skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would strongly dissuade you from ending your formal education at this time. That said, your career accomplishments qualify you as 'child prodigy' in the eyes of college admissions counsellors, on the one hand, and successfully graduating with C's / D's will if anything hurt your case.

Get your GED. Find a good, large community college at 16, and begin there on a part-time schedule, perhaps 12 credits a year instead of the normal 24-36. Get straight A's or don't bother. Now, at any time in your progress towards a "2-year degree" (including after graduation), you can transfer out to a big-name university and have most of your classes count. You have an academic track record that shows you can successfully study, and an extracurricular that outweighs anyone else's. It enables you to focus your learning, remove yourself from the often harsh social environment of high school, and put off the decision about whether you'll begin a traditional college experience for years, and still be ahead of the game age-wise and credibility-wise.

There is a reasonable chance that your business will fail entirely, or be sold profitably in the next five years, and this route provides you with long-lived options, without wasting the time you're wasting now.
Its origins are in an essay by Dijkstra from 1968 called "Go To Statement Considered Harmful"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful

Plus it's a quick way to write a pithy link-bait title (not commenting on the OP, but in general)

edit Actually according to Wikipedia Dijkstra's original title was different, and Niklaus Wirth changed it. I didn't know that, funny little bit of history.
I'm in the same boat. I'm not very good but I'm starting to get better at design. Here are some tips, which might be useful. None of these are affiliate links and I'm not associated with any of them, if that matters.

- It's cliche, but read "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman [1]. It gives you a good sense of design's place in the greater world. The best design principles are as at home in a product development firm as they are in the software world.

- I own "Design for Hackers" by David Kadavy and I think it's pretty good. The content may or may not be "obvious" depending on your skill level, but he phrases things in a way that is understandable and reassuring to the engineering set. [2]

- There's a guy on HN (Jarrod Drysdale) who produced an eBook called "Bootstrapping Design". I haven't pulled the trigger on a purchase yet, but I need to. I've read his sample chapter and am subscribed to his newsletter and I think he's an excellent coach. [3]

- I keep a bookmark folder called "design inspiration" and when I find really cool sites or apps I save them here. You might also want to keep a clipping diary or something where you can keep notes for yourself about what you like and don't like about certain things.

- There's nothing wrong with imitation, within reason. EVERYONE stands on the shoulders of giants and the guy who designed that awesome site or app probably started by shamelessly copying existing stuff. In fact, I recommend that you spend some time trying to EXACTLY copy things you like. You'll start to get a feel for how to accomplish certain affects and, in general, you'll get design a little more "in the fingers".

- http://ux.stackexchange.com/

- Have a project. Have a project. HAVE A PROJECT. It's very difficult to just "learn design", just as it's very difficult to just "learn programming". Unless you're just a natural autodidact, you can read all the tutorials and books and whatever but, when it comes time to do something on your own, you'll just be sitting there staring at a blinking cursor (or an empty Photoshop document) unless you have some place to start.

I hope this all helps, and don't be afraid to share stuff on HN with us. There are plenty of folks who would love to give you positive criticism and feedback.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Bea...

[3] http://bootstrappingdesign.com/
Working in the aerospace industry for a number of years, I've seen and created all types of crazy spreadsheets to design aircraft and ensure they are safe to fly.

The good thing about the engineering industry though is that all those spreadsheets get checked by someone more senior than you.

The problem is though, thanks to the increased usage of finite element analysis and more detailed models, the amount of data being pushed around in spreadsheets has grown exponentially.

Far beyond the ability of someone to reasonably check it all.
I personally am not fan of Excel, even though you can do a lot in it, I prefer other programming languages. But I can see its huge popularity among the "cool" office workers. Learning the functions in Excel its pretty easy and powerful at the same time.

Take my uncle for example. He is mediocre office worker, selling lawn-mowers for living. He took the time and learned some advance excel functions and created few cool spreadsheets for his office, and everyone loves it. His reputation grown a lot with bosses and e is known as the guy with solutions.
Smart TVs have a serious communication problem
Thanks for your reply and your thoughts on the different frameworks.

Totally agree about giving better options to dev quickly in java too. There are so many times when I just end up using python to dev quickly and make a proof of concept web api and then when I have to interface with JVM systems, I end up writing thrift interfaces to keep my original python code around and to allow me to do quick changes to the api.

I tried dropwizard and it really makes it easy to write a webapi and is really fast. With that said, I will play with Micro very soon and let you know how it went.
Wouldn't it be better if the return is just a list of either the result (in the case that the value of a KV pair matches), or a reference to the result (in the case that the key of a KV pair matches)?
You cannot share your source code in a way that those who matter to you can modify and run, without them paying the price too. Including your future self.
This is a thing because it is an allusion to Edsger Dijkstra's letter “Go To Statement Considered Harmful”. See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful . Evidently it predates that letter, but its pervasion in computing blog posts and such is probably due to the relation to Dijkstra's article/letter.
Suicide Is Not A Choice
Tim Felgentreff did some cool work on remote debugging with MagLev. The video is pretty sick:
http://blog.bithug.org/2011/09/maglev-debug
I think danso's problem would also be solved by showing them pivot tables in Excel.
You don't have to ask your readers to subscribe to a service at all! Again, it's just a button :) There is not even a web app running on the back. Only some Javascript and the use of your localStorage.

It's integrated on a couple sites like: http://andraz.wpengine.com/ check it out to see how easy it is to use.
I make a good living replacing Excel for small businesses.
They are editable for me. I tried it in Google Chrome 24.0.1312.69 and Chromium 24.0.1312.5. Both on Linux.

Which version do you have?
I haven't try Chef yet, but it seems like it has some advantages, I should give it a try!
Medicine is essential for society as well. Would you like to take it out of the hands of the mega corporations as well? Who exactly would be making the new drugs? And don't say the gov't. They gov't's track record of producing new drugs is negligible. Gov't funding contributing to new drugs? Yes, of course. But gov't funding playing a major role in putting a new drug in a patient? Minimal.
Another approach to this type of thing worth checking out is Dan Ingall's Lively Kernel http://lively-kernel.org/
Haven't tried on this machine specifically, but never noticed much lag as a result of running from USB on others. There is a USB3 port on the back if you're concerned about performance (just remember this is a $250 ARM laptop, not a MacBook Pro).
AFAIK, there's no plan to implement this.

You could however, make the modifications and submit them to PG to include on the site instead of waiting for someone else to do it. You'll need to download Arc (http://arclanguage.org/) -- the code which runs HN is a tweaked version of 'news.arc'.

There's also an Arc fork on GitHub: https://github.com/nex3/arc

Up-to-date directions for setting up Arc can be found on the Arc wiki: https://sites.google.com/site/arclanguagewiki/
If the application is blocked, can the author please openSource the script? If everyone starts using the script, I believe it will be quite impossible for CL to block it.
Is it fair to repost a comment from the original article? That's what I've done here:

Who exactly do you think you are talking to? I work in a call center and had a meeting where if we didn't work more efficiently and faster we would be determined "burnt out" and let go. We're temps so the ax is over our heads at all times anyway and it only pays $12 an hour. Vacation, what a laugh.

If you had been talking to say decision makers about how workers are treated that would have been something. Instead, your article is about how decision makers should treat, wait for it, themselves, with no consideration of whom they supervise.

Workers have become treated like machines and have little choice. Your privileged point of view is out of focus on the lives of most Americans today.
Absolutely agree. Stopped reading after this:

"However, anecdotally, it seems that people are upgrading their iPhones and iPads in longer cycles."

The entire article is based on personal observation. This is has very little to do with the wider market.
Have you heard a bunch of people recite the phrase "Good programmers don't care about money" ?

Turns out, it isn't a perfect description of reality.
They should really be encouraging this instead:

rel="http://relogo.org/"

Given RFC 5988, link relations that are not yet standard should be URIs. This one is a great example of why: if you don't know what the rel means, you can de-reference it and get documentation.
Panko has a paper here (http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/My%20Publications/Whatknow.h...) which mentions it in the Introduction to Errors section, under the "consistent with other human error data" section.

> Consistent with Other Human Error Data

> When most people look at Tables 1 2, and 3, their first reaction is that such high error rates are impossible. In fact, they are not only possible. They are entirely consistent with data on human error rates from other work domains. The Human Error Website (Panko, 2005a) presents data from a number of empirical studies. Broadly speaking, when humans do simple mechanical tasks, such as typing, they make undetected errors in about 0.5% of all actions. When they do more complex logical activities, such as writing programs, the error rate rises to about 5%. These are not hard and fast numbers, because how finely one defines reported "action" will affect the error rate. However, the logical tasks used in these studies generally had about the same scope as the creation of a formula in a spreadsheet.

He has cites at his website too.

(http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/ssr/)
Interesting distinction between worker and decision maker.
Because, as I said "there is a psychological, emotional or social cost in having some people much worse off than others". In order to invoke Pareto optimality you must define utility functions and you can justify essentially any policy by omitting costs and externalities in those functions.
IMO, Understanding Big O helps you avoid doing stupid stuff like O(n!) where the problem can grow faster than your ability to purchase hardware to keep up. But you probably know when you are writing code like this intuitively.

If you have very performance critical code you probably have some sort of range of inputs in mind. In which case it's more practical to just do benchmarking and statistical based evaluation.
For a few years I was righteously indignant about the gender issues involved but now it's just trite

Why should anyone's opinion matter except for Lenna's own? You are complaining about an uncoerced act.

For reference: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/lenna.shtml
there’s no easy way to test spreadsheets

Sure there is... you set up a spreadsheet with a known test data set, and make sure your formulas compute the expected results. Just like testing any other software.
I don't see an option for email, browser add-on/extension etc (by browser addon, I mean to suggest the type of alerts you get in Gmail when you have that extension installed). The service is simply providing one relatively known service and rest the unknowns (again, looking at it from common-denominator average perspective).
http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

30. Startups for startups. The increasing number of
startups is itself an opportunity for startups. We're one;
TechCrunch is another. What other new things can you do?
Looks more mature than JSDB.io - particularly with the larger collection of libraries and tagging system etc. But honestly your site is cluttered and ugly, JSDB is winning there. A twitter feed, really? I think your site needs some clear direction. Just saying.
So you want your live editing beeing persistent? What about testing?
I think you should first write a test that fails before attempting to fix it...
I absolutely agree that suicides would decline for a period of time, since guns are the first thought for most men considering suicide. However, once it is no longer the primary way of suicide, something else would replace it. In Japan, the first thought for most men is not a gun, but a train.
Yeah, that's a good idea. Craigslist basically blocked any connections from Google App Engine to their domain. But, if you ran the site from your own computer, they wouldn't really have any way to block it.
I don't get this post.

O notation specifies the asymptotic behavior of (mathematical) functions. e.g. sqrt(n) = O(n/log(n))

In order to use O notation to describe the performance of an algorithm, one must specify 1. What is being measured and 2. What is the class of inputs.
The author is not complying with their own requirements:

> Pattern matching and polymorphism is not allowed

Using dynamic dispatch on different functions of type Int -> Int is, precisely, polymorphism. Doesn't look much like the OO polymorphism that some people are used to, but FP folks use this kind of functional polymorphism all the time.

That being said, the main premise of the article is quite valuable: yes, you can program with no conditionals. And i think it's quite useful to know that polymorphism can be used like that without suffering too much of an unfriendly syntax (see lmm's comment on Smalltalk: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5198419).

Finally, although pattern matching can be seen as an overpowered if-statement, the relation can be also turned around: the if-statement is a special case of pattern matching. I won't say that pattern matching is not conditional statements, but i think it's also quite valuable to notice that you can use pattern matching as a new programming primitive instead of the if-statement. For example, the if-statement implemented in Haskell:

if :: Bool -> a -> a -> a
if True x _ = x
if False _ y = y

Relying only on pattern matching instead of conditional if-statements can make quite the difference on how one reasons about programming problems (e.g. Prolog and declarative programming in general).
sumifs || dsum an alternative too.
Chris Granger's Light Table is also trying to do it. Of course, Bret Victor's talk breathed new life into this whole thing. But everything old is new again.

People want to build software from a small kernel that scaffolds itself. They want to immediately switch between "testing the app" mode and "building the app" mode. They want something more than a text file, a tool pipeline, and an executable at the other end. On the other hand, they don't want their code to turn into an opaque binary blob that can't be diffed, can't be read by text tools, and can't be shared with people who don't feel like using your sweet "Invented on Principle" tool.

It feels like we're converging on the ideal solution, but it's happening more slowly than I think many of us predicted.
Snap is also worth a look:

http://snap.berkeley.edu/init

(it's a semi-port of MIT's Scratch language).
Yeah. That's a fail. Pretty much killed my afternoon.
Only specific questions:

“This question is protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site.”

It's basically like semi-protection on Wikipedia: things which have gotten a lot of attention can get lots of noise, so only more established users are allowed to add content.
There is a talk by James (the main developer of the LF key manager), from a recent linux conference in australia. http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/mp4/Making_UEF...
> With Chef you have to maintain additional services like CouchDB and RabbitMQ.

You can avoid those dependencies by using Chef Solo instead of Chef Server. In my opinion chef-solo is also a much easier way to learn Chef, so you can get the main concepts down before tackling chef-server.

But yes, Chef's dependencies are staggering. I once tried using an AWS micro instance for a Chef server, and it kept crashing because the system didn't have enough resources.
This is awesome. There is, no doubt, going to be a lot of haters complaining about how hmexx is taking advantage of techies/the terms are unfair/don't do it/etc.

But the reality is he/she is putting money where his/her mouth is, and making it happen. To come up with something completely new like this takes guts, and even moreso to follow through. The fact that ~300 proposals were submitted is evidence that demand exists for such a program.

Also interesting is the fact that 4 out of the 5 participants selected are located outside of the United States. We'll see if geographic distance becomes an issue. I've long thought YC is missing out on a lot of talented developers who may not have the freedom to drop everything and move to Mountain View.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the results!
big round of applause. you nailed it completely
It only makes sense if you talk about utility webapps (like twitter). Not everything is a webapp though. Wikipedia for example, is just a display of documents. Should it become a fancy webapp? I don't see much benefit in it.

The old page concept is plenty fine in many contexts IMO.
Law of Attraction Coaching
What is this “MOOC” you speak of?
New nanotech promises nothing will ever get wet — so how should it be used?
I am completely behind the longer-term upgrading of your phone. But only once you find your match.

I have changed over 8 phones in 2 years and it has been actually rather frustrating. It was at the time when smartphones were coming out. Of course , as a geek, I had to have one. It was nightmare. Displays were unresponsive, phones were freezing etc. I end up using old keyboard-standard nokia for few years.

About a year ago, I have been using Galaxy for few months. The experience was much better then my first phones, but still not perfect. And then I bough my dream phone. Many of you might not know it, but its called XiaoMi (小米). It is chinese phone, but not some chinese garbage it is well thought-trough phone, performance much better then newest galaxy and armed with android and MIUI on top. Peope say that Xiomi company is like apple in china. I have to say I have never been so happy with phone.

XiaoMi now released version two of their phone. The phone has everything that first version is missing, and I am very temped to buy it, but there is a bit of fear if the phone wil let me down the same way my first phones did. And i am so happy with my current phone, why would I change? Maybe in few years....
They probably don't even have to ask. They could A) steal MS's signing key. B) Find a security flaw in an already signed bootloader. C) Ask MS to sign a non-rootkit bootloader with a subtle security flaw.
What do you replace Excel with?
The cables were selectively published until the point that the encryption keys were disclosed. There was a front page story every week at least for several weeks.

Locations of radar installations have no political significance in themselves. Obviously where exactly the line should be drawn is up for debate but I see no one claiming the line is where you say they are claiming it is.
I've been a pretty vocal fan of Android for years, but I was oddly in limited company when panning Chrome for Android when it came out. It seemed that every Android advocate, and even its worst critics, were falling over each other to declare it a new panacea.

It was a marked setback from the already weak native browser (I use Android phones, tablets, and iPads. There is no doubt that later versions of iOS shot it far in the lead for browsing). It seems to be a universally single-threaded browser. I'm not talking about the native limits of JavaScript...but rather every part of the browser. If a page has an HTML5 video...there's a several second pause of the entire browser while it considers existence. Layout, loading things...everything seems to stall the main thread. It is abysmal.
Learning Breadth-First
This is why I strongly believe that regular people should not learn how to code, despite all the "you should learn how to code" articles.

Excel is a really good example of how easy it is to get up and running, and how easy it is to get yourself into a lot of trouble. You might not need to program per se, but you do need to know how to DEBUG and TEST your programs as well. This is something that most people are loathe to do. It requires a great deal of discipline, and even though in finance you're supposed to test spreadsheets during internal auditing, most auditors aren't trained in proper testing/coding, so it ends up being ad hoc. In fact, it's scary how much intermediate financial statements are rubber-stamped/robo-signed by people in the finance, usually because they are pressed for time.
Has Anyone Applied to App Academy
I recently applied to app academy and had an interview, but hadn't heard anything back from them afterwards. Anybody had a similar experience? I know this probably means I did not get accepted, because it has been a week since my interview.Or maybe it just takes while to make a decision since they are obviously interviewing other candidates as well. Anyway, has anyone gotten accepted into App Academy?If you did, how long was the waiting process? And what was your experience at the academy like? Thank you for your replies in advance! I would really appreciate any input!
Yea experience of wasting your life in rabbit holes, combined with getting older while getting little accomplished may help you focus. Unless you really find something in the rabbit holes, then down you go.

If you never find anything and still can't help yourself it's some lethargy/depression ADD brain dysfunction. Make sure to exercise enough to be in shape, eat, etc.
Ask HN:  Are there any other books like Running Lean?
Ask HN: Are there any other books like Running Lean?
Using complex analysis to study generating functions that describe time complexity is definitely interesting, and there are some cases where using generating functions can make a complicated analysis a bit easier to deal with, but I don't see any reason to think that analytic combinatorics is more practical on a day-to-day basis than big-O notation. Analytic combinatorics is much closer in spirit to the techniques that Knuth uses to analyze performance in The Art of Computer Programming, and I don't know many programmers who prefer Knuth's style of analysis to big-O.
WebDAV?

Heaven help us…
Developer tools have always been Microsoft's sweet spot. Excel just happens to be targeted at non-developers.