skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't be turned off by the fact that this is geared towards kids more than adults:

http://hacketyhack.net/

It's a pretty decent introduction to Ruby.
Since you're in CS and EE I would recommend gnu radio http://gnuradio.org/trac which includes both.
When I started coding I found a book that spoke to me -- This is very important because if you get a book you don't like or understand you will not want to learn from it.

And I tend to agree you should probably not start with PHP as your first language. I did, and now all I do is Python and Ruby which are significantly better, imho.
Crisis or no, a decent housing search would be a goldmine. The problem is doing it with Realtors stranglehold on the MLS database.

MLS is like Google... if a house isn't listed on MLS, it might as well not exist.
>Someone who thinks that they can sell it to a bigger sucker

That's usually where the ethics thing comes into play for some of us.
The reason I picked PHP, is that so many open source web stuff seems to be written in PHP and I want to be able to customize these apps (ex: joomla, wordpress, etc). But ultimately I just want to code without thinking and if python or ruby takes me there faster, so be it.
This makes sense! Think I will take the 3 days off between the Christmas and NYE holidays and do this! Thanks.
Here's as simply as I can put it:

I wish I would have taken this course as an undergrad.
users will resort to submitting stories that are either very sensationalistic or are 'funny', to appeal to the widest audience

If you replace the word 'users' with the words 'TV news' you also have a true statement.

It's a general problem with all things consumed in mass. The lowest common denominator is pretty low.
Inside the "Ron Paul" Spam Botnet
Know your Enemy: Tracking Botnets
How does making a deal with a country compensate the business owners for lost revenue? It's just bizarre that they would rather bribe other countries than allow money to come into their own country via legally-operated sites.

"Instead of rewriting its gambling laws, the U.S. rewrote its trade rules to remove the issue from the WTO's jurisdiction," writes Lorraine Woellert. "The prospect that other countries may take a similar tack if cases do not go their way has alarmed the international trade community."

Hey! No erasies!

Rewriting the rules after you already agreed to them... priceless.
Like so many other things in mathematics, I suspect it goes back to Euler (18th century). He invented the capital-sigma notation for sums, although I'm not sure what letters he used for his indices.

The use of x, y and z as unknown reals goes far as back as Descartes. I don't know what he used for integers though, or whether he bothered to distinguish integers from reals.
Madison, WI has a very active Buy-Owner site (http://www.fsbomadison.com/) that charges a few hundred dollars to list. It gets about 25% of the sales in the area (realtors and MLS have the other 75%). The sale prices end up being a few percentage points lower than realtor sales on average, but there's no sales commissions so it ends up being better for both buyer and seller. Best of all, it's run by one family basically out of their garage!
There is also "Learn to Program" by Chris Pine [http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/]. The book is an easy read, moves along well, and best of all, the entire book in one huge Ruby script, so you can dig in there after you are done reading the book for some real work examples...:D
Vista is proprietary. They can stick in a backdoor wherever they want. Wasn't there recently an issue with Windows Update ignoring your settings and updating itself anyway?

http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/security/0,39044215,62032221,0...

http://www.betanews.com/article/Experts_Astonished_to_Learn_...

Not to mention all the hidden metadata and undo information in your MS Word files. If you value privacy, using a proprietary OS (including OS X) is not the way to get it.
[Meg Whitman, eBay's chief executive] wasted $2.5 billion on Skype under the "I better do something to justify my existence plan." She could have bought the Kinko's chain for the EXACT same price. To the penny. What a coup that would have been. What a great combination of services and opportunities. Oops, FedEx bought it instead.

Wow. Word to MY mother.
"Macros: why they're evil"
I take it you've never used Objective-C and Cocoa.

Objective-C is a very dynamic language, especially among compiled languages. It was based on Smalltalk, the same language Python and Ruby were influenced by.

There is really very little room for JavaScript to improve upon Objective-C.
Voting Bot War at Reddit?
"Once I figured it out, it was great, but I was beat. Is there a better way to learn programming?"

No. You found it.
The Advantages Of A Local VC
When you are selecting VCs to target in your first fundraising process their office location(s) should be a key consideration.

VCs that you expect to serve as your...
An Engineer's Christmas
If I may over-generalize, yours is the "city" opinion, and the OP is the "rural" opinion. There were a lot more risky loans made for cynical profit in the cities, but in rural areas, you tend to hear more sad stories about destitute grandmothers and orphans.

I feel badly for the working people who are going to be ruined by the sub-prime crash. Yes, they should have known better than to take such stupid loans, but the OP's analogy to a used-car salesman is a good one: if it weren't for consumer protection laws, there would be a lot more people who get screwed by unethical car scams. The real-estate "industry" needs more consumer protection laws.

That said, I'm severely annoyed that the smug, get-rich-quick mentality that has been promoted by agents and "investors" in the cities might be rewarded with a government bailout. For the last three years, I've watched people in Seattle (among other places), go insane with speculative greed. I've been told that real-estate never declines in value, that renters are of a lower caste, and that anyone who didn't buy into the bubble would be priced out of the market forever (a statement which is transparently mathematically ridiculous).

The number of "talking haircuts" driving around in leased Mercedes and BMWs has skyrocketed; the perception of wealth is at an all-time high. Meanwhile, landlords are evicting low-income tenants from apartments (to capitalize on the bubble with sketchy condo conversions), raising rents, and using market forces to otherwise screw people who can't stomach the idea of paying 3-4 times as much to "own" a property as to rent one. As far as I'm concerned, our society will be better off if this latter class of people go bankrupt -- if not to jail.

But I still feel for the grandmothers and orphans.
The Io Programming language could use a nice web framework (or web server). Have a look at Io, it is a very dynamic, fun language to work in:

http://iolanguage.com/about/
Chris Alden of Six apart on open sourcing Movable Type and the LiveJournal sale
Nice idea, but a pity that they couldn't just buy an intelligent power switch that was IP addressable. That's how I manage the worst case scenario for my servers.
Javascript is simpler - but more importantly, much more popular than Objective-C. It's also garbage collected, a feature that Objective-C may also have these days, but not when I last used it a couple of years ago.
Ask YC:  Detecting hidden meaning in online discussions (e.g., detecting sarcasm)
How would you do it?

Also, what about context? For example, if someone insults you, should you take the insult seriously? Or does this person insult many people?
That's really interesting. I don't really ever think about the fact that all this 'social media' could mainly be determined by bots.
Toshiba makes a personal Nuclear Reactor. Available in the US 2009
Perhaps zipcar or similar would be a better solution?
I think you're wrong :)

"Jiggy" is a native iPhone app that hosts these little Jiggy apps, which are written in JavaScript but have nothing to do with HTML/CSS. The site talks about "Jigglins" which are written in Objective-C and add functionality to Jiggy, like the one they wrote that exposes part of UIKit (the iPhone's GUI API).

So you need these little Jigglins wrappers for every Cocoa API you want to use. They do mention a code generator that I assume is for this purpose though. I assume that's how PyObjC and RubyCocoa do it to.

All in all, this is an interesting idea, and it might be nice for simple apps and experimenting. But I've written some iPhone apps, and I can tell you this just doesn't seem worth the trouble. I did try installing it, and it seg faulted, so I gave up. We'll see once it matures a bit, but by then Apple's iPhone SDK will most likely be out (hopefully with Objective-C 2.0's garbage collection).
GameClay, online casual game creation.

Tractability: Low

Obviousness: Very high

Deepness: Medium

Wideness: High

Discoverability: Very high

Monetizability: Low
Sure, but I still don't really know what you're talking about. You're talking about a GWT widget?
Why is it that no matter whose "fault" it was, the taxpayer is the one who ends up penalized?
Thanks, that's the kind of comment I was afraid of :) ...my mind is now pretty much made up.
There is only one way. You need to pick a problem and then try to solve it. The problem needs to have depth and should require some gumption on your part.

Unfortunately, days when you try and solve one problem for a long time can be common. When you think you are getting into something like that you need to take a 5 minute quite break. Something that gives your concious brain quite time, I find ideas and answers flood in then.
uncov: Are online office suites/apps doomed?
And ghost accounts. (I recall both YouTube and reddit founders mentioned that in the early days they had many accounts to keep the discussion and make an impression there's a lot of people)

EDIT: I'd also add that the whole thing looks a bit scammy when you also take into account that site owners make money on users' content. So, to sum up, bots and ghost accounts provoke to sign up and provide content, which is monetized by the site owners then.
Stand on the shoulders of giants, e.g. use and study good code.
A great story - I even felt a bit of compassion for the poor old serverbot sitting in the corner when it was neglected and no longer needed.
Evocative Names
Web Dictionary 2.0 - with speech, very cool
Dr. Mobile: Using a Cell Phone to Measure and Send Your Vital Signs to Nurses
LG and a team of Canadian researchers are working on a gadget that lets patients send vital signs to doctors via cell phones.
Busy: Makes the boss happy. Productive: Makes the client happy.
The term you're looking for is 'sockpuppet'.
There are laws against predatory lending which are intended to protect consumers from lenders trying to take advantage of them. Obviously, they aren't good enough. In my opinion, the real problem is that lenders should never be able to profit if the consumer defaults on the loan. Without the mortgage brokers and hedge funds on the back-end buying the debt from the banks, the banks would be much less likely to issue bad loans, because they would end up getting royally shafted if the purchaser defaulted and they still "owned" the debt.
This is a like a Great Hacker claiming that open source is killing the art of writing software.

Anyway...artistic talent transcends the tools, and a sea of garbage photography should make the truly excellent art stand out even more.
Indeed.

http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/public/press_releases/2005/211008.h...

From the first page of the DOJ complaint:

"The Department of Justice's Antitrust Division today filed a lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors (NAR), challenging a policy that obstructs real estate brokers who use innovative Internet-based tools to offer better services and lower costs to consumers. The Department said that NAR's policy prevents consumers from receiving the full benefits of competition and threatens to lock in outmoded business models and discourage discounting."

Isn't it interesting to note that in this instance, it does not specify whether the 'consumers' of the broker are considered agents or the actual homebuyers themselves? Most brokers don't deal with the little people (the little people being the homebuyers themselves) . . . they run shops which employ agents who compete with each other (e.g. artificially inflating property valuations).

In this wikipedia article on the MLS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_Listing_Service):

''A person selling his/her own property - acting as a For Sale By Owner (or FSBO) - cannot put a listing for the home directly into the MLS. ''

So. . . a decent housing search tool aimed at people who want to sell FSBO to people who are not agents themselves and who don't have buyers' agents would probably go over quite well.

The main challenge here would still be that evil Realtor stranglehold . . . keeping the agents away from the FSBOs.
There are ways around the syntactic capture issue, but they're very rare.

This is like saying there are ways to avoid an index going off the end of an array, but they're rare. You avoid it by checking the length of the array.

Unintentional variable capture is simply a bug. The only reason it even seems to people that they need a "way around" it is that they don't really understand what macros do.
Useful Google feature: better date search
""" To Raikes, Google's challenge is an attack on Microsoft that is both misguided and arrogant. "The focus is on competitive self-interest; it's on trying to undermine Microsoft, rather than what customers want to do," said Raikes. In other words, he believes that Google is launching an attack for the sake of sabotaging Microsoft, rather than addressing the needs of consumers and what they actually want. """

HYPOCRISY!!!
Simplified GTD
If you believe Microsoft is a force for evil, then doing something to undermine them would be in customers' interest.
More Mac Vulnerabilities Than Windows In 2007?
$8,000-per-gallon printer ink leads to antitrust lawsuit
2007's top five websites
Pretty much all of the submissions from this site are linkbait attached to fluff.
I think the route to success with programming is much like maths, medicine or indeed any discipline, go for breadth first then depth. Don't spend all your time mastering one aspect, try to learn many different things at once even if you are actually only interested one specific thing. Once you have even just basic knowledge and familiarity with most facets of a field then you will be better equipped to approach any specialization.

So in your case its fine to learn PHP but I would encourage you to look at many different things that are unlike or even the antithesis of PHP. It will help you understand where general computing nomenclature comes from, what the limits of your chosen technology are, how best to implement it in a given environment and ultimately it will give you a much better understanding of the technology itself.
Playful Programming
http://books.google.com/books?id=HMvf12TnJQIC&pg=PA381&#...
A Common Lisp web startup test-case, two years after the Reddit switch
Think of it this way: learning a programming language is learning a completely arbitrary and made up language that is used to talk to a hunk of 80 million silicon switches and try to convince those switches to do something complicated. It's going to take a little while to learn that language.

When I first started studying CS at school, I thought that there was some secret knowledge that the true hackers had that allowed them to program without thinking about it. And alas, I must not have had the hacker gene because I worked at it and worked at it and worked at it until I solved a problem, only to move on to the next problem.

Then, it hit me: That's the secret knowledge. You just have to keep chipping away at it. Eventually you'll become good at it. There's no free ride; it's a lot of hard work.
This is really a tempest in a teacup. NSA influenced a NIST standard; MSFT implemented the NIST standard. Dual EC is not default behavior for Vista. There's no evidence of a deliberate backdoor, and most of the failure modes for crypto RNGs involve a threat model you don't care about: someone who can read/write memory from arbitrary processes or the kernel.
I've been a PHP developer for 6 years and I'm a ZCE. When possible I choose Python over PHP for web related things.

I think the main thing to accept is that if you're going to be coding then you're going to be thinking a lot. If you're not thinking and going on auto pilot then you don't know enough...
Do Both.
Y combinator (the function) in Ruby
Lisp has a bunch of functions that generate new symbols that are guaranteed never to have been seen before, but writing code that's completely safe, so that it never accidentally captures or shadows an existing variable is a very tricky skill.

Nonsense. The "skill" consists of calling one function (not a "bunch" of functions).

For me, the hardest part of learning how to write safe macros was trying to figure out why people kept saying it's so hard.
I agree it's a great book but IMO it's important to understand that modern AI is about:

1. Classification and Learning (aka is that apple ripe? or what's the best website for a given search?)

2. Modeling / Machine vision (Where are the rocks around this rover.)

3. Goal Seeking (AKA what's the best path from here to DC.)

With enough resources we can do any of the above fairly well. So using AI is more about understanding how to link the above activities to some useful problem. AKA control a rover when your ping is 15 min or solve a CAPTCHA.
A functional spreadsheet in 40 lines of code
Described and commented at http://www.nsl.com/papers/spreadsheet.htm.
I recommend throwing out the entire field of computers and starting from first principles. Let's put the Ermine back in determine and stop weaseling our way out of deterministic systems.
Providing public goods by profit seeking entrepreneurs.
Who needs the government since we have mathematics?

Also discussed on a canonical mailing list here http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-June/000783.html

"In the form he described in his paper, a dominant assurance contract is a contract offered by an escrow agent to members of the public; it is of the form, "In exchange for my payment of $S, if K or more people donate $S to this same cause, the escrow agent will create public good X (at cost $C), and keep all the donated money. If fewer than K people donate $S, the escrow agent will return $S + $F to each of the donors and will not create the public good."
Who needs the government since we have mathematics?

Also discussed on a canonical mailing list here http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-June/00...

"In the form he described in his paper, a dominant assurance contract is a contract offered by an escrow agent to members of the public; it is of the form, "In exchange for my payment of $S, if K or more people donate $S to this same cause, the escrow agent will create public good X (at cost $C), and keep all the donated money. If fewer than K people donate $S, the escrow agent will return $S + $F to each of the donors and will not create the public good."

Edit: Designing a mechanism that works for new unproven products, too, is left as an excercise for the reader.
I took both classes - logic last semester, networking this semester.

For CS work, networking definitely a better idea - it's very important to understand how the things you're building on top of work, and it's not all as simple/intuitive as it seems.

Math logic, on the other hand, is enough fun that with a little curiosity, you should have no problem learning everything on your own.
Creative Commons launches CC+; License with some rights commercially available
Perhaps we should strive for the greatest common divisor?
Ask N.YC: What is the best way to research patentable ideas?
I've been thinking about a new idea for a couple of hours today. As is often the case, I got side tracked by another idea, and I think it may be novel and patentable.

How have you researched ideas you thought were patentable to determine whether or not you should step it up and talk to an IP lawyer?
Plus, the fact that javascript is garbage collected doesn't mean that jiggy is. If they are really just calling out to objective-c libraries, than either they are doing their own really tricky memory management, or they'll have to force it up to javascript.
40 lines of the most unreadable code ever...
The persai blog was really helpfull, its great to find other people dealing with this idea of natural language parseing , that aren't phd students.
Javascript's also a hell of a lot more popular than ruby, haskel, lisp, <insert your favorite dynamic language here>, etc. But nobody here is saying "Let's give up ruby and switch to Javascript!" Popularity is not everything.

(It's also worth noting that Objective-C itself may well be as popular, or more so, than most of those same languages. It is, of course, a difficult thing to measure, but there is some evidence to suggest its at least more popular than languages like Lisp)
Hard working lobbies?
"not to mention not having to deal with stuff like pointers or waiting for Apple's SDK to come out"

Well, you don't have to wait, as evidenced by every iPhone app, Jiggy included.

And since when did garbage collection mean not having to deal with pointers? Not having to deal with memory management is not the same thing. In Java, everything is basically a pointer.
I have a client whose background process crashes once or twice a month (thank you Windows). The management dashboard checks a data base and includes a warning message if the process hasn't run in the past hour. Since "someone" checks the dashboard every 5 minutes or so anyway, action can be taken to restart the background process.

But what if, for some reason, no one checks the management dashboard for hours? I was recently asked if there was a better way. "You have 2 options, either (a) upgrade to Unix and reboot once a year whether you need to or not, or (b) run a background process to see if the background process is still running." We're not spending any money on (a), so I guess it's (b).

Now I need a PHB dashboard for "someone" to check every 5 minutes to see if the background process that checks the background process is still running.
But not "Wang Wordprocessor" or "gopher technology"?

It's difficult to predict the exact form it will take.
I do not want to wait five billion years.
"Budget Freeze", remember?

Embrace your constraints :-)
Thanks for the link. Looks fairly well written. The author sure seems like he's given quite a bit back. I will check it out.

Now for the really stupid question from a php programmer...

In one or two sentences (no language wars please), WHY should I consider Python over php?
I had no idea that spamming operations were that organized.
Ad-hoc robotics! :-D
Here's the real issue:

How many people are employed by power companies and their related organizations? Thousands? Hundreds of Thousands? Millions? My guess is millions at least.

When all those people lose their jobs because everyone has their own power plant in their basement, it's going to make the depression look like a bull market!

This is the true cost of our way of life that most environmentalists have trouble admitting. The scale of change required would be revolutionary. It will hurt.
Maybe its premature optimization, but: what happens when the fuel is consumed? All the reactor must be dumped or it is enough with the fuel?

I hope the owners never have to call the helpdesk!
But then you will need people to setup the new reactor, you will need salesmen, you will need technicians to run revisions. Probably not all places will be safer enough to hold a nuclear reactor, so probably the traditional grid will be still necessary... Think of it like a distributed power plant with a grid which still needs maintenance.
Why Self-Delusion Can Help You Succeedd