skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I posted on Jeff's original HN posting... so I know what it's like to have one's arguments split over multiple tit-for-tat postings.

I also agree with what you advise that learning is good for its own sake esp. if it is a concrete skill.

--

But I think the "learn to code in a year" fad has less to do with normal concrete skills. A lot of the cheerleading present this mysterious "Coding" as some form of national imperitive.

I've seen references to how many 'coders' other countries have as some sort of Arms Race. More coders == better somehow.

Whilst I admit having zero coders is bad, I just don't think that happens in practice.
I like the arrow since it reminds me sometimes that I'm working with a pointer and not an object on the stack
The other nice thing about HSMs are concurrent sub-states. They allow clean modeling of the orthogonal aspects of the state.
Correct. Memory operation re-ordering can occur due to the way the cache-coherence mechanism is implemented. If messages on the bus between cores are not ordered, memory operations can effectively be reordered even if each core never performs any reordering (e.g. due to cache misses).

This is a great explanation: http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/~yingdi/paperreading/whymb.2010.06.07...
I like this point. It is an important distinction and a good comparison to a related area, physics. Two thoughts, though, that I'd like to hear your thoughts on:

1. Don't we all learn physics? At least basically in school we learn about inertia and atoms and velocity. Sure we don't learn the hard stuff and our understanding is woefully incomplete. But the analogy would be "the physics we learn in school" and "things like conditionals, sets, graphs, types".
2. The utility curve of physics is a little different than that of programming. Both contextualize the world and give you richer understandings of it in a similar fashion. However, physics stops solving everyday problems sooner than programming does. I have never whipped out alternative spacetime topologies to solve an everyday problem. I have written tons of bots and things to automate my life.

Dunno, just some thoughts.
Haven't you actually purchased a license to the book contents and not an actual book?
Do you mean sentences like

> Even if 90% of those 7,200 were mined by botnets, and 100% of those mined were sold, that would represent well under 10% of the daily trading volume.

This is a perfectly correct instance of the subjunctive mood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood), I think, not a language trap.
I like these instructions: http://www.stylesen.org/openshift_client_tools_installation_...
Thanks for sharing, we are looking forward to expand to PHP and Python as soon as possible.
The thing is these very teens will be seen walking around with the Hunger Games or whatever the recent teen "must read" is. They brag about having read the last Harry Potter in 4 hours. It has become a cool thing to actually be literate in the latest teen book craze.
I have to admit that I am not as familiar with this feature, so I will check it out. I glossed over it as something I could already accomplish with a check constraint or a trigger, but I think you might be right that there's more to it than that.
A big part of a successful "full" distributed team are the tools and processes that are developed and implemented. When you work in a shared office space with the rest of your team, a lack of structure and organization is much more tolerable than when you're on a fully distributed team.
Its quite impressive, but will they actually be able to write "real" articles, or just convert stock or sports data into paragraphs? Since its possible that data is easier to look at in table form.

http://zappable.com/2012/04/algorithms-writing-articles/
Nice point, and really, how many folks actually find writing code in Python cumbersome or "work" like some languages? It's not perfect and of course if you need really fast computing, it's obviously not (even close to) the best for speed, but it's expressiveness & readability are a pretty big step up from most other languages.

Also, I hadn't seen this essay by PG before (from the comments); a bit old, but interesting take:

http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
Try binding shift-space to underscore. You'll start to feel much better about it.
It's an interesting parallel given how much the average person really understands about physics when they leave school. I'd venture next to nothing.
You don't need parallel algorithms to see the effect of memory ordering bugs. Any program that runs concurrent threads (for different operations, say a thread for computation and a thread for IO) can be affected if the threads attempt to share information. Any sharing among threads must be done very carefully.
The 360, despite it's initial problems is a resounding success for MS. To include it in a list of blunders would be a mistake.
Former astronaut criticizes NASA's current course
Bravo!

Also underscores in uri strings look awful.

this_uri_is_ugly.html

vs

this-uri-is-pretty.html

I wish python allowed for dash in its script names... cannot import from module-test.py but I can from module_test.py

Thank you for posting this, I "laughed-out-loud".
Accounting systems: a rant and a quest
Show HN: Guide to playing Dota2 Android App
YouTube videos' rotating loading icon now turns into a game of snake
Press arrow keys while a video is loading or buffering, and the circle of dots transform into a chain. You die when you run into the edge of the video. You can continue to play over the movie.

What's a good YouTube video to play snake on top of?
My ereader of choice is the Asus EeeNote. Very hard to find, and I'm not sure it's even made anymore. I ordered one from Taiwan (thanks, Chrome's built-in translation!). It has a Wacom digitizer, so it needs a pen, but that also means it doesn't register finger presses (so you can rest your hand on the screen while you write). There are a couple buttons at the bottom so you can flip through pages or through the menu without needing the pen in your hand. It's not the best ereader out there, but it's the only one I know of built for handwriting and reading at the same time. Black and white screen with no backlight, which is reportedly the reason Asus never sold it in the US. They didn't think the market would be there.

It can also be used just for note-taking (wifi sync with Evernote), it has Firefox built-in for web browsing, has a camera and can take audio notes as well. Plays MP3s. I use it a lot for writing notes in class while recording the audio of the professor. When I get home, my notes are already on my PC. Sitting at home, I can plug it into my PC and use it like a 8" Wacom digitizer in Photoshop. Totally worth the $250 shipped from Taiwan.
Well said. I am no fan of Balmer, but using stock prices to my comparisons from one period to another is usually foolish. It's one thing to say that the price of a stock has plummeted in a short period (SHLD being a good example from the article) is indicative of poor leadership; it's another thing entirely to compare stock prices where they currently stand to when they were priced for perfection.
I program in Underscore, you insensitive clod!
I think the discussion should not be that everyone should learn to code but that everyone should have the opportunity to learn to code, if they want.

We shouldn't be arguing why we should or shouldn't learned coding over other skills, like plumbing.

I praise people that put in work to make learning (such as coding) an easily accessible endeavor for those that want to learn. I would also praise Khan academy and universities that have made learning a variety of skills easily accessible to the people.

As a society, let us push to make education and learning open and accessible to all.
Native Firefox for Android now in Beta
TechCrunch Review of Zoho's New Site Builder
Why Did Josh Hannah Invest In Quora?
Do Not Track just got a lot easier
Scala Dojo Ep03 - funs with OO
Mayor Bloomberg Unveils The Made In NY Digital Jobs Map
How To Check If In Wordpress Admin Area
Agreed.

I'm with Jeff on the idea that programming isn't in the same class as reading and writing and basic maths but I certainly don't agree with the whole article.

But I think the criticism of his article isn't to say he's wrong, everyone should learn to code, it's that he's wrong, some people probably would benefit from learning to code.

My issue is really with the people who flip his position 180 degrees and say "No, everyone should learn to code". Both positions are wrong.
My impression, based on eyeballing logs for my own low traffic, unimportant sites: Google collects and uses stats on how often pages change, how often they come up in searches, etc., and for static and/or low importance pages they scale crawling back. This frees up crawling resources to spend elsewhere, like on important, frequently updated pages, new sites, et al. I haven't looked closely in a couple of years, but the pattern used to be that new content would be crawled fairly agressively and after a while it would back off to an "appropriate" level.

Back then, other search engines took a good while to begin crawling my new stuff in earnest, and once they did their crawling pattern did not seem to change much over time between a (relatively) popular changing page vs. a lonely static page.
He's discussing this in the context of writing code, not typography. I think it's fair to assume we're starting with the premise that we would only choose characters that are easily typed on common keyboards. Choosing uncommon characters in programming languages, such as en-dashes and em-dashes, is choosing to deliberately make our lives more difficult [1].

I think it's pretty clear from the article that his comments were meant to be taken in that context. If he'd chosen to preempt the pedantic readers by making that context explicit, it would have only diluted the article with noise that most people would rightly assume is implied by the context.

I don't know what your keyboard looks like, but mine doesn't have en- or em-dashes on it, and I wouldn't even consider them for a programming language syntax.

[1] Even when using en-dashes and em-dashes in prose, they can often be typed with multiple consecutive hyphens, e.g., '--' and '---' in LaTeX.
You have no idea what it's like to be a woman in technology, I'll bet, and your attitude is very indicative of this.

What relevant facts do you believe I am unaware of, and how do those facts invalidate my reasoning?

Note that accusations of ignorance without actually demonstrating it usually fall into the realm of ad-hominem (i.e., a logical fallacy).

I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make about cultural things - you seem to be advocating some sort of moral relativism, is that correct?

I'm not advocating any particular moral beliefs, you are.

I'm suggesting that the best way to understand these American attitudes on jokes/etc is to merely treat them as an American/western cultural/moral value rather than look for a logical basis for them. I.e., the same thing I'd suggest to Americans asking about Indian attitudes towards unwed mothers.
Half of all Americans  think Facebook is a Fad
A Mathematical Challenge to Obesity
While OpenShift doesn't have a paid support model per say, there is a very active community (which includes developers constantly monitoring forums, IRC, and Bugzilla, as well as Twitter). Chances are, if you hit a problem, you'll have a bunch of people jumping on it very quickly.

There forums are here: https://openshift.redhat.com/community/ as well as a very active IRC channel (#openshift on FreeNode)
Xbox has been brilliant though.
You could do that, but one of the best things with coding is that you get instant gratification and constant feedback.

"Hey look, my computer just said Hello to the world!"

The ability to play with scenarios while exercising your logical critical thinking and to get instant feedback is essential to learning.

I liken it to the difference between learning photography in the film days vs. digital. I bought an SLR in the late 80s but it was very expensive and time consuming to get good. I had to buy and use up a roll of film, take some notes about when, where and how I made the shot, then pay to get them developed. With digital, I see the shots I make instantly, and I can make mistakes and try again without incurring constant film and development costs.
Google Adjusts Kerning for 'kerning' Searches
I agree that everyone should try something different, and that they should try something they consider scary and alien and borderline impossible (but that obviously isn't because other ordinarily competent people clearly do it).
High Availability at Heroku
"knowing to code is hugely empowering."

That is not a good reason to learn to code. Being beautiful and rich is empowering. Being tall and strong is empowering. So what?

A large number of people cannot be beautiful, rich, tall, strong, or good enough coders to feel empowered.

On a completely unrelated note, everybody should learn CPR.
Truly find-file is much more readable than findFile. IMHO.
Also directory? vs isDirectory
I doubt Forbes serves its website from an iPhone.

Based on http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://forbes.co... they don't use Microsoft software either. As for Microsoft's profits, anyone who has read The Innovator's Dilemma can see all of the signs of a late stage great company that has failed to address disruptive innovations. They will continue to have great profit margins as they bleed customers until they wind up with no business left.
My 6 and 8 year old kids love ebooks. They have a rooted Nook Simple Touch and access to a Color Nook and a Motorola Droid. They like the Color Nook best (big screen, can play games) but are perfectly happy to read from any of the devices.
So, WireOver will form a core group of peer nodes via EC2 instances and try to share bandwidth costs with other peers.

It seems the main bottleneck at first will be figuring out a way to get the original data source onto the core nodes (ship on physical media?).
Infographic: When The Lights Go Out, The World Eats Junk
Please, Learn All the Things
“Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can - there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.” - Sarah Caldwell

I am a specialist (programmer), and a jack of all trades. In the last two month my garbage disposal broke, my mailbox was ran over by a car, and my lawn welcomed its new dandelion overlords. I have managed to replace my garbage disposal without being a plumber, replace my mailbox without reading the manual, and overthrow those fascist dandelions without being a professional landscaper.

I remember once received about 25 'broken' monitors from a hospital. I was able to fix everyone (with the exception of the broken screens) by simply knowing how to identify and replace broken capacitors, something I was taught a while back with every intention of becoming the best electrical engineer I could be.

Programming is my primary passion and profession. My secondary profession is cooking Thai food. My secondary passion, learning.

I am a professional programmer, who just recently turned 21, with no degree. I can say I am no professional landscaper, no plumber, and definitely no electrical engineer. I can say though, that at each opportunity I was given to learn something about plumbing, programming, or electrical engineering, I have taken and benefited.

To the argument that is currently going on on whether or not everyone should learn to program, I say that neither side is right, and even the argument itself is wrong.

Strive to be the best programmer/electrical engineer/cook/plumber/landscaper/you name it you can be, and you will benefit... always.

So to anyone anywhere, I say learn everything everywhere. Not just programming or plumbing, but everything at every opportunity.
Scientists in the US have developed a way to generate electricity using viruses
What is bone? ddg search doesn't find anything easily.
Yeah, the srcset for every device type on every single image seems excessive. I was hoping we could take advantage of file naming conventions and define a way for user agents to request 'filename' + 'variant key' + 'filename extension' instead of the 'filename.extension' file in the src attribute when it wants non-1x images, where 'variant key' is something like "_2x" added to the filename for 2x images. Then you could just flag img tags as having 2x available boolean. I don't think whatwg likes the idea of file names as metadata, though.
Don't forget that books also have a super low cost to entry, are very easy to loan, and aren't a huge loss if you replace them.
Pure Ruby code in MRI 1.9 can run on multiple OS threads, but it can't run on multiple OS threads in parallel. Here's some reading you can do if you're unsure:

http://merbist.com/2011/10/03/about-concurrency-and-the-gil/
http://www.igvita.com/2008/11/13/concurrency-is-a-myth-in-ru...
http://jabberwocky.eu/2010/10/02/where-is-the-global-interpr...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Interpreter_Lock

Yes: Ruby can allow native code to execute in parallel with Ruby code (although it doesn't always do so, as you note). But if you're under the impression that multiple Ruby threads can execute in parallel, you're wrong. That may or may not be a problem, depending on what you need Ruby to do.

JRuby can be a good option for parallelism, but it's also slower than Ruby MRI 1.9 and has an ecosystem that most Ruby developers will be unfamiliar with. Regardless, my point was that Rails doesn't magically "work with multithreading," at least for standard Ruby deploys.
China's search giant Baidu releases low-cost smartphone
I don't think he means that learning plumbing is a bad idea.

I think his point is just that a big hype cluster around learning plumbing would seem silly. There are a lot of useful skills in the world. Programming is one. Plumbing is another. Let's not get crazy and over-emphasize programming.
You're just not the target market. Corporate types who wouldn't know what FTP was if it jumped up and bit them on the nose LOVE Sharepoint.

What do we need Excel for when we have perfectly good Perl and CSV files, you might as well ask...
Technically, you're probably right. I don't care. Companies can (and do) weasel their way into anything by saying it was part of the license agreement you signed. Fair use is fair use in my opinion. Buying the physical copy gives me the real thing, forever. Buying the digital copy for basically the same price shouldn't take my rights away based on a license.

Don't even get me started on Amazon's new Kindle format that's literally and strictly a simple PDF wrapped in encryption. I bought one of them for a class expecting to read it on my Touchpad, but apparently it only works on Mac/PC/iPad and nothing else. Complete bullshit. This is why people break DRM.
Developer Productivity Report (Mostly Generic, Some Java-Focused)
I look at it as a useful life skill like cooking your own meals, doing your own laundry, changing a tire, making minor household repairs, etc.
Apple modifies Siri after algorithm finds Nokia smartphone better
Not refocusing, but Canon made film cameras that selected the focus point based on eye-tracking. They were actually pretty damn cool. Actually, they still are pretty damn cool.
> Underscores require me to hit the Shift key. When writing prose, I only hit the shift once or twice per sentence. In Ruby, I have to hit the shift key every few letters. Awkward. Inefficient.

Oh my, oh my, how do people ever cope with that vile "having to hit shift" that have regular capitalisation of all nouns etc. Surely such a thing is impossible, as is hitting shift when you need an underscore.

I understand that some things could be more efficient, but "hitting shift" hardly qualifies in my opinion...
How Mark Zuckerberg Booted His Co-Founder Out Of The Company
thanks for that. I couldnt get passed ridiculous "capital one" advertise that took over my screen. I gave up looking for X to close it down.
Here's Matt describing what is done to create security and prevent abuse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=y...!
That's not backwards-compatible.
repeat after me.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die lisp die.

die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.
Not really. Memory ordering and cache coherency issues are endemic to race conditions, but race conditions are bad bugs even in the absence of fun tricks by the caches.

You "fix" this the same way you fix any race: you get your synchronization right. The instructions used to implement the mutex (e.g. lock cmpxchg) are "serializing", which means that all memory operations issued before them in the instruction stream will be completed and committed before the instruction issues.
The short answer is: No - but they're a heck of a lot cheaper.
How to get a job as a self taught programmer?
Hi I've spent the last few years learning to program. I've gotten jobs on elance and recently my first contract gig for $35 an hour.

I've produced some web apps and each is much more complex than the last.

My question is what is the minimum requirements... or what are some minimum specific things that hiring people are looking for... to get a job at a startup or bigger co.?
I for one love it when someone types whole paragraphs about the desire to avoid keystrokes. Every language has it's irritating quirks, none of which do I care enough to write about.
Task Queues: Episode Two of "A Django Podcast"
Pointers aren't always to objects on the heap, they can be pointing to locations on the stack as well.
I was only a teen a few years ago, and they probably don't like eBooks not for any rational reason - it's probably something to do with being cool and different.
I wonder how the author types all the brackets in LISP without the shift key. I'll take an occasional underscore over that mess any day.
Are we sure about Basho being fully distributed? Their "careers" page lists positions in particular cities and gives a few office addresses.
Shoptiques (W12) is hiring Ruby on Rails Developers in NYC
I noticed this too after using Coffeescript, going back to plain JS.

It's especially annoying when shuffling array elements or function parameter around: all items need to be separated by a colon, except for the last one, that must not have a trailing comma, making line swapping a nightmare. Drives me nuts.
Big shout out to Jeff Croft for allowing us on his new podcasting site, we're having a lot of fun.
> Another way to put it - and this might be a money-grubbing attitude unique to Americans - is to internalize that -if- one deploys a firearm as a civilian one should expect to pay out $20,000 bucks minimum. That's the average legal bill a guy faces if he shoots someone in the US.

Wow :) That's really interesting to put it like that. I didn't know that. But police would have a different outlook on that right?