skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(disclaimer: i'm the author) it's important to keep two things in mind when considering any ranking: first, and most obviously, no language ranking will be perfect for all readers, because the metrics for ranking languages will vary on an individual basis. second, the intent of the ranking. for our purposes at redmonk, this is an important consideration, because we neither intend to nor claim to produce rankings that are representative of language use broadly. if the rankings were representative of all use, languages such as COBOL would have a substantial presence on the list. we are rather interested in communities that we believe to be more predictive in terms of future use, of which github and stackoverflow are two obvious examples. the sustained strength of javascript on both properties has been one example of their ability to identify trending languages.

as for the criticisms regarding the usage of stackoverflow above, this is why we correlate the stackoverflow rankings with github. one represents discussion and research about a language, the other is manifestation of activity within a language. what's interesting is that the correlation between these properties has historically been strong and appears to be getting stronger over time.

again, no ranking is perfect - ours included - but we feel that measuring programming language interest and traction via these properties is at the very least an interesting datapoint.
Assuming an efficient free market. Which education certainly isn't.
I think the great advantage the Raspberry Pi has over the Mk802 and other Allwinner A10 based devices right now is the community resources.

Let's say I wanted to install Debian on the Raspberry Pi. I can go to http://www.raspbian.org/ and find a healthy project and well-organized documentation. What if I wanted to install it on the MK802? After a lot of googling and skimming results, I'd probably end up at http://linux-sunxi.org/Debian if I wanted to build the bootloader, kernel, and root filesystem myself or http://forum.doozan.com/list.php?6 if I trusted somebody else's work. The experience is very different.

This is why I'm hoping http://www.indiegogo.com/pengpod succeeds. I think what they plan to do is exactly what the A10 platform needs to succeeed with hobbyists-

Maintain a community forum and wiki
Provide source for everything we create and share it on Github.
Provide a package repository for the PengPods.
Provide prebuilt images, with updates as available.
Provide tools, scripts and guides as we go.
The circle is a Procrustean bed - the real way to derive the scale is to use a line of fifths that never returns to the starting pitch. Circle any group of seven consecutive fifths, and the group's major scale tonic is the one second from the left. This line goes into double and triple sharps/flats, etc.
What does that mean for us though, the "skilled workers" when everything is being shipped overseas? A friend of mine who works as a systems engineer for Verizon said their dumping 30% of their US staff and shipping it to overseas. This seems to be the pattern (anecdotally) as of late for a lot of large companies. When there's someone with comparable skills on the other side of the world who will do your job for a fraction of the cost, what's to stop a race to the bottom?
I don't know, and I doubt anyone has ever been arrested for bribing a police office over a speeding ticket. But I think a few people have at least been investigated for paying bribes to gain contracts for things like oil rights and arms deals. So, be careful boasting about your arms deals on HN :-)
I'd say the other big advantage - and to my mind even more important than the social aspect - is the access to the tutors and professors. Having done a number of online courses, they're fine as far as they go, but even a well run forum is no substitute for actually being able to talk to the subject expert, get him/her to walk you through the problems...

Edit:

There's another major advantage: formal qualification / certification. There's obviously nothing to stop me cheating at an online course, the certificate or congratulatory email they give you at the end is nearly worthless.
we haven't seen that yet although i suspect you are right. we tend to stick with our portfolio companies longer than we maybe should so it will take a while before we see what the failure rates are. in our 2004 fund, which is pretty mature now, the failure rate was about 33%, which is what we model it out to be at the start of a fund
One thing the article doesn't touch on is how to replace things other than the big, sit-in-an-auditorium style introductory lectures. It's plausible MOOCs are on their way to delivering the equivalent of that educational experience for much less money. But that's really only the introductory part of university curriculum. Just as important imo is the part where you do projects and get hands-on experience.

For example, in my senior-level AI class, we had lectures for the first 2/3 of the semester (approximately), and then for the last third, picked a project to do individually or in small teams, and met one-and-one with the professor once a week to develop and carry out our project. That was by far the most educational part of that class. And in physics, the physics lab was just as important as the lecture, possibly even more important when it came to learning how to actually carry out experiments properly.

I can imagine that kind of learning being tackled, too, but I think it'll require something considerably more innovative.
Introducing Hawk, a new HTTP authentication scheme
that would be a wonderful thing if it were to happen
It's spam. Look at the very last line of the "article".

Flag it and move on.
I'm sure if you paid for the premium service the customer service would be more responsive.

Simole rules of life: All software has bugs. Free services have slow/no customer service.
yes, and the cost of developing for iOS, Android, and web at the same time
Check out my article "Measuring Language Popularity is Harder Than Many Think" http://smthngsmwhr.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/measuring-popula... and I must say that both github.com and stackoverflow.com are not just typical sites and getting data only from those sites is not enough. JavaScript is very popular at github.com and C# at stackoverflow.com Other sources give different results as well.

We may be more or less sure only in 10 or so most popular languages and judging relative online popularity may be hard for them.
I've seen this too, it's an interesting development. The virtual community is also pretty powerful in a lot of the courses.
No; they have an agreement with StackExchange to allow for republishing of the content (check the byline).
HTML5 visualization
visualization of DNA sequences as 2d image
Why Are We Trained To Solve Problems, But Not To Identify Those?
Improving is an iterative process. You find problems, solve them, and then find more. Videos suck because they're static, they don't answer questions. So you make them adaptive. And so on.
Wow!, Can I conclude that the you are beginner only when you are child?
Interesting to see Donuts co didn't get mentioned once despite applying for 320 gTLDs.
I've nothing against a good textbook, but MOOCs are so much more than simply substituting a book for a video - there's the online community, the structure that weekly exercises bring, and the possibility of a (nearly worthless) certificate at the end.
> laziness can often be emulated when necessary.

I haven't used Haskell enough to say that this is anything more than speculation, but I would imagine that the converse would be true. Python is an excessively eager-evaluating language[1], and trying to emulate lazy evaluation in Python requires enough back-bending that it probably wastes more time/memory than it saves.

In Haskell, since you have guarantees about monadic purity, I would speculate that an alternative runtime could use a secondary thread to 'walk' the tree and evaluate the thunks whenever resources are being under-utilized (or when memory is tight). Perhaps that would be effective enough to be a net improvement?
And judging the relative popularity for less popular languages such as Common Lisp is even less precise if we base the research only on github and stackoverflow. So I would be very careful with this comparison of language popularity. Although it is better to have some chart that none :)
How many of them were photos of food?
It's no longer good enough to have an app that works, it must work, and be beautiful, and be cross-platform, and use the cloud, and have social integration, and ...

Or maybe (he writes, donning his HN-proof flamesuit) having genuinely innovative ideas actually does matter.

There are plenty of people around here who keep saying it's the execution that counts, launch with a MVP because you need data so you can pivot, what matters is having a great team, and all that. I'm sure there is some element of truth in all of those things, but most of the "businesses" based on that philosophy seem to build something obvious that a thousand other people thought of and any 15 year old geek could do in a weekend, and then act all surprised when they don't become the next Facebook.

If these are the kinds of people who are approaching VCs with a view to serious funding, it's hardly surprising that most of the ones that don't have literally the best execution in a market with hundreds or thousands of plausible competitors will fail.

To me, it seems crazy today to even try going after mass-market, low-level consumer services. There's far more money in B2B unless you really make it to the top in B2C, which you are extremely unlikely to do even with a fantastic offering. And if you are happy to settle for a business that is merely very lucrative rather than the next Facebook/Google, you can do very well in B2C with a good idea in just about any specialised field, where the market is not every consumer in the world but the people in the market really want what you're offering because it genuinely benefits them in some way that nothing else did before.

[Edit: I see Fred is posting here, so I'll mention that it would be interesting to know how many of the companies VCs take on tend to be in that latter category these days. Is specialist B2C just too small for VC-style deals to make sense most of the time?]
The Django Book
In high school, I was lucky to have multiple teachers who were sticklers for imparting the essential building blocks of strong writing. We spent a lot of time "in the weeds," rote-learning vocabulary, sentence patterns, paragraph construction, and finally, structures for the expository essay (above and beyond the academic essay we mastered in school.)

The surprising thing, even to someone like me who considers herself a good writer to begin with, was how important working through each "level" of writing was. While I haven't reviewed the foundations in a long time (I probably should), because I spent so much time painstakingly memorizing the contents of each earlier on, I can now write quickly and confidently and usually be pretty close to correct.

Here are some books I'd recommend for each level:

1) Vocabulary - Wordly Wise (the older the version of the book, the better the word lists), such as here: http://www.amazon.com/Wordly-Wise-Book-Kenneth-Hodkinson/dp/...

2) Sentence structure - The Art of Styling Sentences, http://www.amazon.com/The-Styling-Sentences-K-D-Sullivan/dp/...

3) Paragraph construction - Paragraphs and Essays (the part on paragraph construction and patterns is very straightforward, basic, and clear, I don't think it's worth buying the whole book though), http://www.amazon.com/Paragraphs-Essays-With-Integrated-Read...

4) Expository essays - Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry (this is the textbook NYU uses to teach "Writing the Essay"), http://www.amazon.com/Encounters-Exploration-Inquiry-Pat-Hoy...
I thought that as it works currently you can sign up as a free developer and generate certificates so your apps can run on ML.
Sandbenders: Why the luster of the iPhone is diminishing
The Allwinner A10 is being outpaced by its competition for the same price. It's too weak and anyone watching this space knows how far to bet on Allwinner for anything.
"Hashing password is mandatory because user data can be compromised" is not the same as "Hashing passwords(preferably salted) come into picture only when user data is already compromised"
Here is why equity crowdfunding will not be possible any time soon
I meant my comment from the "civil liberties" point of view too. CCTV leaves a permanent record, accessible in perpetuity and to the authorities only. But if a police officer were on the street instead, public activities would remain pseudoanonymous so long as he's not paying attention or what you're doing doesn't otherwise stand out as important to the cop in the moment.
I'm pretty sure that this integration process in my brain continues even when I'm unconscious. Or would this definition of unconscious preclude people ever being unconscious except when they're dead? I think that's sufficiently at odds with the everyday definition of consciousness that a new word would be called for.
"... the misdeeds of security industry and security researchers who become famous by uncovering the mistakes that people like Torvalds have missed." (from the article)

That's kind of what he's talking about though, isn't it? That idiot who let the vulnerable code go live to half the world in the case of a Linux vulnerability would be Linus. You'd have to argue pretty well to be able to convince anyone that Linus is an idiot though! Security (especially at a kernel level) is likely far too complex to be just a checklist of "don't do this" or "do this" and it magically becomes secure.
Sorry, but this is an example of bringing in extraneous math and notation to make something well understood seem mysterious. The fun statistics facts being abused here are: 1) moment summaries (sum 1, sum x, sum x^2 ...) are easy to manage; 2) many important summary statistics (count, mean, variance, kurtosis ...) are easy functions of moments; 3) once you decide to think parametric you can use that many distributions are completely determined by the first one, two or three sufficient statistics. But since all of the above can be clearly taught- it isn't as exciting.
Completely agree.
I commented based on my personal observation which, I guess, can not be generalized.
Sorry if that's not directly related to the post. I don't really get the story behind Rasberry PI. Is the goal to make something cheap enough so that it spreads widely ? Otherwise there are plenty of platforms that would be better for learning programming starting with a simple browser no ?
>On the other hand, C# and Visual Basic are weekend coders' languages

Or they simply have anti-git bias in developer's culture. Like F#, which is not popular among beginners but placed far away over median too.
Just like with coding, improving your wordcraft is a two-fold process: read and write. If you are reading a lot of quality work from various genres (articles, blog posts, short stories, journalism, poetry et al), you will be constantly learning new words, sentence structures, phrasings, all the tools of writing. Then, by writing a lot you will be able to put these new techniques to use and figure out what works best with your particular approach to writing. I learned to write effective fiction and poetry (I've been published in literary magazines and been invited to read at several events) by close-reading all my inspirations and then practicing writing in their style. Once I got a feel for what made Reverdy "Reverdy", I was able to approach my own work in the same manner which results in magnitudes of improvement.

It is also imperative to constantly be rereading your older work, not only as a measure to see how much you've improved but also as a way to reinforce positive progress. If I can read an article from a few months ago that I wrote and not want to close the browser window immediately, then I consider that a worthy article and it boosts my confidence.

That being said, I have found that flow-charting ideas is good for building up the structural integrity of a piece, especially if it is more on the analytic side. You have assertions (themes, viewpoints) and then linkages between them (facts, observations). By building a flow-chart you can see how they weave and if your implications make sense. A visual overview is very helpful in this regard. It keeps your writing tight and succinct. Again, this is just a personal opinion - the writing process is a difficult and stressful one because there really are no universal "tricks" or approaches to quality, worthwhile work.
Yeah I agree. I think there should be some mention of why a "fifth" is important (3:2 ratio of frequencies, which is recognizable, and when this is continued, it eventually "loops back" to the original note (at a 2^n:1 ratio, where n is the number of fifths up until it repeats)
Show HN: Find videos and photos you liked on Facebook (Weekend project)
An ABC proof too tough even for mathematicians
It varies a lot, depending on where are you in Brazil (city/location), how busy are things, etc

I'd say most are 'legitimate' (usually Rio is the exception) and if there's nothing wrong you'll just go through without a problem.
Dude, I agree with your basic premise that it should be possible to discuss bias and double standards. I agree that sometimes bias against male opinions and experiences can happen and, when it does happen, it's not easy to get anyone to accept it because it doesn't fit our accepted narratives about sexism. Gender neutrality is definitely a noble aim.

But in this case I think you're wrong. This thread is a totally legitimate discussion of a very interesting, detailed and inventive technical post and I find it hard to believe that an equally detailed and well-written post from a male perspective would not be received in much the same way.

I don't think you're being sexist, but you are being wrong about something in a way that an average internet commenter would find hard to distinguish from sexism (and the average internet commenter is not particularly capable of nuanced thought).
I like it. I think it looks and feels much much better than the standard ubiquitous twitter/fb logos.
Put your absolutely most important point at the top.

Make your words, sentences, paragraphs and articles as short and simple as possible. People don't read, they skim.

(Where you used "reiterates," I would have used "repeats" or "gives.")

Read what you write, and move your lips when you do it. A good sentence sounds good.
Macro advise: read a lot of material similar to what you hope to write. Write a lot, you only get better with practice. Collaborate with a good editor.

Books: The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, Shertzer's The Elements of Grammar, and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.
WOW Amazing DNA visualization!
Indeed - I remember hearing about someone setting up a 5-disk RAID set of floppy drives, but 16 seems a little excessive :)
They wouldn't identify it as laziness because there isn't anything lazy about that code.

You have just perfectly shown that it is indeed "error-prone and difficult" congratulations.
There are plenty of people around here who keep saying it's the execution that counts, launch with a MVP because you need data so you can pivot, what matters is having a great team, and all that.

I've been calling bullshit on the "execution is everything" meme for a while now, but I hadn't thought of it as maybe a cause of increasing difficulty in the startup ecosystem. That is an interesting hypothesis.
Yup, that's right - I thought IRS treated a single member LLC as a sole proprietorship for tax purposes. I guess the correct term is disregarded entity. Either way the definitions were specific to the tax status and separate to the liability definition, which is yes a LLC.
Seconded. In C#'s favourite environment (Visual Studio) the GIT-support is so far from seamless that it's one of the last source-control/VCS's you'll consider.
Basic writing advice:

http://apostate.com/how-to-say-nothing-in-500-words

Macro structure:

http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/snowflake.php

Though it inclines towards fiction, I find it useful with non-fiction as well.
It's a sad sign of overselling in the web-development industry when every podunk newspaper wants me to install some discrete app for their site, usually covering the page with a modal popup, which causes me to hit the back button and not visit their site at all.
Futures in literature from the past
trying to emulate lazy evaluation in Python requires enough back-bending that it probably wastes more time/memory than it saves.

Wholesale, yes. But one could e.g. use a generator in Python to emulate a infinite list.

I would speculate that an alternative runtime could use a secondary thread to 'walk' the tree and evaluate the thunks whenever resources are being under-utilized (or when memory is tight).

But the thunks could also evaluate to large or infinite data structures, leading to resource starvation when such a strategy is followed.

IMO if the language uses a lazy evaluation regime, the programmer should decide on where strictness can be applied. It's fairly easy to enforce strict evaluation in Haskell via bang patterns, seq, or deepseq. It's reasoning about laziness that is difficult for newcomers.
Apparently some Chinese company tried to get the chinese for ".gov" or ".government", and the Republic of China[1] and Hong Kong[2] governments are unhappy, to say the least!

[1] https://gacweb.icann.org/download/attachments/22938690/GOVID...

[2] https://gacweb.icann.org/download/attachments/22938690/GOVID...
When I write a sentence, I use five stone questions1.

Does it say what you mean?
Can it be clearer?
Can it more closely match overall tone?
Can it be made more novel?
Can it be made more beautiful (prosody)?

The five priorities at which the questions aim are meaning, clarity (which includes brevity), tone, novelty (avoiding cliche), and prosody (and other aesthetics).

When I've first drafted a sentence, I start from the top of the list, and ask these questions in turn. Asking them forces me to think about an answer; it prevents laziness. As soon as the answer to question suggests a possible change, I make that change, and start again from the top. I repeat until time constraints force me onward.

This is a great process, because if I have very little time, I end up concentrating only on meaning. If I have all the time in the world, I get to also play with the sound of the words, and the play of the tongue.

Questions about meaning, clarity, tone, novelty, and beauty can also be fruitfully applied at paragraph and treatise levels; but my greatest concern is usually for the sentence.

1. http://diiq.org/five_stone_questions.html
If one believes that they are incorrect, he is effectively stating that he (someone thinking abstractly in the absence of any hard data) is better at pricing the value of the work than the manufacturer (who is directly affected by the outcome and has a wealth of hard data).

The pricing error argument can be made based on a definition of "value" that is in fairly common use around here (market price) and no more data than is included in the article: they offer a certain price for the labor and don't get as much of it as they want, therefore the price they offer is lower than the value.
Actually I think it has more to do with content on Stack sites being freely available under a creative commons license.
Humanity’s last invention and our uncertain future
b in the case given is the mean. so it's defined as sum(a)/n. so the "ignored" term is sum(a-sum(a)/n)) which is zero.
I see no obvious chip. If cloud apps and data can become unavailable with no immediate support response, they shouldn't be critically used by a business that desires to stay in business, period. For non-critical apps the cloud could be fine.
I suggest not bothering with Strunk and White past a quick skim. It is, at best, inconsistent and self-contradictory.

This article makes the case:
http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...