skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a starting point, sure, but it's not necessarily a great one. Books are books. They take time to find, money to purchase, time to be delivered, and then they take time to read and pursue.

When I started learning Django, the key thing which everyone pointed me to was a simple screencasted tutorial where a man with an Indian accent started showing me how to write a wiki in Django. It wasn't pretty but it was a way to bootstrap myself enough into the Django mindset that I could start learning how to do database-driven web design. Then I could sit down and read the docs and they mostly made sense. Before that, Django was impenetrable; just seeing "oh there's a data model which is embodied within the databases, you have to run 'syncdb' first to get this working," etc. was a harrowing way to do 'Hello, World!'.

I have a little advantage with Clojure because it is a Lisp and I've done Lisps before when I followed the SICP video lectures and learned some basic Scheme. In this respect coming to Clojure is much easier for me than working with Haskell. (Although seriously, the Haskell interpreter is so much easier to use--please, someone implement libedit or another readline clone in Clojure and put it in the Clojure main distribution so that the 'up' key gives me the last line.)

But nonetheless, this is the first time I've seen a clear attempt to say, "here, let's work together to build a substantial program in Clojure." There is so much you can learn from such approaches that I think it's crucial to have some. Even this first tutorial page starts talking about how you should do some 'lein trampoline run' call rather than trying to do things with Clojure directly: that's something crucial which was never communicated to me via the Clojure web site. I now get to read up on Leiningen and what the hell that is for, as well as perhaps what the hell is in clojure.contrib that they also don't tell you about on the clojure.org "Getting Started" pages.

Seriously. This sort of thing is the difference between `django-admin.py startproject website` and creating a new text file which starts `import django`. Both are technically ways to develop a new site with Django, but the first one is the Correct Way To Do Things. (And fortunately djangoproject.com tells you to do things this way.)

You just pick up so much implicit stuff when you follow someone along as they program a very simple nontrivial application.
I remember the 6502 from the days the Apple II hit the market. It was huge back then. Strangely, the article lists a number of 6502 systems down to Futurama's Bender but doesn't mention Apple II.
Do you know what the word "trusted" means in the context of security?

> Do they think they can secure their email servers better than Google can?

Just because someone secures their servers better than you can doesn't mean you automatically have to trust them with your data.

Let's assume for a moment that I have the safest vault in the world. According to your reasoning, the logical thing to do would be to put your valuables in my vault? Gosh ..

And even if you do trust Google with your sensitive data, do you also trust all their employees that might have access to it? http://gawker.com/5638874/david-barksdale-wasnt-googles-firs... And Google is a rather big corporation, if anything were to go wrong, they are notoriously hard to hold accountable.

> Are they going to refuse to hand over data if requested by authorities?

Well, they do not necessarily answer to the same authorities as Google does, so in some cases, yes, absolutely.
The best text-book I can suggest for you is: "How to Think About Algorithms - Loop Invariants and Recursion" By Jeff Edmonds.

It takes you through all the relevant mathematics required to learn about basics of CS based topics you are looking for (algorithms, proofs and other practical applications).

It also acts as a good primer for learning basic Computer Algorithms. The USP of book is it's noob friendly and I think perfectly suited to your needs.

Check it out here: http://www.amazon.com/Think-About-Algorithms-Jeff-Edmonds/dp...
Kata Kata Lucu
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I much appreciated the article. And even more when I discovered from other commenters that http://www.aosabook.org is a collection of architectural description of a lot of Open-Source projects. I immediately read about sendmail by Eric Allman (http://www.aosabook.org/en/sendmail.html) and I appreciated it actually more than the article about Nginx. There is a lot of wisdom in it and now I understand the reasons for some architectural decisions that have been taken for sendmail.
You might like "To Mock a Mockingbird" by Raymond Smullyan. It's a book of logic puzzles with a focus on combinatory logic (a model of computation related to the lambda calculus). Aside from the logic/math/CS nature of the content, the progression of the exercises should help with mathematical-style reasoning in general.
I started my reply with this:

"If we're discussing whether it makes business sense, IMO you're only looking at the upside for Google."

I didn't comment at all on the morality issue and whether Google should do this or not.
Stages of UFO conspiracy:

1. The government covers up UFOs and alleges they are natural phenomena

2. The government strikes a deal with aliens to learn their technology in exchange for human test subjects.

3. The government uses the alien technology to build new aircraft, and now needs to cover that up.

We're at 3, I think :)
Even though I have no sympathy for people who are opposed to gay marriage as private citizens, as Google shareholders I don't feel they should be forced with a choice between supporting their beliefs (however wrongheaded they may seem to me) and being a Google shareholder.

I'd tend to agree but this isn't really about beliefs, it is about discrimination.
I think you are seeing this in the wrong light.

It will not change issues that are part of its immediate business.

Instead google will be seen by others as a champion of freedom. A good force. Something that isn't "evil".

Therefore, the purpose of this strategy is twofold
One, is that you get something that helps out your employees.
Two, you get to be seen in the world as a progressive force of change. By changing the public perception can do no wrong or that google is a champion of good is worth more. This is a marketing program that you do if you have billions to use.

So, you are right. There is no reason that this is relevant to its immediate business. It's a marketing ploy that has the side effect of championing civil rights. I'm not complaining I think its great!
To be honest I have never found any functional language that gives anything near helpful error messages. I have found that the best way is not to read the error messages but to pattern match on the phrases. Sounds like a downside but the benefit is it takes only a mere fraction of a second to look at an error message and guess what is wrong once you get comfortable. There are not too many patterns either.
Gosh, correlation is not causation. There are a million other random things we could correlate here and none of them causative. All this article really tells us is that, for some reason, the author has an interest in promoting certain courses of action.
Oops, "Franzen, simply qualitatively."
Engineering management is dying
I don't know that much about Chinese religions so taking what you write about it at face value. My interest more is to try to clarify what we are talking about wrt religion.

I: Confucianism and religion.

I think the real challenge here is to define religion. As I define religion there is no question it qualifies. Namely:

A religion is a tradition of myths and/or rituals which transmit and encode patterns of meaning which can be flexibly applied to life in order to make sense of what happens all around us.

It is not necessary to believe in historical accuracy of myths (this obligation to believe was new with Christianity). Adherents may in fact have complete freedom to make sense of the tradition however they like.

Interestingly there are religions (the traditional Hopi religion among Native Americans, for example) which incorporate forms of atheism into them, so a lack of deities isn't fatal.

My understanding is that Confucianism would meet this definition. Would you disagree? You have rituals, stories, etc. which create the patterns of society. The same with Taoism in a different way.

II: Meaning and function of religion

I think our brains work on mythic levels as well as logical levels. I think that religion gives us ways to understand patterns of life which are beyond what we can do in a reductionist approach. I think it has always done this in a way which is deeply tied to culture. That's why I agree with the GP that religious rituals recognizing procreative marriage are entirely universal.

If Chinese folk religion created the institution of marriage, then why is it none of the entire process involves religious worship of any sort?

I don't know that you would define it as religious worship but at least what little I know of it has religious symbols woven throughout the practice. It is ritualized in a religious context. I don't think all religions demand worship though. For example, why is red so highly associated with weddings? Then there is the tea ceremony.

My knowledge of all this is pretty highly abridged because my wife told her family when we got married to abridge the Chinese rituals.
Interesting! Are you skeptical that the article author's proposed solution of creating more regulations and thus making the government larger and more powerful is going to improve anything?
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Not that this is an excuse, but once you know a bit more about how Clojure and the JVM work, stack traces become a lot easier to interpret. Most of the time, there's at least one line in the stack barf that tells me exactly where to look to find the problem.

This may actually be a bad thing, because it disincentivizes those who have the ability to fix things to be more newbie-friendly.
BankBot says All Your Economics Are Belong To Us
The Project Euler problems might be right up your alley. They are little programming exercises that start easy and rapidly become harder. Along the way you figure out enough math to make the programming easier, or at least enough to make better algorithms. The forums are enormously helpful. http://projecteuler.net/
I am pretty confident DOMA section 3 (the only part that actually does anything) will get struck down next year, and the definition will revert to the states. Before Scalia's off-the-wall dissent in Arizona v. United States I thought it would be unanimous on 10th Amendment grounds. Now I think maybe 7-1 or 8-1 depending on whether Kagan recuses.

I think there is virtually no chance that Thomas will vote against a 10th Amendment argument. The only hope congress has on this (though kudos for them for defending the doomed law) is to hope the court follows Comstock and gives the federal government broad authority to tack on all kinds of things to federal powers.

I think the chance of this though is very, very small.

However, if they do strike it down on 10th Amendment grounds expect a lot of hand-wringing from liberal law school professors. When a district court found it violated the 10th Amendment, Jack Balkin (very much on the liberal side) said something to the effect that while he wanted to see DOMA struck down, the 10th Amendment was just too dangerous to the idea of centralized government to allow that to stand.
Access Your Facebook Account with 3 Passwords
This story has an underlying theme shared by another story here on HN a few days ago about a mobile app that reached a million users in a year without any viral marketing (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4205571). And that underlying similarity is this - a relentless focus on customers can make up for low marketing spend.
When making judgements like this, it is good to remember that your experience of a place depends not only on that place, but even more so on your own state of mind. When you see confusion all around you, you should honestly ask yourself how much of it is coming from your side.
Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/dd299405.aspx. Gobs of stuff, compilers, linkers, headers free for the download. So the statement They still do, only in Linux/BSD land they do not. might not be true.

Visual studio full version is not free, but you can easily build (compile, link, run) everything for zero dollars. (Not even a picodollar.)
I can unequivocally state that the conclusion you reach for many corporations or companies in India may be true. But not for these two. The first company is a family/friend owned company of the Karunannidhi empire, often called the first family of Tamil Nadu. The second is owned by a very famous and politically connected man in Tamil Nadu, and now in New Delhi.
In India, Bharti Airtel, Reliance, Bajaj and these are among the many companies that are strictly profitable because of state capitalism, or as is more commonly known: Crony Capitalism. I am not going to write an entire political discourse here, and of course, just because they got the permits does not mean they would do extremely well; but it is a significant hurdle.
For a restaurant to operate in any city of any state in India, you need 180 licenses, with 105 of them renewed on a yearly basis. Do you know how many bribes that entails?
For an FM radio station to operate, as a public welfare concern, you MUST pay 65% of your operating profit BEFORE tax to the government for the 'privilege'.
These crony capitalists pay over some money to the politicians, but these extreme barriers to competitive entry in many fields allow them to rake in the profits. Rahul Bajaj is one: any traveler to India must have seen ubiquity in the autorickshaw. Ask the owners of Piaggio how quickly they were decimated when trying to introduce a bigger and better auto, by the so-called authorities, simply by having to get a bunch of licenses and also not being allowed to compete in key markets because of union rules.
The only area in India where you can run an honest company without having to fork over bribes incessantly is the internet.
The xcode download that I use to build lots of stuff cost $0.
I don't think you need to learn really hard core math to do CS. In my experience, the one most important "genre" of math was discrete mathematics. My textbook was Elements of Discrete Mathematics, and I think it was a really great intro: http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Discrete-Mathematics-Computer...
Kind of reminds one of the PDP-11 architecture.
In 2011, 3% of Intel's revenue came from "software and services", up from 1% in 2010 [1]. They also acquired McAfee in late 2010. So it's probably safe to assume that compilers generate somewhat less than 1% of Intel's revenue, perhaps significantly less. But even if only 1% of that pre-McAfee 1% figure is compilers, that's still over $5 million (over $50 billion * .01 * .01), so I suspect Intel's compiler business profitably employs a number of full-time developers.

Microsoft's combined "servers and tools" operating segment represented nearly a quarter of its revenue and over 20% of its operating income last quarter [2], and while it's not immediately clear how much of this comes from the "tools" portion, I don't imagine it's anywhere near zero.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Fina...
[2] http://www.intc.com/annuals.cfm
The debate over corporate APIs is not new. That's not Dave's point. A lot of people are just starting to think of Twitter in the same light, though, and that is definitely new.
So, those memes are true descriptions of the market right now. You have presented persuasive evidence that you have sufficient programming skill to be marketable at present. How about spending the next six weeks in a self-directed boot camp for learning how to be better at seeking and landing jobs? Treat it like you're learning a new language: wake up in the morning, go to it, pound on it until evening, stop.

There's a billion things you can do to start here. In general, read Ramit Sethi on the topic. Specifically, who do you know that has hiring authority? (Buddies at CreateSpace? Have any moved on?) Who can they introduce you to?

Do you like coffee? I actually don't, but they often sell chai tea at the same places, and you could drink pretty much infinite chai tea right now just by saying "I can FizzBuzz, interested in getting coffee or something?" Hiring directors at most companies needing engineers are desperate and they'd love to hear you out, if for no other reason than you maybe be Starcraft buddies with their next hire.
Given average age of Google workers, the upside wins in their case.
Government does not fund anything. It redistributes the wealth of the taxpayers. At least attribute the source of the funding to the correct people.
The conclusion that I've come to is that VC-istan isn't actually technology, at least not in this current social-media fueled bubble. It's old-fashioned social climbing and self-promotion with a bit of technology in the back end.

Do startups actually succeed based on technical merits, or on how well they market themselves? In this social media bubble, it's the latter. I'm not going to claim that technical skill doesn't matter. I just don't think it matters as much. You can back-fill the technical stuff by hiring the right people (contrary to our overblown claim that non-technical CEOs have no hope of finding technical talent because they can't individually judge it) but if you build great technology and can't sell it, you never get off the ground.

It's exceptionalism that leads people to think that the VC ecosystem is in some way (or should be) morally superior to Wall Street, Hollywood, the fashion industry, or Madison Avenue. Sure, what we do is cerebral, but so was advertising in the Mad Man era. VC-istan isn't worse than these other industries, but it's not better. When you have a "creative" industry, there are a lot of opportunities to do great work and profit by doing so. But there are also smiling-idiot narcissists who pile in and fuck everything up because they think they're "creative"... and of course, what gives them this opportunity is that there are other idiots in power who will put them ahead of the people of substance like us because they don't know any better.

It's the expectation of meritocracy that makes us unhappy, but human organizations and ecosystems and societies all turn to shit over time no matter what so this is an unreasonable expectation.

There is a place for people like us, the virtuous soldiers who get rich slowly, building our skillset until we're just really good at a few things... but there's also a place for smiling idiots. And smiling idiots are always going to be the "cool kids", and it's the cool kids (not people of substance) who get those stupid TechCrunch articles written about their 7-Couric products. It's the expectation of fairness in human structures, which is just unreasonable at scale, that creates the unhappiness.
I don't know how much truth there is in this from the foreigner's point of view, but a lot of us believe (me and a lot of my friends included) that a vast majority of tourists who come to India want to witness this very same upon coming here.

It also fits one of the many reasons why the density of foreigners is maximum in areas like Pahar Ganj and Old delhi (the dirtiest parts of Delhi IMO). So when some "gora" (typically white people) complains that Delhi is so dirty the biggest wtf going on in my head is.. then why the hell are you staying near Pahar ganj or traveling by a cycle rickshaw in 42 deg near Nai Sadak. The place near the Airport is cleaner than New York ( at least after the common wealth games) but nobody wants to see that. Who wants to come here all the way to see some old glass building in neat and clean surroundings. What's unique about that right?
batista said Wrong, marriage was a religious ceremony all along. Which doesn't seem to make much sense given potatolicious' post.
You may not come from the same culture that I came from, but the early significant milestones in my mathematical education were:

1. Reading the "aha!" books by Martin Gardner, as a child.
2. Reading Lockhart's "A Mathematician's Lament" [1]
3. Linear algebra, calculus, and complex analysis classes. I was taught
these at Cornell; you might look for them via MIT's OpenCourseWare [2].
4. A bunch of combinatorics, from Cornell's classes in probability.

The most key thing I can tell you about mathematics is, always go back and read the definitions. Always. I have sometimes helped out math students on topics which were way out of my depth, simply because I picked up their textbooks, flipped several pages back, and said "hm, what does this word mean? what does that word mean?", building up connections all the while.

You may also want to start in a completely different direction, since you're interested more in CS-based topics (I am interested more in physics-based topics) by starting with number theory and modular arithmetic, and of course MIT has a Comp Sci section [3] which also produces lectures on OpenCourseWare; you may wish to watch those lectures.

[1] http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

[2] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/

[3] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
@kshatrea : Very true. I cant agree on that more. The angle I was looking for was more on how one can achieve heavy success rate without the modern corporate structure or the contemporary methods of marketing.
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@ raheemm : Very true, lots of businesses in south india do work on that basis. Word of mouth. No online presence, or social media presence, yet they gather millions of customers.
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I had the same benefit until I started getting sicker and my immunity stopped. So, you can keep on doing this if your immune system keeps up with you.
The trade off then becomes efficiency of scale vs. tolerance to failure.

I would argue that certain sectors, like infrastructure for public utilities, would be negatively impacted by treatment as a free market - the cost of building that infrastructure presents a barrier to competition, so the market isn't terribly 'free' anyway - and gain much more from the efficiency of having a single pipe going to everyone's home which all suppliers use, with everyone paying for the maintenance of their own infrastructure.
That's an interesting reasoning. I wonder how many patents Nokia has that will be useless against Android because Nokia released MeeGo as open source.

Right now, I consider Nokia a tool for Microsoft to push Windows Phone onto the market. Whether they consider this a distraction or a threat will be evident by their reaction.
I think it is valid to judge a society on how it treats its least fortunate. You are certainly unlikely to learn much about a country from its suburbs and its CBDs, they are (relatively speaking) alike the world over in my experience.