skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From an implementation point of view, putting everything in a single attribute is way simpler; the design of <video> is quite problematic. The reason is that with a single attribute everything can be processed atomically. With a design based on multiple elements things can happen between elements being processed, creating many more edge cases.

Although in general things that make authoring easier are preferred, designs that are easy to implement in a bug-free way are generally preferred over designs that are complex and likely to lead to interoperability issues. After all, having to fight implementation differences is a rather common complaint about the web platform.

It also hasn't been clearly demonstrated that multiple elements are easier to work with. They are more familiar, but significantly more verbose. I don't know how that plays out in practice.
I read half the article and just had to come here to make the same comment as you. This whole "how would Michael Bloomberg learning to code help him do is job?" is a strawman of the most epic proportions. Of course if you are an executive with a limitless staff to fulfill every possible mundane detail that needs to be taken care of then coding is of no use for you. Hell, even if it is you have people to take care of the coding.

Coding is for the rest of us who don't have our own personal staff. Coding allows anyone to magnify their own productivity. And this idea that non-professionals shouldn't write code is ludicrous. Of course they will write bad code, but it won't be any worse then them taking 100 times as long to do things by hand and probably make harder-to-trace mistakes in the process. It's pointlessly elitist to suggest that code should only be written by professionals; it's like saying you better hire an architect and structural engineer before you build your own doghouse.
I can only add to this. Because one of the most important skills, after checking my finances, was being able to cook. And knowing, what healthy food is and how to make it, so it stays healthy and(!) tasty.

I might be able to learn a lot of math in school, reading/writing, research (in university), critical thinking (throughout life). But being able to care for my own food, to know, what not to buy (or what to buy) and so on, helped me stay sane and in good shape.
> innocent

Yeah, well, after reading his responses here, I wouldn't go with that word, but rather with another one that starts with in - and ends with competent.
Yes of course. But do you need to teach kids cooking from first grade until they start college, on the same level as math, reading and writing?
This doesn't modify parsing. Modifying parsing would be something like allowing <img> to have child elements. Adding extra attributes to an element requires no changes to the parser.
I gave you a whole list of options but you only focus on these two. why?
The first All-In-One Solution for Thesis Framework
Visual Composer which comes packaged with shortcode system, various useful page templates slider capabilities , build in audio/video player and of course, much more turning Thesis into an even more powerful Framework.
I would add: born in right country OR be prepared to do that in other complicated ways.
Facebook Files New S-1, Pricing $34-38 Per Share, Raising $14.7B
> the mayor of New York City will hopefully spend his time doing the job taxpayers paid him to do instead. According to the Office of the Mayor home page, that means working on absenteeism programs for schools, public transit improvements, the 2013 city budget...

Given the context, this remark is so frivolous I honestly think it may have been made in jest. But just in case it wasn't:

1) Bloomberg has declined the $255,000 salary. He receives $1 per year. This certainly says something about where his priorities lie and how he views his position as the mayor of NYC.

2) Regardless of salary, I have a feeling Bloomberg wouldn't let programming overtake his life and prevent him from fulfilling his responsibilities.
I tried DDG, but Goog's results are just better. And when I do tail -f log/access_log on my box, GBot is always there, hitting my sites every few seconds 24/7. Sometimes Bing is around, but less frequent and much slower.
> I am certain that if the same line had come from a lady, no one would have found it offensive.

Well yes, because context matters. When you have a power disparity, comedy only goes one way - if a member of a majority group makes disparaging remarks about a minority group, that's not funny, it's straight-up bigotry.
Why is this advice limited to 'single dictators'? Surely oligarchies masquerading as democracies can also benefit from it.
After you registered on the app store, which requires giving them name, sex, email, address, phone number and going through the account validation email and "password must contain X special characters and you need six different security questions" hoops.

Last time I checked, Java SDK or Eclipse didn't want my A/S/L.
When Did Agile Swallow Pragmatic?
And even if what you say about nesting is true- It's already a part of the standards for video, audio, and objects. It's not like we can change our minds about those. So we make the whole language inconsistent just because?
Tesla vs. Edison. Fight! (Or why Tesla was the greatest geek ever)
I think I might have worded the second paragraph wrong, as it seems a few people have taken it literally and misunderstood my point as being that cooking is a useless skill.

Cooking is of course a good skill to have. So is plumbing, car repair and a lot of other things. But this is entirely besides the point.

The point was this: Is it a necessity for children to be taught [cooking/car repair/plumbing] on the same level as math, reading and writing: From 1st to final grade in school, 10 hours every week? Of course not.

Atwood argues that it is the same with programming. No matter how much we and he love programming, it is not comparable to reading, writing, math, communication and similar.
I don't think you truly believe that though. Most people who hack daily have at least a basic working model of the computer. There's a compiler parsing, generating code, there's possibly a VM executing bytecode, an operating system managing memory, scheduling, network and other services, below that there's a CPU executing some representation of assembly code, it's in turn composed of some sort of a logic array, etc. etc. I'm not saying you know the inner workings of everything.

It's more along the lines of, we teach physics with the aim that people finishing high school should have a vague notion about at least newtonian physics, some electromagnetism and the scientific model. For computers, we teach how to open Word, check your e-mail etc. Stuff kids know. What they don't know is how this all ticks, and I think there is certainly value in helping kids construct a vague mental model of it all, and how to apply certain parts of it to a screen they'll probably interact with 4-16 hours per day for the rest of their lives.
1. It is ridiculous to tell somebody not to learn something in his spare time.

2. Atwood says:

"at least high school level math are fundamental to performing the job of a politician. Or at any job"

Do you know what is high school level math? It is a seemingly randomly selected subset of mathematics in fact based on mostly the scientific and engineering needs of the 19th century. What is included in 'highschool-level math' should be evolving. For example basic programming knowledge is more fundamental in today's society than trigonometric equations, coordinate geometry, logarithmic equations, etc... (all of which is high-school math).

Very basic programming could (and should) be part of basic math education.
Yoginder Yadav
Yogendra Yadav is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi since 2004. He is Founder Convenor (1995- 2002) of the Lokniti network and the founder Director (1997-2003) of Lokniti
I was one of the first adopters of the Lytro and the article hits on all the good and bad points I've found in my own usage. (I built a hackintosh VM just to play with my photos). What I really wanted was a camera that would work in any lighting or at any speed without me having to manually adjust the settings. I'd thought light-field photography was something that could accomplish this, and perhaps it still is, but for now it's still out of reach.
Sooner or later, all freelance coder sites drift towards cloning Facebook for $250 or less.
As opposed to vocational coding/programming/hacking. Seems like you're being facetious for the point of it?
As many others have pointed out, I think there are two sides to non-professional* coders learning to code, one of which I agree with wholeheartedly, the other I disagree with, equally wholeheartedly:-

* As in paid to sling code - I don't mean to cast elitist aspersions with the term 'professional'.

The Good

Learning to harness the amazing realm of creativity that computers offer - unlike other fields of engineering, you aren't limited by the need for millions of pounds and a team of people to turn your idea into reality, nor are you constrained by the laws of physics or possibly killing people should your calculations turn out to be incorrect.

For example, I am slowly writing a chess engine, it's such a joy to explore that because I want to and it's interesting to me.

There is a core kick that many people get out of programming, which is when you actually get something working, knowing that you made the computer do that. I wouldn't want to take that away from people.

Another aspect is that, should somebody learn enough to make some aspect of their life easier, that could even be simply learning some vba to automate some process which used to take them several hours, that's worth a lot too.

The Bad

People thinking that coding is easy and straight forward, simply because they've learnt to do something trivial or played around with code a little bit. I have met several professional programmers who have had the same opinion and then gone on to produce the most horrendous, unmaintainable, broken code imaginable and get paid a lot of money to do it all the while producing quite awful software.

I wholeheartedly agree with Jeff's point that this sort of attitude is not something we ought to encourage. If people more generally think of coding as something easy, then the kind of programmers who produce shitty code and think it's fine will be emboldened and we will be doomed to experience yet more broken software in the world. That's the last thing we need.

There's a element of pride in all of this, admittedly, but it's still a very real issue. Good programmers don't get enough respect, nor does good programming and we don't want to play with that.

The cooking example cited by shin_lao is a great analogy - you don't want to discourage people from coding, quite the opposite, but don't think what you do is the same as Pierre Gagnaire, or even the guy working in the kitchen of that cafe you like down the road.

I do want to add that yes, the good can lead to a good professional programmer, but it's critical that it be realised that, as Jeff says, you need to put in your hours, whether the Gladwellian 10k figure is accurate or not.
I don't care if the syntax is a bit unsightly. Let's just get this into shipping browsers as soon as possible. It's a major requirement for responsive design and this has good fallback behaviour. We can all just stick to 'mobile first' design and a .js polyfill shouldn't be hard.
I'll leave the part of "coding is important because computers are everywhere and learning how to automatize everyday things is a great skill" to others, as there are lots of excellent comments about it in this thread. Let's talk about something different:

> But understanding variables and functions, pointers and recursion? I can't see it.

Hey, I'd argue that understanding exactly those things are what should be included in "everyone should learn to code". All of those are difficult mental constructs important for understanding how our complex world works. Let's look at it case-by-case:

variables - this is basic; the idea to take something (a concept) in your hand and manipulate it by a symbolic name. This is, in some way, taught in high-school math, but somehow many people don't seem to grasp the idea behind the concept of a variable.

functions - ability to take a set of instruction and name it. Possibly have it parametrized. That's simple. But naming several sets of concepts, and then using them to build another layer of concepts, which is then used to build another layer of concepts... I'd call this an essencial problem-solving skill.

pointers - concept of indirection; for people not accustomed to it, it's easy to get lost in different levels of indirection when discussing things
(like, a difference between 'belief' and 'belief in belief', or P, proof of P, proof that P is provable, etc.)

recursion - because not everything circular is invalid; sometimes things defined in the terms of themselves are the simplest way to go.

To all of this I'd also add one more, IMO essencial, thing - understanding of feedback loops. It could cut out a lot of discussions about whether X causes Y, or Y causes X. Surprise surprise, it might be a feedback loop, in which X and Y are interlocked, and are both to blame.

Bottomline, programming teaches us a lot of important skills and mental constructs useful for problem-solving and understanding how the world works. And those skills are hard to get elsewhere.

A silly example from high-school biology: what is genetic code if not opcodes for protein assembly machinery? DNA "data" is code that programs machines building proteins. Easy to understand and remember if you know even a little bit about how 'automation'/'computing' is done.
Sketches from the NYT Electoral Map
I really agree with this part: "You should be learning to write as little code as possible. Ideally none."

Less code is better than more code. Even less code probably means you are reusing someone else's code which is even better. And this is the one that programmers can't accept: composable/configurable tools are better than programming languages. Better as in plain better, and better software engineering.
Choosing a Garbage Collector for Java (and how Oracle got involved)
Or, here's just a crazy out there thought. What if we save our images in high res progressive format, and program the browsers to stop downloading the images as soon as they've acquired enough resolution? Caching can be done with http range requests. Older user agents just end up downloading larger images than they wanted. Javascript and server script can use the JPEGtran library to retrieve lossless low res versions of jpeg images. Similar things could be done with png. No modifications to any standards need to take place.
The greatest geek who ever lived
Memory Reordering Caught in the Act
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Paul Graham's Office Hours Questions
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Pandora UI Free for iOS – User Interface Pack
You can now download the free version of Pandora UI containing a handful of elements that will definitely be helpful. Pandora UI Free is oriented towards iPhone (+iPhone 4s) and iPad (+the new iPad).
... and then profess to study that which his generational peers have foregone. If only we could all be mayors of NYC!
Ask HN: What do I need to do to complete my web app
My background is as a server side programmer, and am very new to web programming.

I am just completing my first web app and am almost ready to launch it up onto the web. Is there a list of things I need to make sure I have before releasing? By this I mean things that you would not always think of such a robots.txt file, a favicon etc.
If you'd like to hone your skills selling just drop me a line to:

rm at innovafy dot com

I'll gladly help you out.
The idea that you should learn X to "succeed at life" (whatever that means) is fallacious. We learn things to become better people as a whole, not necessarily to use those skills in our jobs. I bet Bloomberg is not using his math skills in his job and that's fine but he's probably thinking using logic (I hope) which is something you learn both from math and programming.
JQuery.fracs - determine visible fractions elements
Sustainability is dead. Long live sustainability
Pardon my ignorance, but what exactly should I be looking for that warrants a frontpage of HN for this link ?
Please Learn to Code
Paving the cowpaths to the denial cloud
He could asses IT costs
Factual Launching Location and Mobile Ad Targeting Tools
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Is there a way this can take place entirely server side?
Please don’t learn to code but give it a try
Web servers shouldn't need to rely on any other information than the URL in order to serve the right content. This keeps the simple use cases simple, as the URL directly translates to a file on the server. Otherwise every web werver in the world would need some special new logic for choosing different files.
Being a programmer is really really really fun the first few years. Kinda like playing video game. However, it eventually become something that is can be unhealthy. It really undermine other sensory input from the body. And primarily focus on the mind and finger interaction.

However, given the current state of the world, where many things are in one way or another controlled by software. It would be a good idea to have a skill related to coding, just to know if something is possible with code. And understand that it is not just magic under the hood.
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Has anyone chosen openshift over heroku for django? I didn't see any pricing info; is openshift still in beta?
"The existence of individuals who wouldn't gain much from learning to code does not imply that no one will gain much from learning to code."

In the blog post, Atwood actually writes the following:

"Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people."

His actual argument is that the "everyone should learn programming" camp is wrong, it is not an opinion that no one can gain much from learning programming.
PostgreSQL 9.2 beta adds JSON
> An apology, at least to me, is a statement that you regret an action you performed, and hence are saying that if you were transported back in time and could relive that moment, you would have acted differently.

I've been trying to think of how to express a response to this which is clear. Here's my best shot.

One can regret actions one performed, or actions one didn't perform. If you were to express such regret for either, it'd be deemed an apology.

Strictly speaking, "regret" doesn't imply that could you relive the moment, you would have acted differently. As per the dictionary definition: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/regret

1. To feel sorry, disappointed, or distressed about.

The negative consequences of an action or inaction is apparent only in hindsight. You might do something differently if transported back in time, if you somehow had that hindsight, but feel absent that impossible scenario, you acted as could be expected by anyone, including yourself.

Finally, you may have faced what amounts to a no-win situation, where there was no way to choose outcomes that would avoid negative consequences for someone else without betraying some defining principle by which you choose to live your life. You may regret your actions (or lack thereof) and their consequences for others, without feeling there was a way to do better.

Really, there is a lot more nuance and variation available on this.
I use a lot of state machines in my embedded projects. Perhaps it's because I was a developer on a state chart to C converter (www.visualstate.com) some time ago and that have colored me.
I find it strange that it isn't more widely used. Perhaps it's a lack of tools for checking deadlocks etc?
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See also the screencast[1] linked in the article, it shows that the compiler and VM are rather good given the fluidity of the demo, and it's also a good demo of the experience of Lisp REPL-driven programming.

[1] http://vimeo.com/42070553
Are you weeping for the engineers or for the developers?
some of these family are in Denmark, which has a very egalitarian structure. But yes, family environment and friends circle counts a lot as well. Which brings me back to it is more important to have a good environment than learning any information. All that can be learn on the job.
I'm not trying to be facetious, just misunderstanding whatever point original commenter is making. "Most people don't what programming even looks like"? I don't think that is true because most people can search for code samples if needed.
Russia 2045 - Avatar Project (Achieving immortality through robotics)
Looking forward to websocket reverse proxying in 1.3
I think the root issue here is the perception that programming computers is some dark sorcery that requires years of secret incantations in dark rooms to master.

Coding is like being a baker, or a plumber, a mechanic or a school teacher. It's a useful job in society and no more or less laudable than anything else.

Anyone can love their job - and they ought to. If they do, it doesn't mean everyone should feel the same.

I say, better to affirm how ordinary coding is, rather than how extra-ordinary.
Official support for WebSockets and SPDY in nginx is big news. WebSocket support especially, as previously it was impossible to do long-polling / WebSocket type work in nginx without resorting to unreliable 3rd party modules.
I don't care about the schedule on which any of those things are taught, just that they are taught.
Whilst I agree to the extent that I would dread the monstrosities brought to birth by a huge programming populace, I can't agree with the overall article.

I think the comparison with plumbing is apt, but not in the way he intends.
Let's say I turn on my tap and no water comes out, now I know nothing about plumbing but at least I know that the water comes to the tap through pipes so perhaps one is blocked or leaking?

By the same token if my car engine won't start then I can hazard a guess that it's perhaps a failure in the ignition system or the starter motor. I can also reason that the engine works by combustion of fuel, so it is logical that if the fuel tank is empty I won't get very far.

Contrast this with computers, the average person has literally no conceptual model whatsoever of what is going on beyond the fact that they require electrical power.

Of course people learn the buzzwords from the media to make it sort of sound like they know what they are talking about. I remember years ago people bragging about their "64 bit" console despite not having the slightest clue about what a bit was or why it should matter.

This makes it easier for people to buy media scare stories about "hackers" etc as well as not really understanding what it means to protect themselves online (beyond installing some AV software and praying).

It might also make life a little easier for people who are not technical to specify software requirements.
For example many times I've been given a spec like "if X happens then do Y", of course X is never one thing, it is a combination of a large number of sub conditions that are dependent on various external variables etc.

When you try and get somebody to explain in detail all of these subconditions to you so that you can make the software correct people will often take you for being overly pedantic because they understand intuitively what they mean by X and can't quite get the fact that the computer doesn't.