skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found this to be a great visual. I stared at it for quiet some time looking for the patterns. I thought it would be cool to put some music to it... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnHhRtHmiCc

Edit: I will go back and fine tune the video so it syncs to the music.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4527602 - 30 minutes after you posted.

I would suggest you use the hn search for all people who post about learning or wanting to program and offer them a free course in exchange for them writing blog articles about what they liked and didn't like.

Also - on your website you need to be more specific what you actually do. It says "rails tutors" which is specific but it doesn't tell me a) when it happens, b) where it happens, c) what i'm actually going to learn, or d) why it matter.

Here's a good example of someone (Amy Hoy) selling a course -> http://javascriptrocks.com/performance/

The other good example of someone teaching courses http://railscasts.com/

In the real world you can always use skillshare or meetup to target groups of people who are programmers (ruby and or rails) or want to learn to program and meet them in real life.

Good luck!
"Not following the news is what causes harm." - I totally agree with Joel here, and disagree with you. I've spent the last 5 years pretty much a news junkie. I spent 2-3 hours a day, equally split between the NYT, WSJ, Economist, and weekends spent listening to NPR.

What I've realized is that, in general, I'm not better informed about the world, but I am more indoctrinated into the Left Wing (NYT), Right Wing (WSJ) and Intellectual-conservative-laissez-faire-right (Economist) world views.

I guess for a more complete picture of the opposing world view philosophies, I could add BBC, al jazeera and CSMonitor to my mix - but these outlets don't inform, they promote their world views and, more importantly, pander to the desires of their audience. Suggesting the news is a way of getting unbiased knowledge of the world is like saying the Supreme Court of the United States makes judgements based on law.

You want to get an unbiased view of the world? Go out, and see it with your own two eyes, smell it with your nose, touch it with your hands.

I don't believe, after spending the last years comparing and contrasting the WSJs/NYTs takes on stories (often comedic in their different perspectives) that I'm any better informed about the world than if I had just watched the Daily Show, or even, god forbid, tuned into CNN/Fox News.

The one exception, that I've found, is Nate Silver's column - http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/. I'm not sure what worldview he is promoting, other than "Math is cool" - and I do tend to trust it with regards to what's happening in term of Polling data regarding the US election.

Other than that, though, I appreciated and agree with pretty much everything Joel wrote in his post.
But it won't be like that in 2015. Android is already dominating in developing world. Low-end devices powered by Android is the future. In India for example, maid at my friend's house didn't have mobile phone till 2007. Now she has mobile phone but she wants to buy "smart phone" with few thousand rupees (equivalent of 100 odd USD) and saving money for it. When my friend told me about it, I was stunned.

In the hindsight, it looks like Android was masterstroke from Google. It wiped out MSFT from OS market for handheld devices.
> What worked for you to attract traffic to your site?

Having content that people actually want. If this is so, your audience will increase by word of mouth, no explicit promotion required.

> but the daily traffic just doesn't seem to increase much.

Everyone has a site. Everyone wants visitors. Everyone would like more visitors. The sites that get visitors without coercing them, do it by having useful content -- not content that you think is useful, but content that visitors think is useful. And content that isn't duplicated everywhere, like ... well, one example ... Ruby on Rails tutorials.

Google "Ruby on Rails tutorials" : 3,150,000 hits.
This does not have to be a theoretical debate. Facebook content is available via their API. Most of the writes (liking, commenting, status updates, check-ins) are also available via API.
If your concern is about contributing to open soource software, you don't need to know how to code to contribute. Bug reports are actually hugely important and some projects take financial donations.

As to learning to code, there are actually a lot of good resources. http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ Is a good book which will show you the basics and get you started with a lot of practice. The Khan Academy also has some introductory videos: http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/tutorials/programming-basics. In addition, you can find tutorials for just about any language and they'll also show you some of the basics.

Oh, and Visual Basic, while arguably being shitty, is a real programmng language, so if you understand it, you already know how to program. You just need to learn a more useful language.
Nas, on artists being more accessible to fans
Is there an App/Map for passenger van restrictions in San Francisco?
Some streets prohibit tour buses and vans with seating over 8 person, which makes the tour planning a hell. Is there any app/map for that?
This article comes at a very opportune moment for me, as I've been reading "Bowling Alone" over the past weeks. The book chronicles the many facets of decline in civic participation in the US (voting, church attendance, donation to charity, engagement with local schools, running for local office, etc.) and explains some of the consequences of the decline.

HN readers, as a whole, are very focused on science, technology, and startup businesses; this focus produces incredible innovation and wealth, but at a very real cost to communities, family life, and other "olive trees" that make life worth living.
Automatic Database Normalization?
Lately I've been working on projects that were started by someone else and the databases tend to be a mess. For example, instead of having a separate Members and Organizations table (like for a user participating in politics), the members are repeated over several rows, with the Organization Name field set different on each row. Then if the member's street address is updated, the SQL UPDATE changes the Address field on all of the rows.

At first glance this seems horrible, and I'm tempted to make a table to store member-organization entries. But unfortunately there are several hundred queries in the app and this is nontrivial to write, much less exhaustively test.

So it got me thinking, why is this the programmer's responsibly? Why not just make a database where you can do anything you want, and the contents of each field would be stored once uniquely, with the duplicates represented by pointers or hashes under the hood? Then run in a mode that guarantees atomic updates over any number of rows.

Then the database could infer relationships by the queries that are executed instead of how the data is organized. It would generate the relationship graph automagically so the programmer just has to sign off on it. It could even run in a mode where if the code tries to execute an operation that breaks the graph, a notification could be sent to IT or whatever.

So this isn't really nosql, it's more like unstructured or self-organizing SQL. Has anyone heard of something like this? I googled a bit but all I found were these unhelpful links:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4564486&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D4564486

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4477257/is-there-any-software-that-can-normalize-data-bases-tables

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/07/maybe-normalizing-isnt-normal.html

Thanks!
Maybe adding a 'Bulk' button somewhere and turning the input in a textarea (and disabling the substring search) would work...
Maybe 5% of smartphone consumers would actually care about the nuts and bolts of it. I think Apple did a great job by showing it how it affects the user: battery life, speed for tasks, and demoing Real Racing 3.
Good work. Small typo on your frontpage that you may want to fix: "webiste".
Where can one get information about how to actually code with this? The videos sure are fancy, but don't offer much information.
The NYT example is a bad one because any commercial use of of the API is forbidden per the Terms of Use [1]. It seems like the API would be a pretty bad starting point if you were a business that wanted a relationship with the NYT.

[1] e. YOU SHALL NOT: (i) use the NYT APIs for any commercial purpose or in any product or service that competes with products or services offered by NYT. (from: http://developer.nytimes.com/Api_terms_of_use)
Will the Internet replace traditional education?
I'm talking about staff computers, not computers for childrens use.
Über Tests: fast, isolated integration tests for distributed apps
I noticed that you summarized the slant for 3 of your 4 chosen sources, but not for NPR. I'm always curious about well-informed opinions regarding NPR's editorial position, and would like to hear yours.

For the record, I have read a fair bit of BBC News and CSMonitor in past years, and came away feeling that the Beeb was predictably middle of the road, and CSM was actually fairly good. I haven't read Al Jazeera but have heard it's more respectable than Americans expect. As for your other three, I agree with each. 538 is the only part of NYT that holds my interest.
So long, Retina
Everything is still happening, but someone fixed it in the last few hours so that it doesn't trigger RequestPolicy. If this post triggered this change - touche, anonymous Google employee. But I'm still going to rewrite my URLs so you don't see my choices.
Thanks, it's corrected now.
I've looking at railstutors.com and see a lot of room for improvement.

Currently it's NOT IMMEDIATELY CLEAR what you're offering (maybe because the name itself focuses on tutors and since a clear service description is lacking, it's easy to get confused?) or what the value proposition is. WHAT DO YOU OFFER and WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT YOU - clearly answering these two questions should be a high priority for you.

A clear CALL TO ACTION is missing: 'Learn more about this course' doesn't cut it. Let your call to action be a megaphone: unambiguous and impossible to miss.

Ok, I've spent some time on your site and being the indecisive type, I'm just not sure if signing up is worth the hassle and cost. Can you GIVE ME A PREVIEW, SAMPLE OR ANYTHING that narrows that mental gap between what I want and what you offer? Testimonials on the front page is a good idea but I want to see for myself. Also, I can barely smell the social proof coming off those testimonials. Humanize those people or get references from more trusted people and sources.

The TYPOGRAPHY LOOKS BAD on Win7/Chrome 21.0.1180.89 m [1] to the point that it makes it difficult to read your copy.

[1] http://www.webpagescreenshot.info/i/31758-916201221158am.png
>I'm not sure why the newer compilers don't produce the expected behavior by default.

The reason is that there are optimizations that a compiler can do when it knows that two particular pointers will not reference the same location in memory at a given time (which is called aliasing). These optimizations have to do with memory access. If pointers cannot be proven not to alias each other, then the order in which they are loaded, modified, and stored will be very rigid since it is impossible to tell if changing the order will change the end result. Sometimes that's just life; you might have some complex interactions going with your pointers, and it may actually be that the order of operations can't be changed.

But if you can assume that the pointers don't alias each other, then the compiler is free to change the order of operations for better efficiency. It can often remove unnecessary loads and stores (if x and y don't alias, you don't have to reload y just because you changed x), and it can also put loads together at the beginning and stores together at the end (which is faster because, um, caching? I'm not really clear on that part).

The catch is that in general, there is no way for the compiler to know whether two pointers can alias each other. In C99, you can inform the compiler of this with the restrict keyword, but that requires that you do some careful analysis of your code to make sure you aren't lying to the compiler. If you mess up, you may end up with bugs that are very difficult to track.

So that's where strict aliasing comes in. Usually, two pointers of different types won't point at the same memory location. So they added the "strict aliasing" rule to make that fact official, because it means that in the vast majority of cases, code gets a nice speedup without any changes or difficult reasoning. Using a union is basically a way of informing the compiler that you need it to make an exception this one time.

I used to use a macro something like this to make the process concise:

#define PUN(x, toType) (((union {__typeof__(x) __a; toType __b;})x).__b)

Then you'd do:

int i = PUN(int, x); // evil floating point bit level hacking
i = 0x5f3759df - (i >> 1); // what the fuck?
x = PUN(float, i);
x = x*(1.5f-(xhalf*x*x));
You're welcome. Good luck.
To error is to human, all good.
Ah, nothing like some good union-bashing from the economy journalists. Countries like France, Germany, Spain, Japan among others have much more powerful unions than the US, yet they are able to upgrade their rail infrastructure. Either the article is bull or American unions are for some reason more "evil" than in the rest of the world.
It is interesting to note that Apple now designes their own programming language, the compilers, the operating system, the processors and the products all that tech goes into. That's a pretty rare configuration of a company that hasen't existed since what? the 80s? [1]. That's a really unique opportunity to do really wild things, I hope they don't squander it. But I guess that requires a bold visionary, not of the Jobs type, more of an academic.

[1] I guess IBM still counts, but mainframes aren't that sexy anymore :)
Difficult to see why measurements from the benchmarks game n-body task were shown in section 5.2 Baseline, Table 1.

Instead of 5 bodies, 50M iterations - the problem was changed to 16k bodies, 1 iteration.

There doesn't seem to be any basis for comparison.

(The benchmarks game programs weren't even used as starting points for parallelisation.)
I didn't "rubbish" anyone. Nor did I even dispute any facts.

I'm simply asking Ericd to describe the specific mechanics of fraud. The only factual claim he made was that assumptions were made (hint: they always are), and in his opinion this constitutes fraud.

I'm just asking for more detail. Specifically, who was lied to? What action did they take as a result of the lie? What did they lose as a result of that action?

You know, standard questions about how a fraud might actually work.
> I work in the smart grid industry, just a lowly network engineer, but in the last 5-7 years, I've rarely, if ever, see anyone confuse kWh/kW.

I suspect you're not the demographic the commenter was aiming at.
Thanks a lot for the feedback! appreciate it very much.
It's so much easier to say that when it isn't your life you are talking about.
This headline made me expect a campaign blitz against Apple Inc itself (presumably related to the recent lawsuit). I never would've clicked if I'd known it was just a comparison ad between a couple of particular devices.
> But for 99.99% of "smart people," college is probably the best bet.

Perhaps not. In the USA: Of the top 1% earners, 49% have a postgraduate education[1]. From what I could find, There are 600,000 doctors and 11,000,000 lawyers in the USA which could be said to cover the vast majority of the 49% group.

Of the remaining 51%, 23% have a college degree leaving 27% without a college education. Unless you are looking at very specific fields, it seems you are slightly better off without a degree at all if you are striving for financial success.

If your sights are not set so high, and you're happy with just a regular job: Only 30% of the population have a college degree. That means that 60% (discounted 10% to account for unemployment, which isn't even fair as many college graduates are unemployed) of the population are doing just fine without one.

With that said, you should still go to college. It is an amazing experience that comes with countless positives. Whatever happens in your future career with respect to said education shouldn't even be a consideration.

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/151310/u.s.-republican-not-conser...
Actually, I'm sure there are people who don't process the 'per' as more than a verbal convention with an abstract meaning, and who are somewhat confused about the entire notion of rate. They're probably pretty rare on HN, however.
xando, this is awesome.

Love the graphics and the concept.
UK Plans come with "unlimited" texts although they're actually 10,000 under a fair usage policy. However, most providers let you go over this number a couple months in a row before charging you for the extra texts at the standard rate (£0.10/$0.16 per text)
It's not the ISPs behaviour I find strangest, though, but that the rights organizations have not asked for even marginally more effective measures, such as even asking to have all IPs owned by The Pirate Bay blocked.
i would really love to see ocaml versus go
Almost all databases use it in form or the other.

PostgreSQL uses it, Oracle uses it, MySQL (innodb) uses it, Apache HBase uses it, the list goes on and on...
My definition of Machine learning is more inclusive than yours. What about regression? I suppose you would put that with tracking. Density estimation, Structure learning, Matrix Factorization, Ensemble Methods, Boosting, Clustering or merely estimating a joint distribution? None of those cleanly fit your categories yet are machine learning techniques.

You limit to gradient based techniques but why emphasize convex optimization? That leaves out neural nets and places where SGD can do very well.

Machine learning is basically the combination of statistics and optimization where you can work with a lot of data and the output of your computation is more important than the model. Here GA and other heuristics such as tabu and annealing are just search/optimization techniques for gradient free or NP-Complete problems.
ah, I initially met most of the programmers I know though hackathons and meetups. Startup Weekend was one of the first things I went to where I met a lot of people, and that happens basically everywhere.
Can you? Or do some apps just always ask for the latest timestamped version when they read?
>if your database system can't do lock-free reads, your database is broken

Yep.
I have a retina. It has the burn-in problem. It's not noticeable and doesn't bother me.

It's the price you pay for 1st-gen, new technology.
It was 1996 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upzKj-1HaKw). No, Jobs was certainly never as humble as Musk and I never said that, they definitely have different characters. My point was that we still have to wait on Musk, this man and his companies are far away from their goals and it remains to be seen whether they can afford to keep being idealistic.

And don't get me wrong, I'm a space freak, I root for that guy as much as anyone.
I see, so you think the education problem in america is down to people who aren't descended from europeans dragging the side down.

It is my belief that the US is marginally better than Denmark at educating people of European descent. The data supports this belief.

I have no data on whether the US is better or worse than Denmark at educating people from other groups. If you have data on income I'd love to see it.

I don't know what you mean by "education problem". The main "education problem" in the US is cost, and this has little to do with the quality of the students.
It seems like a matter of inadequate tools more than anything.

When I write native code, I write apps that are broken up into relatively small chunks, which are then demand-paged off the disk when needed. A freshly launched copy of my app that hasn't touched most of its code takes up very little memory.

And of course, all apps work that way, because that's how the system is built. It's actually substantially harder to avoid that lazy loading functionality than it is to take advantage of it.

Obviously, the systems used to lazily load machine code stored locally are different from what would be needed to modularize and lazily load source code being loaded over the network, but surely there's some way to improve this without making programmers do a ton of grunt work. If pages are loading huge amounts of JavaScript code that goes unused simply because it's easier to code that way, doesn't that mean the tools are deficient?
뫼비우스의 띠
Thanks for the feedback. We do have a separate page talking about details of the course, but looks like that's not obvious for people coming to the front page.

I like your suggestion of HN search and will do that - thanks.
RAD is a company I think would be pretty cool to work at. How's business treating you guys? Any cool projects right now you can talk about?
Good point. However, it's pretty crappy on my 3GS.
The lesson here is that the worst time to raise money is when you need it. Your answer to "What will happen if this round doesn't close?" should be "we'll keep growing at 20% a month instead of 50% a month if we got funding" rather than "we need this round to come through to keep the company alive".
You could but it's not enforced. In practice, teams at google seem to use the time axis in myriad ways, and seldom like datomic.

Also, always reading the most recent timestamp doesn't use time like datomic does. You aren't querying by time and so on.
Learning to code is a bit too general for concrete advice. what would you like to code for? websites? mobile apps? games? algorithm? or automating systems?

do you have a language / framework in mind?
There was a nifty article on Flipcode long ago ( http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Fast_Approximate_Distance_F... ) in a similar vein.
I have a retina. It has the retinitis pigmentosa problem. It's quite noticeable but only bothers me sometimes.
Ask HN: I want to port PhET Sims to HTML5
using the phyzixlabs.com platform.

Any suggestions for how to entice hackers to help port these Sims?

PhET: http://phet.colorado.edu/
Also easy to keep an argument going by saying "my point is understood to be correct"

Citations: On NDAs an etc.

....

Why a VC Will Take a Lighter to Your NDA - Wilson Sonsini

http://startuplawyer.com/venture-capital/why-a-vc-will-take-...

Why Most VC’s Don’t Sign NDA - Foundry Group

http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2006/02/why-most-vcs-dont-si...

One More Time: No NDAs - Anil Dash

http://dashes.com/anil/2010/05/one-more-time-no-ndas.html

From PG: YC Library http://ycombinator.com/lib.html

The Cult of the NDA.

tl;dr "Cases where trade secrets and/or patents are both protectable and essential are rare."

http://www.frozennorth.org/C509291565/E1939404619/index.html

.......

Lots of communication happens in confidence, but not under NDA for various reasons.
Actually common code on 4 platforms. We share Java code between the server, the web (via GWT), Android (already runs Java natively), and now iOS (via j2objc).

That's basically the reason for this. We have huge amounts of Java libraries, and we want to create and ship out features on 3 platforms simultaneously. Not having to write, say, an Operational Transform library 3 different times (JS, Java, and Objective-C) and keep them constantly in sync will go a long way.
Seems like it's just too 'high-end' currently. I would definitely consider it if they ever made a low-end retina. Actually, I think Vizio had a retina competitor and it looked pretty good, so did the price.