skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What my 11 year old's Stanford course taught me about online education
Well said. I wholly agree with "learn to code" != "become a programmer".

Learning programming has helped me in many other walks of life. It has taught me that every problem can be tackled with a systematic approach, given enough time. I like to think that helps me to notice things that would have gone unnoticed without. More than anything else, it is this approach, enforced by programming, for which I hold gratitude. Critical thinking.
> Default search in Chrome?

It's not default in Chrome, it asks when you first use it what you wanna use as the default search. You have to opt in to google and bing is just one click away. Most still choose google anyway.

In contrast, to change bing from being default search, on the default browser, on the most used OS in the planet. You still have to go inside preferences and opt out, which takes several clicks. And then, Microsoft still tries to sneak bing to you if you install MSN (windows live or w/e it's called now), which will change your default search engine on FF and Chrome to Bing. Unless you opt out during instalation.

And still people choose google.
I actually talk about my anyfu experience here: http://jeffwhelpley.com/2012/03/14/just-in-time-expertise-my....

As you can tell from that article, I am all for consulting in short intervals, BUT there are a couple issues with the Pomodoro Hiring Experiment. First, 20 minutes is way to short. I have had hour long sessions with several experts since my original blog post and I truly believe that you can only get value from an expert in under 60 minutes if you already have a prior relationship with them and they already understand the basic problem you are trying to solve. If not, it is going to take 10 - 15 minutes just to get on the same page with them.

Look, talking to an expert is not magic. I don't care how good someone is, they aren't going to solve your problem at the drop of a hat even if it is a simple problem just because of the time it takes for context switching and getting up to speed with your background.

One last thing. There is a big difference between getting expert advice for higher level strategical or design questions vs. solving an actual coding problem. I think if you are just using an expert for strategical/design issues, you can get a lot of value in an hour. If you are trying to solve a coding problem, you run a serious risk of not getting any value at all for your short time period. How many times have you debugged an issue that you thought was easy, but then ended up taking you 6 hours. There is little chance you would even ask an expert in the first place for a simple problem (i.e. it wouldn't be worth it), so there is likely a pretty good chance that if you are looking for an expert to solve a specific technical problem it is going to take more than 20 minutes.

In summary, an hour of expert time is awesome for higher level design and strategy but short periods of time to solve difficult specific technical problems will never work.
Facebook User Growth team on getting to 500 million
Great insight into Facebook's user growth culture and tactics. One that caught my eye was Johns saying that site translation was the 'greatest lever' in getting to 500 million. I asked some questions about their translation crowdsourcing strategy in the comments below the article. I'd be interested to hear anyone else's experiences with translation as a lever for growth.
I'm aware people can understand that, but it's certainly not as easy as the properly formed words. I used that technique to make sure my point was carried across.
Salman Khan’s Next Coming ‘Ek Tha Tiger’ in Pictures
Well, as a male, I'm absolutely fine with that site! The problem of sexism is patriarchy. (Why's the software industry hyper-male? And if you're from the US, ever wonder why every single president has been male? One of those funny coincidences?)

It's not just some bad male apples. I'm fine saying that I'm a privileged sexist male, because I've lived all my life in societies with bizarre preoccupations with gender roles, where one gender dominates the other.
So I wrote a piece advocating why everyone should learn to code:

http://reviewsindepth.com/2011/04/why-everyone-should-learn-...

I don't think Jeff's piece undermines any of the reasons I put forward there.

Going through his points one by one.

It's easy to agree that you should ideally write no code - but of course the ideal assumes that all the provided interfaces in the world provide you with everything you desire, need. The point is that the world is such that most of the time this is not the case.

It does not assume that coding is the goal. It assumes that there are always various goals that have not been met by existing interfaces or infrastructure. (i.e. that the ideal in the first point can never be achieved in reality)

It doesn't necessarily put the method before the problem. It's just assuming that the many of the problems faced by a majority of people (or everyone) in western society can be solved with code.

His next point speak to professionalism in coding. In large software projects - you absolutely need professionalism. But many problems people face don't require large software projects to solve. I give an example in the linked piece above of a problem I solved with code that certainly didn't need a large software project.

His final point - it does not imply this thin membrane between professionalism and being an amateur coder. In fact - I advocate the complete opposite, yet still think everyone should code. I'm not sure why he thinks it does imply this - so its hard to argue against him here. To me it's prima facie not the case.
Browsers on Windows RT: It's a tough antitrust case to make
Xcode is just the IDE right? No particular need to port that if you can just use Eclipse or the command line tools. The simulator could come later as long as you can test on a device so all your really looking at is a objC compiler and a linker.

Whilst I'm sure it's not a trivial task something tells me that there is more to this than technical limitations.
First gene therapy successful against aging
Unfortunately, at the time when Ian didn't seem to care about the issue of responsive images, I asked him about the possibility of using the existing `<img>` element and he said it was pointless to try and modify existing image parsing. Forget it.

Now, he decides that actually this is the way to go. Frustrating.

For reference, in the email linked above, Ian Hickson said:

> So why not just give the UA the characteristics and a template to use to build the file names itself? That way we still give the UA all the same information, but it is much less verbose and still solves all the same use cases. Thus:

<img src="face-600-200@1.jpeg" alt=""
src-template="face-%w-%h@%r.jpeg"
src-versions="600x200x1 600x200x2 200x200x1"></code>
Chinese Executive Compensation and the Numbers Behind the Numbers
Caralluma Actives | In Positive Mood
I disagree. Caches would have to be intelligent. Remember they already have to pay attention to language headers etc. URLs represent a conceptual resource, rather than a single file.
Awesome reply. I now understand. This is still a property of the media though.
> current development tools somewhere a kin to Egyptian heiroglyphics. You can do the basic things like...

Ah, no. Heiroglyphics is just somewhere between an alphabet and syllabary - there are 60 odd symbols and they match to sounds like 'a', 'ts', 'gh'.

The stuff you see in museums is the 'posh' stuff for best, there is a quick writing version of it (also known as heiratic) where the full pictures were made more abstract.

> Could Shakespeare have written what he did in hieroglyphics?

For 3,000 years everybody did. Oh, and don't forget little things like inventing hydrolic engineering in hieroglyphics.

Hieroglyphics is as good a writing system as this text I am typing.

> You could argue that Excel is a programming environment.

Actually Excel/spreadsheets are THE programming environment - used by millions of people every day to perform their daily work - loads more than use obscure programming specialist dialects/paradigms like Ruby, or Java or whatever.
长春信用卡套现
Epson Movario BT100 – See Through 3D Glasses « StartupTunes
So long as you don't go too many months with too many vacancies and suddenly your rent doubles.
Hitch a ride through Google's Cloud
JRuby is fully parallel with no global lock and many people choose it for deployment. Rubinius 2.0, which is in development, will also lack the GIL.

You're also very confused about how threading on Ruby MRI 1.9 works. First of all, pure Ruby code in 1.9 can and does execute on multiple OS threads, in parallel.

Also, the problem that the Ruby VM still has is that while executing native code, it does not allow a context switch unless that code explicitly informs the VM that it can do a context switch. This is in effect how the global interpreter lock works. The gotcha here is that native extensions that are well behaved, can inform the VM that a context switch is possible. For instance, the older "mysql" gem was NOT well behaved, blocking context switches between threads, but the newer mysql2 gem does behave well and works correctly in multi-threading.

Right now, if you start a new Rails 3 app, it will work in a multi-threading environment correctly and modern Rails servers are taking advantage of that, unless you install some older gems that haven't been fixed. The biggest problem is that you can't know what libraries are well behaved, but if that's too much of a burden, JRuby is a fully supported platform for Rails and doesn't share the same issue.

So like, seriously dude, do some reading.
_Every_single_time_ I start the Facebook app and either the notifications or messages icon is red, the list that pop ups when clicking it is outdated. So the progress to just read a single message or notification is,

1. Tap highlighted icon
2. Suppress the instinct to tap the first entry (high failure rate here :))
3. Pull to refresh
4. Wait for refresh
5. Hit the new first entry

Either this happens to everyone, then it contradicts your point, because not every normal user knows how to pull-to-refresh. Especially since there's no visual indicator for this at all.

Or this bug only affects some users, and then it explains why you are happy. My girlfriend on the original iPad certainly has the same problem.
Maybe http://owncloud.org ? I don't think it supports playlists, though, but they're pretty open to pull requests (or merge requests, as they're on gitorious). Only downside is that it's written in PHP ;-)
> Why do you wish that people would change their consuming behavior and not their producing behavior?

Because it's a wish, and it's OK to wish for impossible things.

You're right - it's not an ideal world, and an imperfect solution is better than nothing. People need to know more facts, so they can contextualise new facts. Infographics (even bad ones) can help there. And good infographics do exist (though they can be rare).
JavaScript Style Guides And Beautifiers
As opposed to a professional "coder"? (I also see "programmer" as a more distinguished title and I prefer it to "coder" (and even "software engineer"), but I don't understand any of these terms to have any generally-accepted definition; personally it is only a matter of taste.)
When you reach a certain level of wealth, you'll begin to view your government more as a service provider than a community to which you belong (you're hyper-mobile so the world is your community). You can certainly afford to shop around, if you're willing to take the rough with the smooth (e.g. lower taxes under one government but perhaps a higher cost of living).

A strange but (I reckon) valid analogy: imagine if your first ever laptop had been a Dell. Using this laptop you made a fortune by starting a tech company, and with your newfound riches decided to buy a MacBook.

Should Dell be angry with you because you used their product to make a boatload of cash and then left them high and dry? No. There was a contract in the first instance which didn't specify a lifetime commitment, and you never stepped outside the bounds of that contract. You gave them their money when you bought the first laptop, and that was all you owed them.

In terms of governments, Eduardo Saverin had been paying US taxes for his entire working life. The system provides a strategy for opting out, but he's now paying an exit tax and he's lost any benefits that US citizenship and residency brought (like TSA patdowns and pepper spray incidents).

If you believe in making citizenship irrevocable, coupled with the global US tax burden (US citizens have to pay US tax on their worldwide income regardless of where they live), you'll put off swathes of future investors from coming to the USA. You're basically sending out a message that says "we're so paranoid that you'll leave that we're going to imprison you here"—like glassmakers on the island of Murano.
But should it be mandatory for everybody to learn cooking on the same level as reading and writing? Is it such a basic requirement, that we're decreasing our children's chance of success, if we don't teach them cooking (edit: Again, on the same level as reading and writing)?

Apart from at least a fundamental ability to use a stove, it is naturally not that crucial of an ability. The argument of the blog post is that it is the same with programming, i.e. It is not a necessity to succeed in life to know how to code.

I don't think the point of the post is to discourage anybody from learning to code. Rather it is a counterpoint to the recently heavily promoted idea that programming is somehow a necessary life skill.
Yahoo is using Bing so it is not strange that is has zero indexed pages.
Also Duckduck go is using Bing and some others like wolfram alpha.
The only reason I still use Google it that they are still miles ahead of the competition. I have switched for a while to Bing, DuckDuckGo and others but always wend back to Google.

I do value my privacy, for instance, I switched from gmail to fastmail even if fastmail has less functionality. But for search there is not a real alternative for me.
I've had 1Password for a few months now, and didn't know this. Colour me impressed. Thanks for pointing it out.
I like the "computational thinking" concept for computing literacy that doesn't imply being a professional programmer, as described in this article: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wing/publications/Wing06.pdf

Familiarity with those concepts might help bureaucrats with organizational planning even if they never wrote a line of actual computer code. Programming is first about making things so clear and well-understood even a computer can handle them, and only second about actually making a computer do them.

Atwood might have a point in that if someone just goes off to learn to code using a cookie-cutter course, they might not really learn to work with the more important first part, but might end up like a JavaScript programmer who has no idea about Turing-completeness instead: http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/579047.html
In Europe IE will also asks you to choose a default search engine on first start.
Doing it wrong: cse in guile
Our primary spoken language is screaming
Light-field photography
Don't US citizens still have to pay taxes on their income (over a certain amount) each year even if they claim residency status in another country?
Hard to read the page. A third of my netbook screen is covered by the style="position:fixed;" header.
If I'm manipulating the statistics in my head properly, even with a skewed sample, Alexa stats should converge on the truth as you go higher in the ranking, because the distribution of web site accesses is very skewed towards the top websites, which should have the effect of limiting the error as you get closer to #1. If Alexa says a site is well within the top 1000 (as opposed to just on the border, and Alexa shows them at 771), I'd accept that as strong evidence.
iOS developers are certainly expensive. But if you have to balance 500 million users and a single development team, I don't think anything less than 100% on the user makes sense.
No you don't have to prove your innocence per se, but it would be good to be able to prove that you had an open wifi. If you could not, the prosecution could show that the default for your wifi box is encrypted, and hence it's reasonable to assume it wasn't open. This is basically like trying to prove your alibi.

Does a burglar get off if we leave our back door unlocked? Not that I know of.

Burgely no. However sometimes in sexual assault/rape cases, the perpetrator gets off based on what the victim was wearing/doing (thankfully this is decreasing).
Shoddy bridges aren't bad, relying on them is. The fact that Bloomberg will write some code doesn't mean we'll have to use it, just like I have plenty of code in my HD that I don't throw into the world, because it's absolute crap.

If we could all build bridges in the our own yard, I think we'd see some of new fantastic bridges which we could re-use. With coding, we can.
That article is so full of strawmen, it's not even funny.

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.

I have a hunch that the vast majority of regular office workers has at least some portion of their work which can be trivially automated. Knowing how to code maybe allows these workers to go and code up a script - but even if they can't, it might allow them to identify this and state their work in terms of programming, thus vastly lowering the barrier to getting someone else to do the actual programming.

A workforce that can accurately say "this is a computers work" opens floodgates of productivity increases.
> Feels like this guy is trolling every single one of us here - myself included - to get a reaction.

Wow, just wow. This just crossed the bullshit horizon.
Indeed, why not? This is no more or less as exciting an announcement as that of a new knitting hobby.
There are few jobs I can think of where learning a TINY little bit of coding could help as much as when you're Mayor of New York (or a major CEO, etc). If the guy figures out nothing else than that he can make a program to keep tally counts as he discards emails, he just has to click which category they belong to, or that he can send form letters programmatically, he will be far more productive. Yes, aides do both of these things, but with code you don't have to communicate what you want someone to do, you can just do it and tweak it until it's most helpful for you - when you're the one in total control you are just so much more productive.

I basically completely disagree with this submission.
It was for Apple obviously. Only apple can require you to pay $99 and fax them your proof of identity just for running a app on your own device (actually, I no longer remember which document they asked, but I remember I didn't had time or motivation to scan and fax those documents).
Lenovo Unveils 9 New ThinkPads, Complete With Ivy Bridge, HD+ Screens
Aye, I think Cloudflare had Yahoo! in there as a bit of a legacy thing. I find myself appending !g to a lot of my queries on DDG; but I'm fine with that, as it offers me some interesting features that I don't get on Google.
> A little like saying that peasant farmers in the bronze age should learn to read and right.

Oh, the irony. :)
I was hoping we'd see another fine article from Jeff Atwood on the important distinction between coding and programming, something that is sometimes derided as largely pedantic, yet never fails to arouse interesting discussion.

Unfortunately, this seems to be a more blunt, standoffish interpretation of Peter Norvig's classic article on the long road to programming competence "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years." Jeff Atwood even references the article in this post, which I find disheartening, as Peter Norvig never once says something like "Don't even bother." Self-improvement is hardly a fruitless endeavor, and while not everyone is capable of writing good code, much less making a living off of it, there are a lot of wonderful things you could learn about yourself through such an undertaking. Plus, there are far less productive/interesting ways for people to spend what precious little time they have.
Hm, that could work. PHP is ok as I, sadly, use it for my day job. I dream of the day when I can leave it behind :-)

Thanks for that anyway, will give it a try. The document features, etc, could be handy too.
1. Make the things cost nothing, and you will lost the simple value of the thing. The value of the things comes with people caring about it. The simplest way to make people care about something is money.

2. Make the AppStore open and censorship-free and half of the apps will not be able to launch.

3. You need to get rid of script kiddies and lovers of fun and former middle-tier managers and game magazine review writers etc etc to have something that is close to a quality thing. Behold: native development and steep learning curve.

So, keep talking.
I acknowledge you know a lot more about Hieroglyphics than me. But my comments were based on the understanding that it was really the development of an alphabet by the Phoenicians that took writing from an obscure system to something usable by every day people. Maybe this isn't the case?

Also English is widely acknowledged to be a very expressive language compared to, say, Swedish which has a sparser every day vocabulary. I'd be surprised if you told me that the nuance of the finer English texts could be adequately captured in Hieroglyphics.

I agree, Excel is a programming environment. Could do with better version control and debugging though.
> we're decreasing our children's chance of success, if we don't teach them cooking?

Yes. Knowing cooking is paramount to feeding yourself and your family cheap, healthy meals.
Building bridges may not be the best analogy. What if everyone started learning to dance the macarena instead?

Seriously, cooking as an analogy highlights a difference between private recreational practice and public for-pay professional practice. Building bridges, unless you live in a place where everyone has a backyard with a river in it, not so much.
It will actually ask you to chose a browser before anything...
NJ4X - new Metatrader .Net library
Or maybe he could found a company making trading software, amass a fortune, and get elected mayor of New York City...
Yep, I tried to use DDG for some months, but often find me repeating the same search in Goog. However, usually I open a incognito browser window in Chromiums when I search in Goog, so it doesn't get my normal user tracking cookie.
My Raspberry Pi Thinks It's a Mainframe
Caches (proxies) already exist. You don't have the option of reprogramming them for this new header.
Total Lawn Care Services
TLC is a full-service commercial and residential landscaping company.
Comparison Between SkyDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox and Apple iCloud
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert Heinlein

As much as I believe (and I do) in the importance of technical and mathematical literacy, it's no more important than the perspective that can be gained from, say, learning to knit or beatbox. There are very few skills that don't teach some sort of methodical problem solving, the rest is just domain.