skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The first step is letting people know that learning to code is not that hard, and that if they put their mind to it they have a high chance of succeeding."

Is this even true? I think it's pretty well documented that the vast majority of the population actually has a high chance of failing. Look at failure rates in intro CS courses. Remember this?

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm...
I don't know that. I know AeroFS uses P2P.
I remember when VBA came out in MS Office.

Now your average tech savvy office drone could morph their excel spreadsheets into a full blown application capable of processing business data without having to jump through any of the traditional hoops the evil IT department normally demands.

And we ended up with a ton of buggy, dangerous "mission critical" piles of garbage because they were "designed" and built by non-programmers.

Software programming is a discipline on the order of engineering and it will continue to get more complicated and require more and more education going forward. So no, not everyone should learn to "code".

We should be encouraging people to THINK like a coder - to approach problems in a way to identifies root causes and starts coming up with proper solutions.

I'm not in the valley so may it's vastly different down there, but outside (in Canada) tech is still considered a very specialized field, software development especially. It is not considered as simple as basic household skills like plumbing, cooking and building a deck. I would not expect my lawyer to 1) know how to code or, 2) code in a professional and useful manner.
Android Platformer
So recently I have been working on a project. By recently I mean for the past year or so. It is finally nearing completion, and I wanted to get some user feedback on it.

Basically, the game is a standard platformer. Move around, jump, you know, that kind of stuff. The game is a puzzle platformer though, so things try to kill you while you attempt to solve a puzzle. You collect batteries as you play through the game, and if you use a battery, you get larger, allowing you to move blocks around at the price of your mobility. Click the same button to remove the battery and get smaller.

Thats the basics of the game play, and where the real exciting part begins. I have been working on an inline level editor for the game. It allows you to create your own levels using parts from the game and play them as you edit them. This keeps the game constantly new and fresh.

I was hoping I could get some feedback about what I am working on, any ideas to make it more appealing. I would really appreciate it.

Oh, and I have a video posted here, I am going to update it later tonight with the new level editor stuff and the better UI, but this will do for now :p

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1621630581/android-platformer
Why you will fail to have a great career?
Are these trolls with an existing patent you're considering infringing?

Or are these trolls gremlins who will somehow come out of the woodwork after you get your own thing going and try to patent it?

Patent trolls survive by making money. If you don't have any money (and aren't making any), they probably won't bother with you. If you are making money, they will want something you can afford or raise, because otherwise, they won't make money that way either.

In many ways, fighting with a patent troll is a sign of success more than anything else. It means you have the money to fight over. Don't be afraid of success.
مشاهدة مباراة الهلال والغرافة بث مباشر
One of the best explanations I've seen for the question 'how does my computer get from these zeros and ones to these windows' is 4 pages in Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. (Starts at 287, all editions pagination is the same)
He hasn't failed yet. He has pursued a risky plan to reinvent Nokia, one that might yet work out.
For learning to code:
-You develop analytical and problem solving skills. Similar to math, but more practical (how many people really use Calculus on a daily basis?)
-You understand how computers work. No explanation necessary.
-All the other good arguments people have made.

Against learning to code:
-More bad programmers.
-Even worse, more non-programmers who think they can code. Example: Someone does CodeYear and suddenly thinks they are a expert coder. Starts web design business. Sells poorly built wordpress themes to unsuspecting small businesses. If they have low prices, it makes potential customers think that all coding should be cheap("if they can do it for practically free, why should I pay you more?"). Thus, the entire industry suffers.

That isn't to say CodeYear is bad. I like it. It's great for people who actually want to learn to code and don't know where to start. It's bad for people who think they can sell websites after a few hours.
I think learning to cook is an interesting comparison. Would people react the way they do now if someone wanted to learn how to cook instead of learning how to code? I think learning to cook is a really worthwhile skill. It will teach you about food, ingredient and chemistry. It will maybe get you thinking about how we produce food in our world.

The same goes for coding. It will get you thinking about a lot of things that really matter to your life and the world.
I'd say coding is really a lot like learning a martial art. You get exercise (brain/body), you can use it to overcome difficulties (formatting complex documents/leg-sweeping a belligerent drunk), and you can develop it into a career if you focus. But really it's just a set of tools that have a wide ranging use. Of course, you also have to practice so you don't get rusty.

I think everyone who has a mind for problem-solving should learn to code. Heck, even people who aren't especially right-brained can use code to be creative and artistic. And sometimes it's just fun, damnit.
I tried the service a couple of months ago and it is really easy to use. Got a blog up and running in no time just to test the waters using bottle, jinja and mongo. No sweat.

http://blog-georgenava.rhcloud.com
Jpeg does.
There's a great example/explanation on the Facebook Developer blog:

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/627/

Basically, it's Last-Modified on steroids.
This is like saying you shouldn't learn to write unless you're going to be a writer; or that you shouldn't learn to do math unless you're going to be a mathematician; or that you shouldn't practice sports and athletics unless you're going to be a professional athlete.

In any case, you don't learn to code so you can code. You learn to code so you can solve problems in a repeatable way.
I wasn't aware that you could specify completely different images at different resolutions.
What is wrong with acquiring a skill that is completely unlike what you normally do. It's enriching experience and challenges you mentally more than learning something that is very much like what you already know/do.

No one is saying that just because you learn to program you will be seeking to do it professionally. I think mayor of New York knows better than to quit his post and start seeking some janitorial programming position.
Windows 7 is pretty good in my opinion. I only run a linux box right now, but when I need Office/Photoshop/Games, I'm much more likely to go with Windows than Mac.

What's wrong with windows as of Windows 7? As far as I can see, not very much. It seemed quite stable for the limited time I used it. It's good to look at. It gets the job done. What more do I need?

I'm sure Windows 8 will be a decent move up from here. A better choice for worst CEO would have been the former RIM CEO or the current Nokia one. I STILL CAN'T BELIEVE THEY DITCHED MEEGO IN FAVOUR OF WINDOWS PHONE!!! AARRGGGG!
I've run into multiple situations at work where someone I was working for knew how to code, even if it wasn't their job, and it made things so much easier. I probably shouldn't reveal the details, but in general they were able to identify situations where just writing a quick app would help a lot vs. not having one, even tried writing it themselves, after when I ended up writing it and sent the source code along (they didn't have source control access) they were able to modify it as needed to be much more usable without bouncing it back and forth to me over and over, etc..

In another situation the person again figured out when an app would deliver really awesome results over the bog standard 60's way of doing things, and during the meeting to see if we could help out and all the subsequent revision communication, they just knew a lot about how apps get written. They'd suggest things that made it 10 times easier to write, understood that throwing in an option for everything instead of having a set functionality makes testing and code branches and maintenance a real pain in the ass, approved slight changes that made things a lot easier to write ahead of time instead of demanding meeting the requirements exactly as they were written, etc..

It's sort of like when you hear about someone trained as a doctor and who can also code doing all this awesome stuff. Except in a large organization we already have a ridiculous amount of skilled people available, so it's closer to you just need to know about people's capabilities and how they work to get really close to a similar situation where you can take advantage of both fields. So anyway, even if it isn't someone's job to code, it can be very valuable for them to know how to, and it can make them a lot easier to work with for those of us who do code professionally.
There. They apologized. That should shut 'em up.
4 degrees with 0% unemployment (guess them)
Two things about Bloomberg: The "taxpayers" pay him $1 a year (granted that doesn't mean he shouldn't do the job of Mayor, but just saying). And two: He OWNS a technology company. If I owned one and wasn't on the technical side, I'd be interested in picking it up as well
The whole point of voting is that higher-rated comments are brought to the top of the page, making them more visible. Most people don't read every comment.
Awesome, thanks for the explanation :)
Silicon nanotube lithium-ion battery stores 10x more power, lasts 6000 charges
"you can look directly at how many Internet users there are for each root server site in a region. The lower the number, the better." [citation needed]?

I was under the impression that a diverse geographical distribution (to defend against localized natural disasters and targeted attacks) was the primary goal, rather than a concentration of DNS servers in areas of higher internet population.
It's not just in the US, and it's not a "funny cultural thing". Your whole post is extremely ignorant. It's attitudes like yours that make people think that racism and sexism is acceptable behaviour. It's not.
> Programming is logical thinking in practise. Programming is breaking a problem set down, thinking step by step through it, thinking of edge cases, and making it work.

If the benefit of everyone learning programming is logical/critical thinking, breaking a problem down and thinking of edge cases, etc, then why not focus on teaching everyone how to do that instead?

A good way of doing that may very well be teaching some form of programming, but unless you explicitly state the goals up front a lot of people are very likely to miss the point completely and either teach just programming, or learn just how to code.
We switched slightly midstream and we are now talking about an "entirely server side solution", if you scan back a few posts up. It's fairly trivial to do image processing on a server and cache the results based on the URL
Expecting everyone to learn to code is immature, condescending and unrealistic. Grow up.
I agree more with this rather than the other one - I see coding as speaking, writing, cooking [food], or composing music. Sure, not everyone in the world HAS to know how to compose music, but we still know how to compose a simple melody in our heads, and we sure as hell need to know how to write.

Coding isn't hard, coding is simple - simpler than a lot of other complicated things we have to learn as we grow up - and as such it should be mandatory in a world governed by computers.
How Space-Age Nostalgia Hobbles Our Future
Ah, OK.

Germany has always been a "jus sanguinis" country, meaning that the basic principle of its nationality law is blood descent. This stands in contrast with "jus soli" countries like the United States where the basic principle is place of birth. A child born in Germany is not automatically a German national. It used to be that birth on German soil was completely irrelevant to questions of nationality, but children born in Germany since 2000 can acquire German nationality by birth if one of the parents was a long-term permanent resident. I question whether a military baby would qualify, as a soldier stationed in Germany would presumably not be there under a German permanent residence permit.

Assuming for the sake of argument that your son did have German nationality, he would certainly be subject to the draft - if it still existed. Germany ended compulsory service last year. But this does point to a larger issue: anybody with multiple nationalities is fully subject to all the legal obligations imposed on citizens of each country.

(I am not an immigration lawyer, but I've sent a lot of time researching nationality issues. I've also spent some time in German embassies: I have a German wife and a child who is therefore also German by virtue of jus sanguinis.)
Learning anything is a good comparison. There is no harm in learning. Better to be a mediocre guitar player than not be able to play to guitar at all. It expands your mind, and lord knows you were just going to spend the time watching Desperate Housewives reruns.
I see ... so we're watering down the profession to the point where it is all inclusive. Can I start calling myself a doctor the next time I administer first aid?
Computing is taking a similar path in everyday life as finance. As individuals, I don't feel we need to learn how hedge funds, or complex derivatives work, but nobody denies it is beneficial to learn how to manage money, make basic investments, and plan your retirement. The urge to teach programming isn't as much about teaching everyone complex and theoretical computer science, but to teach basics that will benefit them as we move into the information age where technology permeates nearly every business.
Well they clearly think it's acceptable or the site wouldn't exist in the first place.

Besides, I said "might". I probably should have said "some people", but the fact that I have to defend a site that points out abhorrent behaviour towards a minority group in an industry is pretty shocking to begin with.
If you don't like the idea of relying on RedHat to play with this tech, remember that it is Open Source. Download it, use it, heck make a business that builds on it.

https://github.com/openshift/crankcase
https://github.com/openshift/os-client-tools
https://openshift.redhat.com/community/wiki/build-your-own

(I will say though: they make it extremely easy to get started and I really like using OpenShift so far. I've never used Heroku, but if it's this user friendly i'd definitely have used it before... Why don't they have a free offering for people to test out the service?)
Old School Platformer, right on your phone
Yeah, it was significantly more difficult to set up an Android dev environment than it was to get Xcode working. Not to mention, the Android SDK is actually a ton of different SDKs for every possible version of the OS, with a bunch of device-specific SDKs on top of those.

Don't even get me started on emulators. AVD Manager is a joke.
I still think those «buggy, dangerous "mission critical" piles of garbage» are valuable.

If there was no VBA, the jobs these scripts were created for would still be done manually, with a mouse, by some secretary somewhere. "Getting a professional to do it" would never enter into the picture when you're talking about a BigCorp with a conservative, limited-budget IT department.
I believe this should be moved to the stylesheet. We already have ways to determine media/viewport/device/orientation etc so adding different imgs would be a no brainer.

Bonus point, less cluttered HTML.
Michael Bloomberg has a BS in EE. So this isn't that far-fetched. But thus was more a call to action than anythjng so Jeff Atwood is getting caught up taking a political platitude at face value.
It's interesting that none of these criticisms apply to the Udacity offerings. I feel like that team has a more original approach than the university professors who are transplanting their lectures to the Internet.
Focus on the person, instead of the code. Easy!
Show HN: geohub.github.com - locate your github friends
That is not true it is just that the syntax is non-obvious and awkward in my mind.

You can do stuff like Teacher.objects.all().select_related('students') and Teacher.objects.filter(students__first_name='Jill').

The biggest frustration is aggregation though. It has hard and sometimes impossible to add group by and having clauses. Using extra() is very fragile and using values to force the group by is awkward. There is probably no fixing that part of the Django ORM other than just getting rid of it.
Shit code will come from non-coders at the same rate as from coders. The reason that your buggy and dangerous missions critical piles of application (that eventually DID something useful for whoever used that) is garbage is because the people who coded didn't know a single thing about coding, and simply dived into it trying to achieve something they needed, and it worked [up to a point].

That's the whole point of this, learning to code gives you the option to make something you otherwise would consider magic.

You say you do not expect your lawyer to learn to code, but do you expect him to have basic mathematical tools to be able to have a conversation with him about stocks and options and percentages, right? Well, in the not so distant future these simple mathematical tools that we learn early on in life will be incorporated with basic programming tools.

No, lawyers still won't be able to code a Facebook from scratch, but they will be able to code basic HTML template for legal documents, and generate simple reports when they need to. Obviously they'll have secretaries and code monkeys that will do their bidding for money, as always, but they will still know the basic principles of software development, unlike today that most non-technical people consider software as black magic.
I've made a go with this; I'm trying to combine it with GTD, which seems to be working well enough for me.

I like the physical timer with the ticking, actually; it does seem to help me focus a bit. Can't use that in my office, but most of the time I work from my home and there it works well.

Like any time management technique, one must have the force of will to manage one's time. That's where I fall down sometimes, but this at least provides me a "hook" on which to focus, and is fairly easily understood.
When I was 16, I lost a hard drive with 2 years of game development work on it. I eventually rebuilt the game much bigger and better, and shipped it, but not before I cried for three days straight. Now I never leave anything un-backed up that I would be disappointed about losing. Fortunately for us, storage is far cheaper now than it was when I was a kid.
Classical programmer fallacy: equating cleverness with value.

There are plenty of level 3 cheesy little Access and VB apps that any "serious" programmer would laugh that that are level 5 or 9 on your scale.
There apparently is just one root server for all of Russia, and that singlehandedly is responsible for these numbers. (Edit: 4 actually.)

http://www.root-servers.org/

And Canada only has root servers on the eastern side of the county, and none whatsoever in the west.

But does it really matter? Aren't they just used when there is nothing cached?

The author makes it seem like "the powers that be" have some kind of conspiracy, but it's really up to the local ISP's to devote the resources to run a server, there is no one in charge - you just have to do it and then ask to be added to the list.
Here is the link, since it didn't work in the post
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1621630581/android-platf...
Didn't Jeff make the point that people should be taught "computer skill" for the reasons you just listed? You can learn about the ins and outs of technology without learning to code.
How To recover deleted files on an ext3 file system
last I checked, Heroku does have a free offering.
Thanks for the video. Can't wait for jgrahamc to build it.
That would mean the browser couldn't start downloading any image before it had downloaded and parsed the stylesheet. Or that it would download all images and the entire point of saving bandwidth is lost.
As much as this pains me to say it, I don't think Ballmer is the worst by far. The reality is that MS's numbers are still great despite not having the stranglehold over the PC industry that they once had. It's still a very strong company. I don't care for their products, but many people still do.

Ballmer deserves the crap he's gotten for his prior arrogance, but I have not seen that behavior in a long time. I have a hard time criticizing him for his lack of clairvoyance of Apple's success, but who else had it in 2007? Only Google comes to mind.

This story is just out there to get picked up by bloggers and hopefully go viral. I actually think the man deserves more respect.
New Planet Found in Our Solar System?
You would need to turn on caching on your query strings in order for this idea to be useful with a cdn (ie, both http://example.org/image.png?size=big and http://example.org/image.png?size=small would need to be cached by the cdn). The issue is if you use some sort of user tracking, or rss feed, or anything that appends unique data to the end of the URL (so http://example.org/image.png?size=small could become something like http://example.org/image.png?size=small&user=19hv839&...). At that point, every single person is getting the uncached version of the site, since their unique url was never cached before. Its not difficult to configure this sort of thing by any stretch of the imagination, but it does add another step.
You are very wrong about this - people who know how to "search for code samples" know what programming looks like, but they are far from the majority.

I, for one, wish more people understood what programming "looks like", so that I could actually talk to people about what I do without them being completely confused. People can visualize what nearly every other profession does day-to-day, but what programmers do is a complete mystery to most people. I tell people that I'm a writer for a language with a very structured grammar, but that's only part of the story.
Guys, if you ever encounter a woman with a t-shirt that says "Talk nerdy to me", I believe you will have her instantly jump on you and have wild sex, if you tell her exactly what seclorum just said. Which, by the way, I have absolutely no idea what it means. :|
I have noticed these issues, even on my 4s, but it is not a huge issue.
Graphical Programming Goes Open-Source
Express doesn't even have controllers though -- just a routing mechanism.

If you set up your controllers so that they are independent from the routes, then they are just as easy to test.

It could be as simple as: app.get('/users/:id', userController.userPage). You can then test userController.userPage(req, res, next) instead of the route.
FWIW, heroku does. The first heroku slice for a project is free, with the caveat that it'll be spun down during periods of inactivity.

I imagine that most hobby users of heroku (say for a weekend hackathon) aren't paying anything.
> If comedians are allowed to crack nigger jokes and my fat momma jokes, then why can't they crack shut up bitch jokes?

If a comedian at a Dell event had used the word 'nigger' in almost any joke context, someone would have been fired.
Mozilla web apps available on Firefox for windows/mac but not linux