skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
how do you know the good from the bad? what is the consensus?

what is the best book, open source project, mentor, forum, blog, hackathon, tutorial, podcast, meetup or academic course that taught you the best principles that made you a good coder."

It's not any one of those things. It's not who tells you how to think, but learning to make the choices yourself based on how things work. Occasionally there are clear choices regarding what is better, but most of the time, there are trade-offs. It sounds like you need to be looking at those trade offs at a higher level.

You need to stop caring so much if something is criticized, and instead look at whether those criticisms are valid for your use case.

I'd also note that I think a lot of the time, people place certain trades, certain practices, even certain frameworks and languages on a pedestal, when in reality there isn't always a huge difference for the average programming use case.

That's not to say that trying to be a better coder is not a worthy goal. But don't think of it as coding right, or good from bad. People too often use value judgment terms (right, wrong, good, bad) when they should be discussing trade offs (better performance, easier to add to, easier to maintain, less memory, faster compile, less time spent writing etc).

So, expose yourself to different viewpoints. find Java user group, a Scala meetup, whatever, and meet people. Hell, try tutoring or mentoring people yourself, it sounds like you have a wealth of experience. Get many different viewpoints, and try to learn what is right for you.

Also, I've read some of your posts to HN and your blog, and several things you've written or linked to have been informative and interesting. Thank you.
I yearn for the day I can delegate my working out. Waiting for my Rosie robot!
I used to value Ars because they had actual writers, editors, and original content. This new trend they have of being another content aggregator is disappointing.
I completely agree. Not to be too self promoty because thats what we are aiming for at my site www.varely.com but I think everything can be better through more people expressing themselves. There are so many different experiences that we've all gone through and we should be sharing those. In my cases it can help people so much just by knowing people have gone through situations that you have.

For selfish reasons being a good writer and communicating well lets you expose your true talents and intelligence. I honestly think evaluating someone through their writing for the most part can be a more effective test than looking at a persons resume. Anyone can bring a resume and hit all the write points but writing well lets you communicate your interests and passions. You can really show how passionate you are about a subject and how well you an articulate your ideas. In start ups I think thats one of the most important things and in general its valuable.

I also agree when you say you are going to write you conduct your life as if you are going to write. I think it makes you a little more present in your situations because you realize that you want to take note of life. You want to recognize the small things in life that may go unnoticed but are significant.
Traces of Mars' atmosphere trapped inside meteorite
It's actually very hard to make a bullet proof test. Here's a way to spoof your test :)

> var n = 0; window.__defineGetter__('module', function () { return n++; })
> this.module !== module
true
Wow. I thought he got married less than a year ago? That's roughtimes :(
The Flux language proposed in the paper makes it easier to _manually_ decompose a large program into smaller "concurrent servers."

Flow (and note that this is not the only new language being called Flow) seems to go for automatic parallelization; if successful, that's a fundamentally different approach versus Flux.
>I want to read what you have to say

That's interesting because after reading and participating in a number of blogs and message boards over the years, I am really tired of what people have to say. Only because so much of it, at least within the realm of opinion and debate, is so predictable.

A lot of it is rubbish. But I'm willing to accept that such predictability and rubbish is to be expected in argumentative contexts and that perhaps writing more could lead to improved rhetoric and less repetition. Being more widely read couldn't hurt, either.
Just write the book, changing the parts about losing money to making money, and start promoting it.
Really?

The rules state that we're not to make empty, negative comments. I respect the community that PG and friends are trying to build, but there are times when the idiocy on display really test that constraint.

You, sir, are a fool. And this is one of those times.
http://mathforum.org/kb/servlet/JiveServlet/download/206-116...

This version of events you found is extremely interesting and paints a very different picture of the situation.

General background is Boaler published findings from her trial studies that showed miraculous improvements at a low income school that adopted the curriculum she advocates. Bishop was skeptical as it was different from results he had seen, but when asked for more details, Boaler claimed she had to promise the schools anonymity to do the studies and thus the data could not be verified. This claim of anonymity of the school being necessary doesn't make a lot of sense. Anonymity for the students of course, but there is no reason for the schools not to be identified if the study is legit. Bishop's questioning the legitimacy of Boaler's results because of her refusal to publish anything that would enable verification of her remarkable results resulted in her filing harassment complaints against Bishop, a professor at a totally different university. Later Boaler filed complaints that Bishop was "a terrorist", resulting in him being interrogated by police.

He then went and found the identity of the school himself and it turned out that the school went from API 3-6 results to the worst possible result, API 1-1 subsequent to the adoption of Boaler's advocated curriculum, something completely the opposite of her claimed findings. If this is true that this is the same school, then she is clearly engaged in fraud, academic misconduct, stalking, and making false police reports, and is not the victim in this at all, but is actually engaging in conduct bordering on the criminal. If on the other hand this is not the school, the school should be identified so that the claims of significant improvement can be verified. The claim that the school needs anonymity can not be taken seriously.
What Does "Software Is Mathematics" Mean? Part 1
So what you are saying is that the successful business model is shifting to selling shovels to the poor hopeful fools coming off the boat. I do hope that is not the case. I hope there is still gold in the mountains.
No shame
These guys launched on September 11th! WTF??

http://www.knockoutsurveys.com/blog/28198778631
Don't know if @wisty or @ktizo is right here, but she's been publishing since 1993 is not a logical argument.
Drafting Antitrust Case, F.T.C. Raises Pressure on Google
From Cooling System to Thinking Machine: The History of Ideas About the Brain
Why not just state the product isn't ready yet, but you'll contact them as soon as it is?
"Can gamification be considered a reward in the same context?"

Yes, the psychology is the same whether you're talking about tangible rewards (money, physical products, digital downloads, movie tickets, etc.) or intangible rewards (grades, praise, points, stickers/badges, etc.)
I haven't gone over the final spec in depth yet, so I can't really address OAuth 2.0-final specifics.

In general though, I think the ease of development that comes from query strings trumps any supposed security gains of using headers for passing parameters.

Fundamentally, if you're worried about secrets being logged you're worried about MITM attacks (if either endpoint stores secrets insecurely, that's a whole other concern). If someone's actually managed to MITM a user, it's no harder to capture headers than query strings; so it's a mostly false sense of security. To prevent MITMs, you should just mandate HTTPS; that gives you some real improvement, not just one for the very narrow "traffic logs subsequently compromised" case (and even that assumes the log in question isn't capturing headers, which may be typical but is by no means universal).
If I'm not misunderstanding you, this seems to be the same thing as Postmates[1]. I've used it for food more than once in SF.

[1] http://postmates.com/
http://sites.kauffman.org/pdf/angel_groups_111207.pdf ends at 2007
http://www.willamette.edu/~wiltbank/jbv_angels_2009.html was published in 2008
and http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/reports/assets/features... was published in 2009.

All of these look at returns that predate the "new angel age" of the last couple of years. Every hot bubble looks great using metrics collected before world+dog pile in.
Also, there is a Kindle app for the iPad and I presume there is one for Android devices as well. Nook app too, FWIW.
I googled it. Did you mean the first link? It looks well written and interesting from the first couple paragraphs.. The whole list? Yeah, I'm familiar with the topic.

I think the article's author's central premise (to paraphrase: that Ada Lovelace is a phony promoted by other rank phonies for [unexplained, mostly inscrutable but surely, somehow base] political and/or emotional warm-fuzzies) is 110%, really pretty low-grade, claptrap.

Consider the question of Lovelace's role in CS ...

From the perspective of the author of the Ada language[1], call him Jean: he probably must have had some kind of psychic crush on her, right? Any of us (males, I mean) might assume.

From the perspective of later 20th century CS historians, who presumably bestowed the title "first programmer":
Babbage was a hardware engineer; of course he designed the assembly language, in tandem with designing the machine; but since the dawn of computing, and still today, there exists a decided, if fuzzy line, between hardware and software "engineers'.
And Lovelace owns the innovation of considering numbers as representations of any possible discrete item beyond mere numbers (hm, maybe Leibnitz did this earlier, but that really doesn't count, does it?[2]), which is /key/.
So, call them, respectively, first hardware architect, first software programmer. Fair enough?

I think we can definitively settle the question with a time machine - I presume that Charles and Ada would be quite pleased to discuss all such trivia over tea with an esteemed time-traveller. -- Now you have a new, better project that trolling HN threads (jk ;-P).

And no, he referenced nowhere near enough original sources to seem even vaguely credible on such a complex, controversial topic. (See also the first reply in this thread, from jgrahamc - who does give the sense of having actually researched the labyrinthian topic.) And yes, Admiral Hopper. What is with white girls? And how many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

No offense.

[1] "Ada was originally designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede the hundreds of programming languages then used by the DoD." [wikipedia:Ada (programming language)]
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#Symbo...
Microsoft can easily let Nokia fail. Microsoft is already considering making its own phone, just like they've made their own tablets and game consoles:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57458288-75/microsoft-weig...

Every few years Microsoft gives another lesson about why you should never partner with Microsoft. People have very short memories, apparently.
Therefore to optimize, it's best to start with very little original capital, thereby increasing the rate of return. I believe there are many communities practicing this technique.
TL;DR

Through my experiance of using my iPad and keyboard in an unergomonical setup, I can conclude that Windows 8 will severly injure people.
Nokia has to quickly post haste load android on all their smartphones. They will probably have to kick out Elop first, but that won't hurt at all. So (1) kick out Elop, (2) load Android.

It is fricking amazing how a board of presumably tech savvy businesspeople cannot understand the network effect. So let me put it simply -- it is over there are no more smartphone operating systems in the present smartphone segment. Google barely got in with android and the door slammed behind them. Meego was too late and Windows Phone was far too late. It does not matter how good Windows phone is, their DOA based on the network effect.

There are so many apps made already, there is so much investment in app production for both iOS and Android, that any new OS in the same space has unsurmountable obstacles to overcome.

There is actually an opportunity to make a new breakthrough in mobile devices, but one has to reinvent the market, like Apple did. The opportunity is for cheaper phones in the third world. Right now everyone wants a smart phone but most people in the world cannot afford the 600-700 prices (and no they cannot afford the higher subsidized monthly fees either). If someone comes up with a lightweight OS, that has similar features to modern smartphones, but perhaps with worse performance, worse screen, etc., that will be succesful. It will be succesful mostly because it will appeal to people that are outside of the network effects of Android and iOS. But that is not Windows.
I think you're complaining too much about this momentarily being the top story on HN: (it feels to me as if) usually the top story is gossip about how much money some startup raised or an Apple vs Android piece. I find this to be an improvement.
Does anybody else find this part odd?

"This is an allegation that could have destroyed my career had it been substantiated."

Surely the point here is that the allegations are troubling because they could not be substantiated, not despite that. Had they been substantiated, the authors career would indeed have be be destroyed, but the author would deserve no sympathy and Milgram no criticism.

This is a factual statement that does nothing to reinforce sympathies with the author, unless perhaps you don't read it critically. It seems to me to be an emotional appeal.
Pariah project? People forget IE6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IE6 was released in 2000 freaking one, for Christ's sake. It was state of the art for years. Sure it started becoming a pain in the ass to developers years later, but it's only a pariah project with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and years of continued engineering development.
Just in case you hadn't noticed, there are 3 throwaway accounts (apparently opened just for this) running around this thread attempting to discredit any of the ideas expressed by the OP because the OP had the audacity to charge for his time and efforts. It either set off their BS-alarm, which may be improperly calibrated due to their own views of the world which they then project; or, it might be simple jealousy.

Either way, I guess my point is that we (well, I, anyway) have all wasted too much time giving them the benefit of the doubt, I appreciate reading these types of posts (and yours and patio11's), yet would never spend money on any of the products mentioned in any of them.
He's talked about systems for sharing code so that non-programmers can find code that does what they want without actually needing to dive in. Not sure how well this will work out.
Would you then receive it back in your mailbox? I haven't mailed a letter in years, so I'm not sure junkmail gets stamp-canceled.
Notice what they downplay in this article: That almost half of the kids who had just been in contact with a reliable adult still ate the marshmallow.

Also, were the kids allowed to keep playing with the fun art supplies while they waited?

A link to the actual study would help.
I'm sure once it gets popular, people will come up with an abbreviation. I bet this one will be 0x, pronounced "Zero X".
UMVC - A micro MVC framework in JavaScript
May I make a small, unrelated suggestion if the OP is the blog owner? Smaller logo. Took me a full half-minute to figure out that I should scroll down. Took up my entire screen, and thought I was supposed to click something special to see the content.

/rant
Nokia's sales have collapsed. It's not "doomsaying" at this point-- more like "doom observing."

The only real assets they have left are their patents and their NAVTEQ division (whatever they're calling it now). Now would be a good time for them to break up the company, sell those assets, and maybe manage to return something back to the shareholders.

On the other hand, if you still think it's "fine," then you should buy some Nokia stock.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the code you publish to NPM can be different than your client-side script.

Shouldn't we just be making two slightly different versions?
Right. This guy hasn't looked at any Windows 8 hardware. You CAN'T use a mouse with an iPad. Windows 8 is touch enabled, meaning either mouse or touch.

Basically, he's saying that Microsoft has a better product, he just doesn't know he's saying it yet.
First impressions of the pyMCU - real world Python interface
http://www.reddit.com/r/meditationpapers
For a second a read Sybian, totally different technologies.
Stripping people of their titles and degrees merely for incorrectly claiming that one of their peers has engaged in scientific misconduct would have a chilling effect on progress.

If it can be proven that they made those allegations with nothing more than malicious intent, then sure: punish away. But to go after anyone who incorrectly alleges scientific misconduct is an unspeakably terrible idea.
The app stores were not built into the phones. You had to navigate to those third party app stores via the web and download them to your phone. But that web navigation was done via your computer rather than your phone itself. The phones were serving a baby form of HTML that had to be routed via through the carrier if memory serves.
You could just obscure parts of the strip with some electrical tape, so you can see the dark part moving in a circle.
Embed/Run PHP scripts from C/C++ programs using the open source PH7 engine
"if you want to just write code all day (and there's nothing wrong with that) don't create a product - work for somebody else."

this is exactly correct. it is the same reason why so many restaurants fail; somebody says "hey, im a good cook, why dont i start a restaurant?" if you are a good cook and dont know how to run a business, become a chef. if you are a good coder and dont know how to run a business, work for somebody else. business is about way more than just creating a good product. for true, lasting success a good product is almost always needed, but what good is a good product if you dont know how to get anybody to know it exists?
I believe it's the "aggressively tried to identify the research subjects" that probably warrants a more severe punishment. This is a HUGE no-no in research, as research MUST be, for accurate information, anonymous. His attempt to identify them undermines the very most basic level of good research.
Virtually every time there is some logo-related story here on Hacker News I click through, read the story, look at the resulting logo and think 'well, that kinda sucks'.

Not this time! That's a nice one.
I like how they had a little party to celebrate getting ice cream, but I'm wondering, how much did that ice cream cost to bring to space? I think it's about $10,000 to launch a pound of something into space.

At earth parties, $10,000 gets you a lot of drugs/alcohol. At space parties, it gets you a tub of ice cream.
This makes no sense. At all. Not only is the authors experience specifically not about Windows 8 (spoiler: it's an iPad with a keyboard), but his complaint doesn't even apply to the devices he's calling out.

> The convertibles take the idea even further: these are tablets to which you can easily attach a rigid keyboard and then have a laptop-like device but that then doesn't have a touchpad or nipple mouse, it's all touch driven.

I haven't seen a single Windows 8 device demoed yet that comes with a keyboard but without a dedicated pointing device (either a trackpad or trackpoint, or a mouse for some all-in-ones). Convertible tablets still have a trackpad. Even Sony's little slider has a trackpoint.

> Microsoft itself is explicitly making a keyboard cover for their tablet, almost built-in, meant to be used like the set-up in the picture. From a minority use-case this mode of interacting is becoming a blessed paradigm.

The Touch Cover and Type Cover still have a trackpad built in.

If anything, this article is demonstrating why Windows 8 will be better for tablets (at least for "productivity"), because it doesn't have the problem he's describing.

Disclosure: Microsoft employee
Civil engineers are self-confident and don't go comparing themselves to all the other engineering disciplines trying to convince themselves they are real engineers. Software engineering is prone to a significant minority of people who are not so self-confident.

Personally, I am. In my opinion, whenever someone tries to drag in a methodology from other engineering disciplines they do so with a blinding ignorance of "cost" side of the cost/benefit ratio (and often non-trivial ignorance on the "benefit" side too), and the real differences between software and physical things. If car engineers could smash a car into a wall, observe something they didn't like, tweak something and 30 seconds be smashing another car into a wall effectively for free, their design methodology would be different too. (And if you feel inclined to get into a really detailed argument about how it would affect them because you think I'm assuming something about exactly how it would be different, you're missing my point, which is simply that it would indeed be different. Especially towards the beginning phases of the design.)
While that's a tempting conclusion, it's a tough to justify. The original experiment didn't study or account for the parental variable, so it's impossible to tell what effect it may, or may not, have had "behind the scenes."

It's entirely possible that the reliability of adults is a factor in developing a child's impulse control. It's also possible that it's a significant factor. But we'd have to design experiments to study its significance. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that the variable being studied in the original experiment, impulse control, was actually just a red herring disguising parental reliability as the true factor.
OBAMA EXECUTIVE ORDER 13603 ILLUMINATI NWO 2012
Show HN: Service for poker players and rails devs
We developed this from a need we had as two poker players ourselves, it is a fully managed postgres service, with webui, that allows you to lock down your database based on IP, and change passwords etc. We are obviously marketing towards poker players, but some people who find heroku's pricing for pgaas to be a bit much may find us a decent alternative.

cloudpokerdb.com
clickable: http://cloudpokerdb.com
The difficulty I have with his manifesto is that he proposes many ideas that sound quite similar to existing ideas (e.g. graph reduction model of computing, dataflow execution models, dataflow languages), but there isn't a direct comparison: I can't tell if this is a remix of older ideas (nothing wrong with that necessarily), or if there is some additional idea he has that mean the language would be a major advance over past work. It's just difficult to know what to make of it.
It's a bit misleading to say "Five-Figures A Month" when you only have one month's of data.

Let's see that graph in a year's time.
I have co-workers, who have their keyboards and mice too far away and suffer from shoulder strain from "stretching" for their peripherals - so the author has a point that the usage of Windows 8 that comes naturally will influence this strain on desktop/laptop scenarios, and could worsen with larger screens.

Learn to use short-cuts I guess!