skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of these are really neat ideas, but as I read them, I thought: I'd never have bothered learning programming if all that was available to me was what he's describing. I like the separation between the problem I'm working on and the background information I need so I can understand and solve it; having the problem and background information presented together neither appeals to nor aids me.

That may be because I've grown accustomed to learning from documentation and applying it to my work, but I don't think so; I think there's something deeper going on that may have something to do with the way my mind organizes information. I wonder if Bret Victor, if he were being honest with himself, would prefer to learn his way, or the way he actually did.
I jumped to conclusions there I suppose. I figured he was just taking 2^(number of fingers) and calling that counting.
Wow Nokia's stepping their game up.
This is exceedingly cool. I'd love to see this in action for something that isn't a game (preferably my own project haha). Looking forward to the release!
In nine months, Rust has gone from version 0.1 (its first public release) to version 0.4 (expected next week). Much of the work in that time has involved removing (!!!) features from the language and polishing what's left. Version 1.0 is anticipated in the first half of next year.

If you really feel the need to compare with Go, measure the time from Go's first public release (2009) to its first production release (2012).
Thanks. I'd missed the first one.

The timelines are good, but what I mean by 'dynamic' is something with user input that affects objects. Its easy to show how a loop can draw the same shape in lots of different ways, but what happens if the loop might draw different things depending on what the user inputs while the program is running? This gets tricky.
I like this. The more succesful it will be, the closer we will get to a pay-for-content web. Also, the payments methods will need to get much simpler.

Offtopic: I had this ideea of an ad blocker for tv. It will be some device that you can place very close to your tv and it listens for comercial breaks. When it identifies one, automatically turn the volume very low.
Show HN: 30 days on Oblique Strategies
I thought this might interest the life hackers amongst you, I've recently completed a 30 day experiment of using Brian Eno's and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies in a bog standard work environment.
Anything tall is phallic?
How do you think Google should do what you are asking it to do? Remember Microsoft is trying and going nowhere - their upgrades are still a fiasco - despite having a limited set of devices. It is simply not possible for Google to update those hundreds of SKUs out there to the latest version, all at once. The only way they could do that is by limiting hardware choices. People don't seem to like that.

There are rumors that Google will have as many as 5 manufacturers build a Nexus line that they will sell like they do the Galaxy Nexus today. May be that's as close as we will ever get to regular updates for a variety of hardware.
Yes, you can. Doctors prescribe drugs for off-label use all the time. The FDA approves the marketing of drugs for specific health problems, but nobody cares about marketing metformin.
Ooops, I pissed off the C fanboys!
...and they will fly too.
Seems weird. Google especially is a company that relies so much on programmer productivity & getting things right. Getting them wrong typically means lost revenue.

I mean they spend crazy amounts of money on all kinds of projects that have no directly viable monetization scheme, yet for some reason you think it would be weird for them to explore programming languages? Odd.
They do not, by default. I guess the issue here is that we have too many different environments, so it would be impractical.

If you do take some effort, you end up with something like:

http://emacsrocks.com/e11.html
Oh, come on. Rust started as an open-source project in 2010 (with the release of the preliminary design and OCaml compiler that Graydon had written as a hobby project). At that time, work started on the self-hosting compiler, leading to its initial 0.1 release eight months ago, and proceeding with releases every few months and steady progress toward the remaining goals on the 1.0 roadmap [1]. Just because Go was developed earlier doesn't mean that Rust isn't getting done. And it's not noticeably more complex than it was in the initial design; in some ways it's simpler.

(By contrast, Perl 6 has been in development for over a decade, with a half-dozen implementations in various stages of completion.)

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Note-development-roadma...
You're hoping to compete with Nessus? Why?
> I don't think it's like that. I think they're just developing it through usage.

What's shipping with it?

I have a bit of the same impression that the other poster has, that it's always in development without something stable. I hope that gets dispelled sooner or later, because, for better or worse, fuzzy marketing type things like that matter.
you can now mention users with ^tent.tent.is as you say. For users on tent.is, ^username (i.e. ^tent or ^daniel will also work soon)
I think we are all pretty convinced by now that the Lumia has the best camera. Too bad it's also a phone.
Make a really clear plan, show them how many hours it took to build it and explain what kind of support you could offer. If a web presence is important to them, the charity should be able to budget in support hours after delivery. I usually volunteer a fixed number of hours after delivery, limited to a period of time. It helps them understand what your time is worth and that communicating ahead of time is what solves all (most) issues.

If you're not able to commit to support, use WordPress or another very common framework so someone else can pick it up and don't skimp on the comments/documentation.
I don't know if this is a fair criticism. Rust has not been stuck in eternal development for many years like Perl 6. Rust is less mature than Go just because it started (in earnest) later and it's a little more ambitious. Go was immature not that long ago.
The Most Used app on my phone is Dictionary.
The basics of Cross-site Scripting (XSS)
His interactive demonstrations almost feel like he is reinventing Excel. And i like it.

This kind of symbiose between IDE and program code isnt just usefull for teaching, nor large scale software development....

It seems extremely usefull for "explorations" of data. There is a brilliant application idea hiding behind these ideas.
I'm not interested in arguing about what the end user does concerning ad blocking. Everybody falls into one camp or another and I've never seen anybody change sides.

I'm talking about malware and it's effects from the perspective of the website owner. Let's take some hypothetical numbers to make it easy. Operator X has a website that displays 1000 ad impressions in a month, for those 1000 impressions he receives 100 dollars. Now megawhatever diverts 15% of those impressions, net result is the Operator X still serves 1000 ad impressions but only earns 85 dollars for the month. 15 dollars has been stolen from him.

The aggregate value of the delivery of those ads is what matters, not who saw the ads. So it doesn't matter if it's 100 people, none of whom have Adblock or 200 people, 50% of whom have AdBlock. This is strictly from the perspective of the website owner. If you lose 15% revenue from one month to the next while your audience stays constant then you are definitely going to view megawhatever as malware.

Edit: for further clarification, I wouldn't view somebody who did not use adblock in month 1 and switching it on in month 2 as stealing from the website owner because the revenue is not being diverted. The audience, in the context of the ads, has simply decreased from one month to the next.
Yes! People often lose sight of what is Google's goal compared to what is Apple's goal. The bulk of Apple's profit is in iDevices (hardware) and services (iTunes, AppStore, etc).

Google's core business is ads. They sell ads by getting as many people to use their services as possible. More devices running any Android directly translates into more money from ads, and I think this article entirely misses this point.
A mix, although shakes are rare. It's the tempting add-ons (e.g., cookies at Subway) and the late night "I didn't stock any good snacks at home to avoid temptation, and so I end up going to the convenience store" runs that are the killers.
Wait what? Are you talking about the horrible ribbon nonsense they've done to MS office recently? I've honestly never heard anything but negative reactions to that interface. It is awful.
I'd be careful with that, Google can submit an App but it will only appear on iOS when Apple says it can. If you recall there was very long and protracted battle with Google Voice.
Please Stop The Social
i finally learned how to tie a tie, thanks bret!
Back in the 80's, when you turned your computer on, you were thrown into a programming environment (usually Basic).

I started learning to program at age 8, I just had no idea that the thing I was doing even had a name - I just typed commands and the computer responded (no compile, link, run steps).

Took me a while to figure out what the 'for' did (I was drawing grids one line at a time). I still remember what it felt when I finally figured it out.

An educational programming environment should be installed in every machine. You never know who's going to get interested on it.
Yourline of thought is the same that i had for the last decade with regards to Linux. It's still not the year of Linux on the Desktop ;)

And a big part of why is: There is no MS Office, no Photoshop and no Games. Same will apply for ARM/MacOSX.
Still cannot believe they didn't foresee the PR shitstorm they would create by faking the original pictures. Especially since the actual camera is pretty damn decent.
This is why I didn't sign up for your app
We're working on it :D

To me, this is a big win for Dropbox but a big detriment to the ecosystem and other storage players. It's essentially like saying "Only works in IE6" - worked well to buy IE lock-in, but was a Bad Thing for the web. We, of course, want to help rectify this!
About the money issue, it's not so bleak. As you pointed out - you have an expectation about your salary and won't work for less. On the other hand, you also have an expectation on how much you'll work. So you're basically telling people "I will do X work for Y money" with X and Y being respectively the minimum and maximum values you'll take. The question isn't for the company to pay you more money so you'll work more, they have to pay you more money so you'll work for them at all and that is what drives programmer prices up (or down).
The compiler is written in Rust, as is Mozilla's experimental browser engine called Servo.
What says the two actions are mutually exclusive ? the fact that you are not amused does not indicate that there cannot be humour derived.
Cool demo I guess, but I have no idea how this could fit into current workflows or even be applied to traditional applications or websites.

Anyone care to enlighten me?
This is really neat. I see a lot of connections to Borlands visual C builder. Create a canvas, drag elements onto the resulting form and change their properties and code up actions. Of course this example here uses 'clojure' but there are a lot of similarities.

Something like that could make writing web applications much easier than it is right now. Interactive web application development could be a real game changer.
The article has a section on the math used in Google Maps, which points to

http://algo2.iti.kit.edu/schultes/hwy/esaHwyHierarchies.pdf

which says - there are 24 million places in the USA, connected by 29 million roads. You need 4 hours 15 minutes to pre-process this information. From then on, it only takes 7 milliseconds to find the shortest path from one place to another by running the Multilevel Query Algorithm, which is a souped up version of Dijkstra and runs 2000 times faster than Dijkstra's Shortest Path algorithm.

Is that right ? 24 million choose 2 is 288 trillion, so do an all paths search, then have a lookup table with 288 trillion entries, store that in HDFS, slap an LRU caching layer atop that, and you wouldn't have to run any graph query algorithm at all, so should be able to do much better than 7 ms ... just thinking out loud.
Infographic on Italian businesses: 65% have only 1 employee
Sorry but Google Drive is by far the worst out of all online storage/sync providers.

Crashes constantly for Mac users and has awful upload/download speeds. And they have made zero effort to do anything about it for over a year. You only have to look through the forum to see their commitment in general is pretty lax.
Hong Kong Tycoon offers $65 million to marry his Lesbian Daughter
The idea of autonomous taxis has been a part of the conversation for some time, I recall this was one scenario when Google was lobbying in Nevada. (think self-driving taxis on the Las Vegas strip).

This NY Times article from last year hints at the same: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/science/11drive.html
It's a pretty neat device. I haven't seen any others that operate like the Formlabs device does (starting with a pool of liquid and hardening the desired part out of it). Is that a new development, or has the technique been around for a while?
Until they can solve the sensor issues, they won't be. Heavy rain, snow and fog are still damnably difficult for them to deal with in a reasonable fashion.
Not directly, but we are hoping to make our service more holistic in general.
Startup Marketing - Esteem vs Awareness: The Only Two Things That Really Matter
It's not too daunting. `&` is your go-to pointer for most scenarios. `~` pointers are for anything you want to send to a different task. `@` pointers are for things you want to be garbage-collected.
True. I mistakenly thought I had reached the bottom of his essay when I hadn't.
I don't think anyone minds that Apple is competing. I've been fiercely critical of the new iOS 6 maps, and I welcome competition. I can't speak for others, but what bothers me is not that Apple released a different mapping solution, but that the new map app is just so unbelievably terrible for many people [1]. Even with the third-party add-ons, you still can't use Apple maps to plan an inter-city itinerary, or one that crosses the "territory" of multiple transit agencies. In some American cities, that means you can't use iOS 6 maps to plan a trip across town. These are things that did work in iOS 5.

I completely understand how it makes business sense for Apple to develop it's own mapping product, but that doesn't mean that they have to release software that is missing huge chunks of functionality. There seems to be this false dichotomy that Apple had two options: "release a product that is nowhere near ready to ship," and "rely on Google forever." There is a third option, which is "develop maps secretly, do the first two 90%'s of the work, then drop Google maps." Many on HN have argued that maps can't improve until they are used. That is doubtlessly true for some aspects: POIs, especially businesses, aren't going to be added until Apple maps gain mind-share, and there will be errors in the data that Apple bought until someone bothers to tell Apple to correct it. I can forgive Apple for that. But those are the things belong to the third 90% of the work.

If anything, this piece at Daring Fireball just reinforces the idea that Apple has a problem somewhere in the chain of command. It really seems like there's nothing that would have prevented Apple from waiting another 6 to 12 months to announce it's mapping product, except that someone drastically underestimated how difficult it would be to compete with Google. Frankly, I think that's why iOS 6 doesn't have transit directions--the only thing you can do with a late product is drop features or push back the ship date.[2]

I really do welcome all the things that Apple is trying to do maps in iOS 6, and I think they will have a good product in a year's time (or maybe two). That does not, however, mean that I want or will accept broken maps on my phone in the interim.

[1] Apparently this is everyone in Japan, a dude in Portugal, and many people who use public transit to get around in big American cities. For some, the addition of turn-by-turn is a bigger gain than the loss of public transit and street-view.

[2] This is also why I can't see the third-party transit thing as a viable solution. The end-game is that Apple will bring transit in-house the same way they did with the rest of maps. Actually, maybe it's a brilliant strategy on Apple's part to pick really good team to do transit directions. Embark seems to be doing a good job, but they seem to be focusing on just a few transit systems in big cities, with no inter-city transit. Hopefully Apple will acquire them and provide the resources to have really complete coverage.
I dislike the approach described where one concatenates every single javascript file into application.js and then tests for the presence of particular dom elements or classes within each file. This taxes the creation of new scripts somewhat as you must ensure you're not accidentally creating a dom element or class which is going to enable some undesired scripts. Another possible option with "require_tree ." is to use a framework like http://requirejs.org/ and then use in line script tags within pages to require a particular module.

I also think it's a bad idea to enable asset compilation in production. From the Rails asset guides (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html#live-compi...):

"This mode uses more memory, performs more poorly than the default and is not recommended."

My advice would be to use application.js to concatenate scripts you're highly likely to use on every page, e.g., jquery, bootstrap, etc. Then organize the rest of your page specific scripts into app/assets/javascripts/<controller>/<action>.js<.extensions> and add a `javascript_include_tag "#{params[:controller]}/#{params[:action]}` in any views that rely on page specific scripts (within a content_for(:head) block). This way you'll likely have 2 local scripts loading for each page - the application.js file and any page specific script. The upsides are that you don't need to worry about undesired javascript running, the application.js file will be cached and reused across all pages, and your lightweight page specific js file will be served the first time a user loads the page then cached with every subsequent visit. The potential downside is that you either need to specify a precompile array by hand in your environment specific config file or automatically glob files to be precompiled.

Note that you can also use the manifest declarations inside of your regular javascript files, e.g., `//= require 'backbone'` at the top of one of your page specific javascript files.
in the form of airport shuttles between terminals maybe. but as great at tech as Google are, they haven't even thought about the real world issues. Even something as simple as who the technology puts out of work. And aside from the hn community who aren't even all for this, I wonder if this is something that regular people even want. if they don't the economics wont work out. you need mass demand to drive down price, and i am not sure there is mass demand.

I bet the next quarter century will see this come to high end cars, not as self-driving, but as augmented safety, like a glorified cruise control that tracks other vehicles, intervenes when the driver is txting and fails to notice the cars in front are stopped, that kind of thing. Then very slowly the car will take on more and more of the role of driver and the cars the tech is installed in will eventually make its way down to the family Honda and computer augmented driving will be the norm. But that's probably mid century.
Thanks. This was my reading of the OP also and what I was responding to (its about changing programming paradigms for everyone, not just about learning for beginners). I've edited my above post to reflect this.
"... Anything else is simple paranoia."

Not commenting on whether or not Facebook is "evil" as I just don't know. But we really need an antonym for 'paranoia' that is just as condescending.

Whenever someone raises a valid concern when people reuse their password everywhere, when a company pushes the privacy boundary, when people don't make backups, etc, they are often faced with dismissive replies such as "Oh who is going to bother hacking me?", "Oh you are just paranoid" etc.

'Hapless' may be?

Relevant xkcd http://xkcd.com/743/

In reply to your comment, flyt, "trying to be self-sustainable" is the end. This doesn't preclude "evil" as the means.
HA! Yeah right. Look at the outrage that is coming just from Uber offering a service that is basically a comfortable taxi you can hail from your phone. Now imagine what the reaction is going to be when you tell them you want to eliminate the need for a driver altogether.

It'll inevitably happen, but there's a ton of legal battles that will need to be fought between now and then.
How Do I get into modeling?
10 articles for aspiring models. How to break into modeling, how to become a model, modeling industry info, and more!
I'd really really like to watch this video, and countless of other awesome tech videos -- but I can't, there's no captions. As someone who is hard of hearing, I have to wonder how many things I end up missing out on when I can't watch things like this.

Grr.
Having grown up in the suburbs (with plenty of real woodlands around), I have the exact opposite feeling. The community, diversity, tolerance, and learning opportunities of a dense city are better than any suburb or small town. As far as nature goes, I just went fishing with my son the other day (in an abandoned quarry, funnily enough). My wife, who grew up in the countryside of U.K. feels the same way.

Disclaimer: I live in downtown Chicago.
From the article you linked to:

"The regulations would allow vehicles to operate autonomously, but a licensed driver would still need to sit behind the wheel to serve as a backup operator in case of emergency."
I thought a bug extreme enough to reset an iOS device deserved some attention. I'm sorry you don't agree.
Do you have reasons why it's going too far, or is that just an emotional reaction? Consider that these pointer types map exactly to the pointer-type templates provide by C++11: unique_ptr, shared_ptr and weak_ptr: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/memory

In the interest of starting discussion and not just stating facts, I will take the position that I think Rust's adoption of these concepts into the language is a Good Idea. Many pointer-based codes have these pointer types, but they are enforced through convention alone. C++11's templates are a step in the right direction, as they make explicit what convention assumes, but the compiler does not know about them. Yes, because they are template classes, there are certain things one can and cannot do with, say, a unique_ptr, but the compiler cannot do any analysis on the usage, because the concept has no representation in the language semantics. (Ben references a blog post by Niko Matsakis about some of the analysis Rust does: http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/07/19/yet-...)
Why only airport shuttles? Why not as taxis? How cheap could that kind of taxi be? Would you even need a personal car if self-driven taxis are cheap?
When autonomy started coming to agriculture equipment, it was provided by third-parties that used equipment that would integrate with equipment made by most manufacturers.

I personally do not see Google going in that direction, but it is an option to offer add-on systems for all cars. It doesn't necessarily need to be a partnership with anyone.
Mr. Moore Gets to Punt on Sharding
Also, please spellcheck!