skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Same here. I highly recommend WingIDE for Python development. The vim mode is pretty complete and they have been responsive to any bugs I report.
Not enough companies make "just" toys for hackers.
> The editor is quite possibly older than you, and will almost certainly live as long as you.

That explains the funny smell.
The only reason I've ever used scribd is to get illegal computer books. About 1/2 of which I already owned physical copies of.
Some people start coding at a young age and some people graduate high school and decide it is time to give programming a try. Of the latter group, a subset seriously understand what it involves.

I think cs concepts can be taught to anyone but they can't be taught BY anyone. If you start from the very beginning and take baby steps I doubt there is anyone who can't pick up coding.
Even without the name, maybe they would be tipped off when asked if they mind not having a permanent desk and bringing their laptop to work every day.
I think that problem stems from apples vice grip on the app store environment and iphone development ecosystem rather than lack of marketing creativity on the developers part.
i'd say programming environment (unix/mac, vim/emacs) and skill levels (algo, data structure, etc) matter more than hardware

it costs less to hire a skillful (but expensive) developer on ok machine than less skillful one(s) on expensive machine(s)

the 10-100x gain myth on skill is pretty much true
I don't believe that programming is something you need to just get. I've seen a lot of people struggle on assignments like these as a TA. Usually, it's that they're missing certain concepts, but they don't know which ones and they can't debug themselves. If you know 70% of basic Java, you won't be able to create a working solution. You'll get tripped up on a type mismatch error that just makes you bonkers until you give up because you don't know what the error message means or you tried to make a templated array rather than an Object array and casting it to a templated array or whatnot.

There are lots of little pitfalls in programming that are just terrible. In C, you can just walk off the end of an array (or the beginning). In Java, you can store an object in an array and then modify that object in both the array copy and the one you have in a regular variable because Java works by reference, not by copy. A lot of the time, you just need someone who is a lot more learned in programming to notice that. It's not that you don't get a concept like object references, it's that if it's not in your mind, you don't notice when your code does it and it takes a long time for these things to really get into your mind to the point that you catch them fast.

And most people give up. You get hit enough times with silly things like these and you just want out unless you're truly dedicated. I know when I was learning, I hit all the trap doors. It's why I noticed them when other students made them. Heck, back in the old days of Java, you could easily screw up things like int vs. Integer and not notice it - especially since a lot of professors might not make a distinction because for veteran programmers, we know that pitfall, but also because its place is at the start where students get inundated with syntax and such a distinction might go unnoticed (or abbreviated as int in notes).

I would think schools should hire more TAs to help students through those pitfalls except that most students like to do assignments at the last minute where these errors become the source of the mind-breaking stress.
So do some physicists: http://chaos.swarthmore.edu/courses/phys6_2004/QM/19_CatsFri...

The problem is a lack of tools to explore this further. Where are the testable predictions?

The question also makes one mistake: the first neuron fires long before birth. Develop meant is a gradual process, so the emergence of consciousness probably is too.
David, Apple (the "government") does not directly or indirectly regulate the prices of apps (and there is no supply to regulate).

Individual developers are choosing to price their apps at $0.99 (or not). In fact, as I pointed out, most of the apps on the top of the chart are not $0.99.

More importantly, though, is that the charts are just one tool. They offer insight into what is already selling on the store. The charts aren't voodoo, and you don't just magically appear on them one day. Sure, they have an obvious positive impact on sales, but it has absolute no effect on the ability of other apps to sell or make it onto the charts themselves.

Changing the way the charts work is a bad idea, for a lot of reasons. The most important is that the proposed solutions are even easier to game then the current system. The real solution to the perceived problem is to add more ways to discover apps.

Search on the store needs work, and "featured" is entirely editorial (and the choices aren't that great in my opinion). More ways to find new products like a "movers and shakers" view, a "top rated" view, etc, are better ways Apple could actually improve the situation for developers and customers.
No. I often think without language. It's a different mode.
Using Flash to make phone calls sounds incredibly obvious now with 5 seconds retrospect. This could be big.
If you are interested in text editors, you should read The Craft of Text Editing (available at http://www.finseth.com/craft/). In spite of its Emacs-centric seeming subtitle, it discusses a lot of the basics of representing text and implementing an editor.
Paul Graham and many of the YC startups have Aerons. It's not something to skimp on.
I used to develop in emacs/jbuilder now I am fully in eclipse. I miss multiple copy buffers and good keyboard shortcuts. To me, the value added by the IDE - autocomplete, extra method, generate getters and setters, find references completely, utterly and totally blow text editors out of the water. I wouldn't waste my time reinventing the wheel on a new text editor. If I were super motivated, I'd write eclipse plugins to do whatever I needed. However, I work on an eclipse RCP based project to pay the bills so I already had the learning curve financed by my job. That being said, I find vanilla eclipse sufficient for most of my needs.
Several people in the blog comments have cited the “camel has two humps” paper, which still hasn’t made it through peer review. There have been some failures to replicate the study. Perhaps their results were an artifact of the authors’ teaching style, i.e. they were just terrible at teaching, so the students who entered the class without knowing the material failed?

I’m very skeptical of results that claim that some large fraction of the population is incapable of some mental feat like programming. 500 years ago the same was thought of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

(also posted to the blog comments)
You can setup keyboard shortcuts to be whatever you want in eclipse.
Wait, what does he mean about the shift key? I pushed shift, then pushed a, and the a is still lower case.
no it's not. I'm using it right n
About a third of his class needs to switch to a more challenging course.

Every university should have a way to "place out" of introductory programming classes, just like you can place out of introductory (natural) language classes if you have previous coursework or are a native speaker. This should be done by demonstrating proficiency in the skills that will be taught in the programming course.
Shouldn't that be "Flash 10 on Linux is broken"?

Regardless, I have Flash player 10r12 running on the exact same system configuration and it's working reasonably well. One thing I would suggest, however, is using the 32 bit build of Firefox. It's not perfect, but I run for about a week between crashes with this configuration, and I have a hulu or Flash-based radio window running almost all the time lately...where, before on the 64 bit build, I had a lot of stability problems (with the plugin wrapper thing that allows 64 bit Firefox to use 32 bit plugins--not only did it crash a lot, but Flash felt disjointed from the browser in weird ways and a lot of stuff didn't work).
Here's 2 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs :

Use your fucking eyes, and do the work.

If something looks out of alignment, fix it.

If something is hard to click on, fix it.

If you find yourself reading useless information, demote it.

If you find it difficult to find useful information, promote it.

Good design is the sum of a million minute decisions.

There is no silver bullet, nor even a list of silver bullets.

Take the time to make good decisions at the ground level, or don't, and settle for poor design.

Mixed with plenty of exposure to both good and bad design, this process will inevitably turn anyone into a good designer.
Keanu Reaves' reaction: 'Whoa.'
So, the new Candlejack is Firefox 3.0.3 and Flash Pl
So why then aren't fevers associated with yawning?
Tell me about it.

1. Wind up revision3.com and move diggnation back to digg where it should have been.

2. Lay off 80% of their employees.

3. Instead of endless refinements of the "digg" concept (which nobody really cares about anymore), leverage the traffic to make the site more portal-like (I know those are bad words but they'd work for digg). Simple first step - expand into the huffpo realm.

Admittedly this is wishful thinking. Probably the first step to actually making it happen from a CEO's perspective would be a lawsuit against Jay, Kevin and Rev3. Which probably wouldn't go so well.
True. I guess I meant from just the Celtic's standpoint. They would have more of a right to get bostonceltics since that's probably their actual brand name. As someone else pointed out, the term celtics refers to more than just a basketball team.
The 1/3 of college students that have great difficulty with learning the fundamentals of programming can certainly learn it -- but it won't come naturally, and it will need to be slower and more personalized than how it is currently being taught. Differentiated instruction is the appropriate educational buzzword.
No system exists to identify the slow programmers before they get to class and most colleges don't have the resources to offer the more personalized instruction needed to the slower learners.
NVidia builds new ION Platform for serious mobile graphics
Good OS: The Rundown
Jeez, I think you're overanalyzing my comment a little. I wasn't implying any particularly conspiracy theory, I just wanted to point out there were a lot of similarities to another recent event, and it seems possible that's not a coincidence.
I think the point here is that if someone is using a twitter ID for a reasonable use then it's unreasonable for Twitter to turf them off. The use of 'celtics' as an unofficial fan site seems pretty legitimate. Why does a sports team have dibs? If I'm from Ireland can I kick them off? My claim would have more historic president.

Twitter should have a resolution process similar to ICANN.
Excellent points.

This is perhaps why so many solopreneurs can't make it: startups need the symbiotic, complementary talents of code people and business people to build products from ideas that have time-relevance -- as in "this is what is needed NOW". Otherwise, a person wanting to build startup is forced to be a fast learner.

Even though I had a business degree, I knew I wanted to work in tech. I had an MBA, but kept teaching (was already in the process of doing so) myself to code; and now, I consider myself both a code person and a business person with a successful (I do consider zentu.net successful) startup.

It was just a lot harder and it took a lot longer to build with one person. Also, even though I was self-taught, I seem to know a lot more and have a bit more, um, demonstrated competence, than some CS people I've met.

I sometimes get the idea that high-level theory in CS is probably a lot like the high-level (economic) theory in business: it's great and fun to talk about and muse upon, but at the end of the day, it doesn't always help you accomplish anything specific.
Thank you. That's the type of response I was hoping for.
I'd like a device with an e-ink display which I can put on my refrigerator to display my Google calendar. It could check the web for updates a few times a day. I'd want the batteries to last a year.
Same here. I don't spend any money on music and I'd gladly pay $10/month for pandora. I'd also tolerate audio advertisements. Not sure why they haven't at least tried increasing the level of advertising.
Prenatal alcohol exposure damages white matter, the brain's connective network
I think it is interesting that he says he is using the most recent Firefox version, but later says he is using Firefox 3.0.3 (3.0.5 was released earlier this week). Is this the latest version for Fedora 9?

edit Answering my own question - no: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=75053
I can sign up succesfully, it seems it's fixed.
I wondered why Symfony's online book was so good.

http://www.symfony-project.org/book/1_2/10-Forms
Chicago web design 
Flying Cow Design offers custom web design and development services in Chicago, Illinois at great prices.
I think personalization is the key, too.

Why are we teaching programming with a human? At what point are we finally going to have machines that can work 1-on-1 with humans, at their pace, until they grok concepts.

Some people learn more quickly, some don't. Let's not punish one group or the other.

Let's teach interactively, but not with humans!
I had a good experience working for a company like that, actually.
I agree with you. I started my CompSci degree a few years ago without any programming experience. The first intro-class was quite challenging as I had never programmed before. It took me a while to get used to the quirks but I became better after sufficient practice. Like anything else, programmers only get good after they have put in the hours to learn programming and the programming language. Its like music or sports or even academics. Practice makes perfect.
Ubuntu 8.10, FF 3.0.5 and Flash 10,0,15,3 - not crashing. Not all Flash pages work, but that is fairly normal I guess. Flash sucks...

Installed Flash directly, not via Synaptic, if I remember correctly.
More like "Flash 10 on FC9 is broken." Fedora 9 was a less than stellar release, from what I've read. Though I tested it for a week or so and didn't have any problems on my install. My advice when this happens: go back to a previous versioning which does work. Fedora, especially, likes to release early and often. Not always a bad thing, but sometimes frustrating.

P.S. FC10 is out. Flash 10 + Fedora 10 . . .
Recursion for me. I still grapple with it sometimes.
Google Beta (1998)
"I’m very skeptical of results that claim that some large fraction of the population is incapable of some mental feat like programming. 500 years ago the same was thought of reading, writing, and arithmetic."

Yeah and the reason was that 500 years ago reading and writing was college level material. Now they start teaching the alphabet at what age 5? Then again most print material is targeted to a pretty low reading level. So even if learning programing early becomes more common that still doesn't make it easy because chances are the majority won't be very good at it just like many aren't good with the written word.
sudo apt-cache showpkg adobe-flashplugin > out

EDIT:

Package: adobe-flashplugin
Versions: 10.0.15.3-1hardy2 (/var/lib/apt/lists/archive.canonical.com_ubuntu_dists_hardy_partner_binary-i386_Packages) (/var/lib/dpkg/status)
Dependencies:

10.0.15.3-1hardy2 - debconf (16 (null)) debconf-2.0 (0 (null)) fontconfig (0 (null)) libatk1.0-0 (2 1.20.0) libc6 (2 2.4) libcairo2 (2 1.6.0) libcurl3 (0 (null)) libfontconfig1 (2 2.4.0) libfreetype6 (2 2.3.5) libgcc1 (2 1:4.1.1-21) libglib2.0-0 (2 2.12.0) libgtk2.0-0 (2 2.12.0) libnspr4-0d (0 (null)) libnss3-1d (0 (null)) libpango1.0-0 (2 1.20.5) libstdc++6 (2 4.1.1-21) libx11-6 (0 (null)) libxext6 (0 (null)) libxt6 (0 (null)) wget (0 (null)) firefox (0 (null)) konqueror-nsplugins (0 (null)) msttcorefonts (0 (null)) ttf-bitstream-vera (16 (null)) ttf-dejavu (0 (null)) ttf-xfree86-nonfree (0 (null)) x-ttcidfont-conf (0 (null)) xfs (2 1:1.0.1-5) flashplayer-mozilla (0 (null)) flashplugin (3 6) xfs (3 1:1.0.1-5) flashplugin (3 6)

Provides: 10.0.15.3-1hardy2 - flashplugin-nonfree

EDIT: longest OCD edit/update evar
Law firm funded by venture capital?
Did you ever hear about law firm funded by venture capital?

I represent circle of 3 ambitious lawyers from France who would like to start a law firm and open 3 offices in 3 capitals of Europe.
Why Maddox Is Wrong About iPhone
It's a great idea, i think we'll hear about them in the future...
How Google Deals With A Recession
The Huffington Post Slammed for Content Theft
Keep in mind that a team of hybrid code/business people would destroy a team of pure coders and pure business people any day.

It's fine to specialize, but a startup requires all of those skills collected in as few people as possible so that decisions can be made quickly and there's no miscommunication because less communication is necessary.
Many desktop applications (AIM, Valve, WinAmp and MANY more) incorporate IE into their application natively for ads and integrated browsers.

I picked up a bug last week for the first time in years. Just did a reformat yesterday and I don't even use IE explicitly except to test CSS compatibility on my own sites.

Edit: I would love a good excuse to retreat to Linux.
http://www.michaelrobertson.com/archive.php?minute_id=280

I wonder why people vote against flash based voip ? Any explaination to this beside that it's trolling ? I'm asking because we do also dig in this direction. :)
Try to implement this and you will see that it's not as obvious as you think. It requires lots of reverse-engineering.

PS: please don't tell me about red5.
I don't understand all the vitrol...

"guy who made a stupid mistake in thinking that he owned something that he didn't"

The point is that the Celtics organization doesn't deserve special treatment. Why is it "utterly stupid" to think that you could get some names (whether related to an organization or not) that you could later sell? As long as you don't think you are in violation of the TOS it seems pretty logical to me.
And where/how does one get purpose?
Notepad++ is nice.
The future social network model ?
How do they "fix" a broken fiber cable deep in the ocean?
Feel free to actually say something constructive without being an asshole next time.

Did the guy violate any rules? Not unless you go by a strict definition of Twitter's TOS. Your original analogy makes no sense. The Celtics didn't have the name stolen from them (they never owned it in the first place) and the guy wasn't using it for a non-legitimate reason, so why should he not benefit from the common knowledge of the association of "Celtics" with the Boston Celtics basketball team?
Well, sure, if universities were there to teach things, they'd invent ways to teach you using fewer classes. If universities are there to make you take classes until you get a piece of paper, why would they care?
I meant the gist of it sounds obvious, that we now have this plugin on 98% of peoples' computers that can listen to the microphone and open sockets. Obviously the implementation is a very different story.
I've noticed this with higher-level concepts too. There are people who simply can't grasp the concept of a mind that doesn't work like a human mind. There are people who simply can't grasp various levels of meta-thinking - like the distinction between metaethics and object-level moral decisions.

You can keep trying to point in the direction of the meta-level but they just can't look in that direction, like they're in Flatland and you're trying to point "up".

And at least according to them, some of these people are programmers.

It seems there are multiple "gears" that you can have or not have, not just the "programmer's gear". I suspect I'm missing a social gear or two, because there are things I can't see, even after the fact, no matter how often they're pointed out to me.
I don't understand the association of capitalism with greed, certainly people who had the foresight to understand that domains would be valuable at some point in the future (and put their money where their mouths were) should be compensated (at a reasonable price) for taking that risk no?
you didn't even write it in all lowercase.
Doc Comments, that's a new one.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.reflection.php
Ah, Scribd. Unnecessarily complicating the internet since 2007.
Shame that this seems to confuse many-eyes' visualizations. This would be perfect for their time-treemap, if it could pivot the data correctly.

Edit: Looks like the numbers were just uploaded in a non-standard way, i'm going to remove the ticks and reupload
My first day of programming in college I read the syllabus and told the teacher I'd already done everything on it. They let me switch to the next class.
"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" - Benjamin Disraeli
Really? Have you read Positioning (Ries and Trout). Certainly branding is more than a name, but for marketing you want something that is at least easily transferable by word of mouth, no?
I have to wonder if a language with less syntax would be easier to pick up.

Start people that are totally new to programming with something like Scheme or Ruby (surely there are even better ones than these) that requires less arcane punctuation to do things like hello world, then once they get the hang of things, slowly introduce them to more structured languages.
I switched from iPhone to E71 because of neatly designed keyboard. iPhone makes me mad when I need to type anything, no matter whether it's an SMS or a web link in the browser.
I used to use caps-lock for that.

But then I learned enough Chinese to tell my pet monkey to type my comments up for me while waiting for Eclipse to launch.
Diagnosable mental defects aside, I refuse to believe that there exist students who genuinely want to learn Java with a private tutor who understands the student's mental model of the world.

Students range from couldn't-care-less to passionate, not from stupid to smart.
Facebook Stares Down Labels Over Project Playlist Takedown Demand
Here's a cleaned up data set that graphs properly:
http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/datasets/number-...

and Here's a visualization using the time-treemap to compare sector growth:
http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/t...

and here's a stacked area graph that shows it all at once, although it's not as nice for comparison purposes:
http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/u...
Two illiterates can have a conversation a writer could transcribe. I'm pretty sure I couldn't represent the behavior or thought process of a computer-illiterate in code.