skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In Codeacademy you do learn by building a functional project: a Blackjack game in Javascript.

It may not be taking a CS 101 course at an Ivy league school, but it's a great game to get people to start using if statements, loops, conditionals, classes, and objects.

Also, there's nothing like putting a bunch of Card objects into a Hand object to quickly realize: "Oh, THIS is why we do object-oriented programming."

Of course, the "final version" of that functional program is in the Javascript console at the moment. But they are adding jQuery classes in addition to their CSS and HTML offerings. The intent is clear: at the end you will have a complete website.

Even now, if you pick up a book on jQuery and know a bit of HTML already, you can bridge the gap between just the Javascript final project and a website in an afternoon. As I did a few days ago: http://www.highwaterlabs.com/apps/blackjack.html

As the cirriculum develops the final will go way beyond just blackjack.

Here's hoping this money enables Codeacademy to ignore funding for awhile and just build!
Yeah, I thought I read that it works both ways. This device is clearly meant to be used in a horizontal orientation though based on the ports, the cameras and the Windows button. I guess it's positioned as more of a laptop replacement than a tablet, so it kinda makes sense. It's an interesting choice though. I don't own any tablets, but I was under the impression that most people use them in a vertical orientation.
undefined on an AVR or other microcontroller where sizeof(int) == sizeof(char) though.

Just noting that ints are 16 bits wide in AVR-GCC, unless you use the -mint8 option which violates C standards.
Looks exactly the same to me.
How Vindicia solves the #1 headache for SaaS companies: retention
It doesn't take a wild imagination, but it should probably take a reference or two to a documented source...
Java actually uses a signed byte type, which was I guess to keep a common theme along with all the other types, but in practice leads to a lot of b & 0xFF, upcasting to int etc when dealing with bytes coming from streams.
That's not how business works. For any definition of 'business.'
> the Internet works just fine.

From a technology standpoint, sure.

From a jurisdiction, big brother, we hold all the power standpoint, the current setup of "the Internet" is dysfunctional at best.
CFPB helping consumers fight credit card companies with new social-driven site
It's super fun when they arrive unexpectedly. Here's to hoping you don't have long to wait! ;)
given, "a very temperamental person with an inflated view of their own talent or importance."

Linus is certainly temperamental, but you'd have a hard time convincing anyone he's less that a world-class developer, and critical to the linux community.
It's not the usual or appropriate notion of learning by doing. It's more analogous to going through math drill exercises in a book, or following step by step instructions in a lab (doing without understanding). Research on those techniques shows that students learn less than in more higher-order activities (simulations, games, projects, etc., see e.g. Wenglinsky, 1998, Does It Compute?).

I think better introductions to programming for complete novices would include things like visual programming environments (Scratch, Blockly), or editing/tweaking levels in a game, or making alterations to an existing simple game or animation, like the Processing.js ones on jsdo.it and other sites.
A question from the other post: What is some one was to create an open-source version of the app and release the code. There is nothing to stop the parents from acquiring a developers licence and running the app on there hardware. Is there any chance of a project of this nature getting shutdown?

Also what is the patent in dispute?
If it is a UI issue, it would be interesting to come up with an alternate UX/UI interface.
Fahrenheit? What is this, the nineteenth century?

(90F = 32 degrees Celsius)
That's the problem, they're not called "Surface" and "Surface Pro", they're called "Surface for Windows RT" and "Surface for Windows 8 Pro".
You seem to be blurring the line between "the company is profitable" and "I (an individual) am profitable." It's certainly possible for the company to be profitable in a narrow sense (which can be an important bit of information) while you (the founder) as an individual are not.

But since a founder owns equity which he/she expects to become valuable in the future, it's a tradeoff some people choose to make - forgoing a salary now, so the company can thrive.
It's really simple, isn't it?

At one extreme, a company that is cash flow positive before founder wages to ~$2000/mo is paying two founders less than minimum wage. That's not a profitable company.

At the other extreme, a company throwing off $20,000/mo before founder wages is potentially paying founders as much as $120k gross. That's a profitable company.

A lot of first-time founders on HN will post "Show HN" threads talking about how they're profitable when they're in that first scenario.

Maybe once in a blue moon, someone will try to argue that a founder in the second category isn't "profitable" because they could be making $200k/yr at a BigCo instead of $120k/yr.

The question is, where's the line. What's interesting to me is that the line right now is drawn in a very silly place: right at "cash flow positive". I don't care how much further beyond cash flow positive we draw the line, just as long we recognize that right at cash flow positive is a silly place to draw it.
Why would your mom need a desktop-side to the OS to do chat or photo editing?

Firstly, for anyone not already using at least prosumer photo-editing software, the latest iPad apps are preferred to desktop apps by everyone I've seen use them. So lightroom or photoshop users may not be satisfied, but most people looking to make a few standard adjustments are going to get the job done faster and easier by not putting that tablet down.

And for substantial amounts of text entry, sure, the keyboard is great. But you don't need traditional OSX/Windows style keyboard-mouse interfaces to handle a keyboard.
Enough people have asked about it that I'll add it asap -- I only check my email about once a day so it didn't even occur to me as a relevant use case!
> mobile platforms

And that's the problem. I want to have clients on all my devices (desktop, tablet, smartphone) accessing the very same account, like GTalk.
Sure - that's the same as "my business is profitable, but can't afford to hire another employee yet", only it's a fractional employee that you can't afford to hire.
youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format=mp3 -l LINK
Your work to keep the company going is one of the company's costs.
>It pains me endlessly that I must know whether I can contact person X via iMessage or WhatsApp or now this.

I think the situation is short term though (5 years?). Right now there's a battle for dominance on the mobile front and everyone is taking the proprietary route in an attempt to gain market dominance.

AOL had this chance with standardization years ago with AIM but they not only screwed up the entire company but this product as well.
Yes... it is confusing. I had to read the article and the Play page to make sense of it.

My current interpretation is:

"This app lets your phone forward texts to your computer, tablet, or any other device. It also works in reverse so you can text people from any device. The texts are synced on all devices."
if you're talking about CodeAcademy.org, they do seem to complain about it all the time.
What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking
Summary: ++x for signed char is supposed to convert x to int before the ++, but some compilers get it wrong.
also FYI. Most people in the US do not have free SMS/text messaging plans like other countries. Text messaging is unfortunately expensive here. That is another reason to add email which is readily available these days with smartphones. I know it is weird but most carriers in US charge you extra on top of minutes and data plan.
If I remember correctly, it's the organization of the buttons on-screen.
Ever Considered Leasing a Loft Space For Your Office?
It looks like CodeAcademy.com redirects to CodeCademy.com.
I've used Firebase a lot (lucky to be in the beta) for my web apps and trigger for my hackathon projects that i want to quickly push to app store. Great to finally see an in depth tutorial getting written about Trigger and Firebase working together!
All I can say is - wow. It pulls in a lot more information than I thought it would, which makes this truly useful.

It pulled in an upcoming package delivery I have from Amazon, put in on my cue for the estimated date, and provided a link to the package tracker.

It showed me a friend's upcoming birthday from facebook, and provided a link to his phone number. And in related, it summarized every communication we've had together over email, and showed me his facebook and linkedin summaries.

Wow. This took Greplin's core indexing technology to a whole new level.
Udacity provides the feedback: "Your code passed 7 of 11 tests. It failed on test: input = [0,0,0]."

The tests are arranged in order of normal input to increasingly strange user input, i.e., edge cases.

Should be easy enough for Codecademy to implement that.
My current pet peeve is with Google routinely returning first ten positions for SO answers, of which two or three are spot on, but rest of the list could have been better served by independent blogs which appear on page 3 or 5.

Granted this is Google's algorithm's fault not SOs problem. There is no reason to give a single site the first n listings no matter how authoritative it has become (and SO is very authoritative now).
Microsoft Surface: competitor for Ipad on the way.
Git best practices say the first line in your commit message should be no more than 50 characters. Subsequent lines should be wrapped at 80 characters. See http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messa...
I believe mightytext has actually been around longer than koush's DeskSMS.
I think his question captured perfectly the real issue here.

I guess it depends on your perspective. If the only goal of doing a startup is to make more money, then sure. But if your goals involve having more control over your own destiny, fulfilling a desire to build something for the sake of building it, or having a kind of freedom you could never have when working for $BIGCORP, then it doesn't really matter if you're making more or less than you would at $BIGCORP. As long as you are either "ramen profitable" or have runway left to burn, you still have a shot at fulfilling that ambition, which is what matters, IMO.
Microsoft Kinect Glasses "Project Fortaleza"
I can see the new page if I view it in an Incognito window (Chrome).
While claims of up to 2 Million deaths related to Chernobyl[1] are probably not credible, the 6,000 figure is bullshit as well:

The estimates on radioation related deaths of infants is of the same order, and there are Russian claims that 90% of liquidators (at least 747,000 people according to the German Gesellschaft für Strahlenschutz) are invalid.

[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/50890761/Nuclear-s-Endless-Nightma...
Q: What do you call dangerously radioactive nuclear waste?

A: A fantastic source of energy.
CodeAcademy.com currently redirects to CodeCademy.com (I suspect CodeCademy bought the domain now that they have investment money).
I think it's just an indication that they don't want to be fired or prosecuted for leaking sensitive information.
How is this data different from what you could obtain by utilizing OpenLink Virtuoso+Sponger (Freebase cartridge)+DBPedia live?
I spent half a year in China, and I didn't find the word Taiwan as a location offensive to anyone. Could it have been the case that you weren't allowed to say Taiwan specifically when referring to it as a political entity? I was under the impression that Chinese Taipei is the compromise name the two governments agreed on using when referring to Taiwan as an independent entity in sporting events, since having an independent team called Taiwan would not be compatible with China's position that Taiwan belongs to China. However, when referring to Taiwan geographically as the author of this article did, I never once heard Chinese people say Chinese Taipei (neither 中华台北 nor 中国台北). I think in general when people refer to a country by its capital (e.g. Washington or Beijing) they're specifically referring to the country's government. So it makes sense that people wouldn't use Chinese Taipei to mean the whole island of Taiwan if they're not talking about the ROC but rather just the region. I found that people just referred to the island of Taiwan as 台湾 (Taiwan), but certain Chinese government propaganda did the Taiwan, China thing like the author of this article. A video they showed us on an Air China flight showed a photograph of Taipei and labeled it as 中国台湾省台北市 (Taipei, Taiwan Province, China).
I think this idea is brilliant - putting entrepreneurs in the same confined space for months at a time, and stopping in countries where they can see first hand how to design their products differently and scale the in international markets. Being on the ground matters.

I'm lucky enough be on the staff for this first voyage.
Long commit messages are good, but if you want them to display nicely in short logs, enter them the way git and linux kernel commit messages do:

<short 1-liner explaining change>

<blank line>

<paragraph with commit details>

then `git log --oneline` displays the 1-liners perfectly.
If they put as much effort into the courses as they do to marketing themselves they might have a decent product.
It sounds like your landlord was right to evict you. Sure he could have given you a warning first but he has legal obligations for his tenants. He becomes liable for your profit making scheme. That isn't fair to him. Stop trying to make it sound like you are the victim.
That's spun and unfair. Booting with a working framebuffer isn't something that tickles only the "kernel guys" interest. Running the GPU on your hybrid laptop likewise. You realize that, with just a handful of exceptions, the NVIDIA part on most Optimus laptops simply doesn't work under linux, right? And that NVIDIA hasn't so much as lifted a finger to fix this?

So sure, if "customers/users" includes the only handful of 3D content shops out there running linux toolchains, and not the millions of people buying NVIDIA-enabled laptops, I guess it makes sense. But for everyone else it kinda sucks.
People are worried about the NSA because it was the NSA that was found to be responsible for the Room 641a scandal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) in which it was discovered that they were tapping massive amounts of domestic internet traffic without a warrant or probable cause. There are probably another 10 to 20 more of those rooms strategically placed around the country, all of which would be indiscriminately tapping domestic internet traffic (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...). Additionally, the NSA employs more people than the FBI and CIA combined. If there's any agency tapping your internet usage it's the NSA.
I will just say that people very much are saying that. You're pretty much saying that as demand for you goes up and down elsewhere, the profitability of your business goes up and down. And if someone wants to make your business unprofitable, they can just offer you a hundred million dollars to go work for them and drop it - even if you continue on the business, it's suddenly unprofitable.

This is obviously totally false.

Let's do this thought experiment.

Say I would accept this if the author said that true profitability is only the amount that the company would clear if you spent less than a minimal frictional amount of time hiring someone (from company revenue) at rock-bottom wages, to keep running the company.

but if we accept this, notice something interesting. What if the way to get someone at rock-bottom wages is for the company to issue some shares (which means a percentage) and pay the worker in those shares?

Can the company still be profitable (though you're diluting the profit) on those terms? From your point of view, OF COURSE!

The author is talking about the point of view of an investor. ("Stop telling me your company is profitable.") He's not arguing from the point of view of what's worth your time: "stop thinking that if you're profitable it's worth it for you to do that."

The two are totally distinct. If the company has someone on payroll at $0 because they think their work is worth investing in exchange for the 30% equity they have, then the profit the company generates for the 70% stakeholder who doesn't have to put time in is simply 70% of company revenues minus company expenses such as hosting.

That doesn't mean the person who is working for $0 and equity isn't getting screwed. But it also does't mean the company isn't profitable.

The whole article is completely wrong and I've told you why here and in my other comments.

Would you buy a company for a thousand dollars that had paper profits of five thousand dollars a month and will for the next two years, but actually this isn't "real profit" because the founder, who had been earning five hundred thousand as a President at Microsoft, put five years of labor into it unpaid?

Of course you would buy it. That's real profit the company's making. It doesn't have to recoup the founder's lost opportunity cost over the ENTIRE life of the company in order for it to be a profitable company.
World’s Thinnest OPPO Finder Smartphone Feature & Specifications
The Oppo Finder is the world’s Thinnest Android Smartphone Launch in India. The Phone comes with 4.3 inch Super AMOLED Plus display and is powered by a 1.5 GHz Dual Ccore Processor. The Oppo Finder runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. This Smartphone Provides a 1 GiB of RAM also a 16 GiB of ROM for Storage Capacities. Another feature of this handset includes 8 megapixels rear facing Camera one has an 8 MP Sensor, 1080P video record, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. The Oppo Finder would be available at China from June 6 2012.
The hard part is finding something that people might actually want to do. Geocities worked for this because you actually wanted a Geocities website. It would be difficult to start a company with the assumption that you were going to create some new "thing" that people are going to actually want just for the side-effect of their learning to code.

On the other hand, arguably Wordpress, Scratch[1] and even the Chrome, Apple, etc. app stores have already filled this niche in different domains (PHP, kids, browser plugins, apps).

[1] http://scratch.mit.edu/
I've spent the better part of the last 2 months learning how to code with Codecademy, and though there are some issues that need working out (yes, answer feedback can be erroneous and the crowd sourced tutorials can lack flow) I've found it a phenomenal resource. I didn't want to read a book. I didn't want to be deterred by configuring and downloading new software. I wanted to learn basic syntax and be able to go to my browser, pick up where I left off, and feel like I was building something, and toward these ends (oh... and it's free) I've found it extremely helpful.

In short, I am the ideal user of Codecademy and have really enjoyed the experience relative to other resources available.
It doesn't matter. The mere fact that they got spied on would cause people to form their own judgments.
IIRC, Sub7 had a tool which did this. You could also 'pack' the executable.

My infection vector of choice was embedding it into fake resumes and sending it to job ads...ahh, the memories...
I'd be willing to bet there were one or more National Security Letters in play.
https://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/10/29/1456242/hiding-b...

http://www.cisco.com/web/about/security/intelligence/05_11_n...

If you really require references, then you have not been paying attention.

The NSA back-door in Cisco hardware has been known since at least 1997, when I first found out about it.

There are lots and lots of links to be found if you look. They aren't even hidden.

Just know, that NOTHING you do online is out of view of the NSA.
I personally assume that they're collecting everything, but analyzing very little. Just a quick grep on some key terms for some communications of interest, for some possibly very odd value of "interest".

They can always go back and analyze later.

Old-time "usenet" users have to assume that all of usenet got hoovered up while it was going on, and that material is pretty carefully indexed and categorized. Any participants of "alt.tasteless", for example, should never run for major office, as whatever they posted will come back to haunt them. By "haunt them", I mean that once elected, they may get their arms twisted on critical issues. Let's recall what happened to Representative Jane Harman (http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-april-28-2009/your-gov...) - Harman "was caught on wiretap, but not punished, so as not to erode her support for wiretaps."

That guy that posted all that gay pr0n to the straight-pr0n groups in the early 90s had better watch his back, too.
Tell Your Children to Learn Hadoop
It makes me angry, too. And I'd say the ball is in the legislature's court. They can issue ultimatums, can't they? "'Fess up, or we're cutting your funding."

Where the heck are our checks and balances?
My understanding is that the patent is over the design & layout. Essentially though, it's a sampler. Why not release an app that allows you to fill the screen with icons/sounds from a library, and lay them out yourself (as the user)? By default, the layout would be a bunch of blank buttons. But, if the user wanted to, they could reconstruct the original interface on their own...
Was about to comment that you misspelled Kirchhoff but it appears there's a different Kerckhoffs's principle.
Doesn't matter, somebody still needs to do it. I mean, if you look back at the American Revolution, you'd have been nuts to bet on the revolutionaries, right? At some point it becomes simply a matter of principle and you accept the consequences, hoping it leads to a better day in the future.

I'm not eager to go out as a martyr, but with every passing day I'm closer and closer to saying "fuck it" and accepting that that may happen anyway.

But, then again, I've always been a bit of a radical and a hot-head.
We have this now with services like heroku and Google App engine.

Heroku is probably the easiest to get started with and is generously free (you can run actual sites from that free instance). At work when we were mentoring a boss's nephew we had him going to Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial and he had a site up on heroku in about an hour and was really have a great time seeing things iterate as he pushed up changes.

You don't get newapp32.codeacademymeetsgeocities.com but you do get something like rushing-waterfall-2311.heroku.com and you can customize that rushing-waterfall-2311 should you care too (still for free).
Modern solar cells produce the energy that was needed to make them in about three to five years, that’s well below their lifetime.
Two new security features for Google Apps
Ask HN: why doesn't anyone advertise salary ranges on job adverts?
When advertising jobs, I'll often publish a rough salary range.

This seems to have the benefits of:
- being a good signal to people who were looking for a much larger salary, so they don't spend time applying and then get disappointed when they find out what we're aiming for
- being a good signal to people who are aiming for a lower target salary that the role might be a step above what they're actually looking for right now.

As far as I can see, the only downside is that other companies competing for similar people can try to match your salary/benefits package.

Despite all this, I find that a tiny proportion of job adverts actually list any salary expectations. As a job seeker, do you like to see this on an advert, or not? As an employer, what puts you off being transparent about salary?