skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you hit the nail on the head. With all of the resources that are currently available on the internet, it is easier than ever for a non-technical person to learn enough about programming for them to piece together a programatic solution to a wide variety of problems.

In an age where many people spend 40+ hours per week in front of a computer screen, even a small marginal increase in a computer user's productivity could save them hundreds of hours a year. As a result, it seems like a completely reasonable investment of a non-technical person's time and energy to learn enough about programming to enable them to scrap together a program that allows them to accomplish simple tasks more efficiently.

Would a professional programmer be able to write better code more quickly? Of course. But would a person with zero programming knowledge even recognize when a particular task they are spending hundreds of hours each year manually performing could easily be automated? Probably not.
Please understand that my original comment is not about cooking. It's not about car repair either. And it's definitely not about whether cooking and car repair are valuable skills. Or even if they should be taught for 10 hours a week or 2 hours of week.

The argument was that a very high proficiency in reading, writing and maths has more value for the average student, than a very high proficiency in a niche subject. A nice subject being FOR EXAMPLE, cooking, car repair or programming.

Sure, our students might benefit from these subjects. But I doubt anyone would seriously suggest giving the same level of educational focus to those areas, rather than to basic life skills such as reading and writing.

And that is Atwood's point: Programming, like car repair, is an esoteric subject, and as such not equal in worth compared to more basic skills such as reading, writing and communication. By all means, subjects such as cooking, car repair and programming is good to know. But for the average student, a high level in reading will be considerably more important than a high proficiency in car repair.

This is the point (and that's actually Atwood's point, I haven't supplied mine), which I was merely explaining to the OP, as the OP interpreted the blog post as being against learning programming at all.

A couple of people countered by argumenting against irrelevant details, such as the use of cooking and car repairs as examples of esoteric subjects. They even started arguing the value of the specific examples compared to the basic skills, which of course is entirely irrelevant to the point I was making.
> I don't think Facebook has the data yet to detect that you are about to buy a car. If you start liking car reviews, maybe, but that's not a typical behavior.

I think they have the data, but maybe not the means to mine it. I'm guessing that people are interested in buying a new car at important life milestones and when replacing an older vehicle. It's pretty easy to find those milestones ("here's pictures of our new baby", "Grad 2015, whooooo", "Just started at my new job"). Signals for replacing an older vehicle could be looking up vehicle review pages on facebook (does edmunds.com have a facebook page?), like you mentioned.

So I don't think it's impossible (but definitely non-trivial). I have no idea if it's possible to target ads against the sorts of things people post to their wall/photo albums.
This whole thing is turning into a mess. I had some dim hope for Yahoo to reemerge from its recent decade of failure, but I don't think it's possible now.
Great article. I agree, I really don't like it when others try to pull people down. We should be encouraging because the more we bring each other up, the better life will be. I just started learning how to code as well and it's tough and a lot of work, at times you are super frustrated and a harsh remark at the right time could dampen one's spirit.
"No, the alternative is for Google to exert control over the device manufacturers and state that if they're going to be using the Android OS, they need to support and update their devices to the latest version for at least 2 years after the phones are released."

You think that would cause the manufacturers to change their behavior in order to stay certified as Android compatible? I think that would lead the major manufacturers to fork Android, like Amazon has done for the Kindle Fire.
For the Nexus S I really don't see any browser except Opera Mobile as real alternatives, it is just that much faster than anything else.

The new Firefox beta seemed to be quicker than older versions but crashed within a minute of browsing on a semi-heavy page, it is just too unstable and its memory footprint is way too large for a phone like the Nexus S.
I used to work for Microsoft, and while I now work for a "cooler" company, it's good to see people doing some actual analysis about it instead of blind M$ bashing.
Sounder launches, we go hands-on (video)
Quality programming is an extremely broad range, yes. It's not really sufficient to say there are degrees: some forms of excellent quality are completely orthogonal and just can't be properly compared to each other.

And yes, there is definitely a valid space for end user coding. The key is mostly in remembering that an end user cannot and should not be expected to produce something competent, or even palatable.
I'm attending as a dev myself, I look forward to meeting you. Did you attend any of the meetups this last weekend, or last night?
Connect with Web Intents
Boulder Is For Startups
Someday isn't interesting to people deciding what to use today.
I very much doubt that any deal was cut. It just seems that Facebook's algorithms are constantly adjusted.
Doing some security research on Android. Fill out an anonymous survey?
Svbtle by Dustin Curtis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742314
PagerDuty is hiring Customer Service pros
Or "Give us some stock at the opening price, or else."

There is no way for GM to pull this kind of maneuver at this time without looking suspicious.
Just refreshed the page after some 50 minutes.
At the current rate there are about 200 negative user reviews per hour.
Yup - I hate the HR hype (you're HR right) that "OMG LOOK @ WUT WE PAYZ!!!!111".

I've spent the past 10+ years as a defense contractor working cleared programs. I've seen all sorts of sleazy work done by HR and management to push salaries down.

- Justify your position - done 2x yearly

- Switching you from one project to another that has less benefits associated with it (this means the company doesn't have to pay their portion, so it's a larger profit margin for them)

- Not reimbursing for directed travel

- Full Time Employee required to pay for hardware/software to do the job

- Assigned a primary health provider closest to work so as to minimize out of office time; or assigned one on the other side of the state; in this scenario it would have meant a 2+ hour drive one way

- Bait and switch with employee referrals (suddenly not qualified for the bonus because a recruiting subcontractor had contacted them 2 years ago - no documented contact, but let the employee prove otherwise)

But who do you think fills out those salary surveys - HR/management. Do you believe that they'd be honest. They have a vested interest in stacking something like Glassdoor - prospective clients use it. Clients want a workforce that's "happy". They'll pay more for it because the perception is better output and low turnover. So the company has ensured a good payday for themselves, low employee expenditure rate, and the work is still being done. Of course with one project I worked the turnover was a killer (140%+ at the 30 month mark, 6 program managers, 5 deputy program managers, least amount of time someone was here before they said f*ck it was 22 hrs) - but profit is profit.

So keep believing in your vision that companies, managers, and HR speak the truth.
Comparing click-through rate on a passive site like Facebook (I'm there to socialize and I might happen to see something interesting ad-wise) to an active site Google (I'm there to find a product) seems like a bad comparison. It seems like Facebook ad engagement should be measured my metrics closer to billboards.
You guys are so naive. The only reason Jeff doesn't want everyone to program is so that we can have the benefits we have right now. There's currently an industry shortage, it's awesome for programmers right, left and center. We get better perks, better benefits, better pay.

There are definitely benefits of having more programmers, or people familiar with programming, however there are two caveats:

1. With more programmers there will be a much larger signal to noise ratio. Good programmers will become much harder to find.

2. It'll drive down the value of each programmer, regardless of industry quality.

The same thing happened to the aviation industry in India. There were pilot shortages, then they found that pilots get paid really well. Everyone and his cousin became a pilot, boom - quality and more importantly perks/pay went down. Now there's a pilot surplus (of mostly inexperienced n00bs) in the country. These guys are all unemployed and the airlines are all talking about "how difficult it is to find good and experienced pilots". But the pay has gone down..

So yeah, nobody learn how to program PLEASE. I want to be the only programmer.
So the Hans Benedict formula (which has been in use since 1919) is directly weight related.

The Katch-McArdle and Cunningham try to be more specific and relate to the Lean Body Mass (LBM).

However -- since LBM is reasonably correlated with overall weight -- then we can assume that (all else being equal) the fatter person has a higher BMR.
... or Facebook ads don't work.
I could imagine a very efficient and quick way for system updates could be built this way. Would reduce hosting and bandwidth costs for the system developers / maintainers and could improve the speed and availability of updates.

The only immediate concern that springs to mind is that if you manage to crack into this channel, you could potentially gain access to millions of computers in next to no time. In fact, I believe botnets work similar to this (from what I can remember of the Reddit botnet AMA...
It was done in part by an agency called B-Reel. They do quite a bit of work with Google.

http://www.b-reel.com/
I have ran into a ton of gem incompatibilities using Ruby on Windows, however, I would just end up finding a solution for it or a work around. But I can definitely see this coming in handy.
Totally mess up the deer? I'm not sure how you've come to that conclusion.

An AK-47 fires a 7.62x39mm round, which is smaller than rounds like a .30-30 (7.62x51) or .30-06 (7.62x63), commonly used for deer hunting.

And as I mentioned in another comment, while an AK-47 is not an ideal rifle for hunting, it is a very cost effective choice.
I only worked with Harrison very briefly (and merely in the same office—I never worked one-on-one with him personally).

I reached out to Harrison and Zee on Twitter, first. I was irritated that he would do something like that, especially because he knows me. He ninja-edited the post and Zee went on a tirade; that was when I felt wronged. Harrison said nothing to me until much later.

Nothing manufactured, nothing faked, and nothing personal. By and large, I was upset with Zee's reaction.
Nintendo has always sold their hardware for profit. They made money on the Wii from day one.

They're taking a bath right now because the strength of the Yen versus USD removes a lot of their export profit. That, combined with the fact that they're ramping up production of the 3DS and the next console, is the reason they lost money.
The format didn't need to be reversed, it's (almost) open. Additionally there are plugins for the older versions of Office to let them work with the newer format, and it's much much easier to write tools to do things with Word files now - just crack one open and take a look (it's a .zip file full of XML files).
I hope that will be the case. My ultimate motivation is to get students interested in programming and all the other things (control tech, etc) a cheap expendable PC can facilitate. I could easily get 20 of these if they were available but getting one is tricky enough at the moment.
I didn't research anything. I work for a large multinational and our team is responsible for some of the most popular public apps and websites on the entire platform. So yes. I see first hand what it takes to support them.

And the problems with Android are far, far beyond just GPU issues. It is the fact that the most popular devices are also the ones running old versions.
Not with timing like this, which would create such bad blood. This news item has an ulterior motive.

Not that that precludes the possibility that Facebook ads don't work.
For what it's worth, I don't think it's strictly fair to call all plugins that inject ads onto pages "malware."

If the app -- suppose it's a toolbar or something -- gives the user valuable (to them) functionality, and it was installed legitimately, I think it's perfectly acceptable to monetize that way.

So the measure of the malware should be based on the app itself, and how it got onto the computer, and not the apps monetization.

While I can sympathize with site owners who could have their reputations tarnished by users seeing ads and assuming they came from the website, I also feel that if I, as a user, want an app and "pay" for it by accepting ads injected into my browsing activity, that strikes me as something I should be allowed to do.
What isn't joining Facebook these days.
Because if a statement needs more than 80 chars, it's either too long, or too deeply nested.
The worst are the adds with a picture of some guy called Jimmy and another one with long hair. Both asking for money. It takes up the whole top of the page.
Yes - this demo pegged my 4 core cpu on Chrome/Windows 64.
This article is really strong. It lays out what a lot of us knew already, gets some interesting new quotes from sources, and has a lot of insight to offer to any smart startup looking to be acquired by a big company. A real study in what not to do.
I'll be there, I'm local and excited.
It's 17 years old, dry and contextless. It can be useful, but it'd be way down on the list of books I'd hand to someone and not only because I'm assuming anyone starting out today is programming in Python, Ruby or JavaScript. It certainly isn't necessary reading to be a good programmer, by any means.
Their page has (roughly) 300k followers. That's $100 per reachable user per year, which is insane.

If they were using that additional $10mm to get the 300k followers to begin with, that's an even worse indictment of FB advertising for traditional brands.
Everytime I see Diablo 3 online to purchase, ten minutes later it is all sold out. Do vendors not order enough supplies?
As I understand it, the warranty costs associated with all of those RRoDs ran into ten figures. It really set them back on the road to profitability.
> They really need to structure the OS so that the core components can be updated independent of the vendor ones. Then just ship updates regardless of what vendors do.

Except that won't work because what vendors do is modify core system components. Network stacks, audio/video codecs, system themes, etc. are all things changed by carriers and manufacturers for a variety of reasons.

There are two core reasons why Android OS updates are slow to roll out:

1) there is no profit motive to upgrade phones that have already passed their prime retail lifespan

2) modifications made my carriers/manufacturers are not simple and often have dramatic consequences for how the phone and apps on the phone behave

For companies like Microsoft, there is a profit motive to updating released software and selling larger OS upgrades at a price. For Linux users, the onus to upgrade comes from the users themselves, much like how there are those that choose to install custom ROMs on Android to get those advanced features.

Regardless, the fact that you can create an Android app that runs on so many hardware configurations is extraordinary. The downside to the popularity is that its likely your app won't run on every hardware configuration, so the question is how will Google mitigate that problem?
I'm not defending it, I'm explaining it.

Google has created an open ecosystem, and these are the natural consequences. Google can't "do something about it" because of the open terms of their licensing.
What is Facebook really worth?
You have to start small to do big things.

Check out this paper for more - I find it highly interesting:

http://dynamicaspects.org/papers/PADL2010Final.pdf
They have, and it does?
Its obvious that Facebook ads don't work. How often you see a relevant Ad in Facebook? Almost never. So, advertisers show interesting images, but when you click on that image, it is some non-sense website. Facebook has some private information about the user, other than that FB has no clue what is my mood or what I am looking for. Its no wonder GM pulled out of Facebook.
Kickstart It: Touch the Temp with the Cryoscope Thermal Display
At first glance, that number across as absurdly high but they do mention "covers content created for the site".

It could very well include the cost of creation of video content, contest giveaways, promotional prizes and such.

Once you add all that all up, $30 million doesn't seem as far fetched .....
Consoles are sold at a loss, so that more people will buy the console (licensing fees are proportional to the size of the audience/consumer base). Even the PS3 when it first came out at $600 was a loss leader; if i'm remembering right for the PS3, the cost of the hardware was something close to $1000.

Companies expect to make that money back through 1st party game sales and licensing fees from 3rd party developers for access to the sdk.
It's slightly more nuanced than "eat less and eat healthier," because the article is pointing the finger at some general abundance. If you like, look at this researcher's perspective directly. It's not why is this person obese but rather why is everyone getting obese? So he's not going to recommend that the problem is at an individual level, but at an institutional level.

If you wanted to translate this advice for institutions to an advice for individuals, I think it would instead be something like, "pay attention." The hardest costs to see are often the steady everyday costs -- that morning coffee, the groceries, subscriptions, and so forth. The conclusions that "abundance is the problem" and "we're throwing away too much food" seems to suggest that it has sneaked in during the moments when people aren't paying attention; people now don't pay attention to the quantity of food they buy, so more of it gets bought, more gets eaten, more gets thrown away. Look at the things that come automatic, be less worried about single failures and more worried about the general patterns.
One FT employee easily costs more than $100,000 when you include benefits, expenses and so on.

Also GM sells a few dozens models of cars, I could easily see the salaries for the staff who do daily updates for all these models and the advertising agencies who manage it costing 30 million or more.

Also GM has annual revenue of almost 160 BILLION, 30 million is a drop in the bucket in their marketing budget.
hard to believe it's html5/javascript
How Google Execs Get Flying Privileges at NASA Ames
I don't really use ToDo apps but I can say the app loos very nice design-wise and I like that it's pretty straightforward to use.
Nintendo's taking a bath for multiple reasons but in regards to the wii (1) they rode it for too long and (2) all it did was games while the more robust hardware in the PS3 and Xbox made them more useful.
New research shows smartphone growth is global
Bittorrent exists to make it easier to download large files or sets of files. Large files tend to fall into two major categories: media (video and audio), and large software distributions (.isos or other software updates). So, it doesn't seem at all surprising that bittorrent primarily gets used for downloading media files and software distributions. Both of those categories include many perfectly legitimate downloads, as well as some that infringe someone's copyright.
Ugh. I'm sick of this ridiculous debate. Further, this was a horribly written, inflammatory, wildly up-its-own-ass misinterpretation of the original.
And here's the obligatory clone: https://github.com/natew/obtvse
As the article indicates, the headline should be: "Congress might kill the commercial space race." NASA would prefer to continue the competition:

"Ending competition by down-selecting to a sole commercial space company could double the cost of developing a privately built human spaceflight system and it will leave us in the same position we find ourselves today -- having only one option for getting our astronauts to the space station," NASA administrator Charles Bolden told an FAA commercial space advisory committee last week.

Boeing is lobbying hard to legislatively eliminate the competition and keep its cost-plus contracts.
I hardly notice Facebook ads. However, I think the smaller your company, the larger Facebook ads may have an impact.
Also: Michael DeGusta's chart from Oct 2011

http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphan...
Risks of the open Internet
"they make less money than they used to"

That's incorrect, your looking at profit margins and not actual profits. Profits have actually been increasing every year in the last few years (except in 2009).
Every time someone makes this argument I feel like they're undermining the point they are trying to make. You sound like a politician trying to couch his corruption in some legal technicality ("depends on what the definition of "is" is").

There are lots of reasons to look at the content industry and say "You are screwing us over, taking our rights and laughing all the way to the bank while you cry to our faces, you suck" but making up bullshit only makes you seem like you’re pedaling it too.

Instead of buying it, you took it. That's basically stealing.
On eve of Facebook IPO, Silicon Valley’s gap with America widens
The Most Innovative Startups In Augmented Reality
email me your resume?
As long as the plugin explicitly warns you that this is happening, I don't see it as being any worse than running AdBlock.
It depends on what your client wants on the site, but Wordpress is a great CMS. And as for jquery/html; that depends on the theme you will choose to make/buy.
The thing is, they don't. They really don't. I hardly even notice them, like there's some kind of mental block that prevents the brain from perceiving the ads. Same thing applies to Google ads, I completely ignore them. Has anyone else noticed such behavior in themselves?
Halon's Razor is appropriate here. Before everyone gets up in arms, this is probably a bug.
The Crazy Way Europe Measures Inflation Might Doom the Euro
You never worked with advertising.

Advertising agency doesn't sell you a great campaign, idea or pretty pictures.

they sell you media. with a HUGE markup.

10mil media can cost way more than 30mil if bought from an agency creating the 'creatives' (in the case of car ads, a picture of the car, or a movie of it cruising on a road where the art director likes to take vacations)

30mil for 10mil of media, GM had a good deal.
Is beautiful usable? The influence of beauty/usability on reactions to a product
Pretty much, yes. New features in ICS need to be viewed as optional and probed if you're going to use them. Though to be fair there really aren't that many you'd really want -- ICS focused more on the core apps and user experience than it did on extending the platform APIs.

Also, my memory is that something like 20-30% of iOS users weren't on 5 yet. Is that wrong?
Nvidia’s Kepler Pushes Parallelism up to Eleven
Well if Facebook ads DO work (at least for GM) I don't believe they would have pulled their campaign no matter what ulterior motives they may have. Sales are sales.