully the search engines will fix their spiders. In the meantime we have ugly workarounds like the #!/escaped_fragment nonsense.
Agreed; I'm a believer ;)
The surprising draw of 'Draw Something'
Fair enough, I agree that it isn't the prettiest or most natural of code but it isn't any "magic" too far beyond convention. Without C++ templates this is the only way to achieve certain things - and is fairly standardized.

See va_args for an example of naked types being passed in the standard library. Really it is not much different from the fact you have to pass a format string to printf.
Arrogant.
This article makes me wonder if the government may already possess quantum computers.

If they did, how would we know?
With one difference: You install traditional software by choice. On the web, you don't have a choice, everyone can just install and execute whatever they please.
brilliant ... no one listens to me when I say SIMPLICITY is the biggest way to success in the tech world.
This appears to have been written before IDEs were invented. The author suggests that it's acceptable to extend a class just to gain unqualified access to its static methods to save a few characters of typing.
Try Windows 8 Metro UI on your iPad using Splashtop
Perhaps I'm a little over cautious (then again, perhaps not ;) ).
people don't like to think, they want easy, fast, simple.
The problem is that a High School semester is really too short compared to how long it takes to learn C++, C++ is just too big a language. I ended up thinking I knew something about C++, when I really didn't.

And the hello world program for C++ is just as bad as the one for Java, in its own way. You're writing 'cout << "Hello World"' but how long will it be before you teach the students about operator overloading?
Goes directly to "What other operations are surprisingly slow?" and attempts to write micro benchmark with the same results.

Fails....

Most of the general stuff is accurate and dandy but I don't believe you should listen to many (most likely any) of the speed related statements as this article appears to have been written in 1998.

Topic should be "Java IAQ circa 1998".