skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I share your frustration with domain squatters, and the such, it's worth noting that you ought to read between the lines with your vociferation.

His account "celtics" was being used for fans to check stats and news on the basketball team. I wouldn't call that no activity. I have the same kind of account on Tumblr for the Indianapolis Colts; pictures I take when I'm at football games or interesting news clips. It's not a dormant account. So on that note, saying "no activity" isn't correct, he was apparently doing something with the accounts.
Note the unique presentation style - story with flashing images. It's surprisingly appealing. Even simple slides like "Anyway." that stay for just a second or two keep the viewer from getting distracted.

The whole "less words more pictures" philosophy has become really popular lately, and it seems this has taken it to a new level.

Bonus points for style and execution.
IMO Plentyoffish is very good design site, it's simple and direct. And the best thing is I always look better in the real world than my photo at the Plentyoffish:)
It seems almost ironic that an author who sees no value in education beyond securing credentials that get you a good position is only offering anecdotes to back his position.
A system I worked on years ago was delivered in 4 languages. The app would (initially) guess your language based upon your browser settings.

As the translations were often in a state of flux we had a development version that was in swedish chef (bork bork, etc). This was never put into prod. It mostly helped us work on functionality without getting caught up in the actual text (lorem ipsum style).

However, down the line we got a batch of testers that were using our development infrastructure. Go figure, one of them has swedish as their browser preference... When they got "bork bork bork" they weren't impressed to say the least. Took us ages to convince them that it wasn't deliberate.
... and charge you for it until your pulled-out pockets can't drop any more coins, or you bank doesn't give you more loans (which is even worse).

In my 3rd year undergrad, "Informatics" class was teaching us how to use a mouse and close a window. That, after 2 years of requiring computer-typed project reports, and numerous labs involving computers in numerous ways (labs was the best part of the whole degree, we even got to inject dyes into rat brains and then section and image them). That was (is) the Biology degree from the University of Barcelona.
As others have said, if the American people wanted to "bail out" the Big 3 they would have bought their cars.
Because most of the free dating sites are worse. They came in early, have a low barrier to entry (signup is trivial) and benefit from network effect.
No, fail.
I can think of a couple other languages that I'd rather have people learn how to program with. It's a horrible first language.

In my "Intro to programming with Java" class a few years back, it took people three or four weeks just to be able to install java, set up the path in the environment variables on their home computer and compile a "hello world" program. If you were raised on Windows, and you've never used a command line before, it can be a challenge to figure out.

I suggested to every teacher as well as the dean of the program that if they're committed to Java as a first language, then offer students a pre-configured VMware Virtual Appliance with a Ubuntu install with the programming environment preconfigured and set up for the students. That way, they could download the appliance or hand it out on CD, download VMware player and start programming.

Instead, the teacher was playing sysadmin for java installations on Windows boxen.

It's a shame that so many schools teach Java as a first language. I think there's probably a lot of people with aptitude and interest in programming that might get into the industry, but who are put of by all the initial overhead associated with java and sys admin stuff.

I think he's up against a bug in the curriculum and not just people's limitations.
It's easy to work around: hire a virtual server (the tiniest one can go for $15/month or so) from a provider in the US, and then stream out to your home.

Such regulations are laughable. The world is one, administrators and monopolists alike should start to give up before it gets embarassing.
Hm, I had forgotten that. I guess it's just a matter of time before every pair of socks ships with an MP3 player.
I used to start my courses with the following:

"This course has as much chances of turning any of any given person into a programmer as a swimming class can turn you into a fish. Some of you have it, some of you don't. Some of you will find it easy, and some will find it utterly incomprehensible. The fact you are here holds, at least, some, but not much, promise. Live with it."
Flash 10 isn't out for fedora yet. I assume they knew there were problems and haven't put it in the repo.

Flash 9 on Fedora 9 is working fine.
No joke: take a look at the LOLpython source for an example of creating a variant language that can compile to Python bytecode. It's one of many methods to create a DSL, though you often don't need access to all of Python in the DSL itself.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2267/2458668241_707bd3f31a_o....
First a general comment: I´ve read almost all of your essays in two go´s, do I have to say I love them. Only dabble in software, studying financial systems originally. Curiously, I found mathematicians and now computer scientists are the best non-fiction writers, at least they work best for me, whatever they talk about it´s logical and beautiful and well-structured. (I struggled for a long time with the pompous bullshitting of "economists" and "business administrators".) Came here via ESR, whose book on Unix history and essays I also loved. Reconnecting to my past. Thanks!

Regarding the topic of this essay, I think we can expect a lot of change in the financial industry. It is ripe for dissolution into smaller, more networked and fluid units. Also thinking about your essay on credentials here. Madoff is only most visible spearpost, it´s a general problem of delegated decision-making with so many conflicts of interest and such high noise to information. After all, finance and investments is all about information and capital is expressed in numbers. The industry has arrived at a critical point, your writings are highly pertinent for people in it.
You need to get over whatever that emotion you want to call it that is causing you to react like this, and come to the realization that regardless of what you think of the design or even genre as a whole it is one person operation doing what he's doing.
I'm writing something in Django at the moment, and it's really nice. However this bullet from the presentation scares me slightly:

"No need to know any SQL".

This seems very wrong to me.

The Django data model is just a light abstraction over the fundamental model of tables and relationships. If you learned how to work with Django models then you would know the logical constructs of SQL, just not the syntax.

Django models are no easier or harder to think about than SQL (just there is less code to write and maintain because the boilerplate is done for you). It is not a quick fix for an inability to master the basics.
IIRC the two things that the plentyoffish story lacks is passion and determination.

edit: Or was it HotOrNot? I might have got my stories mixed up.
Does someone have an example of jobs that become easier with 4 terabytes of local storage and thirty CPU cores? It seems to me the overhead of administrating these kinds of system would dwarf any benefit.

If you're doing any sort of graphics or video rendering, you eat up all the CPU, RAM and a lot of the disk that you can throw at it. Regular DV digital video takes up 12 GB per hour. Uncompressed 1080/24p HD video footage can take over 320 Gigs an hour. More here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles...

Video and graphics rendering are "embarrassingly parallel" problems, and will generally chew up any resources that you throw at them. Most semi-pro video editing/3d modeling programs have packages that let you throw up a render farm fairly quickly.
Twitter name squatters lose
“Complaining” about peace
They aren't "poor" autoworkers by any stretch of the imagination. I've seen news reports that a unionized Detroit autoworker can make $73/hr. That's where your money will be going.
Are you claiming credit? Because that would be amazing.
I think the primary use case was Object.extend.
"I think in these sorts of classes it'd actually be a good idea to spend several weeks looking at other peoples code and analyzing what it does."

I think that would just result in a lot of students dropping out. As a beginner, it's nice to get the computer to actually do something - even if it's just printing out a stupid message.
You don't honestly believe that, do you? I'm quite sure that both axes exist (and maybe others too).
"In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock." -- Orson Welles
The problem is that you're confusing a concept with its implementation. If it is a basic programming class, there are a whole lot of concepts that should be learned before worrying about the implementation.

Algorithms, variables, program flow, functions. Those are the real fundamentals... things that can even be analyzed in pseudo-code, no need to get into a particular language's idiosyncrasies.
Ouch. Those who can, do. Those who understand, teach.
Eventually, media and computers are going to change our language from a verbal one to one where instantly synthesized sounds and images will directly portray many of the ideas we now communicate using word abstractions.

I'm not the originator of this idea. David Brin had uplifted dolphins doing this in his books. Since they could "see" through echolocation, dolphins could synthesize "images" for each other by mimicking what would be the return reflections of imagined objects and directly beam them into each other's heads.

It will take many advances in interfaces, but we will eventually get there. Already, cameraphones and video cameras and media are starting to effect the way we communicate about the past.
http://pastie.org/343881

If you don't have a facebook account or don't want to login.
Interoute loses 3 undersea cables, massive outages reported
Adam's wife must be a very understanding woman.
For me Im fine with having all music in the cloud.

Why do i want to buy hard drives and manage a huge collection of mp3s? I use to but got tired of doing so...now with my iPhone I just stream the music I want to hear.

SOme of these iphone apps and services cache the music so when i have no internet I listen to the cache.
It's great, but I think I'm going to be pretty sick of it by the time I've seen the tenth presentation on web programming that's been done in the same style.
> It is not a quick fix for an inability to master the basics.

True. In general, there are few quick fixes that get you out of having to master the basics. If you don't know what you're doing, it'll probably rebound on you.

And it's not as if the ideas behind relational databases are hard, in any case.
It's not surprising at all to see a huge variation in student ability for an introductory class. The variation is just as big in other areas. My wife has been attending a large public university and from helping her edit group project papers I've seen samples of numerous other students' writing. Some of them do pretty well, but others are borderline illiterate (seriously).
This is very interesting for me, a non-iphone owner.

Could you be more specific about the apps you use and the caching features?

I'm interested in moving my music into the cloud as well.

Thanks.

Edit: were you referring to a theoretical service or a real one?
Follow up at the ripplepay list, where non-government based currencies are discussed:

http://groups.google.com/group/rippleusers/browse_thread/thr...
Wow. I find that when I start projects I have his sort of obsessiveness but as the project continues I start to loose it.

Oh ADD you've cursed me.
interesting but this didn't apply to plentyoffish, which didn't come up with new technology or new marketing hacks.

it was just the only free dating website at the time, and also with the right design (read=no design) to be trusted by its users
I trust IT analysts to provide plausible arse-covering for way-outta-their-depth CTOs. Boards ought to start requiring CTOs who utter the words "But Gartner said..." to resign.
I taught Comp Sci 101/102 as a TA at a state university in the US. Yes, there are students who just don't get it. There was one student of mine who seemed to think as if the machine contained some weird little fussy creature, and if you somehow made nice to it in its unusual language, it would decide to like you and do you a favor and run your program correctly.

Seriously. He couldn't comprehend:

X = X + 1

To be fair, that might seem paradoxical, but I would break it down for him, going step by step with cards and boxes labeled by the variable names. He just couldn't comprehend. He had a hard time with variables. Heck, I think he had a hard time with anything but social interaction. What was disturbing to me, was the amount of energy he devoted to sucking up to me and trying to scam me by mimicking the "Ah-HA!" moment.

Other disturbing observations: many of my fellow grad students didn't get it either. To them, the C compiler was just magic. No understanding of how things were marshaled on the stack or how operations were implemented in machine language. Surprisingly, they were often about as bad as the local community-college students who got employed by a local corporate body-shop.

At one point, one fellow grad student got exasperated at me in a study session and said, "I don't care about the principles, just give me the answer so I can get an A on the test!" She later told me she was just planning to go into management anyhow. (In a way, that was really disappointing. She was one of the few women in the program, and pretty cute.)
Startup Interview: Eko – Your financial freedom
But the hip hop class is more fun, and eventually you've gained a new skill. Also, this never happens on the internet:

"Tough west African refugee with poor english and a great smile seeks geeky physics student. Lets go for a bike ride, listen to metallica and teach each other new recipes."
Thank you.

When people come to absurd conclusions based upon urban myths, it's nice when someone bothers to set the record straight.
> It's not something to skimp on.

Why not? I sit in a cheap chair. It's fine. I worked for a few weeks in a cheap director's chair once. It was fine; perfectly comfortable.
Our business idea based on the CSS history hack: a new way to monetize web assets.
I have read email list anecdotes of Smalltalkers who introduced their kids to Smalltalk as a first programming language. In the majority of cases, their kids liked Smalltalk and their reactions to subsequent languages are, "Why are they so complicated? They don't do anything more than the simpler one."

Smalltalk as it exists today has about 8 terminals & nonterminals in its grammar. Python has something like 30. Ruby has something over a hundred, but for an intro to programming, you can just ignore most of the grammar and use a subset which makes it very close to Python in simplicity.

Smalltalk was specifically designed to be usable by children.
Like I said earlier, you've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner or you've not had much experience with teaching them. Beginners don't need to be able to see through fluff, they can't, the fluff needs to be gone entirely.

They need to be taught with languages that have no fluff so they learn the basics of thinking logically, algorithmically. They aren't ready to deal with the complexities of dealing with a particular languages quirks and learning to please its compiler with voodoo incantations like int, char, string, long, etc. They aren't even ready to understand that there are differences between languages, so their first language needs to be one that teaches concepts that apply to all languages.

They need to learn what functions are, what conditionals are, what loops are, what recursion is, in their simplest forms, and more than anything they need to see immediate success and running programs or they won't maintain interest long enough to get anywhere near the harder optional stuff like types and compiled languages. As soon as types come into play, you've advanced to an intermediate level, way over the head of beginners.

Beginners and manifest/statically typed languages do not mix well. The closest a student should get to Java, is JavaScript, but they'd be much better off learning Python, Scheme, and Smalltalk before getting anywhere near any of C's bastard children.
A couple of suggestions…

Start with a visual programming language for the noobs- maybe something for kids like Scratch and then something where you can make real apps quickly like VB6. My 5 yr old can do programs in Scratch. She hasn’t learned recursion yet, but loops and events are clear to her. She did learn about the shift key in preschool computer class this year though, so she’s probably ahead of some of your students.

Grade people based on how far they get, don’t make them go forward with the rest of the class if they don’t grasp week one. Let them keep iterating on those concepts until they get it. The tragedy of group education is that you are forced to move and it is very hard to ever catch up. I would computerize the whole class and make it self-paced if there is that much variability.

For the non noobs, the Java 2D stuff is useless. It’s completely useless to learn that API. Make them write programs they can use in their life. Do a simple data model for their budget and use Ruby on Rails to turn it into a web app.

PASCAL, Ada, and Modula-2 suck. I hated programming when I was using those and thought it was useless BS. When I was a student, I liked learning c and asm because you learned about how computers work and I liked learning high level languages with easy graphics libs because you could make useful things quickly. I liked Matlab too, because I could use it to check my math problem sets.
Thats how i learned driving. I couldn't get it, my instructor tried to teach me, but i couldn't do anything right. My instructor was pretty good and knew that it was normal and the next day after a good nights sleep i was starting to get good at driving. After a while of driving with mixed success i stopped for a week, and when i got in the car again i was really good. I got my license, but didn't drive for a month and today i got in a car and after a few minutes of remembering, i was good at it, it was all easy, you couldn't tell that it was my 30-th hour in a car, and i haven't driven THIS car ever before, so i had to 'learn it', and get used to it. The mind is an amazing thing, learning is one of the strangest things we are capable of.
I knew someone would say this ;)

It is true some adults can learn language almost as easily as children, but that's the exception. The main point is that as you get older (for the vast majority of people), learning a new language becomes more difficult. A similar effect may be happening with programming.
There was one tester we all hated, because, well she was just insane. Some developers had email filters that moved her messages to the trash. She was so gone, that she couldn't comprehend the difference between her just thinking something to herself and actually communicating it to someone else.

One day, a coworker and I decided that she was so close to the edge, that we could probably drive her over it.

We placed a little toy called "Gremlin" in the build, with some code that made sure it was shut off, except in the case of our friend, the "Testy Tester." What Gremlin did at random intervals was to have a weird little yellow/green guy grab the bottom of a window (as if the 'window' was a window into his room) and pull himself up to peep in and wave "hi" at you.

This was all fine and dandy in testing. Unfortunately, when the app made it out to production, heavy network made the client take six times as long to finish user authentication. Since we had the conditional shutoff code in the user authentication, this gave a chance for the Gremlin to wave "hi" at some of the users in the login dialog.

Whoops.
>>Also, since Java is statically typed, I think it makes
>>things appear to contain less "voodoo".

No way. It's better to learn other programming concepts without the distraction of having to maintain types. Duck typing makes a lot more sense to new people, in my experience. Most of the popular languages with non programmers (PHP, VB, JavaScript) fit this mold.
Yeah. I ended up editing the original post when I realized it later.
I know they have a $36/yr pro account, but I think it should go in increments of hours listened 10 hours free per month .50 per an aditional hour up to 10$ then .20 an hour after that with a cap at $30 month
He also spammed the hell out of craigslist, iirc. There was a period of about a year where you couldn't go into a craigslist dating room without seeing fake posts that linked to POF profiles.
Will stdio outlive us?
Ask HN: How do you pull all-nighter+dayers
Would be interested to hear techniques people use to stay awake for extended periods of time..
I worked for a state agency a long, long time ago. I was doing Perl-CGI web app, but I was only given a tiny table, a wooden chair, and a little teeny green-screen CRT I could use to rlogin and have shell access. This was actually a machination by the current system administrator who wanted the project to fail because we were impinging on his territory. (He wanted all of that State's Public TV related online publishing to be on an old-style text BBS he had set up.)

Well, my project was wildly successful anyways and I ended up being moved to a proper office and he ended up getting a different job.
Take some naps.
I don't. I think it is extremely unhealthy and unproductive to stay awake and work for such long periods of time.
Krugman: The Madoff Economy
When you have 50 pictures in a presentation about web programming, about half of them tend to fall into the lolcat category. Of course that grows old quickly.

But in a presentation about the dodo every picture is both relevant and interesting. The 60th picture is as engaging as the 3rd.

In other words, with web programming pictures are used because text is boring and the presenter wants the audience to know he doesn't work at IBM.
For my money it is the only IO API one need ever learn.

Good point on signed/unsigned. I think in most cases char is unisgned, i.e., in most environments, so this is not a problem. But can't you do something like:

char c

while( (c = getchar() & 0xff) != EOF) { //Do something }

if you are in a signed environment?

I think really stdio is rather like my experience with mexican food. I live in Austin, Texas now, and I love mexican food, the hotter the better, but as a kid I lived in eldritch New England, not far from the Miskatonic river, and felt I didn't "like" spicey food, being more used to lobster, clam chowder, and so forth. Now they can't put enough jalepenos in a burger for my liking. Similarly, being 27, and thus living in the "java age", I first taught myself to program with the Java SDK, which spares one from alot of these "pitfalls". But now I like the control, and also the relative simplicity of the API, that stdio gives one, arguably more intuitive and easier to remember than in Java, and given a choice between Java and C, I would go with the later. It is an acquired taste.

To paraphrase Charleton Heston:

"They will take my [stdio] away out my cold, dead hands!"

:-)
The Founder's Footprints
goog polyphasic sleep instead: 2-4 hours/day
it's not fu
Edgy, Yet Still Aerodynamic