skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is not simply the case that the elite institutions will be able to take their existing courses and pop them online. More will need to be done and lectures will have to be rethought

I really liked what he said about online education design. The potential exposure of a university course to hundreds of thousands more students than before means that their quality will be under more intense scrutiny. Ultimately, I think that's great and hopefully viewership can pressure professors to construct more engaging lecture videos.
you got it - that is why we have these terms - nothing more nefarious than that
The problem is that most people don't really learn much math at school.
Most people will learn to add , subtract and do multiplication, some will even cram their brains with equations to pass a math exam and then promptly forget it all afterwards.

Programming provides a practical hands on may to introduce logical problem solving. It's something that could be used to supplement Math class.

I find it much easier to understand Mathematical stuff if I have written a program that implements it.
Why dont people call office "The School"?
Ubuntu Fat Clients FTW
Really, it's more a matter of being able to deal with what you don't know. The worst kinds of miscommunication happen when people have misconceptions so severe, they don't even know the right questions to ask. (Raymond Smullyan has an excellent short story that deals with this, where ancient philosophers ask, "What's holding up the earth and the heavens?")

There is no analogy for programming. Most of the communication difficulties programmers have with non-programmers is due to this. The only thing to beware of, is how a little knowledge is also dangerous.
New Headline:

Is the answer always no when a headline is a question?
I'm not entirely sure how this relates to HN.
I took CS101 the first time around, which did have hard due dates. Now I'm in CS253 and the homeworks are much more flexible. They still have dates, but they are more for when the solutions are posted, and homeworks can be submitted after that. I think the actual grading will be on the final project. I like this method much better, as I have been in the same boat, falling behind because life gets in the way.
Ask HN:What was the one hack which took most time?
We have all been through that one hack which took so much time. But feels great when it's done. It has that aha moment to it.

Let's share the story.
Every time I see that word it makes me cringe. It sounds like a disgusting bodily function. I wish we could all decide to let this "word" die in peace.
Money doesn't matter to a payments company? Hmm...

There's always a price.
Actually, APL programmers do code with a screen full of symbols.

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_triangle#APL

I'm beginning to think your mom is smarter for not knowing how to code, because she hasn't been biased yet by exposure to mainstream tools.
Do you have any better way of approaching this?

I mainly posted code examples to show the general idea of what I'm trying to describe. My actual code base has a lot of logic locked behind the authentication and which action to take after the user is authenticated (there are about 4 different places they could land).

4 other use cases are then discovered in the underlying app depending on which action they are taken to.
Nike hyperdunks
Certainly strike that from the credible list.
Microsoft is terrible at naming things. I blame most of Bing's failure on the name, not the actual product itself.
>While most of the article talks about code, the author mentions underscores being ambiguous in the context of underlined fonts. (I don't even think my text editor [for code] supports underlined fonts.)

Lot's of editors do. In Eclipse, for one, it's common to see function names and such shown as hyperlinks when you click on them (with underlines), which makes their definition open (like a function call is "linked" to the function definition).
How much bandwidth does your office really need?
I am having difficulty figuring out your point. Is it that, when you Google for examples for how to do something in Python, you usually don't find satisfactory results? But that other languages (Perl, PHP) do provide such results?

If that's the case, then what particular task you're asking about is going to impact how successful you are. People write much more than just "web-related" things in Python. And, personally, I don't consider that to be important for what I consider a critical mass of users. Rather, what I think is important is that there is enough of a community to provide good online documentation, plenty of technical books, maturity of the toolchain, and integration in most systems.
Real-time synchronous multiplayer 3D gaming with HTML5
Its kind of disturbing to see speculative articles like these make a quick huge wave and creates some kind of impact. Most of the logic behind picking these 5 are based on the stock price, on the other hand if some well known wall st person makes a stock pick, price shoots up. I think this article is little over the limit.
If You Can Copyright an API, What Else Can You Copyright?
For Java folks: JBoss.
The game itself is here: http://airhockey.artillerygames.com/
Right, and this is a barrier to learning digital domains. There is no physicalization of many digital ideas but, precisely by being digital, they do not map onto physical things. I can't run into a lambda on the street or have to fix a leaky loop in my roof. Sure, everyday things touch code but there's a reason why our instinct is to "blow on the cartridge" and not "fire up the debugger"
Do you read English?

edit: I can't reply to your reply so here it is:

My point is that People who write Python choose to write Python. is as true as People who write X choose to write X.

My claim is not that "Everybody who writes X chooses to write X"
"The key was combining knowledge of the business processes with some knowledge of programming."

Knowledge of programming wasn't required to save your company 2mm per year. All it would have taken is someone recognizing there was a problem that could be solved by programming. If you did the job with a couple of months of programming knowledge someone could have been easily hired to do this job, right? They just had to realize there was a problem to be solved.

It seems to me that someone who had any knowledge of what computers could do could have saved your company that money. Just like a person working in a commercial kitchen that wasn't a carpenter could have hired people to improve efficiency and save money.
Fair points. I agree on the first (basic programming courses are now being offered by some schools, but they're not mandatory and far from universal), however I'm a little more hesitant on the second. Knowledge of physics is extremely important to solving basic problems you run into everyday, I just think it's so ingrained that most people don't think about it. Home projects like building a deck or wall mounting a TV for instance are examples of things that require basic understanding of physical laws in order to complete successfully.

I think your first points kind of undercuts your second in that we simply don't think about how physics helps us with our everyday problems since the basics have been ingrained since childhood. I agree that basic computer architecture/programming should be taught in grade school and will go further and say that if it was, it's utility would also fade into the background as we end up applying those childhood lessons unconsciously in our every day life.
We actually do have custom cartridge:
https://openshift.redhat.com/community/blogs/a-paas-that-run...
Evan Priestley (lead on Phabricator) doesn't actually work for Facebook anymore. And he's doing what he like. What's so dubious about that?
Yes. You can see the full lookup path with "dig yourdomain.com +trace" if you are interested
Flame on A beginner's guide to Ember.js
Andy Matthews shows how to use the Ember.js JavaScript framework and walks through a Twitter timeline sample application.
Transform text into a Beautiful Word Cloud (App)
Real conversations are great, but terrible for anyone not in them. What if a co-worker is out sick? At lunch? On vacation? Without studious note-taking any ad hoc conversation is just an untracked change. Not saying they shouldn't occur but if they do, the change (if any) needs to be appropriately communicated to the rest of the group.

I've found that note-taking / decision communication happens so infrequently that it's far better in the long run to just stick to logged forms of communication.

If it's a pair programming team, of course, the documentation is in the code. But if it's something architectural or changing the direction of the product/team, it's gotta be written down.
But there's already existence proofs of good software being developed by fully distributed teams. OK, I wouldn't want to make hiring decisions without an in-person interview, but I can't imagine how body language helps make technical decisions. In fact, I'm suspicious of people who make these types of arguments, because irrational influences like personal charisma have far more influence in person than rational influences, which are more naturally suited to written (not even spoken!) language.
Sync deadlines help with at least two things:

- motivation (helps with procrastination)

- discussion (others are on the same stage)
I'm going to try and say this carefully, because I don't want to start a language war. Quite the opposite: I desperately want to change my views on programming languages.

I've only recently started in Javascript, so I'm probably missing something, but I've been finding it a large step backward from Haskell when compared to Python. Specifically, list comprehensions and generators give Python a more functional feel. Meanwhile, the object system in Javascript has had me generating far more state than I ever would have in my Python code, while also requiring more manual type checking than I ever needed in Python.

I'm new to the language, so I'm sure that I'm missing something. I've read _Javascript: The Good Parts_ and it's helped me grow less frustrated, but I'd love to find out that this language is better than Python.

So, how do you write functional code in Javascript?
Our roadmap has more support for newer versions of Ruby coming soon. We started with the base packages in RHEL but are now working to also bring newer versions as standard cartridges. That said, you can also use a DIY cartridge to get Ruby 1.9.x
Not sure I agree, how many jobs are there apart from musician or carpenter where these skills would be especially useful?

Now think how many monotonous office jobs are there that could be at least partly automated by a few lines of script?

Also when I was at school we had compulsory music classes as well as compulsory design/technology classes that involved using power tools.
Many concepts from algebraic topology can be applied to algebraic geometry after appropriate redefinitions. These new tools seem harder to use than originals. For example I find it technically more difficult to work with étale fundamental group than with a topological fundamental group. Similarly cohomology of a topological space looks simpler than cohomology of a scheme with coefficients in a sheaf. There are many similarities but working with schemes and sheaves is more troubling (at least for me). This of course can follow not from intrinsic difficulty of the subject but from my ignorance and inappropriate intuitions.
Glassdoor.com is a pretty good guide for tech salaries. The salaries are self-reported, but they are aggregated and anonymous, so there is little incentive for people to exaggerate.
HashDays Security Conference 2012
I suppose there are degrees of how free your choices are. Do people choose to use JavaScript for client-side scripting? Technically you have other options, but most people write JavaScript whether they like it or not.

I often write R, not because I want to, but because I'm working with people who don't know any other language. In that case I choose to write R, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about it.
Does it need to "relate" to this site? If it doesn't get the votes, it'll be gone in no time.
Skilled programmers are already horrible at effort and time estimates. The last thing I need is a client who "programmed" some barely-functional shell and who is certain he/she only needs me to "finish up" some of the details.
Made In NY Digital Map: 500 NYC startups hiring for 1,000+ jobs
The most interesting case study would be Home Depot's acquisition of Redbeacon. Does anyone have:

- acquisition price

- Redbeacon's # of employees

- Redbeacon's revenue

- reports from members of either team on how the integration is going? (this would be the most interesting)
Is the difference in variance between SF and Boston really so low? 135.5 (SF) vs 132 (Boston)
And official Python support and having a custom cartridge system
Depressing. Another HN attention grab. The original article was interesting. This one's just words for the sake of it. The most depressing part is that I've now validated it with a comment.
"Will it slow us down?" - Yes.

"Should we do it?" - Depends. Sorry if that doesn't help, but it's true. Depends on how much time it will take away, on the chance that it's transformative, and so forth.
Given that many open source projects are developed by a distributed team, it seems to me that there are plenty of examples where this has worked well.

While face-to-face communication is perhaps the best mechanism of communication at the moment, a centralised team has a far, far smaller pool of potential hires to draw from. It's effectively a tradeoff of communication vs. talent.

My own opinion is that communication between fully distributed teams isn't that bad, and is getting better all the time. The small advantage of having a centralised team doesn't seem worth reducing your talent pool by several orders of magnitude.
> Money doesn't matter to a payments company? Hmm...

Thanks for that non sequitur. Where on earth did you get the impression that I was arguing money doesn't matter to Square?
There is and you don't have to pay for it. The Creative Group is a division of Robert Half, a staffing/recruiting company which also does technical staff. I found the information (particularly the bit about local variances) very valuable. Any hiring manager can reach out to one of their recruiters/account managers and get a copy of this thing. The downside is you have to interact with a recruiting company. :-)

It would be great if someone posted the PDF version of the document like they did this one.
> [...] state machines and error handling are the primary applications of "goto" in C.

Yes, though tail call optimization will allow also handle this problem well.
The one-before-last comment on that post's thread sums it up for me

Yes -- lighten up (non ironically).
Javascript isn't Haskell-esque, it's scheme-esque. I didn't mean to imply it was a substitute for Haskell, merely that it's a better version of Python.

Javascript also has proper closures, and it's support for event driven programming (admittedly, not part of the language) is also quite nice.

[edit, since I can't reply. By proper closures, I mean this shouldn't happen:

> x = 0
> def foo():
> x = x + 1
> print x
> foo()
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'x' referenced before assignment

]
JavaScript will have limited pattern matching. (Better than Python's, because it allows both array patterns and object patterns.)

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:destructuring
No need to apologize! You make excellent points.

There has indeed been a ton of research on SQL databases. But still, Stonebraker, one of their pioneers, said that they should all be thrown out:

"We conclude that the current RDBMS code lines, while
attempting to be a “one size fits all” solution, in fact, excel at nothing. Hence, they are 25 year old legacy code lines that should be retired in favor of a collection of “from scratch” specialized engines. The DBMS vendors (and the research community) should start with a clean sheet of paper and design systems for tomorrow’s requirements, not continue to push code lines and architectures designed for yesterday’s needs." -- http://nms.csail.mit.edu/~stavros/pubs/hstore.pdf

I'm sure a lot of their intellectual work is indeed something I could learn from. But SQL databases are an artifact of a particular moment in technological and cultural history. The thing I really want to learn about isn't the residue of their thoughts as interpreted through 30 years of old code, it's their original insights and how to transfer those to today's world.

Hadoop is a fine example of Stonebraker's point. The original sweet spot of relational databases was easy queries across volumes of data too large to fit in RAM. But Google realized early on that they could do orders of magnitude better with a different approach.

I agree that these new approaches haven't been fully proven in the field, but I'm certainly glad that people are trying.

As a side note, I think the right way to solve the pseudo-English query language problem is by making the query language actual English. If you have a programmer and an analyst or other business person sit next to one another, you get much better results than either one working alone.
So you're partly sure about how this relates to HN, or you're just being cwanky?
The Public Cost Of Private Knowledge
Nothing's wrong with it.

We're just disagreeing with the statement that sell-and-shut-down is what every startup aspires to.
Judging by the ranges, it's my guess that these are not extremes, but possibly 25/75 quartile marks.

The methodology isn't clear, so we don't know how the data were aggregated/culled, but it seems that +/- 3 SD data, at least, were stripped in creating these tables.
Knowing that programming could solve a problem requires knowledge of programming. Someone with zero programming experience doesn't look at a problem and say, "Yeah I can write a script to solve that."
8 Alternatives to GoDaddy
This is the entire reason people petition against the death penalty. And while I've said I can see the need for capital punishment, as a juror I would never sentence someone to death because mistakes happen, the wrong people are accused, evidence gets fucked (accidentally, intentionally), etc.

The mistake isn't worth someone's life.
My old monitor doesn't have HDMI input. Reading text through the composite out on a old TV is painful. They should have used a gpu with DVI-I output, so that it would have digital and analog (VGA) output pins, in my opinion. Nevertheless I'm waiting for mine to arrive :)
Try to think it is a parable: A flaw system (Texas court) exists today, and that kills people. So if you make a system today in good faith (e.g. a web or whatsoever) but didn't rule out all the flaws (which is hard), it can kill someday too.
Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G with T-Mobile Review.
How to Run your Minecraft server on dotCloud
Really? I honestly can't think of a single computer problem that I have experienced recently (except those of my own programming errors) where knowledge of programming would have helped me solve the problem.
I have a hard time criticizing him for his lack of clairvoyance of Apple's success, but who else had it in 2007?

Ballmer has done a lot to copy Apple in the past decade: Zune, Win7 UI, WinPhone. I wouldn't be surprised if they repackaged their old tablets in a sleeker Apple-esque style (which would be funny, because MS was genuinely first to that market) In general you get a very 'me too' feeling out their products in the past decade. (plus Azure and bing, which didnt copy Apple but other companies)
Strictly NaCl is a VM, not an API or platform. What APIs there are are limited to a handful of system libraries used for in-memory work supporting a broader UI written in the browser.

So you could make your "platform" a HTML5 environment supporting NaCl, which is more or less what ChromeOS is. But that's not Android, and doesn't really have a migration path from the existing Dalvik frameworks.
Postgresql 9.2 brings covering indexes
It is available on Cydia for jailbroken iPads/iPhones, if you're into that sort of thing. You probably knew that, but just in case…
Is anyone using QuickCheck as the testing part of a TDD process? Does it work?

There are quickcheck-derived libraries for Javascript, one of them by Douglas Crockford.
Hmm... thinking about this further, it shouldn't be too hard to have a wrapper for my build script that stores the most recent pass/fail state, then automatically commits when that state changes. The trick would be not polluting the continuous integration or end-of-episode branches. I'm sure it can be done, but my git-fu is weak and it would take some research. Might be a good stretch goal reward if funding goes well...
Multilingual Software’s Apps: what makes it vital for your website? ~ Geek House
I do embedded Linux development and I see bugs related to this stuff frequently. What can make things more tricky is different architectures have different ordering guarantees. Anyone know of any cpu architectures that intentionally sacrifice performance for a simpler less bug prone model? I'm thinking of markets like aviation where bugs like this seem particularly scary.
Here's a link to the 2010 HBS commencement address that his book (and this interview) are based on: http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/pr
Boston company is Kickstarting an open-source, open-hardware touch table
Bitcask is specifically designed around not doing random I/O, particularly for writes. A bitcask back end is essentially a gigantic sequential transaction log.
I'm pretty sure most people know about gravity when they leave school, I'd even venture to say that most at least know of the concept that things are made up of smaller things. I'd also venture to call those two things part of "basic" physics.
Maybe people don't necessarily need to learn a particular programming language, API set, platform, etc., but a basic awareness of how computers can be used to automate tasks, how loops and conditionals combined with arithmetic can be organized to make something useful, would really help people realize the potential benefit to be unleashed with an understanding of computers.

I had a computer class in high school where we were taught BASIC, and we were eventually taught to use HyperCard in a likely atypical "humanities" class I took; those experiences were certainly very enriching and empowring to me, even if I never touched BASIC or HyperCard again since.

Is programming even still a part of high school curricula?
If you had been around that generation of systems and toggled in a 30 byte program in hex or octal that loaded a paper tape or card deck that then loaded the actual OS, bootstrap seemed a reasonable term.
Many of the points are not hard to do yet requires discipline to do on a regular basis. Creating engaging content in newsletter and blog I believe is the key.
I'm sorry my point was unclear. Often I place speed (i.e. time-until-I'm-not-doing-this-anymore) at an incredible premium to the point where I don't care what the language is! For example, say that you want to attach a process to monitor a logfile of your web-server(apache, say) and SEND YOU AN EMAIL when a string enters that logfile.

Hopefully, you should be able to complete this task in every single programming language that appears on your resum, including javascript if you have put it there.

In practice, if you are a one-man show trying to get a whole startup off the ground (including all of the biz dev, all of the back-end, all of the front-end, all of the customer e-mails, EVERY SINGLE THING YOUR COMPANY IS DOING) then you don't have the luxury to scratch every itch. There are itches that you can scratch if someone has done it and you can find this out in 15-20 seconds, otherwise, you just don't have the time.

In this sense PHP wins where Python has not yet won.
Django-form-admin: integrate forms in the Django admin site.