skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Craft requires skill and the two are deeply intertwined. In opinion, if you think that programming is some mystical "craft" that can't be taught, then you simply just don't know enough about it.
Does the kind of deployment standards, documentation and support that you describe already exist for other web frameworks (Rails for instance)? I've only used a few frameworks and only Django in production. Just curious if we are behind the curve in the Django world or just have a chance to set the bar beyond what any other community has. As a web developer with novice dev-ops chops I'm 100% support of this idea.
When Go came out in 2009, Android was only 2 years old. Go was easily not mature enough.

Another consideration is Android was fighting for market share from Apple. Forcing Go on developers would just create another barrier to switching.

Go's ARM compiler (5g) still needs quite a bit of work before it can be used on Android. Right now, even the canonical "Hello World" program fails to work on a lot of Android phones.

There is too much momentum behind Dalvik that it would be near suicide to discontinue support. However that doesn't mean Android can't support both Java and Go in the future, but there must be a compelling reason to switch.
Nice. Backed. My JavaScript TDD saw is verging on blunt - so I hope it makes the target :-)

Out of curiosity - which testing framework (if any) are you using for the JS testing? I've played with some of the ones on http://openjsan.org/ but haven't found anything that really hit the spot for me.

Also - I just love the idea of using KickStarter like this. I'm very tempted to steal the idea for some "UX for Developers" sessions I'm building.
Ask HN: Help with transfering a Wordpress site to a different URL
I am doing an intership and the owner asked me to transfer one of his sites (www.vortexsprayonliner.com) to a Wordpress site. I built this Wordpress site http://granitexfloorcoating.com/ for him. It is done. I changed the DNS server and while changing the settings in Wordpress to the old URL I set it to the vortexsprayonliner.com URL. This broke the Wordpress site I built and now it always forwards to the old site for any updates on settings or pages. Even just trying to log in!!!

I don't know what I can do. Maybe going into the datase and changing the URL on it but I don't know which table holds that information.

Can anyone help me?
So what can Google do to reduce the problem? Release only one major version of Android every year? Every 3 years like Windows? Release a private "beta" version for most manufacturers (not just one like now) so that they all have devices with the new OS on the official launch day?

Develop better abstraction layers for hardware? Force manufacturers to use only a few resolutions like 480x320, 800x480 and 1280x720 (retina) for phones, and only 1280x800 and 2560x1600 (retina) for tablets?

What can Google do so that Android still supports many different devices from different manufacturers, but the fragmentation issue is dramatically minimized?
> I would argue the problem isn't the quantity, rather the quality

But you didn't, argue. You simply asserted. You threw out the article's theory by constructing a straw-man you didn't even bother tearing down, then proceeded to inform us of your views.
>being able to hold .... points the op wasn't even making (op being Jeff).

It seems you argue they should refute Jeff's arguments using logic. But how could they when Mr Atwood did not use logic in the first place to support his opinion; I cannot find any of it in his arguments and I doubt you can. He used rhetoric to appeal to people's mind, and every one else who is writing is doing the same thing.
Do you feel this story has engendered a meaningful amount of useful discussion?
As an author, I think the quoted W3C design principles are wrong, and putting implementors before authors is, counterintuitively, right. According to the "worse is better" philosophy, "It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface"[1], and I believe that's correct. Complex implementations invite bugs and compatibility problems, which ultimately hurt implementors and authors alike.

[1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
I didn't find any problems.

However, one of the reasons I was uncomfortable with the setup (besides thread scheuling), is that I personally don't make any assumptions about cache coherency. To me, it could take thread 1 an arbitrary amount of time to see an update made to memory by thread 2, unless some primitive (like a semaphore... with "acquire and release semantics") is used.

Right? I mean, couldn't that account for what is happening just as much as instruction reordering? In theory, I'm fairly certain this is true. In practice, it depends on the specifics of cache coherency in x86-64; if anyone can comment on that, I'd appreciate it.
Steve Ballmer's Microsoft
I agree, but for what it's worth I've seen much better performance with Win 8, both the Developer Preview and Consumer Preview. They file copy user experience is also about 15,000x better as you can see here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/08/23/improving-our-...
This is a terrible post. He wildly exaggerates Jeff's statements and completely misses the point of it, which was not in any way "no one should learn to program", but rather "don't learn specialized skill sets you don't need". Jeff's point focused on whether programming was the best path to solving a problem for most people, and whether they would actually gain anything from it. His main argument was that programming was just a tool for problem solving, and it didn't solve problems that most people would need to. Rather than do a half-baked job of writing some code, people should take a different, more effective route.

I don't necessarily agree with that, but that's what he said. And this post completely misses the point and makes Jeff's post out to be something it was clearly not meant to be.
It's worth noting that at a certain point things achieve such cultural penetration that very few teens rebel against them in that way. [1]

At some point they're simply treated as ubiquitous human endeavors.

[1] 7-11, Coke, iPods, Nike, McDonalds, Levis

When teens resist adults on these points, it usually manifests in minor styling differences or personalization.
(cross brand promotion, garish colors, etc)
Facebook more aggressive w/photo sharing, acquires the Lightbox team
Ah, yes. You are absolutely right that I pooched the Android memory example. Laymen might not care and it might not help them. I think a better example might be someone copying information off a website. I've seen this happen a lot. Someone will have to print off name tags for an event but there's only 10 people per page. Copy. Next page. Etc. If they understood, say, the idea of scraping, they'd see a simple batch scrape and save hours if not days.

As you your other point though, about general problem solving, I think I was unclear. When I said you miss the loops and divide-and-conquers of everyday life, I was just trying -- perhaps too lyrically for my own good -- that you are unable to categorize the world into categories you do not know and cannot recognize. You can't see that the operation you do for every page could be abstracted into a loop, exectuable by a computer. You don't see that you don't need to compare all of your friends to arrange them by height, say for a sweet picture, but you can quicksort them. (Ok this is about as contrived as you can get but programmers have a hard time thinking of places most people don't see programming but we do. Because we see it everywhere).

Finally, sure we should focus on illiteracy, debt, oppression etc. We are working, though, on a lot of these problems programmatically.
Right, but I don't know what you're disagreeing with since I never said that they only point to the heap.
I love the non-sensical strangeness of this:

http://i.imgur.com/Lf6A8.png

And that on the Reddit comments the ordering of the panels is debated.
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I find it extremely difficult to read that font.
So, your motive for attack on Jeff is self-interest?

edit: an elaboration

I'm trying to figure out what exactly Jeff wrote that you hate so much. You don't even consider his arguments, you just have "a guess about Jeff, and a general message about other people who feel the same way."

Jeff wouldn't write something like this:

"Don't listen to the hipsters who claim that coding is as vital as reading, and who claim that for the first time in the history you can learn to code, because now we have an online JavaScript course that we call "Code Year" or something like that.

But that is what I've got from his post. He's not against people learning to code, he's against making it into something that it simply isn't - a vital life skill.
Exaggeration for effect? It's perfectly plausible that a mathematician / physicist would have a weak layman's understanding of energy balance in nutrition.
FWIW:
A few years ago, someone verbally mentioned to me that some study found evidence of some sort linking type of bacteria in your gut to obesity. (No, I don't have a link.) This fits at least partially with my personal experience: In the quest to get myself well when doctors said it could not be done, I ended up slimming down tremendously in the last year or so. That was not a goal. I did not care about my weight and neither did my doctor since being underweight is far more typical of my condition and is far more immediately life threatening. My main goal was to kill infection and get my body working closer to normal, which included doing a lot of work on my gut health, both in terms of gut chenistry and gut flora.
I've been playing around with this for a little while now. I've tried all three approaches so far. The first two failed miserably (I take the blame for most of it, transitioning from a programmer to a leader/manager isn't as trivial as I initially thought).

The distributed model seems to be working the best. We are a truly distributed company. I felt kind'o self conscious when someone would ask where our offices are. But now, I realize, we get stuff done! The team just works, and works far more efficiently than any team I've been part of before.

Granted, 10 out of 12 of us are introverts. I think there's something even better at work. Everyone shows up and does what needs to be done when it's convenient for them, we don't really have "politics" since nobody spends a significant amount of time chitchatting by the proverbial "watercooler" etc.

It's really a very unique culture. We're far apart, but we know each other thru our work and we take quite a bit of pride in our work. There are several serious shortcomings though.

So far, I haven't seen a tool that was quite up to the task of keeping the team cohesive as one unified team.

We started out using Trello (which I still think is amazing), but as we grew to past 5 people and multiple projects, trello quickly became a mess (maybe due to how we're using it). We do rely heavily on skype and dropbox.

We recently switched to TeamLab, which is pretty awesome given all the features,but it's still not right...

I wish I could just extend trello, add some wiki/blogging functionality to it and drastically improve the search.

So, I'm contending that there probably isn't any tool out there specifically directed at a distributed teams. If there's one out there that works well for you, please share... At this point we've decided to roll our own given the time and collective energy we're already spent trying to learn and implement some of the existing tools.

(BTW, our team's not specifically developers, we range from business types to designers, writers and Coders)

To be honest being out of band isn't too bad, we've always got someone working around the clock, so it feels like we're always moving along.
Or, use JRuby?
Nvidia  Introduces Virtualized GPU, Accelerating Graphics For Cloud Computing
A Hacker's Life: Inside Facebook's New Campus
Yes, databases which support index-only scans tend to encourage this pattern of adding extra columns in your indexes. In some cases this can be a big gain, but larger indexes means that the indexes are slower for queries which do not need the extra columns or need to read the entire row anyway.

Another set of queries which benefit from index only scans are those with EXISTS or JOINs just used for filtering the result set. In PostgreSQL 9.1 they always needed to read part of the actual row to check the visibility information. In 9.2 it will for VACUUMED pages only need to check the index and the visibility map.
I think your math is a little off. When the Huffington Post was acquired (for $315m), their traffic was 15m daily page views. Assuming Alexa's not too far wrong, Quora's traffic is about 20% of the Huffington Post's at the time of acquisition, so figure ~90m pageviews/month already.

But really, they're just getting started. Quora has been open to the general public for less than two years. I expect their traffic will be much more of the kind Wikipedia gets than the Huffington Post does: long tail, evergreen content that gets a ton of free traffic from search engines. For that, and for the browsing that they so wisely encourage, you don't need lots of bullshit questions. You need lots of good ones that will turn up in search results, plus plenty of answers they find satisfying.

And there's plenty of room to grow. Wikipedia gets 100x the traffic Quora does now. I don't think Quora will ever be that big, but the $500m valuation isn't obviously insane.
if 42 is the answer, is 'how many URLs have OG tags' the new ultimate question?
How would fluffing the salaries benefit a company? The result would be new employees expecting matching wages and existing employees feeling they are underpaid relative to their peers.
I think everyone who's writing responses to the original article should go to the highest place in their house and jump off and land on something very sharp, so I don't have to see all of this baloney...not that I cared much for the original, either.
Things I'd Like to Open Source Soon (iOS)
Open source dive computer
>I'm refuting his statement that other people should not become programmers, and that only a few chosen few should.

But Atwood didn't say that. All he said was that it's a trade like Plumbing and not a life skill like being able to read.

>The resentment comes from me talking to many programmers who say the same thing.

But programmers DON'T mostly say that. In fact, I had a very animated discussion with Randy Stross of New York Times at YCombinator where EVERY programmer around was arguing that programming has become an important life skill and should be taught in high school. Of course, this is anecdotal but even the recent articles refuting this on HN shows most programmers are for everyone learning programming.

I don't know you as well as other members of the community here but this article seems to be really harsh and doesn't even touch the argument that Atwood made in his article.
I'd also recommend The End of Overeating (David Kessler) which posits that the obesity explosion is due to recent advances in food science re: foods engineered (precise ratios of fat, sugar and salt) to make you want to eat more ("conditioned hypereating").

If you want to lose weight, stop eating packaged food, cut out fast-food and cut back on restaurants/take-out.

Make your own food (like everyone did 40 years ago for most meals) and you'll find yourself controlling your portion intake by default.
What would you propose as a replacement? I agree that it can be a pain, but I'm struggling to think of a better system.
As I said, we have no way to say whether the assumptions are true or not unless consumers are given the choice.

As you admit, no one can predict what consumers will choose.

However, a company can actively work to limit consumer choice. They can attempt to control how a consumer uses a product so as to benefit the company, not necessarily the consumer.

I ask you, "What would hackers do if they had choice?"

It's easy to look upon "success" after the fact and conclude a company is good at what they do.

Apple has failed many times. And they may fail again in the future.

I'd like to buy stuff from a "fearless company", not one that places ridiculous restrictions on users (fear of competition?), even when they are at the top.

Hackers use Apple products and endure the annoyances because there are no other choices.

Apple is the new Microsoft.

Success?

Maybe.

But at what cost to the consumer and the computing world at large?

Apple is trying to prevent people from freely programming and experimenting. Sure, people will still buy and use their products, but Apple cannot stop competition. Arguments that hackers should just accept Apple as the new Microsoft are good for a laugh.

Keep them coming.
> From an admittedly perhaps poorly informed outside
> perspective, there still seems to be fear and uncertainty
> (FUD?) around the deactivation of access to Google
> services and whether and what the side-effects may be.
> [...]
> Without being able to fully evaluate why, there seems to be
> more arguing going on now, amongst those factions. Perhaps that
> is really, at core, what is going wrong. (To extent there is
> something wrong; I mean, Google's not exactly hurting for
> business.)

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I believe that the story "signing up for Google+ endangers your account" is spread online and in the media by companies (one, in particular) whose profits are endangered by Google+ .

Prior to 2011, Google's core businesses were in markets with no large, unethical competitors. That's why there was never a flood of news articles about Maps, or Reader, or GMail -- the competition were basically honest, and used features or user experience to sway users.

Google+ is the first attempt to take on entrenched unethical competition, and that competition's response has been to launch an astroturfed PR offensive. It doesn't matter how many of their accusations are refuted; as long as there's enough doubt to discourage users from signing up for Google+, the PR has served its job.

Microsoft had a similar PR campaign in the mid-00's, to spread fear about Linux and the GPL. I still see occasional echos of this online; commentators posting long-discredited arguments about Linux being insecure, or GPL being viral, etc. I hope that the anti-Google+ campaign is less successful.
Math alone is the wrong tool to solve a problem that is biochemical and behavioral in nature. On an individual level, the fix is straight-forward: eat more "good" fats, and little or no grains and sugars. I have yet to encounter someone who has done this and not seen dramatic results.

It's a trickier problem on a broad sociological level, though. The sugar peddlers have an incentive to create and maintain the addiction, and yet they're also just giving people what they want, and at the end of the day, it's still a free country. We can't ever expect all people to abandon sugar any more than all people have abandoned smoking.

As much as I hate to agree with libertarian dogma, I think the USDA is a big part of the problem. They've been been promoting high-carb diets and "moderate" sugar consumption for decades, and it certainly smells like yet another government-industrial complex protecting existing profits.
> Even though he doesn't say those very words, that's what he's saying.

Partially yes, partially no, and for different reasons than claimed in this article. He does argue that fewer people should pursue programming, yes, but it's because they would be more effective elsewhere. His thesis is that people decide that the solution is for them to write code before they know what the problem is, and that some people make careers that follow that trail of thought. From a purely efficient viewpoint, a work force is more effective when there are fewer people mis-fit into it.

A guess about his motivations? So basically, this was a strawman to vent frustration onto?
Depending on your situation this may not be the most useful advice, but have you considered moving to the Bay Area? It may be tempting to stay in your comfort zone, but for me getting to the big city on my own after college was vitally important.

If I didn't, I have no doubt I'd still be working some soul crushing job in suburbia like my friends who didn't get out.

EDIT: I did see that you said you don't have the budget to move right now, but that's hardly an excuse. You can always flip burgers or freelance or whatever you need to do to save up. Or try to secure yourself a job before you move. That's what I did.
I'm certainly willing to believe the cited paper (both versions), but it does seem to contradict my own experience in teaching unlikely students how to program. I've found that a excellent litmus test is the ability of the student to follow the recipe on the back of a bag of Chocolate Chips. If the result is at all edible then I am reasonably sure that they can make the necessary leap from that kind of information to that which is needed in programming. A recipe has all of the usual things that a program does, they just look a little different. Sequence, loop, decision etc. Maybe these people would have been in the 'We can program group' of the mentioned test, I don't know---just know I've managed to teach a lot of unexpected folk the basics (often using basic for that matter :) )...
He didn't state that people should not become programmers, he stated that people who do not intend to become programmers wouldn't benefit much more from a "coding" course than from a plumbing course, and could instead for example use some knowledge of how to find or build a solutions to their problems in an easy way without actually programming it. I do not necessarily agree with him everywhere, and I do greatly respect your work on "Learn X the hard way", but in my opinion you completely misrepresented what he has written and trivialize a point that actually is interesting and worth thinking about.
GM Says Facebook Ads Don't Work, Pulls $10 Million Account
I did some research this morning, since I might be doing some Android work soon. As of May 1 2012, about 5% are on any version of the latest major release: Ice Cream Sandwich. About 3% are on the previous major version: Honeycomb. The rest, a whopping 92%, are still two or more major versions behind.

By developing against the latest major version, you are going to reach 5% of Android users. Compare that to iOS, where developing for the latest major version (5.0+) means reaching maybe 80% of users.
s/protocol/database format/
Aww, when I saw the title of the link I thought that the World Time Format[1] was going to solicit some sort of public advice on adding time zones and other things which need streamlining.

[1] see e.g. http://www.alphabetclock.com/fulldatetime.html .
See this is the crux of what I thought this movement was about. Logical and Algorithmic thinking is what people should be getting from learning to code. This is a fundamental thing like critical thinking which schools have a really hard time making kids learn.

Plus I have to agree with you that today I wouldn't recommend my path to others trying to learn to program. It wouldn't make any sense.
Semantics aside, this is the reason FB will own the search/discovery space in the future. That's not just a troll comment, that's fact.

FB is amassing a huge database of well organized & socially relevant online documents that other companies are going to have a hard time even coming close to. It's like PageRank on steroids.
Could you guys get a simple histogram of the model data up? The 2d visualization is clever, but it does not tell me what I need to know: does the distribution have a long tail or not? It sort of looks like it does, but the visualization obscures the truth and prevents comparison with similar datasets.
And each one of those has been found to fluff salary data.