skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of the problem is that we usually teach in procedural style -- but this requires learning the MOST abstractions to do anything useful. Procedural style is based on variables, loops, conditionals, and side effects. Functional style is just based on function calls and conditionals; this makes it far easier to explain.

A larger part of the problem, I suspect, is that people are just not interested in the process of programming -- it's the product they want. The first thing you'll notice when you try to teach someone to program (in the normal case) is that they are focused to a fault on making the program work. This is the same problem that keeps people stuck to a single language: "well, it works." You need a genuine interest in the journey, not just the destination, to really be able to wrap your mind around the skill of programming. That's what gives someone the ability to intuitively understand how computers "work."

You wouldn't try to drive cross-continent if you're only interested in what's on the other side -- you'd just fly there, or take a train or bus or something. Likewise, if you're not interested in how a program does what it does, you should just pay someone who does care to do it.
There's less to Facebook and other social networks than meets the eye
The fifth paragraph made me think. What if Google, Yahoo or Microsoft started a social network based on the addresses in their webmail apps? It would instantly be bigger than Facebook.
What happens to a spider's web when the spider is on DRUGS?
Or, if they're in a forgiving mood, this will produce one e-mail address per line, regardless of delimited position, (assuming the founders were already on separate lines):

| sed -E 's/^.*[^[:alnum:]\._\-]([[:alnum:]\._\-]+@[[:alnum:]][[:alnum:]\-]+\.[[:alnum:]][[:alnum:]\-\.]*)[^[:alnum:]\-\.].*$/\1/'
| grep -E '^[[:alnum:]\._\-]+@[[:alnum:]][[:alnum:]\-]+\.[[:alnum:]][[:alnum:]\-\.]*$'
I agree with you, but I'll play devil's advocate.

Right now 3 out of 4 of the world's super cranes are in China, constructing new office towers. The Chinese are holding something like a trillion dollars that we've traded them for TVs and such. The Chinese military is building a deep-water navy, and China keeps making no-so-subtle threats against Taiwan. In addition, the Chinese have a tendency to build up a lot of nationalistic anger whenever they feel threatened, whether the threat is real or imagined.

Now the kicker is exactly as you describe: they cannot scale. Their system is rotten and broken, and the only reason it's still working is that they "sold out" to capitalism, effectively creating an oligarchy just like in the bad old days.

But how would an implosion occur? There's good money that says that the worse things get, the more China is going to be looking for somebody else to get into a tangle with -- what better way to keep people's attention elsewhere. The blame has to go somewhere, and it can't be the leadership. There's an easy case to be made that China could blame it's impeding implosion on lack of cheap resources, favored-trading status of Taiwan, Japanese hegemony, United States imperialism -- pick your bad guy. In a pressure cooker the steam has to go somewhere.

That's the worry.
Right brained here, apparently.
Wow, can somebody please send a copy of that engadget reader comments section to the museum of internet history? I don't want it to be lost to future anthropologists :-)
Let's make this worldwide!
i just updated...thnx
Oddly enough, I find that I don't pay too much attention to who writes what. The size and color of the usernames, combined with the fact that they're rarely capitalized, means that I usually take note of names only as an afterthought.
I don't know. I signed in and was...unexcited.
That's a big task. Photoshop? What about Premiere the video editing software? Do those really make sense as web apps?

Of course it would be neat if they could sell you bursts of processing power from huge servers somewhere. That would be an improvement over desktop versions.
ReadWriteWeb predicts bubble yearly since 2004
Should help with piracy problems also.
What Do You think About RPN (Reverse Polish Notation)
I really love it.
List of Web2.0 Softwares
If you are looking for a list of Web 2.0 softwares, this list is a good one. I used it to look for softwares that i can use for building my own app. Collaborating with other web 2.0 startups is good in that you can concentrate on your core functionality. Ofcourse you have to do some testing before using.
And organic chemistry isn't hard?

Programming is a profession. Professions are hard. That's what makes them professions.

If it was easy, then people would just do it as part of other activities, and there would be no specialization worth of the title profession. We don't think of typing in URLs as a profession, or spell checking documents, but we do think of graphic design or architecture as professions.

Programmers are operating close to the limit of human capability, just as other professionals are. Only a few people can do it well because it's a talent which is unequally distributed, just like being able to draw.

As for why this particular activity pushes that limit? The hardest part of programming is building mental models of non-existent objects which have no natural analogs. It's dealing with the "virtual."
Eh. I have a mild preference for RPN calculators over infix ones, just because it makes it a little easier to keep track of what I'm entering on calculators whose displays are just one row of seven-segment numerals. On computers or on nicer calculators I couldn't care less. I'm equally comfortable with prefix, infix, and postfix and can easily transpose between notations in my head.
This kind of thing will never happen -- successfully(!) -- the general trust level in the web is declining continuously...
I think there are two different questions. One is how we're going to pay for software and the other is how software is going to be made available and kept up to date technically. Regarding the latter, it doesn't look like there will be that binary choice between web and desktop for 10 more years so I'm not sure what exactly Adobe is going to drop. Local storage? Access to USB devices? I don't think so. It will become a matter of interpretation by marketing folks whether a particular application is called a web app or a desktop app. I mean that's what AIR is all about, isn't it?
right.. sorry maybe this should be rephrased as unofficial poll from the submitters.
Another company made similar comments some time ago. Some also-ran called Sun with something called Java VM. But I guess it's different this time. Obviously AIR is soooo much better.
The fifth paragraph made me think. What if Google, Yahoo or Microsoft started a social network based on the addresses in their webmail apps? It would instantly be bigger than Facebook.
The Motivation Behind the Anti-Google Copyright Protection Coalition
A year after Wired buyout, Reddit founders drink heavily
Valleywag title of the year?

Alexis's post on the party: http://reddit.blogspot.com/2007/10/valleywag-mocks-reddit-sf...
I think a lot of future apps will not be web-only nor desktop-only but an hybrid: Desktop apps using the Internet for collaboration and as a source of information.

Like Google Earth but developed with portability in mind.
that image is cool and freaky. it keeps switching on me. i think it has to depend on what side of the brain you are using when you looking at the image.
Some Mental Traps in Learning Ruby
Neat illusion, but I wonder: is the whole left/right brain dominance idea still considered valid by neuroscientists? I thought it was debunked.
Debugger in Ruby not needed, debugger in Smalltalk essential?
I discovered that you can easily switch the rotation by:

A. Covering almost all the image and focusing only in the lower feet.

- or -

B. Closing your eyes and trying to picture it rotating in the opposite direction. And then opening your eyes.
Thanks for the pointer, man.

Suddenly, getting a PS3 got a lot more interesting.
Either I'm so thoroughly one-side-brained that I can't comprehend any other perspective, or we're all simply getting confused over semantics. I see the woman turning to her right. Does anyone see otherwise? Whether you call that clockwise or counter-clockwise just depends upon whether you define the ceiling or the floor as the point of reference.
It's basically just badly rendered -- they have removed all depth clues (lighting obviously, but they've also used flat projection instead of perspective). Your brain fills it in by basically picking which side is in front. That in turn determines the direction you see it rotating.

It's completely random, and has nothing to do with left or right brain dominance; it's even easy to force it to switch to the other direction.
hp 12c w/rpn = best finance calc ever

too bad i only know how to use 1/2 of it's functionality.
Memory randomization (ASLR) coming to Mac OS X Leopard
The pictures compare form-factor, which effectively says: "n810 is as portable as an iPhone".
Study: iPhone already nibbling away at Motorola's lead
thanks for the update - email is in the app but I had not updated my profile. philtulju / philtulju@gmail.com
Ballmer: Microsoft Buying in Startup Range ($50 million to $1 billion)
Obviously size isn't the only thing that matters. That graph in the middle of the article is a pretty sick demonstration that MySpace is dominating this game. And yet, nobody's trying to buy it off of News Corp. Valleywag's claimed that Rupert Murdoch is a lot more excited about Facebook than his own purchase. As is the rest of Silicon Valley, hence the valuations that have nothing to do with the user numbers. Or the yearly revenue...

The thing that is most similar between (post-IPO) Google and Facebook is the immense, almost unbelievably universal goodwill held about the company by the public. Goodwill's not actually worth much money in and of itself, but if the entire world wants Facebook to make money, it eventually will. Let's hope that happens before the users leave.
This is where Adobe AIR and MSFT Siverlight come in
Please avoid long one-liners in code blocks. It forces all of us to scroll left and right to read the rest of the page.
The best thing that could happen to us if they end up like Japan. Japan was buying everything in sight, then there banking system collapsed from all of the bad loans (worse then our housing market I suppose) and they have yet to recover. I know China is making bad loans, we can only hope they collapse because they are eating our lunch right now, in fact we are giving them our lunch they don't even have to take it.
Banking So Advanced - Security holes in a banking sw
I have not yet received an email from YC but I did just get an email from Wal Mart to check out there latest 'Rollbacks'. So at least I have something to read for now.
The servers are slammed, but you can grab the release through torrents in about 30 minutes.

If you're updating, be sure to grab the alternate CD for your platform.

http://releases.ubuntu.com/7.10/
What if there is a cultural mismatch between the two companies?
My bad... Split into two lines, hopefully that helps.
Interesting research related to social sites: Manipulation resistant recommender systems (PDF)
An interesting paper on making recommender systems manipulation resistant by computing rater reputation (you reputation as a rater goes up if you could correctly predict whether the target will like recommended product, and vice versa).
It isn't really debunked. But this method of saying which side is "dominant" is. Each eye's information is sent to the opposite hemisphere (edit: as well as the corresponding hemisphere), so the idea is that if you see it moving left, your right hemisphere is processing the information first, then your left hemisphere.

But there is absolutely no conclusive evidence to suggest this is true, and to show these kinds of things on The Daily Telegraph is a pretty big disservice to teaching people about neuroscience, I think.

This doesn't mean there aren't differences in the hemispheres, but just that visual tricks like this are probably not accurate at all for determining hemisphere dominance (if such a thing exists).
His writing could very well be the inspiration that one of us needs to get to work his version of the future.
This has been linkjacked to oblivion. And I have not seen any compelling argument for right/left brainness based on viewing this image. It's merely an illusion that plays with your depth perception from lack of contrast and depth cues (motion parallax maybe, if you're so inclined).

I believe this is the original source of the image.
http://www.procreo.jp/labo/labo13.html
The author says nothing beyond it being a mysterious illusion.

The switching is as arbitrary as the coriolis effect. Try this thought experiment. Imagine instead of a woman, there was a perfect, black, sphere in the image. You couldn't tell if it was rotating at all. Now I add a protrusion to the "equator." Its length would vary in a sinusoidal fashion, and you could guess the ball is rotating, but still cannot reason it's direction. I can then successfully add protrusions such that it looks like a human and you wouldn't be able to tell; it's a simple lack of visual cues.

edit: my bad, not the coriolis effect. I was referring to the toilet-draining direction that is incorrectly attributed to the effect. The point is, given a little push in one direction, the water, or the image, would continue to rotate in that direction.
Sure they are.

If they can keep making quality products and get them in to the hands of even more people, why wouldn't they? It would only mean more profit for APPL.
How could there be less to it? It's a CRUD app.
So if it isn't the users and it isn't the revenue, then Facebook's insane valuations are the product of... hype?

Valuations aside, you're right in saying what really matters is monetization and this is where Google shines. I don't care how much information Facebook has about me, I don't go onto Facebook looking to buy things. I go there to see what's going on in my friends' lives. As the article states, ads on Facebook are an annoyance.

Google's in the right market for targeted ads because when we're looking to buy something, we're more open to advertisements and clicking on them. On Facebook, I'd guess that very few, if any, are looking to buy something (and hence Facebook's abysmal click-through rate).

Also, I can't see users leaving Facebook (eventually the time sunk into building connections just entrenches you into the network), but I hope it figures out something quickly, or these valuations might drop.
Well, I'm certainly not going to insult you, whether it's part of my argument or not.

I may not reply to your future comments though.
Yes, you should be able to get it to spin the other way. Usually for something like this to determine clockwise or counter-clockwise you imagine a clock superimposed over the image from above, with the observer looking down at the image and clock. Turning to her right would be clockwise.
Yeah, and what about upload speeds? Are people really going to upload gigs of DV's and .raw's to edit them? My upload speeds on a consumer broadband connection have not dramatically increased in the last 5 years.

To me web app replacements of desktop apps sometimes feel like a camping trip. You can survive just fine, but not comfortably. Esp if your app needs to talk to the GPU, iPhone or other devices...

That said invisible updates and implicit backups are great.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_nerve

Nerves of each eye are wired to both left and right brains. Hence there is no order of processing information based on which field of view it is presented in.

Curious discussion about hemispheric dominance; I never really thought about it. I guess a better term is "lateralization."
Business Model Gone Bad: Music and Movie Edition
An entertaining account of some similar research: http://youtube.com/watch?v=sHzdsFiBbFc
Feld Thoughts - CTO vs. VP of Engineering
22% of Canada uses Facebook.

The next 5:

Norway: 18.68%

UK: 10.58%

Sweden: 9.09%

Australia: 6.64%

United States: 6.57%

Those numbers are silly.

http://tinyurl.com/22jnu5
I don't think they are requiring them all to be run as web apps, but they are porting to their web/desktop platform, Flex as a sign of the power and flexability of the platform.
Microsoft's Ballmer: MSFT will acquire 20 companies a year
A forum isn't truely a forum until someone has posted spiders on drugs.
DataMapper, an ActiveRecord replacement where I am one of the coders,uses the same Person[1] syntax. Check it out sometime: http://datamapper.org/
Nope, just can't see it. Maybe it's related to my inability to see stereograms.
Wow, that was truly fascinating research.
Ask YC: check out our clock for YC countdown
http://static.foometer.com/countdown.html

We though it would be fun to have a meter to countdown the time until YC releases its decision for the 1st round picks. We are assuming it will be around 9 pm EST (6 pm PST). (We're extending it on a rolling basis :)

It's just been coded, so please give us your feedback. This is a really early "foometer" gadget, not the business we applied to YC for.
That's not an ad hominem attack.

Technically, perhaps, but it was name-calling. I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't do that.
Not selling is not an 'independence' strategy. It's just a gamble that your competition won't wipe you out before you get sold...
erm... why does it say 22 hours till the decisions are released?

:) Check your dates perhaps?

Edit: could also do without the sounds, but nice use of flash. I suck at flash/actionscript and should really put in some time to learn it.
Using "SimCity" gaming to grow a company and get everyone on the same page
Either that, or a gamble that your business model is capable of producing... gasp... profits.
Great, so my TCP/IP drops while I'm editing my wedding video and I have to wait for it to go back up.

"Broadband, as quick as it gets, is still going to have some limitations in the short term,"

Which indicates they're gambling (heavily) on broadband speeds going through the roof, so those gigs take a minute to upload.

Further, it says people aren't paying $400 for an application anymore.

In other words, they're going to see a heavy revenue hit soon, a revenue timebomb, and I see their stock price halving.

I don't own any stock, etc, etc disclaimers.
I know you guys are excited about applying and receiving a decision, as I was when I applied last cycle, but if anything, your over investment in this application process will probably result in you taking rejection a lot more personally than you should be, which could ultimately result in you not continuing your projects.

The clock is ok. :P
Thanks for the reminder, didn't realize that was there to fill in.
The most insightful text on the linked page is the first (currently only) comment: this is unnecessary and confusing.

In fact, this is one of the "features" of Ruby that I hate -- it's frequently difficult to know what a particular piece of code does, because the Ruby community's golly-gee fascination with interfaces and dynamic mixins tends to lead to inconsistent behavior in different contexts.

The idea of separating interface and implementation is not new. Even us crusty, abused C++ programmers can override the bracket operator; we just happen to believe that overriding that operator in a way that leads to unexpected behaviour for particular subscript values is a Bad Idea.

The principle of least surprise is an important one in programming; I wish that more people would obey it as a law.
That's true, but there is lateralization of the functions of vision. And the speed of processing is the argument that I've heard used by people to describe these visual phenomena.
The iPhone will be hackable too, come Feb.
This has been available for Linux since 2001. http://pax.grsecurity.net/
i just ran across this accidentally on Google, if it has been posted in the past and everyone has seen it I apologize
Thanks!

I can't vote your article up or down until I read the associated PDF, but I look forward to reading it this evening. It's definitely a topic that's important and interesting to me. I appreciate your locating it for the group.
"The switching is as arbitrary as the coriolis effect" - Why is the coriolis effect arbitrary? I believe there are equations that predict both the magnitude and the direction of deflection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect
Yes, that's the other case.
I just updated also. Thanks again.
Oops.. UTC issue that might be resolved now. Yeah, the sound controls and other features are next.
now it show less than 2 hours :)
Using the 24 countdown sound made this awesome. 24 ftw.
While rejection would sting, we already have a gameplan if we get a rejection. The basic system for the clock, though, is just my early attempt at learning AS3 and how traditional Flash timeline-based stuff works with the OO world. It'll be an alternative to the word meters I offer over here:
http://writertopia.com/toolbox/meters

This "holometer" is for sci-fi writers. There will be a more static one for fantasy writers. I'll let people enter progress into the widget, and the data will be stored on S3 or an alternative I'm looking at. The sound and other animation will be optional and users can embed the system in their profile or web page to show others their progress.
updated, thankyou.
"... You're missing a word. ..."

My thoughts exactly except you also missed a word,,,, Prior Prevention Planning Prevents (P!ss Poor) Performance
My comment was aimed at the applicants in general. :P
Keep dreaming kid!
Updated. It might not be a bad idea to add that to the application process. I'm sure there are people that won't see this message.
Dying to get that job? Don't use a video resume
... queue bandwagon backlash
In case you missed it, you can find Aleksey Vayner's (serious!) video resume here:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=J7pok0TKDU8
Bruce Chizen is the CEO so I was curious to see if they have the technology to do this. Then I remembered AIR ~ http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/devt/FE2043E499460693CC2...

"... AIR is a runtime program that allows developers to create cross-platform desktop applications with the same technologies they use for building web-based applications, such as HTML, AJAX and Flash. At the Adobe MAX 2007 user conference in Chicago on Monday, executives confirmed AIR's importance to the company's long-term strategy ..."

So it is technically possible, How will it effect the bottom line? Who knows. Many companies have stumbled when changing programming paradigms ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm
Ask News.YC:  Best Online Incorporation Service?
What has anyone used, what have your experiences been? What are the best? LegalZoom? Active Filings? The Delaware Company? Something else?

I just need a quick Delaware LLC setup.
"... The iPhone comparisons make me laugh since the N810 is not a phone! ..."

Agreed. When I started looking at N800 tablets the connectivity meant that it was useful in areas with WiFi hot spots. Pretty useless for COMMs. The N810 makes a good computer alternative, but it's no phone substitute.
It would make sense if their future creative tools use AIR, which is similar to Microsoft's Silverlight. You'd be able to operate on local files and the programs would still work even if you lost your net connection.
Debating The Year of Living Biblically
We're going out for drinks tonight, especially if we do NOT get selected. We're determined to celebrate either way. :-)
Validation.

http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
Ah, yes, you need XGL, ATI does not yet support AIGLX (or the other way around). XGL works great in Gutsy, it installs easily (apt-get xserver-xgl). The problem is that OpenGL doesn't seem to work under Xgl so you either get 3D apps or a 3D desktop for now. Wait a little longer. I'd like to get off Xgl as well since it's not very stable yet.