skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: how to learn computer programming in 8 months?
I am graduating high school a semester early and have 8 months before college. My career aspiration is to be a startup entrepreneur. I barely know any computer programming now and have tried to teach myself but have had trouble doing so. What do you think it the best environment and method to learn computer programming?
This article reminded me of a quote I heard a while back: "People pay for atoms, not for bits". Not 100% accurate, but if someone is going to fork over cash, you really, really, really need to make it worth their while. Unfortunately I don't think that individual news articles qualify.

I don't know if this is the solution, but here's one idea I had around this problem that I keep coming back to. It's a way to combine the disciplined process of a traditional news agency with the economies of scale and spirit of the citizen journalism movement: http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/y-combinator-ch...
"As each semester progressed, attendance in [the professor's] introductory physics courses fell to 50 percent, as it did, he said, for nearly all of his colleagues...'I had poor attendance, and was failing 10 to 15 percent'"

So, 50 percent of the students aren't coming to class, and they're only failing 10-15 percent? It sounds like the tests are too easy. If the tests were more demanding, more students would come to class--which might (paradoxically) lower the fail rate.

"Unlike in the lectures, attendance counts toward the final grade...[the professor] gauged the level of understanding in the room by throwing out a series of multiple-choice questions. The students “voted” with their wireless “personal response clickers”"

I'm currently a sophomore in Computer Engineering, and I have had several 150+ student lectures that used these clickers to take attendance. It's a simple way to make sure students come to class. This is a major benefit that has nothing to do with smaller class sizes.
As a slight thread hijack, which do you prefer, blackboards or whiteboards?

The physicists and mathematicians I know seem to universally prefer blackboards, while everyone else seems to like whiteboards.

I like whiteboards for any semi-permanent or "data-rich" writing (i.e. multi-color), but probably prefer blackboards for intense computation.
I used to work at Microsoft, and their corporate web site it's largely informational and is maintained by operations guys. I think it's under the HR division. The development structure isn't the same as msn.com or live.com, which have dedicated product teams and management that gets held accountable for mistakes like that.
Not at all, it depends on the context. I really liked his style, and then...bam...it stopped right when I thought it was about to start. Blog entry vs. Essay, I guess.
I thinks 'iTunes for news' is an excellent idea. I would pay for stories.

I will not pay for AP stories or similar ones. Usually the headline contains as much content as the story.

What I will pay for are those incredibly written expose stories that appear in magazines from time to time. I do not care enough about music to purchase a subscription to Rolling Stone. I do want to read their longer essays though, for example the one on McCain a couple months ago.

I never would have thought to read Gourmet. But I loved David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster. I would have paid for that article alone. The rest of the magazine doesn't interest me much.

I would also pay for newspaper stories that are more than just daily reporting. I want the investigative stuff. Stories with insight.

I would consider a monthly subscription to the WSJ so I could get their daily news.

I would pay for the WSJ and NYT op-ed pages so I could read the letters written by CEO's. big time politicians, etc.
The general sentiment about the TEAL classes (the ones with the clickers) is that they are really gimmicky. Supposedly, it gives the professor some feedback on what concepts are unclear and pushes the students to be attentive.

The problem seems to be that it's just unnecessary structure for something that's typically dynamic. It at least partially devolved into an attendance system - students used to just press in for missing friends, until recently when they had each student buy their own clicker.
Tourism takes a hit
Professor Lewin has several classes available online through both MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) and the iTunes store.

OCW Link: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01Physics-IFall1999/Vide...
I would suggest python (www.python.org), though of course you will get many alternate suggestions. Python is easy to pick up and is great for entrepreneurs in the sense that it gives them a good understanding of the fundamentals of programming without requiring them to learn more complex languages.
Loved the description of how Weinman ingests whole passages of text as single visual units. I want that!
Here's the thing - the really smart people at Microsoft are out there working on the hard problems, like improving facial recognition for image searches, writing software that synchs up your work and home laptops to your phone, making it easier for average users to take photos from their digital cameras and post them directly to Facebook, etc... www.microsoft.com is probably run by someone in the marketing department, with the actual html/css/javascript/Silverlight coding outsourced to either an external web agency or an in-house team of entry-level devs - it's really not a good indicator of whether or not MS "gets the web". Good headline for an attention-grabbing blog post, though.
Not necessarily. You can remove all web browsers and stick to pdf documentation.
I think the government has better things to be doing than setting up their own video hosting service.What's wrong with the government outsourcing this job to a private company at no cost to the taxpayer? Sets a pretty good precedent if you ask me.
A good time to be a first home buyer
Austral Mortgage offers competitive mortgage rates for both residential and commercial loans, debt consolidation and investment loan. The company also provides special offer for First Home Buyer.
Start with the basics. Ensure you understand general concepts well before progressing to the details of specific programming languages. Take a trip to your local bookstore and spend a couple hours reading the beginning of several books on programming. I recommend starting with Python because it will remain useful throughout your career while providing a shallow learning curve and stable library, but language choice matters less than the concepts.

I recommend staying away from Microsoft's .NET and other proprietary languages for now; focus instead on more open tools. You'll attain more versatile skills that way.
Open-plan offices are making workers sick
They are yet to say: "Microsoft is Search"
Long Ring Fingers May Point to Wealth in Traders, Study Says
Posterous is great simply because...

1) They took a market which is too complex and made it dead simple...they still have ways to make it even simpler, I have already suggested them to them and they are working on it.

2) They are GREAT communicators, they don't just answer back in some standard way like "We are working on it, we will think about it." They reply really quickly.

3) They just keep on getting better with iterations.

Keep up the good work guys, you've got a fan here!
A New Market for Battery Start-Ups?
For me, it was having something practical to accomplish (and better if it had a deadline attached). String processing (manipulating text) was, for me, a comfortable place to start. Python is a great first language to learn and will let you explore just about every nook and cranny of computer science you find interesting. Pick up a Python book, work through the first several chapters. Then come up with a simple problem you want to solve. If you enjoy solving problems, stick with it -- a programmer you may be!
It sounds like the tests are too easy.

You might be right that much or most of the higher pass rate is due to higher attendance, but it's also possible that students were learning plenty from section, the book, and working on problem sets. When I taught the analogous course (Physics 1) at Caltech, many of the students skipped lecture entirely. The failure rate was typically under 5%, and I guarantee it wasn't because the tests were easy.

One student I remember took it all the way: he skipped everything, including homework (which counted for 20% of the grade), but he got perfect scores on all four quizzes and on the final exam. According to the numbers he had an A- because of the 0 on homework, but everyone in the grading room agreed that was absurd, and so we gave him a flat A instead.
Is 2009 The Year Of The ‘Restart’?
Posterous appears to have a very large market for its product. Of course, its practice of releasing often, working hard, and communicating well has helped Posterous find a good product-market fit. But it's worth bearing in mind that lots of companies do 1-3 and still fail---typically because the market just isn't there.
Fair enough. I thought it flowed well though. The simplicity was very zen.
As entertaining as his lectures were, it was still pretty easy to leave with barely any more knowledge than you had going in. Especially as the topics got more complex.

I had him for my Waves class, and kids found it to be incredibly hard (and to require lots of on-your-own learning) even while Lewin was jumping around the room and making cool things happen with light and sound.
JavaScript is Not Perfect
Ah. Well, that was a book. I'll bet Steele would prefer LaTeX over XML too.
I'd recommend getting started in the following order:

1) Familiarity with Unix & shell scripting
2) A scripting language (Python/Ruby/Perl)
3) C

If you have more time, learn C++/Java, and a functional language. From a motivation standpoint, it might be helpful to learn a language with a specific task/project in mind (ie, I want to learn Python to make a webapp that does XYZ).

Also, check out http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Rather than agonize over the similarity between the sites, is there a way to differentiate yours? Doing an exercise like the strategy maps in "Blue Ocean Strategy" comes to mind as something that might be worthwhile.

Features != user experience. Two sites can have exactly the same feature set but their value and popularity can be determined by completely different factors.

I should also note that you have a huge opportunity here: if his/your feature sets are that similar, you can observe how folks are using those features before even launching. You've essentially gotten some free market research with which to refine your product before you have a userbase to complain about changes.
> The article suggests Lispers could have used sexp as a front-end to LaTeX

(1) As another comment points out, they have when doing so provided benefits.
(2) Lispers tend to be multi-lingual; they'll use other languages when appropriate. If XMLers can only work in XML....

>This is, what XML and SGML people have done for decades

Decades? 20 years/two decades ago is 1988. The first draft of XML is roughly 1998/10 years later/one decade ago. GML, a predecessor to SGML, didn't become public until 73 but the "multiple use" stuff was still in the future.

SGML rode the WWW wave, but that didn't happen for technical reasons.
Alarming, or a business opportunity waiting to be seized? Just think of the emerging market for thumb splints, glasses, and various callous creams.
Congratulations Posterous! It's really renewed my interesting in blogging, and the simplicity is 100% to thank.
By the way (I can't resist one more comment), apropos this:

The nice thing I see in XML is that it abstracts out grammars (using XML Schema / DTD)

Have you ever used XML Schema on a real project? I tried, on a nice meaty project, for perhaps a year. It turned out to be as awful to work with in practice as it sounds good in theory. It's the kind of thing people write design specs for, and then after the standards are ratified they write books about it, without ever actually themselves building anything. Meanwhile, pity the poor schmucks who get the book and try to use it on a real system, wondering what they're doing wrong for a year until they finally figure out that the problem isn't them.

To give you an example: what happens when you give one of these systems a chunk of data that doesn't match its nicely specified schema? Well, with the tools we were using at the time, you get something like "Error type error the int at position 34,1 of element XSD:typeSpec:int32 type invalid blah blah blah". What can a system do with that other than tell its poor user, "Invalid data"?

Now I suppose you'll tell me that we just picked the wrong validator. :)
Could we get the parent comment back up to at least -1 karma? It's not a troll, it's just an unpopular opinion. A score of -7 should be reserved for trolling.
[pic] Putting the size of Africa in Perspective
Web or software startup?
Proposal: Imuse, an IMAP-capable FUSE filesystem
I don't know about you, but I find it's impossible to control the conversation with a reporter. A professional like a PR person or a press secretary may be able to have a whole conversation without saying anything that can be misconstrued, but no ordinary person can-- especially not when they're excited about an idea. You say one or two hundred sentences, and they pick the one that, quoted in isolation, will seem the most controversial.

I was even hosed this way once by Steven Levy, who is one of my favorite reporters. He came to several dinners during one YC cycle. I must have talked to him for hours. I explained all the nuances of how YC works. Out of all that he ends up quoting me as saying that someone who turned us down would be failing an IQ test.

[And before anyone starts jumping up and down about that one again, I meant it in the narrow sense of someone who didn't understand that all we have to do is improve a startup's prospects by 6.4% (http://paulgraham.com/equity.html) for the founders to end up net ahead.]

But you can't just blow off the press. The best you can hope for is that if you do a lot of interviews, collectively the resulting articles will form a sort of Giacometti drawing of the truth.
True, although as swilliams pointed out, your comment was borderline retarded. My guess is you have a tendency to dismiss Joel Spolsky out of hand, and have long since stopped bothering yourself to reason about your hatred.
If you can, try to also spend some time seeing the world!
Oh, strange. I looked through a lot of them, and they were all bigspaceship.
Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is a hoot. (Lincoln is on the $5, Franklin is on the $100.)

Jefferson gets all the good press, but Franklin was more accomplished at more things. (Ben did fundamental work in electricity.)
powerset.com?
I bet is that people simply don't know about it. Even with developers I am still introducing them the usefulness of rss. And it doesn't see any higher with the general population.
LG KE970 SHINE PINK UNLOCKED 
The KE970 is encased in a stainless steel case giving it a certifiable heft and weight. The polished metal exterior lends it an elegant air that speaks of sophistication and gives a hint at the amazing features that lie beneath.
This has worked for me in the past. Though I can never repeat it reliably. Given enough stress for the following day, my thoughts will gravitate back to what needs to get done.
Go for it. As another commenter said, it's called "competition". Coke/Pepsi, Ford/Chevy, etc.

Design your site to look better than his

If it's a paid app, you can beat him on price–or charge more and beat him on quality of features and service

Consider dropping one feature that he has, and adding one that he doesn't–even if it's trivial, it could help you differentiate.
This is very interesting. 10x; talk about statistically significant.
Words to live and die by Garry.
Funny, my 14 yo daughter just cleared 1,800 last month ...

I even caught her calling a friend to tell her she sent her a text ... didn't quite get that one
Simply Ridiculous: Saturday Unit Syndrome
I think the best way, at least for me, is to work your way backwards. Come up with an idea, and then figure out how you can create it... Most people I know who created successful projects (millions, tens of millions of users, etc) did this. Google, IRC, etc are your friends, along with your local bookstore.

[Edit]

I also want to support cmos' point that you should try to see the world during this time - youth is far more valuable than money, and the friends you make when you are young are the ones you remember forever. Especially ones made on random travels in random cities/countries.
"So let me spell out my thoughts explicitly: If success is the carrot, then failure is the stick, and I think we do our best work when we are conscious of both."

I was disappointed here. This seems far too trite a conclusion for the thoughts he put forth in the rest of the entry. Did he feel compelled to wrap it up quickly for some reason? I don't know. But there's so much more he could have said, even within a reasonable-length blog entry.
I'd be surprised if cubicles fared any better.

The real problem is packing large numbers of people in a big warehouse, regardless of walls. I think the best solution is having a small number of people working on the same project share an office. There should be numerous small conference rooms for when maximum concentration is required.
It's a reaction to the overvaluing of joke posts on Reddit, Digg, and such, no doubt.
This totally seems like a story from that newspaper in Sim City. How utterly pointless.
It's a cynical story, that of course has some truth to it. I like to focus on the visionaries, who are seeking a better way (to be more profitable). Once a new way is seen and proven, others (who are less comfortable with risk) become interested. If the time is right, and enough people are convinced, there's a revolution, and a new technology is adopted.

There's a range of people in any industry - I doubt that many fit the black-and-white stereotype that you paint. There are also real advantages of standardization (such as being able to swap different items in and out), which comes at a cost of inefficiency. The interfaces to those standards must be rigid (within tolerances), or you can't reliably swap the modules. It's a trade-off.
Yes! ... I actually work from home, but I went into the office for two weeks this past August to get to know the guys I work for. Their office is an open plan (one big room with a long E[ish]-shaped desk and people sitting at various points along the E).

Two main things I noticed:

1. Office distractions were MUCH harder for me to deal with than home distractions. Distractions at home are generally things I self impose and can control with will power (i.e., not playing with the cat, not turning on the TV, not getting a snack, etc.)... but in the office there was stuff going on all around me and no way to shut it out.

2. The guy sitting next to me was sick -- when I got back to my home office two weeks later, so was I. (Granted, travel could have been a factor here -- I live in the US and their offices are a 20 hour plane ride away in Australia.)

Oh, I hear the bug went around the entire office after I left, too.
Sorry, you are wrong.

I went to the cheapest school I could go to.
I'm still waiting for an Excel-like program that can make graphs as pretty as R.
clearly, this post was supposed to be called "Microsoft is not a web design company."

indeed it is not.
I would email him again saying: "I had exactly that idea myself, and I see that you did too. I really want to implement it. Are you sure we can not collaborate? Because I really want to do this and if we can't collaborate I will go it alone."

Emailing him in the first place was a bad idea, because he has more ammunition to claim you copied him. But you did it already, so you might as well go all the way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio#Correlation_between...
If I had to put on a number on it, I think we have an 80%+ chance of success. However, I'm just here for the journey. The result of the journey, whatever it may be, only signifies it's time for a new journey. Basically, I can't lose.
No I meant highlighting a non <a href> url in the text (which saves it to the copy buffer) and middle clicking into a browser window (which pastes it).
I see what you're saying. But I use json to encode my latest language (release in the coming week). But its a really limited case. It would suck in the general case, but its not always terrible (I hope). Just sayin.
How we built Dojo Learning - Planning and designing new features
This is the fifth part of a six-part blog post I wrote talking about how we built our startup, Dojo Learning, from my perspective as co-founder/lead developer.

This post talks about how we plan and design new features of our software.
"But if they are both ultimate explanations, at some point they have to conflict with each another because they can't possibly both explain everything."

I quite disagree. It's quite possible for there to be two ways something can happen. And just because only one did happen doesn't mean the other can't.

And on top of that this study didn't seem to study much of anything. You could have chosen any two concepts and done this and gotten much the same results.
"btw: there are only 4 line breaks in the entire page. Uh... okay? I'm sure you're just very concerned about saving space."

Have you checked the source of google.com? Actually, Google isn't even a good comparison. Try the source of meebo.com.
Someone is very confused.

You have two things here: the hardware, and the software. The G1 is hardware, either it can or can't record video, but problems with the software have nothing to do with that.
Quoting mathematician Sylvain Cappell (NYU - Courant Inst.):

"When you start on a new problem, you always feel stupid. You might spend a whole day on a single paper, an hour on a single line. And you still don’t understand it. When you get to a certain position in life, you don’t want to feel stupid anymore. In mathematics, that’s when you’re dead."
Lack of sleep 'raises cold risk'
I recommend looking at Relax NG or Schematron.
Funnily enough that is how the facilities people sit where I work. Engineers are on open floors of hundreds of people.
Big Brother will soon have no trouble recognising you
I am also a Ph.D. student and it's somewhat comforting to realize I am not the only one who has more questions than one lifetime would allow one to answer. It's also comforting to acknowledge I am not the only one who has printed that Einstein quote and placed it by my workdesk. Science is a humbling quest indeed.

Quoting Prof. Carlos Bustamante (Cornell):

"Being a scientist means living on the borderline between your competence and your incompetence. If you always feel competent, you aren’t doing your job."
Soul-searching in Israel after Channel 2 broadcasts banned video
Error messages are difficult to do right, and it's one area where (for example) DSL's tend to fall down. You might have a beautiful DSL, and think that it's finished, because you - as the designer - don't make mistakes with it (perhaps because you're really smart; really know the tool; or really haven't used it). Even some fully fledged languages have poor error reporting.

For a grammar specification language (like XML Schema) to do a really good job, it really should also formalize how to specify error messages for that particular grammar. I'm not sure how hard it would be to do this, and I haven't seen any research on it.

An odd thing about XML Schema is that it's not very resilient - when this was supposed to be one of the cool thing about "extensible" XML. The next version is a little better at this. But it sounds like in your case, you wanted to get an error (because there was a real problem), it's just that you couldn't trace where it came from, or what its meaning was in terms of the system. It sounds like a hard problem. BTW: would using JSON or sexps have made this problem any easier? I think it's much deeper than that.