skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, you asserted that it was wrong for Party B (your wife) to suffer because Party A (a thief) took her laptop. It was unclear whether you were only trying to point out that opportunism isn't always moral, or if you were also making the allegation that what the OP had initially done in this case was immoral. (which it is now clear you were not) I was simply comparing the morality of Twitter in this case to the morality of the OP.

Second, the position I attributed to you was a natural extension of your argument, if you don't qualify such a statement as part of a discussion I'm going to assume you are applying your suggestion to the discussion as a whole. In this case you brought up that opportunism is not always moral, which is true, but you did not exclude the discussion at hand so I made the assumption that you were implying that the OPs stance was immoral as well.

Third, please tell me how you expected "you fail at reading comprehension" to lead to any sort of rational debate before you accuse me of the same. When you say such things without qualification don't be surprised if you get called an asshole, because under the circumstances its likely true.
Yes, it's on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD3IXGyHt9c
What I think is somewhat particular about the challenge of teaching programming is that there quickly develops two distinct levels or types of thinking it's "difficult". I don't see "programming" as difficult in the same way that I don't see "writing papers" as difficult: it's a piece of cake to get words on the screen that make sense. Of course, writing a paper can be quite hard depending on the ideas you are trying to express. Similarly, I think everyone believes programming to be difficult depending on the underlying problem you are trying to solve (for example, no one thinks its easy to solve NP-Complete problems in NP time or to write fast games on slow devices).

However, what trips teachers up is that with some students the problem is that they can't even get past the first hump: getting meaningful things on the screen in the first place. It would be as frustrating as having a student in a college level writing course that always puts the words in his sentences in random order, and expects the reader to "know" what order to read them. Such a teacher would on the one hand be teaching tone and proper structure to one set of students, and basic rules of semantics to another. I recall many students in my CS classes just rearranging the syntax in their programs hoping the compiler would finally accept it. Clearly these students are having much different problems than the ones who simply get a little confused when they have a hard bug in their programs or find the idea of pointers unintuitive.
It's not like I want all the poor auto workers to lose their jobs, but this is really ridiculous. Think about how innovative we would be if the government instead offered this $17.4 billion to thousands of little engineering firms as incentive for coming up with ideas and products that might actually make transportation a sustainable industry in the US.

The auto industry needs diversification, not consolidation as a means to fix this mess.
Java's a horrible language for teaching. If you think this...

System.out.println("Hello world");

Is easier to understand than this...

print("Hello world")

Then you've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.

Java's not even a good example of what OO is, and it has way too much syntax and special keywords (something like 50) for teaching.

Python is a far better language for teaching, Smalltalk would be even better because it's much simpler, has only a handful of keywords, and a much more consistent and simpler syntax.

In any case, students should begins with a dynamic language where they don't have to think about manifest types that they aren't ready to understand anyway. It's also much faster working in a workspace or REPL where you have instant feedback and can experiment without messing around with compilers.
In Pascal, Ada, PL/1, Perl, and C, array assignment or passing an array as a parameter results in a new copy of the array, at least under some circumstances. (For example, in Pascal, it has to be a value parameter, not a var parameter, and in C, the array has to be inside a struct.) These are not exactly obscure languages, so it's surprising that you assert there are no languages that work that way. Do you know any languages other than Java?

“Every real language has types,” you say. Except for BLISS, BCPL, almost any assembly language, Forth, B, the Bourne shell, dc, QED, TECO, sed, and old versions of Tcl, to name a few. Again, these are not obscure languages; every piece of software you use is inspired by some of them and implemented in part in others. (There are also languages like Python in which there are only dynamic types, but I agree with your point of view that those are still types.)

And that's why I downmodded your comment: not because it was arrogant, but because it was wrong.
Although I got excited about it at first, I've come to the conclusion that this DSL stuff is seriously overrated. I've seen few successful examples and many silly ones.

There are certainly good little specialized languages -- Common Lisp's LOOP is an example, as are regular expressions -- but these are for programmers, not domain experts.
Maybe this is missing the point, but have you gotten your vision tested? Maybe you're farsighted or nearsighted. I think the world looks a lot more beautiful when it's in sharp focus.
Dailymile.com launches, go get healthy
Popular apps do get preferential placement in search -- so much so that exact searches for some apps do not match in the first page.

Putting niche apps that demand a higher price doesn't do that much good, because the majority of people looking at the charts won't be in that niche. That's why apps with broad appeal get on the charts. It's also why there are sub charts in each category.

As for the the supply issue, you're right. You can't sell anything you want on the store. If anything, though, I think it hurts your argument. By your own definition, Apple is exercising at least some quality control, and preventing you from having to compete with total crap. Unless your app gets blocked from the store (which plenty apps have for no reason), Apple's manipulation in this regard just keeps out your competition.

You're wrong, though, about it not being easier to game your proposed chart metric. You're not taking into consideration price manipulation (or questionable ethics). I'm not going to go into specifics, but it doesn't take much imagination.

Ultimately, its not only cheap apps that are getting in front of people, which is where I think your argument falls down. The majority of apps are not $1. 60% of the top 10 apps cost more than $1, and 40% cost $5 or more. This holds up for the top 20 as well.

You talk about the "voodoo" momentum, and I agree, there is a huge upside to getting to the top of the charts. But it isn't the only way to make money on the store. If that was your entire plan, you only have yourself to blame if it doesn't happen. The evidence shows that price is not the determining factor.
A World Enslaved
Try http://getharvest.com for time-tracking + invoicing. Plans are cheap (the $12/mo starter plan should suit you) and you can easily interface with services such as Basecamp and QuickBooks should your business grow into the need for it.
Maybe maybe not but who here is willing to make any bet on what technology we will have in 2500 years? I certainly am not. And thats just one example of something that could (and is likely to) change drastically.
But the number one app on the store, the one selling "13k a day", costs $10 right now. The number 5 app costs $5. Clearly price is not the determining factor.
Then you've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.

Not just that, but what programming should be like. Hello-world shouldn't need more than two elements.
There's an issue of need satiation. Once a need is met, further improvements can't be absorbed. Like water when you aren't thirsty, it doesn't matter.

Hardware helps performance - but this only matters when more performance is needed. For example, if features or usability are needed, extra performance doesn't help. This is obvious, but it's surprisingly easy to get caught up in improvements that are better, but that don't matter.

For productivity of programmers, faster hardware only helps when performance is a problem. The article says: If [it] makes them merely 5% more productive... - that's an "if". Will a faster PC make you more productive? These days, compilation is too quick for me to squeeze in a swordfight. For other hardware (eg large screens) there is also a limit beyond which extra real estate isn't useful (Joel on Software talked about several of his coders that don't use their second monitor). It depends on the task, of course.

Faster is always cool and impressive. But like a 300 miles per hour station wagon, will it help you?
They are the Roland Piquepaille of... something.
He was stupid for thinking he owned the rights to a field in Twitter's database, regardless of what it contained, or how long he held it.
In the academic world, the semantic web is pretty much taken for granted.

This is absolutely not the case. Among the Semantic Web community, the SW might be taken for granted (to some extent), but among the wider CS community, there is a lot of scepticism about whether the SW is feasible. Most of the people I know in the academic database research community dismiss the Semantic Web, for example.
Get Press for your Start Up with Help A Reporter Out
Proof of the 25:1 ratio of unfunny to funny on HN.
Recursion is really fun until you have to use it to solve something under pressure.
I remember checking out a first-year CS textbook from a library, back when I was in HS. It described one-bit adders and other hardware and then prescribed a lab assignment that required stuff I couldn't buy at a computer store.

Later, I signed up for a CS course at a college, and their textbook was just a glorified Visual Basic tutorial, because at the time, all the companies were looking for Visual Basic programmers.

Now, companies are looking for Java programmers, so the schools have switched over to that. Never mind that programming languages have a long history of turning out to be short-term fads (COBOL and Pascal before Java), and the real skill is in understanding the logic underneath the language.
>glossing over a lot of details that students need to know.

If you're teaching them object oriented programming. Why would you be teaching beginners object oriented programming?

I give the engineering programming classes at Pitt a fair amount of credit. Two semesters -- the first semester covers HTML as a reasonably useful introduction to the idea of structured text files, then Matlab to introduce if statements, loops, and functions in an environment with a friendly console. The second semester was C. Mostly everyone got it -- those that failed out of engineering didn't fail because of programming class.

The classes were taught/conceived by a professor whose primary research interest is engineering education.
I think some people just forget that the machine should be working for the human rather than vice versa.
I've never tried an aeron chair, but with the chair I'm using I'm getting quite a lot of back ache and I can see how a good chair could increase my productivity
Taking the risk and grabbing something generic-but-powerful, like "business.com" or "porn.com" seems fine. Grabbing someone elses brand name for the purpose of squatting on it and then extorting the trademark owner just seems wrong.

The point is that the domains would have almost ZERO value if the business who has the trademark hadn't spent huge piles of money building the brand and the goodwill around it. In this guys case, he grabs @celtics and tosses up some basketball stats, and he's basically leeching off the brand. It's not dissimilar to setting up a Hamburger stand and calling it "McDonalds" with a stylized "M" logo.

In domain/twitter name case, there's no actual risk being taken. Twitter names are free. Domain names are cheap ($30/year at first). So in my mind, they should be compensated at a reasonable price for the risk they took... Let's say 30x return on whatever they put into it. :-)
Ordering by volume * price is in fact ordering by sales volume measured in dollars, and is bound to maximize that. It makes sense economically for the app store, not just the developers.

It's not about gaming the system but about having the proper economic incentives in place.
I see. I'll look into it, thanks. Not too sure how keen I am on the subscription model, though. I much prefer 1-off payments if I'm going to pay.
I should also point out that your Java example won't even compile, you need to wrap it in a class and a main function to even attempt to compile and run it. Tell me again how simple this is..

class World {
public static void main(String args[]) {
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
}

compared to this...

print("Hellow World!")
I guess I did mention the law, but that's not where I was going... But, yes, I know that Twitter has no legal obligation to any party. But if you agree that domain squatters should have to give up domain names to trademark holders, then the parallel holds.
Recursion is easy if you're used to it. A recursive procedure just looks like a loop to me.
Why aren't the celtics stupid for assuming they own that same right?

In fact, he's not assuming he owns it. He's just pissed that his twitter account was taken away for a pretty lame reason.
Loops would probably be easier to teach if they taught "goto" first. "Goto" is easy for beginners to grasp, and loops can be taught in terms of it.
Digg's Miserable Business Model, Losing Millions of Dollars
The downloads tax is one thing. Although I dont think they are entitled to it unless the business is operating in New York. But a really good way to get New Yorkers to stop using taxis and going to bars is to make it more expensive then it already is. A beer in New York cost $6 to $8 on average. People love drinking and they wont stop because of this. But they will either drink less or do it in their home. Either way; the bar loses, the consumer loses, the government loses and the recession gets deeper.

The rich are the folks who save, for everyone else money burns a hole in their pocket. Save them money, they will spend it on more items and you still get to collect taxes.
You still fail at reading comprehension.

You were the one who complained about the discussion not being "constructive," not me. (In the same sentence where you called me an "asshole".) I was just pointing out that you weren't really behaving in a way that often leads to constructive discussion. Consider it a tip. No charge! Feel free to call me an "asshole" as often as you please, if that's what melts your butter. Or a "motherfucker" or "dickhead" if you like. It really doesn't matter to me. But it probably won't lead to constructive conversation!

I pretty much gave up hope of constructive discussion when you put words in my mouth, totally failed to understand what I wrote, and accused Twitter of taking a bribe. So I decided to make fun of you instead.
Box2D ported to JavaScript, rendered in canvas
I disabled Flash when I discovered that if a Web page has multiple Flash objects, then each one gets its own thread. Where one Flash object consumes 20% of an average CPU, 20 of them can render a computer unresponsive.

I also noticed that even if you disable a Flash object with Adblock, it continues to consume CPU cycles.

Flash is Trash.
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It uses Prototype. Personally, I am using the jQuery port found here: http://kjam.org/post/105/

You can edit draw_world.js to render objects in any way you want. The first change I made was to draw true circles instead of n-gons.
Yet another misleading headline. It's not iPod specific, any "digitally delivered entertainment services", including ebooks.
Learning programming in classes like this just seems a terrible idea to me.
i'm very nearsighted, and use glasses. however the kind of detail i see when i'm very drunk is on a different level, regardless of whether i'm wearing glasses or not (like looking at things up close.) it might seem strange that you can see better than 20/20 (or whatever 'perfect' vision is,) but this is something that is independent of the apparatus of the eye. it's deeper, like the cognitive management of attention/focus

i'm sure part of it is that i don't actually use my eyes much from day to day... which might be the reason i'm nearsighted to begin with. but even that much wasn't apparent to me before. though the same could be said of those who have trouble programming. maybe there is something they don't use a lot, and it atrophies over time?

let me be clear. when i say i don't use my eyes much from day to day, i mean i spend most of my energy in my head and i don't really focus on my sight at all. it doesn't take much ocular prowess or precision to parse some text on a screen

but who knows, maybe i'm loony. koo koo
This posting is just a link to an announcement. The actual lectures appear here: http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/Outreach/Public_Lectures/Vi...
My first programming class (or my first class I had to use a compiler) was in C (it was one of those CSCI classes for non-majors) and this guy took us through the whole gamut, even if I barely passed the class, it was a rush. It was probably such a rush because I knew what I wanted to do, but had no idea how to express it, until we finally got to arrays, and I realized that a string is just an array of sorted characters. This insight catalyzed another insight and by the end of the year I was more interested in recursing meaningless input just to see what it looked like when it came out, which never really solved anything in my text-book, but this act taught me more about computer programming than any book could, this act showed me that computer programming is the art of counting and comparing for measuring an unknown order of magnitude. I came out of the course with so much more than what my grade reflected (somewhere between a D and C), but could really care less.

One semester later I ended up in a class called Object Oriented Analysis and Design; [insert brain hemorrhage here] I could not communicate with any of these people (nor my teacher) ever since the problem domain was suddenly so tangible, it seemed so much less enticing. This was when I laid my eccentric theory to rest, went with the flow, and started solving my exercises.
Home Refinance to Fund Your Home Improvement Project
Have you been postponing your home improvement project year after year? Are you gratifying your desire to have a stylish bathroom and a more spacious kitchen by flipping the home improvement magazines? One of the reasons why people postpone their home improvement is that they do not have enough money to fund their home improvement project. If that sounds like you, then there is a way how you can realize your dreams on home improvement. After all, you deserve some change occasionally.
New York state is serious trouble if the only solution that their government can come up with to decreased tax revenue is to raise taxes. This is one of several "lets just raise taxes" initiatives both by New York state, and New York City that are going to drive business and residents away.
Argos Sports, Fitness Equipment, Treadmills
That was a great explanation.

One of my all-time favorites, though, is this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tcp_synflood.png
Awesome site - just one thing to add. It will be good to be able to export the comparison table to a spreadsheet. A simple CSV will do as well.
Testing in a statically-typed language
One of the things that complicates Scheme for many beginners is the prefix notation for arithmetic and such.

It's just not a concept most Freshmen are acquainted with.
Digital Arts College,music video production,Video Production Editing
Madison Media Institute, a digital arts college offers precise graphic design training and music video production training as well as video production editing by qualified professionals."
I started thinking of Loops as "repeaters"

"Ok. First I need to make my variables. Ok. There they ok. Good. Now I need to figure out what I want to do with them. Ok. That's that. Now I need to repeat this 5 times, so I need a repeater loop..."

That's kind of how it looked. Writing a program to tabulate diving scores was fun!
Yeah, for me it's always been struggling through. Stepping away and then coming back to it. Then I get it.

Same with piano lessons as a kid. I had chopsticks down pat after a few weeks. Then it was time to play a triad (a 3 note chord) and I just couldn't do it, pushing three keys at once with one hand.

Spent a whole lesson with my teacher literally just pushing my hand down on the piano while I looked on in horror at how badly I was at it. That sucked.

Then my family went on vacation for a week. At my next lesson I could play them just fine. Something clicked.

But it wouldn't have clicked had my teacher not spent an hour pushing my hand down onto the piano over and over again.
"You ought to go to a boy's school sometimes. Try it sometime," I said. "It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques. The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month Club stick together."

--Holden Caulfield
I don't get how "promoting themselves" has done significant damage to the company. I mean, Kevin is the company. The company is Kevin. When Digg had a town hall meeting in Chicago, people were there to meet Kevin and have him sign their iPhones. He's gotta be out there as much as possible.

I concede having no knowledge on any of these other fronts, but I don't understand how all the good PR that comes from Rose's ubiquity in tech media can be anything but crucial to Digg's success.
I find the subject of slavery interesting so I upmodded this. But I found myself drifting off towards the end. (Traditionally, towards the end of an article, even the most supremely unqualified journalist is supposed to make recommendations to improving the world--unsurprisingly, these always fall short).

In fact, within human relations, there is an economic force that is beyond defiance: Cost/benefits. If the benefits of slavery exceed its costs, slavery will exist. Period.

Period.

There is no fighting it, if that dismal formula says otherwise. This is something I have said to people in real life: We will have slavery again the very instant the laws of economics require it. In Haiti it is already so. In Eastern Europe it has been off-and-on (mail-order brides). In America, we will see it yet....
Carboncopypro
Carbon Copy Pro is a great online business system.Carbon Copy Pro is always continuously developing new marketing strategies and improving the effectiveness of the SYSTEM.
Okay. Here's my real opinion:

If I was setting up a curricula, each incoming student would deal with a digital logic trainer. Okay? Wires and transistors. An 18 year old should learn the fundamentals and not the shortcuts. That's my opinion--maybe I'm wrong. Java is hardly the best teaching language, but it is closer to the bone than a lot of things....
What on earth would venture capital be needed for anyway? If you have clients you shouldn't need them.