skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Someone should really write a blog post on what this all means for a novice. My impression is (and I might be wrong, since I haven't had the time to study the new reducer library yet) that the point of this library is the following:

Many algorithms are tree-like in nature. Suppose, for instance, you have a path-finding algorithm that looks at a map to find the best path for something. In that case, you're going to need to search different path options iteratively to find the best path, leading to a nested algorithm.

Now, this type of algorithm is tricky to parallelize: Sometimes the root of your "search tree" might be small (let's say 3 items) other times it might be large (1000 items). If you know your computer has 8 cores, it's very hard to meter out an equal amount of work to each core- Sometimes several cores need to split the work of a single branch. Other times, a single core might need to handle multiple branches. Also, it may be hard to know ahead of time how much work each branch will require, making the "parcelling out" of work even more difficult.

However, the work for each branch can be expressed as a collection of smaller "jobs", with a function applied to each. And each item in this collection would then also be a collection with functions applied to it (representing each sub-branch.) If you express a nested algorithm in this way, it can be viewed of as a nested collection with differing arbitrary functions mapped, filtered, etc across different parts of it.

If you use this new Reducer library to implement this type of nested operation, Clojure can automagically use the Java Fork/Join library to parcel out equal amounts of work to each core. In effect, you can think of the reducer library as letting you "flatten" these nested collections (without the memory & CPU cost this would entail) to figure out how to split the work out evenly and in the most efficient manner possible, hiding all the ugliness required for this from the programmer.

Please, if you know this library better than I, let me know where I'm going wrong.
Which IRC server and logging do you use?
In abstract, philosophical terms, it might not be. Even in policy terms it's probably not (other than it might be cheaper to store people in SANs.) In practical, day to day terms, of course it is! My own instance of self doesn't want to cease to exist.
Get a Million Hits for free, Boost your startup search engine rankings
What if you could boost your search engine rankings, Page rank, alexa traffic rank. And that too just with 1 click and for free too.
Diablo already killed in Asia
Here you go, less than $5 including shipping :) https://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?p_id=2029
Just because we can't all be programmers doesn't mean we shouldn't all learn to code to any extent.
You don't necessarily have to mark it as global to mutate. Some more interesting behavior:

class BoxedInt(object):
def __init__(self, v):
self.val = v

x = BoxedInt(0)

def foo():
x.val = x.val + 1
print x.val
Companies use HR to fluff the salaries and paint a prettier picture.
What an idiot. If nothing else, learning basic coding skills allows you to have a grasp of what's possible, what's hard, what's easy and what's trivial. Even if Bloomberg never codes a line in his job, that background knowledge can manifest in 100 different ways, and will allow him to be a better manager of people and systems. We would all be much better off if every congressman took a 2 week course in programming.
The point he was making was not only straightforward but also a paraphrase from the site guidelines; here you've seized on the way he worded it in order to perpetuate a semantic argument instead of engaging with his actual idea.

(Obviously, it's easy for me to spot people doing it because I do it to other people all the time too. But still.)
The part at the end was just fantastic, and really sound advice for pretty much anyone.

But, I think people are sort of misunderstanding Jeff's post. I didn't get the impression that he was trying to dissuade kids from learning how to code in some kind of effort to keep his uniqueness as a programmer. I think the point was just that this whole _everybody_ should learn how to code thing is a little odd.

If you want to code because you think it's cool and you want to become a good coder, then great, learn to code. But I think Jeff's point is that we shouldn't make coding out to be this essential skill that absolutely everybody should learn. If you weren't otherwise inclined to learn to code, don't do it just because someone told you you should.

Not that I completely agree with that sentiment either, I guess. One of the top comments by Fuzz [1] on that github gist is a pretty good tl;dr I think:

"Saying people should not learn how to code is like saying people should not learn how to speak a second language."

I'm sure learning a second language is fun, but I get annoyed when people try and make it seem like it's absolutely vital to do so.

[1] https://github.com/fuzz
Yes, because that's how life goes. I'm not going to attack the logic of an article that is illogical, I'm going to talk about the hypocrisy of the person writing it. The human stuff matters much more than the fantasy world of "logic".
The comments on this post where some of the more interesting I have ever seen on HN. Except, those like yours which simply complained that this was posted in the first place. As a rule I don't think 99% of Social Justice issues deserve a place on HN (bob's ISP steeped on him so what?), but neither do 99% of the breakthrough nano battery stories based on some vague improvement extrapolated to infinity. There is a reason the rules suggest intellectual stimulation as the rule and not just avoid anything posted to CNN and IMO this story is one of those that qualifies.
My view is that when someone is wrongly executed, justice is not finished - someone must be held accountable and punished. It's not just "oh well." Sometimes prosecutors are happy to see a conviction even if they know it's wrong, just for their reputations. These people, I'd argue, could be put to death too. Murder.

You can't have the death penalty in a broken system, it enables the same crimes it attempts to deter, and with death there's no recourse. 20 rights and 1 wrong is just unacceptable. In reality, the false positives are apparently much, much more despicable. Just do a search on final statements for "innocent" or "innocence."
If you're seeing ads on Wikipedia, your computer probably has malware
"42% of all URLs that Embedly processes have one or more Open Graph tags" is the truth; the current title is misleading.
It's nice to see that people are developing new models and ways of thinking about weight loss but I wonder how effective this research is going to be. The conclusion of the article is the same old "eat less and eat healthier" which is fantastic advice ... and advice that a great many people don't bother to follow.

As a culture we're eating ourselves to death while worrying that low probability events like terrorist attacks are going to kill us. We're killing us and we're doing it slowly.
There's little doubt that Ballmer has been a mediocre CEO in terms of innovating or at least properly catching the latest technology waves.

However, the Forbes articles ignores several important issues.

1) Ballmer has tripled the sales, and doubled the profits in the last ten years at Microsoft, while paying out $100 billion in dividends (and MSFT still has $60b in cash). This with a company that was already the most profitable tech company (2002). That is not a terrible performance, specifically because...

2) Had Microsoft gone with someone else, it's just as possible they could have ended up like HP, Dell or Yahoo. Microsoft is not in that boat however, and Ballmer has not destroyed the company. The article mentions Windows, but ignores server + tools, which has grown tremendously and is very profitable. Consumer Windows is not their lead profit machine any longer.

It's far more likely that someone would implode a company that is on top of the mountain, than that they would figure out how to create the first trillion dollar company. It's worth keeping that in mind: the only way Ballmer could have apparently succeeded by the article's qualification, is by creating a trillion dollar company out of a price per share ($60) that was derived from the greatest stock market bubble in world history.

There is a limit to how much money you can make at any given time in the global business eco-system. Microsoft had nowhere to go stock market wise, sideways from a stock market bubble price would have been a helluva accomplishment (just ask Intel or Cisco).

Everybody touts Apple today, but the most likely best-case outcome for their company is sideways (5% annual growth) for the next decade. Once you hit the top of the mountain, it becomes nearly impossible to keep soaring.
If the primary reason someone switches to ebooks is so they can carry more textbooks, I really doubt that will do much to shake any ebooks-are-lame attitude they might have.
"We can't all learn how to read, the world needs people with all kinds of skills."

It is perfectly possible to both learn programming and also have other skills. Who knows, maybe you'll be able to do something crazy like apply lessons from one field to another.
The way I interpreted Jeff's post is that as hackers, we tend to see have a very skewed view of the world, and that we believe our tools (programming) are the only way to fix problems, and that everyone should learn how to use them.

Jeff's point is that while certain tools (writing, arithmetic, etc.) are indeed of extremely relevant use no matter what you do, programming doesn't fall in that category, and anyone arguing that all should learn to code regardless of what they do is falling in that fallacy.

(i'm not saying I agree or disagree with that, that's just the way I perceived the post. That being said, Zed's post, especially the last paragraph, is of great value.)
Well, CPR certification requires some effort but I certainly couldn't argue the others on the same footing.
The problem is, in the real world the performance divide between iterative and set-based solutions often spans much more than just one order of magnitude. For someone who's got solid experience in constructing set-based queries, the SQL solution can quite often be simpler to read and refactor as well. That's admittedly a big 'for', though. Good database folks reason about this stuff in fundamentally different ways, and there's a lot more to creating a good database person than simply teaching a programmer SQL.

In respects like that, ORM's greatest benefit is also its greatest downfall. Using an ORM means you can put people who don't have a strong grasp of databases in charge of your databases. Sadly, it also means that you've put people who don't have a strong grasp of databases in charge of your databases.

For that matter, only needing to be "fast enough" is fine if you're the only kid in the playground. That's often a safe assumption to make if you're writing app code, but less so with databases. If the database is being shared by a number of applications, or if the server is hosting multiple databases, or if you have to worry about concurrency, then being "fast enough" probably isn't enough. Because you've also got to think about all the other ways that your queries could be affecting everyone else, and making sure you aren't subjecting your server to the tragedy of the commons.

Which comes to another nice thing about having a dedicated database person. It means there's someone whose official bailiwick is the DBMS. If app A isn't experiencing any performance problems itself, but is causing performance problems for app B (say, because of some perverse locking situation), that's a bug that a DB guy is best positioned to diagnose and fix. If the application isn't too tightly coupled to the database (i.e., sprocs are in place) then he can even quietly fix it on the server side without having to hassle anyone about the application code. A team that's too ORM-reliant, on the other hand, risks failing to include anybody who's even well-equipped to recognize the problem, let alone fix it.
Car repair, 2 hours a week for a quarter or so would be an excellent use of most students' time (with minor the exception of people who live in the biggest cities and never drive). You're missing the point of the people rebutting your argument, which is that cooking, programming, car repair, and many other day-to-day subjects are more important than many of the subjects that you take for granted as being necessary.
Before anybody gets confused, dynamic programming is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming. This page is not talking about dynamic programming, but rather interactive programming.
1. Phone numbers that spell words

2. Order Forms

3. Login Screens

4. Diner order slang

5. Hand signals used on the stock exchange floor
build it up, people find their way through blogs.
Is the issue here that a worse idea got accepted, or that a better idea got accepted over one that took much longer to develop?

If the proposed idea from this "single Apple employee" is obviously inferior, then that does indeed sound like a problem. But apparently the idea was discussed for a few days. So it doesn't sound like it's conclusively worse.

When it comes to programming -- especially creating the spec for something this fundamental -- then the best idea should win, irrespective of how long that idea took to be born. If you're cheesed because months of discussion and (semi-)consensus was bumped by a better solution that took days to be discussed, then that's not a problem, that sounds like exactly what should happen.
Downloading all images is out of the question. You use the most commonly used image as default and when the stylesheet is done you download whatever img is needed.

Or, you use the newly minted 'defer' (I just came up with that) attribute to let the browser know not to download anything until the stylesheet is parsed.

<img src='myhugeretinapic.png' defer>
Damn straight, because I actually care about this stuff. I mean, for all the talk on here about "passion" y'all sure do hate it when people actually are passionate.
Best of luck with this project. Its encouraging to see a large organization that is so committed to open source taking a stake in PaaS!
Looks interesting. I'm curious - what's your financial arrangement with sellers?
Show HN : A list of horrible bosses
Volumetric Rendering in HTML5 without WebGL
Who do you think is in the standards groups? The browser makers. There isn't enough representation from the people who actually will be using these features, and it seems that even when those people can get a word in edgewise it is ignored.

> The developer community did everything asked of them. They followed procedure, they thoroughly discussed the options available. They were careful enough to consider what to do for browsers that wouldn’t support the element—a working polyfill is readily available. Their solution even emulates the existing standardized audio and video elements. Meanwhile an Apple representative writes one email about a new attribute that only partially solves the problem and the 5 days later it’s in the spec.

So yes, it appears that not only does the standards discussion start with working code, it ends with it.
"How can you learn C programming if you don't read K&R!"

What's a better way to learn C than reading K&R?
Vendors take 70% of each sale, 30% goes to the WP App Store.
I wonder how many (and which) CS texts are recommended simply because they are considered "classics." As a beginner there is really no way to tell how good a book will be before reading it without relying on the word of others.
I'm sure he'll write a follow-up clarifying what he said so that he's not guilty of saying anything.
Can't say about the rest, but this story was very educational for me. By far the best argument against death penalty, and one that is not voiced enough (usually people oppose it because "murder is murder") (best as in: hard to argue against).
Not for the first time: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_...
Thanks for bringing this up, I'd really like some statistical awareness to show up in science reporting.

> It needs to be explained how he determined that this isn't related to _why_ they are obese in the first place, i.e. whether these are purely correlational facts.

I would settle for a simple statement that "An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one," all else equal or controlling for other factors.

So much of science is based off accepting statistical evidence, that it would be invaluable for science reporting to state, at least in laymans terms, the statistical veracity of results. In this case such a statement should be even easier since we're dealing with a theoretical model of obesity. Is there a coefficient for "current weight" that is independent of other factors?
Already over a year old, but I haven't seen anyone else doing this, so I thought I share it here.
I have a programmer friend, and his website simply says:

I make computers do what I want.
Often people pay me to make computers do what they want instead.
Lately unity3d.com is doing that a lot.

(http://lucasmeijer.com/)
Honden: de Shih Tzu de aristocraat uit Tibet
Well, stop subsidizing farmers is probably a good takeaway.
I think you have already written an even better answer; when I read Jeff's article I immediately thought of this: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/advice.html
New video about how obtain info from a site
if you are a web programmer you will find this video really cool!
This would be reasonable if people who ought to know better didn't commit this kind of elementary error constantly, particularly in nutrition. It is your attitude, that it's reasonable to publish a scientific article in a major publication without independent thought and fact checking, that I am challenging.
This is the boat I'm in. Everyone seems to be applying this exclusively to BUSINESS and DAY JOBS and MISSION-CRITICAL APPLICATIONS and CLIENTS and CUSTOMERS.

Why not empower people to spend their leisure time or their artistic pursuits in a new, challenging way?
I cannot find any way of doing this other than handing over $99 to Apple. See for example this page https://developer.apple.com/programs/start/ios/

The provisioning portal is supposedly at http://developer.apple.com/ios/manage/overview/index.action but it won't let you in until you hand over money for annual membership.
Not using SQL bind parameters is like recompiling a program every time.
The Ultimate High-Tech Hipster Wedding
You should be happy that you can do better.
The Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan) goes into more detail on the history of the food boom in the 1970s and its link to obesity. Its a great read for anyone interested. Essentially we got hit with a one-two punch of food price paranoia and the high fructose corn syrup innovation.
There's no native function, but it can easily be implemented. See sickpig's answer (sibling to your post) for a Javascript-based solution.
It needs to be explained how he determined that this isn't related to _why_ they are obese in the first place

I agree that more explanation is needed...the thinner person may be thin because she is more active, and the obese person may be obese because she is more sedentary. An extra 10 calories would seem more likely to put more weight on a sedentary person than an active one.
Thanks for the response. As I told Kibwen, the underscore library looks pretty neat. Also, my problems may have just been some brain damage on my part. I'd gathered that object hierarchies were the more idiomatic way to code javascript.

I've been trying to write Javascript and then make it functional. I think I need to start writing functionally and just fit that into the Javascript. From what you've written, that looks pretty doable.
Right, I think your final sentence gets at the crux of what I'm talking about. I have 0 trust in PHP that my script really 'works' -- however, very often I have a lot more confidence in being able to get to something that 'seems to work' within 30 seconds. Whereas, in Python I am pretty much guaranteed to spend 5-15 minutes on it.

As for web work. I actually just did try "how to tail a file in php" and "how to tail a file in python". On the PHP side I instantly saw this stackoverflow question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1102229/how-to-watch-a-fi... which links to this:

http://code.google.com/p/php-tail/

Ability to tail small and big files for updates using PHP and AJAX. Includes the ability to grep results for a specific keyword.

- Fully documented

- Fully customizable

- Updates the page with new information without a page refresh

- Change GREP keyword / invert on the fly without a page refresh

- Uses JQuery / JQueryUI libraries

- Simple to use UI

- Automatic scrolling when required (if a user scrolls up, the automatic scroll is disabled until the user scrolls to the bottom again)

Wow, that is pretty amazing. If someone just HAPPENS to be looking for a quick tail through a web-browser, with grep functionality, this is a drop-in solution. It's not what I needed, but this is my whole point about community-size. As it gets larger and larger, there is a greater and greater possibility that just what you need is 30 seconds away. It would literally take you hours to do all of the above in Python.
While the "Don't Become Anything" thing is valuable (after all it's a thousands of years old insight that can be found in Buddhism for example), the article looks pretty much like a straw man to me. The original post was arguing that "coding" isn't an essential life skill in the way for example reading is and that massive amounts of new coders might not be that good for the world. How is this refuted here in any way? Where is this resentment thing pulled from?
A dungeon game that teaches kids to code
You're right, I thought that it might be a problem but since the name of the blog is "dynamic aspect" I decided to go with "dynamic" rather than "interactive" (in the sense of dynamic language not dynamic programming). But since you brought it up, I fixed the link title.
The point of TFA is that there was a long debated solution in the works that got tossed aside in favour of something a vendor representative chucked in.

How can you determine if it's technically superior if you discriminate on the basis of the source of the feature? Choosing between death-by-committee or trusted-auto-approval is not hard.

i.e. the vendors, and not the community of people interested, are in effect (if not necessarily intentionally) dictating the process. The upshot is we'll see features that benefit browser vendors (whether in ease of implementation or insert-conspiratorial-nefarious-Apple-vertical-integration) rather than features that benefit web developers.