skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really depends what you want to do. Refining your skills a bit could quickly get you to the point where you can build out a testable prototype for a project.

Bill Gates (I believe), talked about the hardest role to fill in a company is someone who is able to bridge the business side of things with the technical side of things. Coming from a business side first, you have a shot at being that guy.

There's a lot of noise now about how everyone should learn to program. I don't think that's the case. It helps to be technologically literate (have a general idea of what people are talking about and what's actually possible), but actually programming isn't a necessity. It really depends on what you want to do. I haven't met anyone yet who regrets learning to code. The problem solving abilities you build when learning to code can help in a lot of other areas. It's a time investment, but you'd be amazed what you can pick up from an hour a day of consistent and focused learning/practice.
Yahoo's PayPal Hires Portend Heated Battle in Payments
What's the low-level cost to determine whether a given string is "numerical" or not? Also, would "001" be considered a numerical string?

This reminds me of Excel-like programs that by default, automatically detect (and convert) fields that appear to be dates/strings...often to catastrophic effect.
The only good TOS is one whose URL returns a 404.
I believe it is largely a solved problem. Or at least the unsolved parts are reduced to a single problem: entropy input estimation.
You're assuming simple single-operator comparison. It compiles if ( x = y && p ) return -1; with joy.
Just because a piece of legislation has a nice feature doesn't mean it can't be horrible for its other properties.
I thought that the meme was, "Hey Girl"?

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/ryan-gosling
How is it different than knockout? It looks very similar from what I can tell.
As I see it 90% of Google+'s purpose is to get users to create profiles and then these popup within Google properties in the form of picture thumbnails when the user comments or uploads stuff, etc. Which is perfectly reasonable as almost all web apps now operate around user profiles (mostly Facebook's), what I find to be unreasonable however is the seemingly heightened intolerance some pundits have developed towards G+.
Downvoting because you're railing against a language without understanding it. That, and your C++ comment above, make you sound like the programmer version of internet tough guy. Whatever your real life skills may be, it certainly sounds like a lot of posturing.
Heh, the site mentions creating a Dead Man's Switch and doesn't actually mention Dead Man's Switch: http://www.deadmansswitch.net
I've seen this done a few times before.

Akismet is one example:
http://littlebigdetails.com/post/6493183632/akismet-when-you...
"Exactly which maven and luminary of computer science has advocated the use of PHP?"

I didn't say that they were luminaries per se. Programmers telling non-programmers that PHP is OK for them is what I'm referring to. That would match the analogy--someone who's studying health science telling someone who hasn't studied health science that McDonalds is perfectly healthy.

Programmers need to stop telling non-programmers that it's perfectly OK to use PHP. Frankly, they need to be blunt that programming is hard. That you either have to willing to put in the investment or don't do it at all. This soft runway into developing applications is exactly the reason why so much poor software exists in the common market.
Would your medical application fail FDA approval if you used a language like C or C++ that contained strncmp? Because that function throws away data, too.
Creating Easy Keyboard Shortcuts for Web Pages
Weak typing does not require bonkers coercion of types.
ln -sf /dev/urandom /dev/random

OpenSSL, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD agree with me.
Google Docs I can see, though it's basically "Word, but in your browser." (Hence "If not Word then almost certainly something very much like it.")

I've had some mild push-back from a few people when trying to get them to switch from Word, but it has the upside of you always knowing what the current version is, a problem the Wordists I've dealt with run into often.

A wiki, though, is a lost cause for many. I do not want to be the one having to teach people how to correctly format tables or embed images with the correct size and captions.

"Why do I have to learn all this stuff when we already know how to use Word?" is a common lament.
I agree - the problem with the bubble is that it makes all relatively sane business people seem insane. It now seems insane to create a profitable business that lives within its means...
I agree, but would point out that this list seems a bit more oriented to the type of folks doing web application development, rather than web publishing. Not every site or job demands knowledge of the latest tools or techniques. Is it good to know they exist? Sure, but I wouldn't count someone out who does't actively use git or only knows JS by way of jQuery.

One thing I would add to the list is a conceptual understanding of how a web page gets to someone's screen. E.g., how a webserver works, what headers are, how DNS works, caching, general CMS principles, etc. Perhaps that's implicit in the list, but I've been amazed sometimes by other frontend folks that didn't have knowledge of some key piece of that pipeline.
That's probably fine. I'm just regurgitating the feedback I got from the lawyers - you should have exactly one representation of the terms so that people/courts/whatever don't get to pick and choose.
Researching and writing about Goldman pushed Taibbi around the bend on anything having to do with finance.

A few tidbits:
Even worse, the JOBS Act, incredibly, will allow executives to give "pre-prospectus" presentations to investors using PowerPoint and other tools in which they will not be held liable for misrepresentations. These firms will still be obligated to submit prospectuses before their IPOs, and they'll still be held liable for what's in those. But it'll be up to the investor to check and make sure that the prospectus matches the "pre-presentation."

Oh my gosh - you mean before I invest my hard earned money I should read the PROSPECTUS. Say it ain't so.

Then he goes on to say:
In the same way, get ready for an avalanche of shareholder suits ten years from now, since post-factum civil litigation will be the only real regulation of the startup market. In fact, there are already supporters talking up future lawsuits as an appropriate tool to replace the regulations being wiped out by this bill.

Isn't "post-factum civil litigation" an even better mechanism for enforcement?

Look companies that are "bad actors" are going to cheat the SEC and the public anyway, and companies that aren't "bad actors" had to go through the additional expenses to comply with the SEC regs that have now been relaxed.

I would rather have motivated shareholders (and their lawyers) with an axe to grind policing the markets than bureaucrats. If you look at the job bureaucrats have done to date,the track record is not so great.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-obam...
I agree, these kind of dramas seem to ignite a certain segment of our community, that being said I feel for the guy, local users groups are where a lot of people make their first foray into speaking and presenting. I am sure this will not be a positive experience for this person if they where just starting out. I understand the need to convey accurate information but a little understanding of the environment goes a long way. Local users groups have people at all levels as such some have just learned how to do something and are eager to present what they have done. Right or wrong they got it working and they want to show others, we as a community should encourage that.
Thanks for the feedback! I was so happy with my design but am kind of glad it got critiqued. I have a small stack of design books I plan on reading. Motivation++
Having been through similar decision making processes myself (with the Google Custom Search API, the Google Translate API, etc), this is just as likely an abuse mitigation technique as it is a revenue generation opportunity.

Requiring even a modest at-cost fee for a web service does wonders to discourage all sorts of misuse, from wanton large-scale data mining, to blatant repacking and resale, to worse. (Heck, simply requiring a valid credit card alone helps.)

And sadly no, simply having low quotas for free access doesn't entirely suffice. If there's material value to be extracted from a free service, you'd be amazed at the lengths people will go through to create large numbers of low-volume scrapers. Most of these are obvious and easy to detect and defeat, but continually doing so adds up in cost, and it takes engineers away from providing better services to legitimate customers.

In short, most people on the outside don't appreciate just how difficult the handful of bad guys make it for companies to do something good for the other 99%. So I'm sympathetic to Microsoft here, I really am.
Yeah! I will use it.
Judging by the huge number of stupid comments on that bug report this bug was posted on reddit.

If you don't actually use PHP (as most of the commenters seem not to) don't comment on the bug, it has nothing to do with you and you are just making noise.
When you a programmer you can work for a while, finish your code, have it pass tests, and then you are done - with 100% confidence that your work resulted in the outcome you sought (code that works).

When you are product/marketing/sales person, you typically work for a while, aren't sure if what you are doing is correct or optimal, maybe find out later it did or didn't work, and then you have to do it again and again and again.

So, to make the transition, you have to get comfortable with the uncertainty inherent in business activities. To put it another way: You'll "fail" far more frequently in business than in programming, and the causes of your failure will be far less obvious.
It's funny. I remember Sussman saying that the meta-circular interpreter (written in Lisp) is the Maxwell's Equations of software.
Uh, the unit test being executed before the first commit was failing. It's a logic error, not a syntax error.

And I was using GCC, which is happy to assign values amid a more complex logical evaluation. Try: if ( x = y && p ) return -1;
People don't know what they want until they see it.
Testing is not a feature
Live-time?
I'm not a Windows developer but I've tried my hand and work with a lot of people who are getting into the things described in the article using Windows.

Things really are harder and it's something I've been trying to explain to people I'm mentoring and they're finding it out the hard way. The thing about that statement is that a lot of times people will start a holy war over it. No one is saying Windows sucks here. It may or may not suck but that's beside the point. The reality of the situation today is that the majority of the open source community is creating things that will eventually be running on a Linux server. IIS is just not used all that much at all outside the corporate space and even they are moving toward Red Hat these days.

But any time I explain to someone that they'd have a much easier time on a Mac or Linux distro they start an argument and give me that "you're an elitist" look. I'll tell them to use Git but they need a special program for it. I show them SSH and they need another app for that. Same for Ruby, most local dev servers, etc. and then every mundane command for me turns into twice the work for them because they have to do what I'm doing plus whatever extra steps plus configuration on their machines.

It's really frustrating for them and they give up. A lot of times a person who has learned some basic HTML and CSS who wants to level up and start doing some version control and set up a remote server ends up giving up on the whole thing.

So the whole ecosystem really is different as everything is built with a nix environment in mind. I'd been working on a Mac for a long time and needed a laptop. I got a cheap Windows laptop and thought I'd dual boot with Xubuntu so that I could deal with certain Windows file types and have an easy way to test sites in IE. Well, I ended up booting to Windows less than 10 times in 6 months and eventually got rid of it altogether because there was nothing Windows did that my Mac or Xubuntu couldn't. I even tried to write so,e desktop software and do some web dev and found that Windows is awesome for desktop apps... If you're only developing for Windows... and Windows is great for web development... if you plan to use an IIS production environment and/or you're going to program in ASP.net or C# exclusively.

But again, this isn't a Windows bashing party here. It's just the reality of working with open source and web dev in 2012. There are certainly things that make nix systems difficult to work with depending on the context but as it stands we're living in a time where *nix is the default platform for web development.
That's funny because I graduated from UF in 1996 and computer degrees were just about as confusing back then.
Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture
I really hope DDG have thought out a backup plan, I am an avid user of their amazing service
I ride a bike at lunchtime. Sometimes skip lunch to do it, or ride to lunch and back.
Part of the objection raised here is that the php maintainers are not amenable to fixing these problems with the language. Maintaining a private fork of the language with different semantics is both a recipe for disaster and at best a local solution.

Bug reports have been filed and closed for many of these issues.

A full on fork of php might be interesting, though the thought of what's going on behind the scenes in the php interpreter terrifies me.
There are tons of sites like Dead Man's Switch. I couldn't think of any reason that that site in particular was any better/more reliable/steadfast than the others.
Yes, there are only 3 ways to render HTML in a browser; through a page load, innerHTML, or DOM apis (mostly createElement and appendChild).
"I am inclined to agree with the conspiracy theory that if these secondary stats were any good, we would be hearing about them."

I don't think it's that simple. Google publishes very few figures that have to do with its core profitability. For example, number of searches a day is not reported. I doubt it's because that figure isn't any good.
Absolutely correct!

But it still seems to me that Taibbi is focussing on one particular aspect of it without any indication that he noticed the other angle.
Real criminals can:

- Host such data off of a server bought with a stolen credit card and accessed via anonymous proxies.

- Use any of the normal pastebin sides out there with offline encryption methods. (E.g. use PGP + copy/paste encrypted text into browser)

- Host such data off of a hacked server.

I don't really see how ZeroBin is scary. You could even do something like this: https://dgl.cx/wikipedia-dns with a hacked domain account + a hacked server. I'm sure the amount of traffic could be small enough for the hack to remain hidden for a long time.
Pebble E-Paper Watch Raises $1M In 28 Hours
I wonder if even a small imbalance could almost completely explain it.

If a gender is less likely to be able to find a Significant Other (we'll assume that homosexuality exists in equal proportions in both genders), would they be more likely to take risks than the other gender? It wouldn't take much of a difference to make a large change in founder figures, since such a small amount of people try to start a company.
I think every site should implement this great UX. So thoughtful.
We're running on five EC2 instances, each instance is running Elasticsearch configured to use 25GB of RAM. With the current data set we might be able to get by with less RAM, we're still in the process of figuring out what works best for us.
Why was it necessary to bundle the _MACOSX and .DS_Store files with the zip download? I rarely see zip files with thumbs.db or desktop.ini files in them.
I'm a non-coder.

A very simple guide to make a very simple, understandable web-app would be the killer feature for me.

There is a tutorial for a chat-app but that's way over my head(I of course get how to put in the code, I just don't understand it (REST, roots, references etc). If I could be shown how to make something insanely simple, and I actually understood how it worked, it'd lead me on to the next thing. A collaboration with codecademy might be the thing.

So much potential.
> Isn't "post-factum civil litigation" an even better mechanism for enforcement?

Only if you prefer getting ripped off and then having to pay lawyers for ten or fifteen years to get back a tiny part of your losses to not getting ripped off in the first place.
But how are you doing that if the server sends back HTML? Like, say you ask for a tweet, and the server sends back the following:

<div class="tweet"><div class="header"><div class="username">rihanna</div><div class="retweet"><img src="retweet.jpg" alt="retweet"></div><div class="tweet-body">Check out my new tattoo of a woman getting a recursive tattoo!</div></div>

You can't send that to document.createElement. Your only options AFAIK are innerHTML and writing your own DOM parser to build up a tree and use the DOM API to create the elements one by one (which will be OMGslow).

And of course appending a new element doesn't make a lot of sense if your changes are transformative rather than additive (e.g. collaborative editing).
Did you read the link you provided? They actually mentioned right at the top that they have a newer search API which is recommended (though I'll admit that I missed it too at first).

https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview
To other biz dudes learning to code (I'm one as well): it's not as hard as you might think. It can be frustrating though.

Understand that you may need to start slow, and you'll fight a lot of bugs. Every few weeks, you'll seem to have a epiphany where "stuff makes more sense." Take pride in those moments and seek them out. They're addicting as hell.

The moments will be small at first. Working through an error message, reliably using methods for the first time, figuring out how to prank your friends (personally, this is a major non-financial/career fulfillment reason for learning to code). Tell people about them, though it may be a little embarrassing to say you fixed a typo after a hour long headache.

Then the epiphanies will get more substantial. Building a login system. Debugging an email notifier. Figuring out you don't need rails scaffolding anymore. Figuring out how to push more logic into the model and out of the controller. Integrating some no-nonsense libraries and APIs. Tell your friends about these -- you're earned it. Those first few hair-tearing periods were you paying your dues.

Some point along the way, you'll start to see problems differently. You'll see solutions instead.

I've always felt these moments were the equivalent of the "language dreams" my old foreign language profs would talk about. When studying a new language, you'll eventually have a dream where you converse in your studied language and you know what's going on. When you start to see solutions in code, no matter how technically skilled you are, you know you've reached a similar tipping point.
> Isn't "post-factum civil litigation" an even better mechanism for enforcement?

No. The future shareholders of the offending company are the ones who pay. Thanks to corporate liability shields, the offending officers will get away.

And oh, cure is better than prevention, right?
Please let this become the norm. This is fantastic.
"No offence", yes, always a good way to start one's post! I think you missed out the "just saying", though. You need that too.

'=' vs '==' is not a syntax error. Consider "x=y=z" vs "x=y==z". And it's in somebody else's code. And they wrote it 2 months ago, but the programmer who's using it has only just started working with it. And they are super busy and don't have time to look at it. And it sort of looks like the problem is in the code you changed last week.

You can easily lose 4 hours over this stuff... have some imagination ;)
I'm also a 2007 alum, and I steered clear of CS as an undergraduate because of the confusing organization you describe above. If that organization wasn't so confusing, I would have tried CS out (vs. the econ BA I hold right now and the MSCS I'm working on now).

The department may have problems, but shutting down research throws the baby out with the bathwater. Degree consolidation would go a long way to improving student enrollment.
It's not "crappy foreplay" - it's a presentation.
Some time back, people here referred[1][2] to his posts as one of the interesting programming blogs they read.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120706
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3131380
For those of you who have a "vested" interest in the reputation of a department you graduated from many years previous (and by many I mean more than a year ago) and are worried about its reflection on you.

Perhaps, instead, you should concern yourself with your personal professional achievements and credentials post graduation and how those reflect on you. To me that seems like a MUCH more productive use of your time.

This seems like a concern to future and current students; rather than alumni.

// Light-hearted jab at UF alumni

Leave it to a Gator grad to be worried about keeping-up appearances.

Go Knights!
It's not obvious that they're actually "shutting down" any research, though. They seem just to be moving it under the aegis of other departments.
I explained some of these security issues in a recent talk on False Start and Snap Start (which was withdrawn from IETF for other reasons).

http://rdist.root.org/2012/02/27/ssl-optimization-and-securi...

What's interesting to me about Adam's post is how fragile protocol implementations are in appliance-type devices. Of course, having seen the internals of other similar devices, I'm not surprised, but the parallels to consumer electronics are surprising, given the critical nature of these network appliances.
I hope I gave due credit to the possibility that part of what's changed is me when I said in the next sentence: "Maybe it’s the result of people starting to take front-end dev seriously, maybe it’s browser vendors mostly getting their shit together, or maybe it’s front-end devs – again, myself included – coming to see some well-established light about the process of software development."

I do think the profession of "front-end development" has grown up a whole lot in the last couple of years. There have been front-end pros since long before I was even in the business, but I think the profession as a whole is being taken more seriously, and a set of baseline expectations for people in the profession is solidifying.
I agree with both of you that there will always be bubbles but recently bubbles have moved from one industry to another. e.g., savings and loans -> tech -> housing etc. I am just arguing that maybe the tech bubble on 2010s wont be as bad as the 1990s given the memory about recent history of this sector and the big bubble of 2010s may come from a different sector.

I have to agree it seems that many signals are pointing towards a big tech bubble, though personally I will wait to see the tech IPOs following the hype of Facebook IPO to call a definite big bubble.
Matlab Creator Cleve Moler to Receive IEEE 2012 Computer Pioneer Award
This is a bad idea. It was a bad idea when paranoid sites did it to try and stop people from stealing their images and it is still a bad idea when trying to be helpful. There is a wide variety of behavior accessed through right click beyond save as.