skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree with the notion that there is a huge gap.

I originally learned to program via QBasic in 21 days. DOS in 21 days. VB 6 in 21 days. ASP in 21 days. Borland C++ in 21 days. HTML 5 in 21 days. PHP+MySQL in 21 days.

Because that's what we had! The books came with CDs of code examples and compilers you could try that worked on windows. And by the end of the book, you had a working chat program.

Was it great code? Secure? Scalable? Efficient? We'll never know because that code is long gone. But I wrote quite a few chat servers, hit counters, and dentists' websites back in my day.

And that is basically what "Learn Python the Hard Way" is. Teaches you the basics, builds up to some neat little projects, and since most of the software problems in the world are variants on "how do I loop through a list of blog entries and display it in a table" then I am not convinced that this is a complex enough problem that 21-dayers can't come up with a good data representation.

For the vast majority of us who will never ever face scaling problems, not understanding the cost of a hash table lookup is perfectly okay for an MVP.

The stuff you learn in school is completely valuable. But sometimes I feel like the things I learned (caching algorithms, design patterns, etc) put me in a mode of "spend a lot of time trying to architect" rather than "building something that works and upload to github."

"Just learn to code" emphasizes the latter, and I think that is a good thing.
What's the row of numbers on the copyright page of books?
Show HN: Weekend project. Adding Google+ support to the Instagram Android App
Since Facebook announced they were going to purchase Instagram there was little hope that an Instagram interface with Google+ would be released. But there's more than one way to skin a cat. The link below is for an alpha release of an instagram add-on that allows you to directly post your Instagram photos from the official Android App to Google+, email, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, SMS, etc, etc. No more limitations!

This is an alpha release as only myself and one other person has run it :-) To use it, you'll need to already have the Instagram app installed. When you run my app, you'll be asked to Launch your Instagram app. From there you'll use Instagram normally until you're ready to send your photo out. When you press the ">>" button, instead of getting the Instagram share screen, you'll get a standard Android share menu with all the apps you have on your system that are capable of taking a photo in as content.

http://socialmediaticker.com/shareinsta.apk
On the input side, I would guess the problem is that the minifier in question uses a parse tree with a not-quite-perfect grammar. It sees

clearMenus()
!isActive && $parent.toggleClass('open')

and parses it the same way it would have done

clearMenus() !isActive && $parent.toggleClass('open')

On the output side, using ; is simpler to program (A\nB only means A;B in some cases, depending on B). And you'll receive fewer flames for it.
I find this idea of trying to maintain a certain "elite" quality quite silly. This sort of growth is a natural phenomenon that happens to valuable sites like HN.

Trying to prevent growth in a certain area (i.e. the less awesome people who you like here) will prevent growth in all areas—e.g. HN buttons could also promote HN to great but new hackers. If you stop these guys from getting involved, you'll cut off the lifeblood of a community whose participants are moving very quickly past the phase where they're excited to be involved in such a community—people get successful, busy, jaded, etc. and not forever passionate enough to bother doing the things that HN needs: reading, commenting, voting. You need new guys to replace the old guys, and both can learn from each other.

If HN is locked down to a degree that its natural growth is stunted, it will die, and probably deservedly so.
Show HN: Share your To-Do's with your followers. 
Hi guys. We've launched beta of our first web start-up project and waiting for your feedback.
No.

Sure it is the easier solution right now. But in the long run that would mean the Crockford would be able to dictate the style of Javascript to whatever the hell he wants.

Given how important Javascript is now (and will be in the future) we cannot allow any one person to retard the entire future.

Anyway use Googles closure compiler -- it can actually handle Javascript.
Well, he is a part of the Ruby community, and they do often seem to often favor emotional arguments conveyed through harsh language.
Ive tried to collect some videos how previous entrepreneurs did that here: http://www.ideaoverload.com/Find-ideas/Finished-ideas/Media-...
You have three boxes.

I'm not sure what the third one has to do with the first two.

You're going to need more than an arrow to make that connection.
True, but that is a language, products and implementations sometimes need to be more this way since they are the front lines/interface/api. Even falling back on broken standards or less clean implementations (url over version header on restful apis for one example) to work in some cases where absolutely needed but make it harder to do so.

Shipped software should try to work or be usable in the shipped format, get funky behind the product layer if you want.

Here the minified javascript that everyone uses, should just work with the current infrastructure. If it doesn't, provide the tool that fixes the problems for people to ship with.
How is that different than adding a nullable column shoe_size to the user table in your relational DB, and an if(user.shoe_size != null) in your application?
So wait, you're saying a business is supposed to make money by selling something? You just blew my mind. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that what you are professing here applies to other businesses that have nothing to do with enterprise software. Or any software for that matter. In fact, I am going to go so far as to suggest that there are only three businesses set up to not make money- social media-related startups, government programs, and charities. If you are not starting a social network/gaming/photo-sharing/location-like thing, this Instagram acquisition story should pass you by like a ship in the night.
Jsmin is broken if it can't handle missing semicolons.

Googles closure tools actually do parse the Javascript and can properly minify them better.
I'm sure you're very tough and edgy but that doesn't change the fact that incessant swearing is childish and annoying. It also makes choice words too common, further reducing their punch.
or if Palm could evolve theirs.
> Write down your to-dos.

Alright.

> See the to-dos of people you follow.

Ok, so when I write down my to-dos as you suggested before, you're automatically going to share it with people who follow me. Alright.

> Discover what's popular in your town.

You lost me there. How do the above actions relate to this last one?
"Crossing the Chasm" is definitely a good book to understand one perspective about how technology is adopted. Basically find any way to get early adopters who are known by their peers to visibly use your product/service, then reference those folks in your marketing to start the bandwagon to get a larger user base who start self referencing and recommending. This played out at several startups I was with.
Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 4 Notes Essay
Simple. Look at the other comments, and it becomes apparent there are downsides to relying on / abusing ASI, and no advantages. (The only claimed advantage is that the lack of semicolons is visually appealing, but this is nullified by the fact the rules are sort of confusing and not apparent to all contributors.)

Thus people are inferring this fat fellow is doing it only out of illogical, ego-based personal preference, because nothing else makes sense.

I’m not saying they are right — I couldn’t possibly know — but given the facts, it’s a reasonable assumption.
The playground
It is not the solution at all, in any way. For example: Banning Iran from your online services is making it difficult for change makers to succeed.

Tools must be global.
Thanks for your feedback. We'll think how can we improve the landing page asap.
With working hyperlinks:

https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/2.0.3-wip/js/boots...
https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSMin/commit/5ca277ea452...
I have two Gen Y daughters. My general impression is that Gen Y is not analyze-eable as the Baby Boom was. I attribute this to the end of monoculture, but that's probably a bias.

I have no idea why anybody who is not in finance would care to live in NYC. That's a late-boomer bias, probably caused by watching Barney Miller.
Do not covet. God is just.

Heaven is God's company.

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

n, as may lower its price in the home market, much more
than the bounty can raise it in the actual state which tillage may, at
the end of that period, happen to be in.

I answer, that whatever extension of the foreign market can be
occasioned by the bounty must, in every particular year, be altogether
at the expense of the home market; as every bushel of corn, which is
exported by means of the bounty, and which would not have been exported
without the bounty, would have remained in the home market
On Twitter he said it took six days: https://twitter.com/#!/ibdknox/status/190857331238645760
Some people are using e-mail like IM and e-mail is built as an asynchronous communication system. In my opinion, that's where the friction happens.

The author of this post brings up a great point about defining expectations on reply times. I think it's healthy to create an auto-reply that states that you only check e-mail x number of times a day.
I considered that, then I figured it was reasonable to discount infinitely large pieces of ice.
We should be adapting computers to work for humans, not adapting humans to work for computers.

I agree that there are tons of improvements to be made to effective e-mail use in organizations. But many of the behaviors we exhibit are completely natural to us and difficult to change. For example, we check our e-mail on what psychologists refer to as a variable interval reinforcement schedule; we know that at approximately some interval we get an e-mail that is helpful or enjoyable to us, and we waste our time checking for that e-mail.

It's hard to change the e-mail we receive on a global scale in one instant. It's quite a lot easier to develop tools that change how the e-mail we receive is displayed to us. One such concept was the Gmail priority inbox: what if you only got notifications for the e-mail that was important and could buffer up the rest for later?

A complete theory of how e-mail could work might easily involve a hybrid approach. Why aren't people suggesting solutions that could work instead of debating approaches? Does it have to be one way or the other?
IRC is a complex protocol that's way OTT if you just want something simple for 1:1 communication.

-- author of qwebirc
Waiting to exhale - the art of free diving
After writing your todo's (and interacting with your followers of course), you may want to know what's popular in your neighborhood and continue with adding popular tasks to your list.

However, you're right. Flow that we used in the landing needs a quick fix. ;) Thank you.
It's a wrong advice but you don't explain why it's wrong. You just state it with a very strong opinion/trust. If it didn't work for you, then it might have worked out for others.

Still I'm convinced to do what you love. I dropped college and I'm a lot better off.
People are different in that some people are better at achieving regardless of their feelings towards the goal (good example would be many straight A students), while other people struggle endlessly with a task unless their feelings are in line with the goal (e.g. some high school or university dropouts). I believe every entrepreneur has to be achievement oriented to some degree.

However, being achievement oriented and not working on something you find interesting will always be the more difficult situation for everyone - you'll be constantly fighting upstream to some degree. It's possible, but not the ideal situation.

Align your work in some way with your largest goals and you're bound to be happier and the chance of success is bound to be higher.
Please.

Professionalism is what is killing great languages like C# and decent languages like Java.

It is just an excuse for those in suits to look down on the rest of who create software because we fucking like it, in a way we like, rather than in a way that doesn't threaten them.
"The publishers wanted to stop Amazon from using what one of them called “the wretched $9.99 price point,” according to court papers."

I can't say that I care about the specific price point... but when I see an ebook costing more than a physical copy which has to be printed and shipped to me, I feel a certain amount of annoyance knowing that it's the publishers who're causing that. Even costing the same is pushing it.

Am I being reasonable in holding this position? Maybe not, economically. But I doubt it's an uncommon one.
Great comment enginous. I want to look into variable interval reinforcement now, as I've been approaching this from more of a research-based angle.

The solutions should be hybrid, though I still believe that better behavior, reinforced by technology, is what will be the most effective. If you have your client reinforcing good checking schedules, that's a behavioral/technical win/win.
I think that's a visceral reaction based on his rudeness.

So long as he keeps building tools and utilities that people rely on, and that people use, he is at least influencing the direction of Javascript and, knowing that, I'd think one might take heed when Crockford says "this will break in the future", as he happens to have more insight into the language than most.

I understand that he wasn't polite, and I certainly understand the desire for the 'asshole' to be proven wrong. And maybe he is. Of course, that doesn't make him wrong, and it doesn't mean that he's "retarding the future" either, necessarily.

But the fact that jsmin is perhaps the most widely deployed JS minification utility does matter, whether anyone chooses to accept it or not.

And if you really think that he is retarding the future, the correct answer probably isn't to bicker about it on the internet, but to create a better compiler (or work on getting a better compiler accepted) as de facto.

At the end of the day though, Fat is the guy who has to deal with all the tickets talking about 'This doesn't compile in jsmin', and I'd think his life would ultimately be better off if he just added a semi-colon.

Of course, that's my opinion only, so take it for what it's worth.
Well, I have more than 10 years of programming experience, so I obviously did not get the feeling of being taught programming. But I think non-programmers also do not have this feeling. So people play the game, learn to program their robots and maybe don't even realize that this is actual a kind of programming.

I think what people can learn from the game is how to combine simple instructions into more complex robot movement. In addition, you to step through your 'program' in your head in order to check that it is doing what it is supposed to do. But I honestly cannot say if this game is suited to teach programming.
Or you can track Scroll Depth without jQuery.
https://github.com/CardinalPath/gas
I strongly disagree that developers should stop whatever they're doing just to do any 2-minute task that comes up. This would be a huge distraction. When you're a developer, you need long chunks of quiet time to focus on your project. Constantly interrupting that focus to do 2-minute tasks is a sure way to make sure you can never get "in the zone" and concentrate on anything.

Personally, unless a 2-minute task is time-sensitive, I let a bunch of them pile up, then take 30 minutes or so to do them all at once.
I just added a blog post about getting to the front page of HN and some of the initial problems.

http://puppyshowdown.com/blog/2012/04/hacker-news-caught-me-...

Thank you everyone for the great feedback!
It isn't entirely the having to manually drive that people don't like about driving. It's also the time and cost to run, park, insure, maintain, etc. Driverless cars won't help most of this.

No matter who is doing the driving, walking a few blocks is more convenient than driving a mile. And anyway, walking is more fun.

I grew up in suburbs, and the article described my experience perfectly. I may someday move away from the urban core, but I don't forsee myself ever living more than a block or two from a few cafes and a market.
I'm curious - what made you go with ASP.NET over an open source alternative?
No I won't sign your NDA, here's why.
Amazon Low Prices Disguise a High Cost
Gas prices have gone up, but adjusted for inflation not outrageously so.

But gas prices are themselves a big (maybe even the largest?) drivers of inflation, since they are not only counted themselves as they result in price raises for a lot of other products, like food.
UK Government Takes on Tractor Trailer Emissions
Orange UK Storing and Transmitting Passwords in the clear?
I had those smartphones, and they were never a joy and something I got from work. The iPhone was the first time I wanted one for myself.
Too bad it's down. This guy seems remarkably thorough. Does he come from money? I'm just wondering how he gets the time to do this as it seems like it would take a lot of work.
Here's the 4 freedoms outlined by the FSF, which are embodied in the text of the GPL

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

> The freedom to run the program, for any purpose

If nothing else, the DRM system built into iOS devices makes this impossible to satisfy. That freedom isn't being granted wholesale as required, it's being metered by Apple. They can take it away at any time if they want to, because in order to run the program your device MUST contact them and retrieve decryption keys specific to that app and that account holder. That's not freedom, its permission on a fine-grained basis

> The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1).

Releasing the source MAYBE complies with this, changing the program tends to require the code anyway, but its a grey area to me. Have I actually enabled recipients to change it if they can't run that code without Apple's permission? I guess, in a way, but it's a bad deal for them for technical reasons

> The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

Sure I can hand out binary copies if I want (that can't run anywhere but jailbroken or preauthorized devices during beta testing), but someone receiving a copy through the App Store can't. The program is encrypted and can only be decrypted with a key held by Apple

> The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3)

Same deal as previous point to some degree, they can modify the code, but then what? Grey area? Technicality? Not an ideal vision of freedom even if technically compliant.
Hard to get a usable AST in Lisp? The ClojureScript analyzer is 500 lines of code.

For all the meta-programming projects I've taken on - delimited continuations, embedded logic programming, and extensible pattern matching - I'll take Lisp data structures over the actual Lisp AST any day.
That's a good idea. Ideally a combination of time and points actually: if it's a new article then show the counter, but if its older and low points, then hide the button.
If I see people errantly slinging around "hipster" for any reason, let alone to pettily attack people who prefer a certain style, well, I'm going to be even more annoyed than seeing more god damned "email is(n't) (the best thing/going to screw your mother)" posts.
It doesn't help if the tool and its documentation encourages bad practices. I don't blame the tool really, I just don't think it helps.
NYC has so much more than finance, in fact unless you seek out finance types its pretty easy to be isolated from them totally, plus they tend to blend into the Jersey Shore type crowd in many places. Plus there is so much more to NYC than just Manhattan.
Some incidental writerly advice: Avoid using the word cancer metaphorically, unless you're deliberately trying to parody the writing style of, say, Adolf Hitler. Otherwise it's like trying to use a howitzer to dig postholes in your yard.

I first began to notice the dangerous power of this word when I was working in cancer research. To a cancer researcher, cancer is a thing one deals with all day long, but at a very safe emotional distance. You're used to cancer cells; you study them all the time. You spend quite a lot of time carefully raising them in dishes. You give excited talks about how they work. Still, it's hard not to notice that when you tell a stranger on the street what your research is about, there's this little intake of breath.

And then I grew a bit older, and some friends and I lost relatives to cancer, so we got the chance to actually experience the process from the patient's point of view. (An opportunity which, fortunately, many young people don't get.) And I gradually realized, at a gut level, what all the fuss was about: Cancer is really awful. Dying of it is awful, and not dying of it is also pretty damned awful, because the treatments are painful, often damaging, often disfiguring, and dreadfully uncertain.

Don't use the word unless you mean it. And you probably don't mean it.
Can we dig up some information on the author? Instagram clearly disowned him somehow.
Secret Computer Code Threatens Science
Isn't the latter due to the oil boom? I'm sure if you looked at growth in the San Jose area from 1990 to 2000 it would be a similar increase.
Speed Reading Techniques
Think about all the information that you need to read on a daily basis and the time you need to spend on it. It could save hours of reading if you could find a magic formula to speed your reading technique. Regardless of your purpose: whether it is for your professional or educational needs, speed reading can save you lot of time that now you could relocate for some other activity.
In SF is going to get a Target in the downtown shopping area. Same story as Seattle going to Target meant going to a sub-urban area.
Freedom to be who you want to be and (1) be respected for it and (2) find similar friends. In other words, higher probability of finding fellow outliers.
After thinking about it, I agree. Sometimes that semantic information or metadata can be very useful in operation. Specifically, having typing information and pattern-matching can be a Godsend in many cases.
For me, it shows '4' on your site.
New Shares Class Gives Google Founders tighter control
Sorry, I downvoted you by mistake:|
Wow, someone finally gets it. The application isn't broken, the users are.

We expect too much from it, wanting it to be our todo list and other roles that it plainly wasn't designed for.

I email doesn't do what you need or want, then find something else that does. If you cannot, then build it and release to the world.
illumos is free and (most importantly) open source. Running a closed OS and binaries on a production server isn't the most foolish idea I've heard, but it's in the running.
Not to mention: Most older Americans are broke. An apt in the city (think re-populated smaller, older cities, and large towns) is cheaper to heat and cool, convenient; so then a car and it's attendant expense is unnecessary.

If I am old and divorced i'd rather have neighbors across the hall than a house to maintain, even if I can afford it.
In places like ND, you can have a few people move in and see large gains in relative population.

Now, there are parts of ND that are growing, which is largely attributed to oil sands exploration. Which is attracting blue collar workers from some of the declining cities.
Very cool. Makes me wonder, what other valuable visitor metrics am I missing out on?
I can (and do) turn it off on my 3rd gen keyboard kindle.
But the processing power needed to run it will be less.